ALBANY COUNTY — The county executive reported 24 new cases of COVID-19 today and three new hospitalizations of patients with the disease, bringing to 14 the number of county residents hospitalized with COVID-19; two of them are in intensive-care units.

Governor Andrew Cuomo, in a conference call with reporters, said that the statewide rate, based on Saturday’s test results, of New Yorkers infected with coronavirus disease 2019 is 1.35 percent.

The areas with micro-clusters of the disease, where more testing is done and restrictions are imposed, is at 3.18 percent. Cuomo noted that positivity rates in Brooklyn and Rockland and Orange counties are all down this week.

“The focus works and it says we can get the positivity rate under control and, as we saw with Queens this past week,” said Cuomo, “we get the numbers down, we then open up the areas. It’s just math.”

Cuomo also said that New York is battling the national surge of COVID-19.

“Because, although we like to think we control our own destiny, we still have people coming from around the country into New York, and the numbers nationwide are really high and getting higher,” he said. “Thursday, Friday, Saturday saw the three highest one-day counts nationwide — 85,000 cases on Friday was a one-day record. So, we are fighting the national tide, and so far, we are defying the national tide.”

Cuomo took to task President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, for saying today, “We are not going to control the pandemic.”

The rest of Meadows’s comment to CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union,” was, “We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics, and other mitigation areas.”

Cuomo told the reporters on his Sunday conference call, “If you believed you could control it, then you’d try to control it; if you don’t believe you can control it, then you lie about it and deny it and you minimize it.”

He went on, about New York State, “When you go from the highest infection rate in the country to one of the lowest, it means you controlled the virus ….  Flattening the curve is controlling the virus. ‘Controlling’ is a different word than ‘eliminating.’ We controlled the virus ….”

He concluded, “They surrendered without firing a shot. It was the great American surrender. Americans don’t surrender. And they didn’t even put up a fight and what we learned in New York was, if you put up a fight, you would have won because New York won. Other states won also.”

Newest numbers

Based on Saturday’s test results, the Capital Region, of which Albany County is a part, had a positivity rate of 0.8 percent. Eight of the state’s 10 regions had rates above the targeted 1 percent.

The other region below 1 percent was the Mohawk Valley, at 0.6 percent.

As of Sunday morning, Albany County has 3,450 confirmed cases of COVID-19, according to a release from the office of the county executive, Daniel McCoy.

Of the 24 new cases, 13 had close contact with someone infected with the disease, four were health-care workers or residents of congregate settings, and seven did not have a clear source of infection identified at this time.

Currently, 1,163 Albany County residents are under quarantine, up from 1,097 on Saturday. The five-day average for new daily positives increased to 26 from 23.8. There are now 139 active cases in the county, up from 133 on Saturday.

So far, 15,385 county residents have completed quarantine. Of those, 3,311 had tested positive and recovered.

The county’s COVID-19 death toll remains at 140.