Montco officials: Peak of pandemic still two weeks away

EAGLEVILLE » Montgomery County officials reported a sixth coronavirus death in the county and revealed that scientific models appear to indicate the peak for the disease in the county is still two weeks away.

An 82-year-old Springfield woman with underlying health conditions was the sixth person to die during the COVID-19 epidemic and she was in a hospital at the time of her death, county Commissioner Chairwoman Dr. Valerie Arkoosh said during a Monday news briefing at the county emergency operation center in Eagleville.

Meanwhile, officials announced 75 new positive cases of COVID-19 on Monday, bringing the county’s total number of cases to 506 since March 7.

The new cases included residents from 27 municipalities, including two areas that reported their first cases — North Wales and Telford.

To date, 51 of the county’s 62 municipalities have reported coronavirus cases, said Arkoosh, who was joined at the news conference by fellow commissioners Kenneth E. Lawrence Jr. and Joseph C. Gale, and Dr. Alvin Wang, regional EMS medical director, and Dr. Brenda Weis, administrator of the Office of Public Health.

The new cases in the county included 39 men and 36 women whose ages ranged between 11 and 89. Five of the individuals are hospitalized.

Arkoosh continued to strongly reinforce the “social distancing measures” recommended by state and county health officials to help prevent the spread of the virus, warning that scientific models indicate the peak for the disease in the county is still two weeks away.

“We’re still not at the peak of this disease. We have seen some modeling data that would seem to suggest that the peak here in our area is probably about two weeks away,” Arkoosh said. “So this is no time to relax. This is a time to hunker down, redouble your efforts at staying home.

“We want to make sure that we do everything possible not to overwhelm our hospitals, not to overwhelm our first responders. We have plenty of examples from around the country of what that looks like. We don’t want that to be here in Montgomery County,” added Arkoosh.

“It’s all going to depend on what people do in the next two weeks. If everybody stays home, it should be hopefully fairly manageable. But if people start going out, if they start relaxing it, if they loosen up, it could be very, very serious,” Arkoosh said.

Arkoosh urged residents to pull together as a community to stop the spread of the disease by staying home, other than for absolutely essential trips.

“If you go out in our community unnecessarily, it’s frankly reckless at this point. We have disease everywhere in this county. The way that we get this shut down as quickly as possible is to stay home and prevent the transmission of additional disease,” Arkoosh said.

Officials said to date, three correctional officers at the county jail have tested positive for COVID-19.

“To date, no inmates at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility have tested positive for COVID-19,” Arkoosh stressed. The first correctional officer returned from an out-of-state trip and tested positive for the virus. Contact tracing was completed in the jail and five close contacts were identified and none of those were inmates, officials said. All of the close contacts tested negative and have completed quarantine.

Contact tracing was completed for the second positive correctional officer and no contact with inmates has been identified.

“The contact tracing did identify five correctional officers with whom this individual had direct contact, all of whom have been tested. We are awaiting those results and those five individuals, as well as the positive officer, remain in isolation or quarantine,” Arkoosh explained.

The third correctional officer who tested positive has had contact tracing completed and no direct contact with inmates has been identified. That officer did not come to work at the Eagleville jail while in the “infectious period” of the disease, “so there’s no one else being tested or in quarantine related to this individual,” Arkoosh said.

“However, this individual does remain in quarantine,” Arkoosh said.

County court and jail officials have taken measures to mitigate the potential spread of COVID-19, including previously declaring state of emergency operations and closing the facility to the visiting public and lawyers. Authorities have also tried to reduce the jail population without threatening public safety.

Since the March 12 emergency judicial order was enacted, the prison population has been reduced by 100 individuals, from 1,342 to 1,242 and the average number of daily admissions to the jail has gone from 28 to 8.

The reductions were achieved by the courts through a combination of early parole for eligible inmates, electronic monitoring for those inmates on work release, expediting administrative dispositions for probation violations and deferral of weekend sentences, officials said.

Court officials are expanding their efforts to reduce the prison population further by considering early parole for anyone eligible for parole through August, increased administrative dispositions for non-violent offenses and further use of electronic monitoring for those on work release.

“The courts believe these efforts will have a significant impact on reducing the population in the correctional facility. The courts have stressed that each decision will be made on a case-by-case basis with consideration of public safety in mind,” Arkoosh said.

Officials added the county’s community-based COVID-19 testing site at Temple University’s Ambler Campus in Upper Dublin, continues to be available. As of 8 a.m. Monday, 2,364 people have been tested at the site since March 20.

Sixty-percent of the test results have been returned and about 13-percent of the individuals tested positive, according to officials.

The site will provide testing by appointment only. There will not be any treatment conducted at the site, which will be open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

The link to register is available at www.montcopa.org/COVID-19 as well as at the county’s official social media accounts, officials said.

Individuals who do not have access to the Internet or do not have an email address can call 610-6313000 at 8 a.m. daily to register for a testing appointment that day.