Greene County has no COVID-19 deaths despite previous reports
Greene County went Monday from having one COVID-19 death to zero after the state switched to a different electronic data collection system.
A new reliance on an Electronic Death Registration System reconciled previous reports that now focuses on listing deaths in a county of residence rather than the county where the death took place, state Health Secretary Rachel Levine said.
It took the state months with extensive work to push to an EDRS, which follows a requirement by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to list COVID-19 deaths by county of residence.
“We’ve never seen a pandemic outbreak like COVID-19 in 102 years,” Levine said during an afternoon briefing on the state’s response to the pandemic.
Westmoreland County went from having 32 deaths from the virus to experiencing 38 after the data collection system was switched.
Washington County saw its positive case count increase by two to 133 while its death toll remained at four.
Allegheny County reported no new COVID-19 deaths Monday for the second consecutive day.
The county added 38 new positive cases of the virus, including 14 residents of long-term care facilities, the county’s health department said. To date, 1,641 people have tested positive for the novel coronavirus since March in Allegheny. There have been 143 deaths from the virus there.
Gov. Tom Wolf said Pennsylvanians helped to cut the state’s case counts in half by staying at home to help slow the spread of the virus.
He eased his stay-home order in Southwestern Pennsylvanian Friday, and he said he learned Monday that “not very many people were showing up in Downtown Pittsburgh.”
While some business owners had trouble luring people back to work, others recognized that some customers still believe they were not safe from the virus to go shopping.
To business owners who opened in defiance of his orders, Wolf said the real penalty for doing that involves putting people at risk of getting sick.
“The timeline is not set by the state, but by the virus,” Wolf said.
Pennsylvania recorded 87 new COVID-19 deaths Monday, taking the total to 4,505. There were 822 additional positive cases of COVID-19, bringing the statewide total to 63,056.