Official: ‘Learn how to live with virus’

“We will get through this if we each do everything that we can to be part of the solution. If we all follow data driven recommendations and evidence-based solutions, we will beat this thing.” — County Commissioners’ Chairwoman Dr. Valerie Arkoosh

EAGLEVILLE » After many sacrifices, Montgomery County residents appear to be flattening the curve of COVID-19 in the county but their work is far from over, county officials said.

“And now we’re going to need to learn how to live with this virus until there is a proven treatment or a vaccine,” county Commissioners’

Chairwoman Dr. Valerie Arkoosh said during a recent news briefing at the county Emergency Operation Center. “And in the course of learning to live with it, we each have to figure out what we can do to make it as safe as possible.

“Looking at our current data, including hospitalization, we believe we continue to be at a plateau. So that’s good, but we must work to get our numbers lower. We should think of where we are now as our ceiling … where we’re running about 15-percent positivity rate at our testing site. This is about as high as we ever want to be again,” Arkoosh said.

Recent data has shown that of those tested at a community based drive-thru testing site in Whitpain about 15-percent of the people are testing positive for the virus. That’s a decrease from a peak positive rate of 24-percent that officials reported around April 5.

“We will get through this if we each do everything that we can to be part of the solution. If we all

follow data driven recommendations and evidencebased solutions, we will beat this thing,” added Arkoosh, who as a physician has been at the center of the county’s efforts to combat coronavirus and provide citizens with the latest information regarding the outbreak.

Arkoosh said residents “have some time” before the county reaches the goals that would allow the county to relax some mitigation measures and reopen under Gov. Tom Wolf’s reopen plan.

“Let’s use this time wisely. Each of us needs to think about what steps we can take in our personal lives and in our work lives to learn to live with social distancing,” Arkoosh said. “Social distancing needs to become second nature and socially expected in the same way that shaking hands used to be. I’m going to put shaking hands in the past tense, because we are not going to be shaking hands for a very long time.”

Business owners, Arkoosh suggested, should be thinking about steps they can take to operate their businesses responsibly in the future.

“How can you create a business environment that makes your employees feel safe and encourages your customers to want to patronize your business because they have confidence that they will be as safe as possible?” said Arkoosh, a graduate of University of Nebraska College of Medicine who also has a master’s degree in public health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

As an example, Arkoosh pointed out, operators at some of the county’s large meat processing plants have installed Plexiglas sheets between workers on the production line and installed more handwashing stations.

“For each business, it’s going to be different, but this is a good time to begin thinking about what it’s going to take to meet some of these social distancing goals,” Arkoosh said.

For those whom COVID-19 may be likely to cause serious health complications, they should think about what they need to feel safe during the ongoing public health crisis, Arkoosh said.

“How can our communities come together to support you? We need more testing, particularly the rapid virus testing. The county is actively working to significantly expand our contact tracing team and look forward to beginning contact tracing as soon as our numbers get down a little bit lower,” said Arkoosh.

“The county is actively evaluating options to provide additional financial support to our small business community and our safety net organizations, both of which have been deeply impacted by this pandemic,” Arkoosh added.

The county’s future goals, Arkoosh said, should include: safely restoring economic activity and safely getting as many people back to work as possible; safely reopening child care so parents can get back to work; safely opening schools this fall; and continuing to protect hospitals, hospital workers and first responders, including permitting hospitals to safely resume elective surgeries.

Arkoosh said hospital workers should have enough PPE (personal protective equipment) and hospitals should have more COVID-19 patients being discharged than being admitted and their total number of patients should be able to be accommodated in normal patient care areas.

Under a detailed, colorcoded plan for reopening the state in phases, Wolf previously indicated if Southeast Pennsylvania continues to have a higher number of positive COVID-19 cases, then reopening there will be slower than in places where the case counts have been low.

Under the plan, to determine when a region is ready to reopen and return to work, the state will evaluate the incidence rate of COVID-19 cases per capita. Specifically, a regional assessment will measure the COVID-19 cases to determine if the target goal of an average of less than 50 cases per 100,000 individuals over the course of 14 days is met.

Montgomery County, which has a population of about 830,915, recently recorded 2,612 cases of the virus over one 14-day period, for a daily average of about 187 cases, according to the statistics.

In order to meet the governor’s target of less than 50 cases per 100,000 people, the county would have to see a reduction to 415 cases over 14 days, for a daily average of 30 cases.

The county is currently in the red phase of Wolf’s plan, which mandates that only life sustaining businesses can be open, large gatherings are prohibited and there is a stay-at-home order in place. Arkoosh emphasized that Wolf’s reopen plan “has more than just a single number that we need to meet” in order to move to the next, relaxed phase, the yellow phase.

Also part of the puzzle, Arkoosh said, are sufficient hospital capacity and available beds, adequate availability of personal protective equipment, expanded virus testing and a contact tracing system in place to help quickly identify and contain any burgeoning hotspots.

Even in the yellow phase, Arkoosh said, larger social gatherings would be prohibited.

“It’s in your hands, folks. You need to take personal responsibility for your actions. We’re all in this together. This is the time for everybody to step up and do the right thing,” Arkoosh said.

“For now, you must stay at home. But use this time wisely to make your plan and together, as long as we hang together, we will be ‘Montco Strong,’’ said Arkoosh, quoting a popular county motto.