State retires long-term care report

The Pennsylvania Department of Health reported 4,506 additional coronavirus cases on Friday. The seven-day total of 27,150 cases calculates to a moving average of 3,879 cases per day, down 3.7% from a week ago, and down 17.2% over the past 30 days. The moving average has been declining for 14 consecutive days.

To date, there have been 1.56 million infections statewide.

Week-to-week case rates are rising in 21 of the state’s 67 counties, including Schuylkill County, which has the highest rate in The Morning Call’s 8-county region. Rates are within 10% of last week’s rate in 20 others, including Lehigh, Northampton, Berks and Bucks counties. Carbon and Monroe are among the 26 counties decreasing at least 10% from week to week.

There were 85 deaths reported Friday, for a seven-day total of 474. The seven-day moving average of deaths per day is 67.7, compared with 69.3 a week ago, a decrease of 2% in the last seven days.

The Health Department announced Friday that it has retired the weekly Survey 123 tool used by senior care facilities in the state. The tool was utilized by both assisted living facilities licensed by the Department of Human Services and skilled nursing facilities licensed by the Health Department.

According to a note on the Health Department website, “[t]his change will eliminate a duplicative reporting procedure that will result in better data integrity and most importantly, allow administrators to focus more on the care of their residents.”

A new dashboard with facility-level data from the National Healthcare Safety Network now appears on the department’s long-term care facility data page. The NHSN data includes only skilled nursing facilities, and is not directly comparable with the former Survey 123 reports. The former report included county-level data summaries of both Health Department and Human Services facilities.

A press release noted that 14,381 deaths have occurred among Pennsylvania’s 1,643 personal care and skilled nursing facilities, accounting for 45.8% of the total 31,377 COVID-related deaths recorded in the state.

There were 113 cases and one death in Lehigh County, and 81 cases in Northampton County.