Officials to study regions for Pa.’s gradual return to normalcy
Marc Levy/Associated Press
Gov. Tom Wolf speaks at a press briefing in early April.
Dr. Rachel Levine speaks with American Sign Language interpretation in a photo last month.
Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine said her department believes that social distancing and other measures intended to curb the COVID-19 outbreak are working, as officials cautiously elaborated on plans for allowing commerce and other activities to start reopening in some parts of the state.
“Instead of 37,000 cases, we could be having 100,000 cases,” according to some early models for the spread of coronavirus infections, Levine said Thursday. “But we have, from the efforts of everybody in Pennsylvania, through the mitigation and prevention efforts that the governor put in place, been able to bend that curve, so that it has been going up, but at a lower rate.”
Levine said the measures ensured that hospitals and other health-care facilities were able to avoid becoming overloaded, even if some hospitals in the south- and northeastern regions had “many cases” that still create a challenge for hospitals.
“But we’re not out of the woods yet, and that’s why the governor’s taking this very moderate, progressive approach about opening businesses in specific areas,” she added.
On Wednesday, Gov. Tom Wolf had outlined plans for returning to normalcy as public-health experts monitor the numbers of cases in different areas. Officials said they planned to study the northwestern and north-central regions of the state further but set May 8 as a target date for moving counties in those areas from “red” category to “yellow” under a system of phases they’d developed.
The shift would mean that in affected counties some businesses, like retail stores, would be allowed to reopen. Working remotely would still be encouraged and some types of establishment, like gyms, would remain closed.
Levine revised the number of total statewide deaths downward to 1,421 – 201 fewer than the count reported the day before. She said some deaths that earlier were considered probable cases of the virus were attributed to other causes after further investigation.
In total, there were 37,053 cases to date statewide, with 36,665 probable ones and another 388 confirmed. That figure represented 1,369 additional positives since the day before.
In Washington County, five new cases were reported for a total of 92. There have been two COVID-19 deaths in the county.
Greene remained at 25 cases, none lethal.
Levine said the state wasn’t planning to test people who weren’t showing symptoms as part of the evaluation of different regions.
“We are relaxing, however, our standards in terms of who would be tested,” she added. “Previously, we were prioritizing those who were health care workers, those in long-term-care living facilities and then other seniors 65 and older, all of whom had symptoms. But we’re going to relax that, and we’re really going to start to look at anyone who might have symptoms … but we will not be able to do the sort of widespread, population-based testing of asymptomatic individuals at this time.”
Wolf acknowledged that some of the criteria were open to interpretation, but said the overall goal was to return to normalcy while preventing the spread of the illness.
“We’re laying out objective criteria that are not meant to be: this is a hard and fast rule, this is a bright rule. We’re going to have to make subjective decisions, but we want to do this as objectively as possible,” the governor said. “The goal here is to keep Pennsylvanians safe, and to make sure that we don’t outstrip the capacity of our health-care system.”
Levine said the state is working with hospitals and other health-care facilities to do testing, plus partnering with the Rite Aid pharmacy chain “and perhaps other businesses” and possibly opening up a mass-testing site or providing mobile testing to increase capacity in areas as they reopen.
Among the criteria that experts will use are the number of new cases per capita. The target will be 50 new cases per 100,000 people over the previous two weeks in each of the counties in a given region.
“This is just one metric that will be combined with others, such as the availability of testing, the availability of hospital beds, the case management and contact tracing that we have discussed before, and the modeling by Carnegie Mellon University. We’re putting all of those together to make a final determination about a region.”