BUFFALO, N.Y. — Over the past several weeks, Western New York has seen an uptick in basically every significant metric tracking the coronavirus pandemic.

Erie County reported its rate of positive cases Wednesday was 5 percent, a number that settled to 4 percent on the state's website later.

"The bottom line is we're trending in the wrong direction whether its 4 percent, 5 percent, some of the other areas in our state are also in that same category so it's something that's deeply concerning to us," Lieutenant Governo Kathy Hochul, D, said.

Hochul, who heads the region's response team, said there are spikes happening all over the state.

"It's not just Western New York," she said. "We're bouncing around. For a while, we're among the highest but absolutely we're seeing it in the Finger Lakes, the North Country periodically, Hudson Valley."

The positivity rate in Buffalo's 14212 zip code exceeded 6 percent last week but Hochul said the micro-cluster strategy the state has implemented, particularly in the New York City area, in which it pinpoints a small area to take more aggressive measures, is not a viable one for Western New York at this point.

"That's a great strategy but when you have community spread and the source is college students, grade school students, family gatherings, sporting events, hockey games, birthday parties, some nursing homes, it's really hard to do the same kind of strategy that we've worked successfully on before so now it just comes down to compliance," she said.

WNY leaders like Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz and Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown did not rule out this week the possibility of another shutdown of non-essential businesses.

"Obviously there could be a shutdown as we're seeing in other countries and other communities if people don't continue to keep their masks up and their guards up," Brown said Thursday.

However, Hochul said a repeat of the state's actions in the spring is unlikely at this point.

"We're not having conversations about a widespread Western New York shutdown and we're not doing that elsewhere either," she said. "We're not having those conversations at this time. We've learned a lot more about the spread of this virus since March and April when those shutdowns were absolutely necessary to protect human life and we're in a different point of our strategy now."

The lieutenant governor said the strategy does include providing counties with more testing and rapid testing kits and continuing aggressive contact tracing, but much of the onus to reduce the rates has to fall on the citizens.

"We are being very concerned about people getting COVID fatigue, not following our guidelines, having more gatherings with family members and there was a time when you thought if you got together with my family and friends it's probably safe — not the case anymore. We need to be very vigilant. Keep wearing your mask," Hochul said. "It's all we can do at this point."