HARRISBURG — Union and Northumberland counties will not be going green next week. In an announcement Friday, Governor Tom Wolf did not include those Valley counties in the 16 counties who are going green next Friday.
Governor Wolf says Union and Northumberland have still not met a set of three criteria now being used to move counties from yellow to green, “We look at higher rates of new cases in the past seven days. If that’s declining, we like that. Second, over a 14-day period, if there’s a decrease in the percentage of positive cases, that’s a good thing.”
The governor says the third criteria has to do with contact tracing, “We’re looking at outbreaks that can’t be managed with contact tracing, so if an area has an outbreak for whatever reason, and it looks like they don’t have the capacity to deal with that, that’s a concern for us.”
Union County Commissioner Chairman Preston Boop says Union staying yellow is ‘absolutely ridiculous’ and there is ‘no reasonable excuse’ to leave the county behind the rest of north central PA. Boop also says the county has yet to hear from the governor’s office from a last minute pitch made earlier this week. He says if business wants to open under green phases guidelines, they should.
The counties going to green next week include some the Pittsburgh region and the other parts of north central PA, including Lycoming and Clinton. Snyder and Montour counties are now in the green phase, and eight more counties, including Dauphin and Schuylkill are going yellow. Wolf has already said Philadelphia and Lehigh Valley area counties will go yellow next week.
Later in the press conference, Governor Wolf says all PA schools will open on time in the fall, with guidelines in place from the Department of Education coming next week.
