Onondaga County officials say the BA.2 strain is highly contagious and now the predominant strain in the county.

They said because of that and people traveling for winter break, cases are on the rise.

“If we know if just a few people traveled and came back, with how contagious it is, it would have spread quickly,” Deputy County Executive Ann Rooney said.

According to state data, Central New York’s positive cases last week averaged just more than 46 cases per 100,000.

The state’s average was 14.7.

The county reported 181 new cases on Tuesday with 49 residents in the hospital and eight in intensive care.

Rooney said hospitals are reporting no capacity issues. She said mitigation protocols will be triggered by hospitalization rates and county hospitals are nowhere near that point.

Rooney said that’s especially true because this variant seems to result in milder cases.

“We should be really, really happy right now. People are being treated by their primary care physician, they’re able to stay at home and get over COVID," Rooney said. "We want to stick to a metric that we’ve all agreed upon, and that is the stabilization of the hospitals, which in our communications with them, they’re saying ‘we are OK.' So we don’t want to further alarm a community when we’ve engaged the whole health system to respond to this pandemic.”