ALBANY COUNTY — For the first time in 60 days, Albany County Executive Daniel McCoy announced at his Sunday morning press briefing, no county resident was admitted to the hospital for COVID-19 in the last 24 hours.

“I’m hoping we may be at the apex and we’re on the way down,” said McCoy.

Still, he reported, nine more county residents tested positive for the coronavirus disease 2019, bringing the county’s total of confirmed cases to 1,345.

Currently, 28 Albany County residents are hospitalized, with seven of them in intensive-care units.

Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple said that a portable morgue used locally for a week has been shut down. “I never thought in 33 years of public service that we would have a portable morgue in the county,” said Apple, calling it “very heart-wrenching.”

The county’s death toll from COVID-19 stands at 59.

“Our EMS calls have hit a plateau,” said Apple of the county’s emergency medical services.

“Finally, I’ll tell you, things are turning. Things are slowing down a little at the EOC, which is a great sign,” Apple said of the Emergency Operations Center, which was set up on March 1. “I think it’s the constant education and awareness.”

McCoy said that the eight counties in the Capital Region — Albany, Columbia, Greene, Saratoga, Schenectady, Rensselaer, Warren, and Washington — now meet five out of the seven metrics outlined by Governor Andrew Cuomo for reopening.

He believes the metric on hospitalization will be met this week.

The most difficult metric to meet, he said, will be having 30 contact tracers for every 100,000 residents, and additional tracers based on the projected number of cases in the region.

A tracer identifies other people that a person diagnosed with COVID-19 has been in contact with. Those contacts are then isolated for the disease’s 14-day incubation period to prevent its spread.

Albany County alone would need at least 90 tracers; the county’s health department currently has 30. On April 29, Cuomo announced with Mike Bloomberg, former mayor of New York, that Bloomberg and Bloomberg Philanthropies will help with a new testing program.

The program, coordinating downstate New York with New Jersey and Connecticut, will trace COVID-19 contacts to control the rate of infection.

“Tracing is a very big, big deal,” Cuomo said. “Once you trace, and you find more positives, then you isolate the positives; they’re under quarantine, they can’t go out, they can’t infect anybody else. This entire operation has never been done before.”

In Albany County, Commissioner Elizabeth Whalen has led a similar initiative since early March.

“We’re also going to be partnering with Johns Hopkins and Vital Strategies in putting together that tracing operation,” Cuomo said. “It will be coordinated tri-state and downstate.”

McCoy said on Sunday that he had reached out to Sheriff Apple and to other emergency-medical-services teams and to firefighters to see if they would be willing to work as tracers.

Apple is on board with the plan, McCoy said. “His guys jumped right on, and ladies,” said McCoy, which would add another 30 tracers. McCoy hopes to “set it up and get going till the Bloomberg foundation is up and running,” he said.

“We can meet half of that,” said McCoy, meaning supplying tracers. But, he said, more testing kits are needed.

Governor’s plan

“We’re only going to open up with the guidance of the governor and his team,” said McCoy on Sunday.

The regional guidelines for reopening New York are outlined on the state’s website.

The first three metrics are based on guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

— A region must have a 14-day decline in hospitalizations on a three-day rolling average.  A region with few COVID-19 cases cannot exceed 15 new total cases on a three-day rolling average;

— A region must experience a 14-day decline in deaths on a three-day rolling average. Regions with few COVID-19 cases cannot exceed five new deaths on a three-day rolling average; and

— A region must have fewer than two new COVID-19 patients admitted per 100,000 residents per day.

The other three metrics that McCoy believes the Capital Region can meet are:

— A region must have at least 30-percent of its total hospital beds and intensive-care-unit beds available after elective surgeries resume. And hospitals have to have stockpiled at least 90 days’ worth of personal protective equipment;

— A region must have a testing regimen that prioritizes people with COVID-19 symptoms and individuals who came into contact with a symptomatic person, and conduct frequent tests of frontline and essential workers. Each region must have the capacity to conduct 30 diagnostic tests for every 1,000 residents per month. A region must maintain an appropriate number of testing sites to accommodate its population and must fully advertise where and how people can get tested. The region must also use the collected data to track and trace the spread of the virus; and

— A region must present plans to have rooms available for people who test positive for COVID-19 and who cannot self-isolate.

Of drafting a Capital Region plan on reopening, McCoy said, “This has never happened to anyone … Are we going to stumble? Probably. Are we going to do things we have to readjust and fix? Absolutely.”

He hopes to submit the plan to the governor’s office by Friday.

McCoy described the state of Georgia as opening up without a game plan and praised Cuomo for putting requirements in place. “The lives of New Yorkers weighs on you … especially when you have the pressure from the business community to reopen,” said McCoy.

He said his own priority is the “safety and health of our residents,” and concluded that a safe reopening “only will work with everyone doing the right stuff.”