All of state still at high spread risk

The Christmas holiday didn’t provide a reprieve from COVID-19 for counties across Pennsylvania.

A report released Monday showed that all 67 counties in the state continued to have a substantial risk of community spread of the infectious disease for the week ending on Christmas Day, the third straight week every county fell into the highest of three risk categories.

The weekly report is part of an online risk assessment tool created by the state Department of Education in August to help school districts decide if they should hold in-person classes based on the risk of community

spread in their county.

Community spread means people have been infected with the virus in an area, including some who are not sure how or where they became infected.

Gov. Tom Wolf said Monday that statewide COVID-19 data has been improving lately, crediting restrictions his administration has put in place. But, he added, Pennsylvania is far from out of the woods.

“This is the second consecutive week that we see a decrease in percent positivity, providing us with data that our efforts to reduce and mitigate the spread are working,” Wolf said. “Although this is encouraging, we need to stay the course in our fight against COVID-19. We need Pennsylvanians to continue efforts to stay safe, stay home as much as possible, wear a mask when out of our homes, and avoid gatherings with those outside our households.”

The state’s community spread risk assessment tool uses county-level COVID-19 data on incidence rates and the percent positivity of diagnostic testing to group counties into one of three categories of risk of community spread: low, moderate or substantial. A county-by-county list of ratings is released each Monday.

The COVID-19 incident rate is how many people out of 100,000 have tested positive for the disease over the past seven days. The percent positivity is the percentage of people tested over a seven-day span that test positive.

The following are the metrics for each of the state’s risk categories:

• Low: An incident rate of less than 10 per 100,000 residents over the past seven days and a seven-day positivity rate less than 5%.

• Moderate: An incident rate of 10 to 100 per 100,000 residents over the past seven days or a seven-day positivity rate between 5% and 10%.

• Substantial: An incident rate of greater than 100 per 100,000 residents over the past seven days or a sevenday positivity rate greater than 10%.

For each risk category the state provides guidelines on how schools should provide instruction: in-person, virtually or a mix of the two. The recommendation for school districts in counties with substantial community spread risk is to hold classes fully virtually.

School districts are not bound to follow the state’s guidelines and have the ability to choose what mode of instruction they use regardless of the county’s risk category.

The results in the state’s weekly risk assessment reports have changed drastically, mirroring similar changes in statewide daily COVID-19 case counts.

When the tool was first introduced in August, just a few weeks before the start of the school year, just one county fell into the substantial risk category.

But by the start of November, as Pennsylvania began the climb toward what became a fall wave of cases that dwarfed numbers from earlier in the pandemic, more than half of counties had a substantial risk.

The number in that category, as well as daily case numbers, continued to grow. And when the last holdout, Cameron County, shifted from low risk to substantial in the week ending Dec. 11, the entire state was in the most severe risk category.

That has held true since, as the state continues to muddle through a lengthy COVID-19 surge.

According to the state Department of Health, the statewide seven-day incident rate for the week ending Thursday was 373.3, down from the previous week’s 445.8. The statewide seven-day percent positivity was 15.1%.

On Monday the state reported 3,460 new COVID-19 cases. It was the first time since Nov. 29 the state reported less than 5,000 daily new cases. Despite the dip, recent statewide numbers continue to far exceed ones from the first wave of the pandemic in the spring, where the highest daily case count was just over 2,000.