State moves Beaver County from red to yellow phase
Reopening based on data, Wolf, Levine say
Gov. Tom Wolf said Friday that Beaver County will finally move from red to yellow in the COVID-19 reopening phases on May 22, a move he said was determined by facts, not political pressure from local elected officials who were angered he kept Beaver County out of the yellow phase while the rest of southwestern Pennsylvania was moved last week.
“No, these are not political decisions,” Mr. Wolf, a Democrat, said during Friday’s online news conference to announce the decision. “Again, we’re all trying to keep people safe. And as [state Health Secretary] Dr. [Rachel] Levine just said, we’re looking at the data, and
Beaver County is doing much better, which means that we think that the virus has less of a chance this week than it did last week of actually infecting people. That’s what’s driving these decisions all across Pennsylvania. Politics has nothing to do with this.”
Despite Mr. Wolf’s statement to the contrary, Beaver County officials took a victory lap Friday after learning about the announcement.
“This decision is incontrovertible evidence that the voices of our citizens and local businesses were heard in Harrisburg,” the three-member Beaver County Commission said in an emailed statement after the governor’s announcement. “To be sure, this past week our board has publicly and passionately expressed our disapproval of a decision that we believed would serve only to harm our county’s economy and morale. For that, we do not apologize. We will always ferociously defend and represent the best interests of our citizens.”
Commissioner Jack Manning, one of two Republicans on the commission, said in an interview that he welcomed the state’s announcement.
“I feel somewhat vindicated from all the heat I took from people that we were putting them at risk” by opposing the state’s refusal last week to move Beaver County to yellow, Mr. Manning said. “A week later, I think [Mr. Wolf] kind of came around to our thinking.”
Last week, after Beaver County was the only one of 14
southwestern Pennsylvania counties not to be moved to yellow starting May 15, the Beaver County commissioners put out a joint statement saying they supported county District Attorney David Lozier’s decision that he would not enforce any criminal action taken against a business that chose to open under yellow guidelines on May 15.
Some other counties’ elected officials in the eastern side of the state have made similar statements.
Then on Monday, Mr. Wolf said during a news conference: “These folks are choosing to desert in the face of the enemy. In the middle of a war that we Pennsylvanians are winning, and that we must win. They need to understand the consequences of their cowardly act.”
That angered elected officials, including Mr. Manning, who said he thought it was inappropriate to use a war analogy in a debate with a county like Beaver because it has so many veterans.
“I thought it was an insult to the people of Beaver County to say we were surrendering to the virus,” Mr. Manning said earlier Friday during a lunch hour rally at the Beaver County Courthouse organized by a local citizen in support of the stance taken by the county’s elected leaders.
“We have the largest Vietnam veterans organization in the state here,” he said, referring to the local chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America organization.
The “drive- or walk-by” rally Friday involved about 25 people standing on the sidewalk with handmade signs either supporting the county’s officials or mocking Mr. Wolf. Most of them did not wear masks, although all the county officials who attended did. The ralliers stood facing Third Street — the main road through Beaver — as people drove their cars by honking in support.
Mary Christine Whipple, of Harmony, said she organized the rally “to support the commissioners, the DA, the sheriff, our elected officials, for going to bat for us.”
Mr. Lozier, a Republican, also attended the rally. He said despite Mr. Wolf’s announcement, he won’t enforce any criminal action against businesses that could reopen under yellow this coming week. That’s because, although his statement got a lot of attention last week, he said it was just reiterating a prior statement.
“On March 20 [shortly after the state released reopening phase rules] I issued guidance to our local police departments that I would not be enforcing cases related to them because I thought [the state guidelines] were vague and unenforceable,” he said in an interview Friday.
It was not only vague, Mr. Lozier said, it didn’t make sense to have police go into a business, interview the owner, interview customers, spend several hours on a case, and potentially put themselves at risk “all for a $10 fine.”
Despite that stance, he said he knows of no “flagrant” violations of the state guidelines in Beaver County of, say, a hairdresser or bar or restaurant owner staying open.
That, he said, may be because the state still had “the hammer” of licensing that it could enforce against many of those businesses, including, for example, removing a liquor license, as Mr. Wolf threatened to do in counties that would not enforce the reopening rules.
In addition to Mr. Wolf, Dr. Levine said during the same state news conference that the decision the state made was based on data, not politics.
“Actually looking at all of our metrics, our data and our models, including the Carnegie Mellon [University] model but others as well, Beaver County has had decreasing case counts over the last two weeks. That has been consistent. So they met all criteria to go from red to yellow,” she said.
Mr. Lozier said, however, “I think we had the science on our side last week, too.”
Beaver County Sheriff Tony Guy, a Republican, who also attended Friday’s rally, said after the Democratic governor’s announcement that to him it appeared the state changed its modeling to adjust for the impact of the massive COVID-19 outbreak at Brighton Rehabilitation and Wellness Center, which represents the overwhelming majority of cases in the county as well as the deaths from COVID-19.
As of Friday 338 of the county’s 516 positive cases, 76 of the 83 COVID-19-related deaths in the county have occurred at Brighton — which had 460 residents when the outbreak began in March — according to a Post-Gazette analysis of the state’s data.
“An analysis of the data clearly shows that there was a decision made in Harrisburg to recategorize the nursing home numbers,” Mr. Guy said. “I can’t help but question whether that would have been done absent the attention brought by our citizens and elected officials.”
Mr. Guy said it is obvious to him that the state changed its model that required that counties must have a positive COVID-19 case rate of less than 50 cases per 100,000 population over the prior two weeks before they can be moved to yellow.
“If you leave the nursing home in there, we’re still in the red,” he said.
That’s true but just barely.
The county’s rate with all cases counted over the last two weeks going back to May 1 is 54 cases per 100,000 population, much better than its two-week-prior rate a week ago, when from April 24 to May 1 its positive case rate was 86 cases per 100,000 population.
Part of the reason the county’s rate has started to come down so drastically, Mr. Manning said last week, is that “nearly everyone in Brighton has been infected.”
State Department of Health spokesman Nate Wardle denied the state changed its model to allow Beaver County to move to yellow.
“The decisions being made are looking at the scientific data being presented and the expertise of our epidemiologists and public health professionals,” he wrote in an email answer to questions.
“Previously in Beaver County there was at least one major outbreak in a congregate care setting, and as we have seen new cases decrease in that setting the cases per 100,000 people metric has dropped, which has lent to moving the county from red to yellow,” he added.