More than 394,400 Western New Yorkers have contracted Covid-19 since March 2020 and 4,368 have died of it.
The five-county region – Erie, Niagara, Chautauqua, Cattaraugus and Allegany counties – had reported declining case counts, hospitalizations and deaths since its second-wave peak in January 2021, as vaccinations ramped up across the region and more people acquire immunity. Cases and hospitalizations rose in early spring, peaked in mid-April and declined sharply before beginning an uptick in July that continued into the fall. The number of new cases dropped in early December but then shot back up around the holiday, reaching the highest levels since the start of the pandemic. The number of daily reported cases topped 2,000 three times in the last week of the 2021. But the number of new cases has since dropped sharply.
Hundreds of thousands of Western New Yorkers are now fully vaccinated, causing the daily pace of new vaccinations to slow.
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But disparities in vaccination rates remain. Since the beginning of the rollout, white Western New Yorkers have made up a greater share of the vaccinated than they do of the overall population. Many Western New Yorkers of color have received vaccines at a disproportionately low rate, by comparison.
The share of Western New Yorkers who are fully vaccinated also lags behind the figure for New York State as a whole.
Public health experts and officials, both locally and at the federal level, say the effect of the vaccines can be seen across a range of pandemic-tracking metrics, including the “positive test rate," or the share of Covid-19 tests that come back positive.
The number of Western New Yorkers hospitalized with Covid-19 rose sharply in November to levels not seen since the spring but began to fall in late January. Many of the region's most at-risk people, such as nursing home residents, were vaccinated in the early months of the rollout.
More than 6.6 million New Yorkers have contracted Covid-19 and more than 62,400 have died in the past 37 months. Across the U.S., 104 million cases — and 1.13 million deaths — have now been reported.
This page will be updated daily with the latest statistics from the state and county departments of health, as well as new data from The New York Times' national Covid-19 tracking project. You can get the latest updates by bookmarking this page or subscribing to The Buffalo News' daily Covid-19 newsletter.