A spike in COVID intensity will likely mean a corresponding spike in COVID case counts and percent positivity in the near future, according to Albany County’s health department.

Currently, just 36 percent of children ages 5 to 11 have been fully vaccinated while 73 percent of adolescents aged 12 to 17 have, according to state figures.

As health departments in New York State and elsewhere are no longer doing the contact tracing they did for most of the first two years of the pandemic, the federal government has launched a website to help Americans figure out, as individuals, how to deal with COVID-19. The “toolkit” has links to find test-to-treat locations, vaccine sites, and how to order masks and self-administered tests.

“New variants, such as the B.A.2 variant, continue to arise,” said Governor Kathy Hochul, “and without additional federal funds the proven tools we have come to rely on, most notably vaccines and boosters, may not be readily available for all New Yorkers.”

“We never had a high-five moment and said it’s over,” said Governor Kathy Hochul of COVID-19. “We’re in a new phase; we’ve been adapting to the circumstance and reopening in a way that I still believe should continue.”

Both the state’s health commissioner and governor on Monday emphasized two main courses of action in dealing with the latest Omicron sub-lineage: People should get vaccinated, including booster shots, and people should immediately be tested for COVID-19 so they can be treated to stem the spread.

The two companies producing a messenger RNA vaccine against COVID-19 — Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech — have asked the Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization for a second booster shot.

On Wednesday, Governor Kathy Hochul quietly extended for another month the pandemic state of emergency she had declared on Feb. 14, set to end March 16. The shortened declaration, which says, “New York continues to experience COVID-19 transmission, with the rate of new COVID-19 hospital admissions remaining at over 100 new admissions a day,” runs through April 15.

Albany County Executive Daniel McCoy on Friday reported two previously unreported COVID-related deaths — a man in his sixties, and a man in his seventies — bringing the county’s death toll from the virus to 533.

While surges are growing in other places in the world, like New Zealand and Hong Kong, and remote Pacific Islands are just now experiencing their first deaths from the virus, the United States, for the most part, is now defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as having “low” or “medium” transmission rates.