PA Gov. Tom Wolf (right) at a recent press briefing
Gov. Tom Wolf today elaborated on the criteria the commonwealth will use for its phased reopening of the state’s economy.
The base metric, according to his office, is that a region will need to have fewer than 50 newly confirmed cases per 100,000 population reported to the state Department of Health in the previous 14 days.
So, for example, a region with a population of 800,000 people would need to have fewer than 400 newly confirmed cases reported in the past 14 days to meet the target, according to the governor’s office.
Additional criteria include:
- Enough testing available for individuals with symptoms and target populations such as those at high risk, health care personnel and first responders.
- Robust case investigation and contact tracing infrastructure in place to facilitate early identification of cluster outbreaks and to issue proper isolation and quarantine orders.
- Identification of an area’s high-risk settings including correctional institutions, personal care homes, skilled nursing facilities and other congregate care settings, and assurance that facilities have adequate safeguards in place such as staff training, employee screening, visitor procedures and screening and adequate supplies of personal protective equipment to support continued operations.
PA also will rely on a modeling dashboard under development and evaluation by Carnegie Mellon University to take a regional and sector-based approach to re-openings, the easing of restrictions and public health response, according to Wolf’s office.
As of Saturday, the health department has reported 40,049 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the state and 1,537 deaths from the disease.
Health Secretary Rachel Levine today said that the department has divided the commonwealth into regions for “more than 50 years,” so is working within those established boundaries.
Those regions are: northwest, northeast, north-central, south-central, southeast and southwest.
Wolf has set a May 8 date for restricted re-openings for the first two regions—the northwest and north-central regions. Currently, these two regions meet the criteria of moving from the state’s “red,” phase, which the entire commonwealth is under currently, to the less restrictive “yellow” phase, Wolf has said.
Levine today said that, even after a region opens, it’s unlikely that daily life will immediately return to the way it was before the pandemic hit in early March.
“I think it will be a new normal,” she said. “The way . . . back to before is extremely unlikely.”
