File photo
HARRISBURG – The expected fall resurgence of COVID-19 in Pennsylvania is here, but state Department of Health officials are not panicking, and we should not need to restrict to the restrictions experienced in the spring and summer.
Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine and the rest of the department’s coronavirus response team held a news conference Wednesday, “In most states, they are seeing increased case counts, and we’re seeing that in Pennsylvania, so that’s what we mean by a fall resurgence. There’s no way to know exactly what the peak will be in terms of the spring versus now, but we’re certainly seeing a change in the last number of weeks than what we saw before.”
Dr. Levine says daily statewide case counts have been over 1,000 for nine straight days, and daily statewide hospitalizations have doubled over the past month.
But Dr. Levine says the state healthcare system is in good shape, and there are no plans to bring back business closures or stay-at-home orders, “We have so much more resources than what we had in the past. We have the significantly increased testing, we have also the case investigations and contact tracing in a much more robust way, and we have much more PPE than we did in the spring.”
Dr. Levine says 21% of ICU beds are available statewide, and 19% of medical and surgical beds are available. More testing is also on the way, with 150 million antigen rapid tests coming from the federal government.
Dr. Michael Huff is the health department’s Director of Testing and Contact Tracing, “The federal government through Abbot, will directly ship 50 million of these tests across the U.S. to personal care facilities, skilled nursing facilities, historically black colleges and universities, home care and hospice organizations, and Indian health service.”
Dr. Huff says the first allocation of tests have already been received to the department, who will send 250,000 tests weekly through the end of the December. Priority will go to counties listed as having ‘substantial’ spread and to other vulnerable populations.
