ALBANY COUNTY — After March 12, when Albany County announced its first two cases of COVID-19 and started holding press conferences to regularly update the public about the spread of the coronavirus, the county health commissioner urged people to look at Italy to see where Albany County would be if residents didn’t stay home and follow protocols.

On Wednesday, Commissioner Elizabeth Whalen said county residents could look “just down the road” to New York City. The day before, Governor Andrew Cuomo had announced that cases in New York were increasing at a rate faster than expected and the peak could come in two or three weeks.

Cuomo had put the state on ‘pause,’ executing a 10-point policy meant to assure safety for everyone. Effective on Sunday, March 22, at 8 p.m., all non-essential businesses were to close across the state. Also, all non-essential gatherings of any size for any reason were banned.

This followed days of increasing restrictions.

Yet the numbers of confirmed cases kept climbing. On Wednesday, Cuomo reported there are 5,146 additional cases of coronavirus disease 2019, bringing the statewide total to 30,811. The epicenter is New York City, which has 17,856 confirmed cases.

Cuomo is working with the Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to transform first the Javits Center in Manhattan, within a week, into a hospital facility with 1,000 beds. Four more transformations are to follow at downstate locations, and a Navy hospital ship is to be deployed to New York Harbor.

Meanwhile, hospitals across the state, including in Albany County, had to develop “surge plans”  to increase their capacity for hospital beds and intensive-care unit beds by 50 percent and are currently making plans for more. (See related story.)

New York State has more than half of the confirmed cases in the country. Cuomo said this week that as many as 140,000 hospital beds may be needed and New York State had, before the surge planning, just 50,000.

“We’ve taken every action that government can take to reduce density and we are testing more than any other state in country, and now we must focus on increasing our hospital capacity and our supply stockpile as quickly as we can to ensure our healthcare system is prepared to handle the apex of the wave,” Cuomo said in a statement.

“We also still have issues with density control, especially in New York City, and we are continuing to encourage all New Yorkers to think of others and stay inside as much as possible to protect our most vulnerable populations,” he said.

On Wednesday, Cuomo announced that New York City will pilot closing streets to vehicles, opening them to pedestrians instead as part of the city’s plan to address the lack of adherence to social-distancing protocols. As part of the plan, Cuomo is also enacting a voluntary playground social-density protocol that prohibits close contact sports such as basketball.

Also on Wednesday, Cuomo said that 40,000 health-care workers, including retirees and students, have signed up to volunteer to work as part of the state’s surge healthcare force, and more volunteers are expected. Manhattan hotels are providing free lodging for health-care workers.

Cuomo also urged the federal government to implement a “rolling deployment” of equipment and staff to address the critical needs of hotspot areas with high numbers of positive COVID-19 cases instead of providing limited quantities to the entire country at once. He pledged to personally manage the deployment of supplies and equipment and technical assistance to the next hotspots around the country once New York State’s number of hospitalizations begins to decrease.

Albany County

Albany County Executive Daniel McCoy announced on Wednesday morning that the county now has 142 confirmed cases of COVID-19 but, since hospitals with limited test kits have stopped community testing, that number is expected not to continue to rise as fast.

The remaining kits, which are supplied by the federal government, will be used to test patients who have been hospitalized and health-care workers who have been exposed to the virus.

“We are not capturing the numbers of actual people affected,” said Whalen on Wednesday.

Throughout the week, in daily briefings, McCoy commented on how, driving the streets of Albany, he saw regular traffic and kids playing basketball and soccer in parks.

“Wake up. Stop being selfish,” McCoy said at Wednesday’s briefing. “This isn’t fake … This is real.”

Whalen said on Wednesday that Albany County had, to date, performed 2,886 tests, with 142 positive results — about 5 percent.

In 80 percent of the cases, she said, the symptoms — fever, cough, shortness of breath — are “mild to moderate” and patients can be treated at home.

As of Wednesday morning, Albany County had 557 people under mandatory quarantine and 633 people under precautionary quarantine. Four-hundred residents, who had interacted with a student at Farnsworth Middle School who tested positive for COVID-19, will soon be coming out of quarantine — none of them developed the virus — and Whalen “strongly encouraged parents: Don’t change your behavior.”