What Happened to the Westchester County COVID Map?

What happened to the COVID counts by Village and why are there no more COVID maps from the County?

After a week of wondering where the COVID counts were going, County Executive George Latimer held a COVID briefing at 2 pm on Monday December 21 and explained why he had made the decision to stop sending out the maps.

Latimer explained that the counts on the maps were based on individual records of positive COVID counts by name and address from the state. The county had been taking this data, aggregating it by zip code and producing the map that was then published on the county’s Facebook page.

However, Latimer said that often the data was 3 or 4 days old by the time the map was issued and that zip codes are not unique to one Village, so some of the counts may have crossed Village lines. He used Scarsdale as an example, saying that the 10583 zip code also includes parts of Yonkers, Eastchester and New Rochelle, so that map might not reflect what is actually going on in the Scarsdale School district.

He said that the county was working on a better analysis and said he hoped to issue new information by the end of this week…. December 25.

In the meantime he reported on the numbers for Westchester County overall where, as of Sunday December 20, the positive rate was 5.3% with a 7-day average of 5.9%. You can check the daily counts for the county on the NYS website here.

Latimer reported that there were a total of 8,269 active cases on Monday, almost double the 4,344 active cases on November 20, just before Thanksgiving. However, in the last five days, cases have decreased somewhat, hitting a high of 8,771 on December 15 and falling to 8,269 on Sunday December 20. Latimer said it was too early to tell if this was a trend. The county is still seeing about 500 new positive cases a day, a 5% ratio to the number tested. (As of Tuesday, December 22, cases had climbed back up to 8,910 with a 6% positive rate.)

About the numbers in the hospital, as of Saturday December 19, 353 were in County hospitals with COVID. This has risen steadily from 348 one week ago, 321 two weeks ago, 244 three weeks ago and 168 a month ago. As there are 2,400 beds in Westchester County hospitals, he reported that we are not reaching capacity.

A total of 1,606 people have died from COVID in Westchester since the beginning of the crisis. This week 44 people passed away and two weeks ago we lost 35 people.

The NYS School tracker as of 12/18 reported 29 positive cases among students in the Scarsdale Schools and 21 staff/teachers.

So if you’re wondering how many people in Scarsdale are positive, stay tuned. Latimer is promising new information by the end of the week. In the meantime, click here for statewide statistics.