Onondaga County will partner with a local business to produce face masks for county hospitals starting this week, officials announced Tuesday.

Tessy Plastics, a molding and engineering company based in Skaneateles, approached the county to provide healthcare workers with the personal protective equipment, a company spokesperson said during a media briefing.

The partnership comes at a critical point for Onondaga County in its efforts to treat patients infected with the novel coronavirus, County Executive Ryan McMahon said during the briefing.

Onondaga County confirmed 21 new cases of the novel coronavirus in the past 24 hours, with a total of 249 positive cases in the area. The county is currently monitoring 194 active cases, McMahon said. Active cases involve patients who have not recovered from the virus or have died.

The novel coronavirus causes COVID-19, a respiratory disease that has infected over 858,785 and killed 42,151 globally. New York state confirmed 76,049 cases as of Tuesday, with over 1,550 deaths as well.

Thirty-one individuals with COVID-19 are hospitalized in the county, with 12 currently in critical condition. One person has been released from the hospital, McMahon said.

Every municipality in Onondaga County except for Elbrige, a smaller town, has confirmed cases of COVID-19, McMahon said. Syracuse has identified 78 cases, more than any other municipality in the county.

“This disease is in every corner of our county,” McMahon said.

The county has completed 3,400 COVID-19 tests through both local doctors and its triage site at the Syracuse Community Health Center, and is waiting on the results of 485.

After a COVID-19 test comes back positive, the county health department reaches out to patients to ask about any people they may have had contact with since the onset of their symptoms. Patients who test positive are immediately put into isolation, where they need to remain until their symptoms show improvement, said Indu Gupta, county health commissioner.

“We still have so much unknowns about this that we would like people to continue to really follow principles of social distancing,” Gupta said.

Fifty-five individuals have recovered from COVID-19 in the county and have been released from mandatory isolation and quarantine. Continuing to take the situation seriously and practice social distancing will help the county move toward economic recovery, McMahon said.

“I’m pleading with the community to continue down the path we’ve gone on,” McMahon said.

The recently-passed federal stimulus package will help Onondaga County, but future aid packages need to reflect community needs more accurately, he said.

With a population of 467,000, Onondaga County does not meet the half-million population size criteria for many federal funding efforts, although the county is servicing all of central New York at the moment, McMahon said.

“I think in this next package there needs to be an acknowledgement that some of us are impacted more than others,” he said.

Published on March 31, 2020 at 11:41 pm

Contact Marnie: ammunozc@syr.edu