With Easter Sunday coming up this weekend, Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon has a simple message: don’t visit family. McMahon said there are many positive cases of coronavirus that came from people visiting their loved ones, which got them sick.
“We need to stay home,” McMahon said. “We need to use technology, whether it’s the phone, Skype, Zoom, FaceTime. We do not need to put mom and dad at risk, because we are getting families together.”
McMahon said he’ll be celebrating Easter with his immediate family, and that’s what everyone needs to do.
This comes as a sixth person has died from the coronavirus in Onondaga County. The victim was a woman in her 70s who had underlying medical conditions.
“If anybody has compromised medical conditions and they get this thing, it’s a killer,” McMahon said.
Thirty-eight people are in the hospital, which is up nine since Monday. Twenty people are in intensive care. There are 397 positive cases in the county, up 20 from the day before. There have been 119 recoveries.
Onondaga County’s most recent social distancing score improved from a C- to a B-.
The county executive said he continues to get emails from residents upset about his order to close golf courses. He’s asking people to put things in perspective.
“When are we going to look at some of these numbers and realize taking a couple days off of golf is not a big sacrifice, when we’ve had six people die, five people die in the last week,” McMahon said. “Fifteen percent of our cases are in the hospital. Are you kidding me? Let’s put things in perspective as a community.”
McMahon said testing is still not at the point where healthy people can get tested.
“If testing capacity becomes where I can go buy 25,000 tests, then we can make decisions about testing nonessential employees and a whole economic cluster, and then making the case, we just tested all those workers, let them go back to work,” McMahon said. “If we had that type of capacity, we could then do things outside what the medical realm determines. We just don’t have that capacity.”
