Fitzgerald believes Allegheny will move to green

Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald said Wednesday he has not heard yet from the state that the county will move from the yellow to the green phase of the state’s COVID-19 reopening next week.

But based on case data, he expects the state to announce on Friday — the day of the week Gov. Tom Wolf has typically announced counties’ movement into new phases — the county will move to green.

“I have no special intel” about the state’s decision, he said. “But just based on what happened when a number of counties went from yellow to green after two weeks of being at yellow, most of the southwest Pennsylvania counties — including obviously Allegheny County — have kept our numbers very low. People have been very responsible.”

He was referring to 18 counties — including most of the counties in northwest Pennsylvania — that were moved to yellow a week before Allegheny County and other counties in southwest Pennsylvania. Those 18 counties stayed on yellow for two weeks and kept their case counts down during that time, and then last Friday Mr. Wolf announced they would move to the state’s green phase starting May 29.

Moving to the green phase allows for opening more businesses to operation, including restaurants and gyms, though with social distancing restrictions.

Though the state uses a variety of factors to decide whether a county can move to a new phase — including the population density of a county, the age of the population, commuting patterns and others — new COVID-19 case counts have played an important role in the state’s determination.

Allegheny County had its worst weekly case count in a month last week — from May 15 to May 22 — with 157 new positive cases.

But Allegheny County Health Department Director Dr. Debra Bogen said that increase in cases was largely due to an expansion of testing in the county, which included more than 200 tests that were done of residents and staff at the county-run Kane Regional nursing homes last week.

Because the percentage of positive results from all the tests has not gone up, but more tests were done last week, she said the increase in cases “may just reflect that more [tests] have been done.”

Asked if, as some have said, there is a “slim chance” anyone in Allegheny County could be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 unless they work or live in a nursing home, Dr. Bogen cited data that breaks down the 278 positive cases in the county between May 6 and May 20.

“Well I think that with the data we showed today, that doesn’t appear to be the case,” she said. “Of the recent cases we’ve had, less than half are among residents of long-term care facilities and about 10% are from health care workers. And that means the rest of those are from people who are living in our community.”

“So I don’t think that a slim chance is really a good way to say that,” she said. “I think people are still at risk. And the general public needs to follow the same guidelines: Wear your mask, wash your hands, stay out of crowds, keep your physical distance.

“I wish I could say that there is a slim chance, but I would not be confident in that,” she said.

The county’s data shows about 41% of those 278 cases were among residents in nursing homes, and another 14% were health care workers, most of them employees of long-term care facilities.

That leaves 45% of the cases, or 125 people who were found to be infected during that two-week period, and none of them were health care workers or residents in nursing homes.

Out of those 125 people, 54% of them were linked to another known individual or “cluster,” the county said in a press release after the news conference.

Where those clusters are is not clear. Dr. Bogen was not available after the news conference to answer further questions.

Though the county has been in the yellow phase for nearly two weeks, Dr. Bogen noted it is too soon to say if any cases were the result of some businesses and activities reopening or people being outside in warmer weather.

That’s because it typically takes about five days after exposure to develop symptoms, and then a test has to be arranged and results returned, which can take several more days. That means it may not be till next week before any new case counts reflect new cases that were the result of the county being moved to the yellow phase, she said.

“We have not really seen an uptick at this point. But we think it’s probably still a little bit too soon,” she said. “So realistically, we won’t know if there’s an increase from reopening from about Day 10 to about 14. And, again, we’re really at the beginning, at the front end of that estimate.

“I sure hope we don’t have an increase,” she said.