Coronavirus hotspot emerging in northeast Pa.

Concerns about region closest to NYC

• Emily Previti/PA Post
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  Emily is a reporter for WITF who’s been covering voting and elections since July 2019 as part of her former role with statehouse accountability news organization PA Post. She was the senior reporter for statewide public media collaboration Keystone Crossroads. Previously, she covered city hall for PennLive/The Patriot-News (Harrisburg, Pa.), was a watchdog and city hall reporter at The Press of Atlantic City and reported for the Northwest Herald. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.
  
  See other articles by Emily Previti for WITF.

 Dani Fresh / Keystone Crossroads

At the Sayford Market in Harrisburg, an employee tells a customer through the glass that they’re closed for the day.

Dani Fresh / Keystone Crossroads

At the Sayford Market in Harrisburg, an employee tells a customer through the glass that they’re closed for the day. (Dani Fresh/Keystone Crossroads)

• Four more Pennsylvanians have died from COVID-19 complications, and another 600-plus have tested positive for the coronavirus, state officials announced Sunday. The new numbers include the first cases in Mifflin and Venango counties. Nine counties, all of them considered rural, still haven’t reported any cases. Some public officials say that’s because tests aren’t available in sparsely populated areas; they’re calling on the state to include county-level testing numbers in its daily update. Meanwhile, Health Secretary Rachel Levine shared that she’s refraining from visiting her own mother in a long-term care facility and reminded others to do the same in an effort to protect the population most vulnerable to the virus.

• Bucks County officials announced three residents died over the weekend due to COVID-19 complications. Deaths also were reported in Berks, Lancaster, Lawrence and Monroe counties.

• St. Luke’s University Health Network has deemed the Pocono Mountains a “hotbed” for the coronavirus, The Morning Call reported Sunday, with half of patients at its Monroe campus being treated for COVID-10. The declaration comes amid increasingly vocal concerns from northeastern Pennsylvania officials about a COVD-19 surge in the region given its proximity to New York and New Jersey, where the virus has already overwhelmed health systems and prompted the CDC to issue a travel advisory. Levine said Sunday it’s up to the feds, ultimately, whether NEPA will get a mass testing site like those up and running in Philadelphia and Montgomery counties.

• Gov. Tom Wolf on Sunday requested a “major disaster declaration” from the federal government, a step that could bring in more resources for the state’s fight against the coronavirus outbreak. The designation would expand access to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or SNAP) benefits. Already, the pandemic has presented additional challenges for people who use food stamps — which can’t, for example, be used to shop online for groceries and have them delivered, WESA’s Lucy Perkins reports.

Best of the rest

A map published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing the size of the coronavirus outbreak in the 50 states.

• The Trump administration announced Sunday that the federal government’s social distancing initiatives will continue for another month, a reversal of sorts given the president’s discussion last week of returning to normalcy by Easter.  But even late April seems like it will be too early for Pennsylvania to cease coronavirus restrictions — at least based on existing models such as this one from the University of Pittsburgh. That’s one of at least four models Levine said state officials are factoring into their decisionmaking.

• While Pitt’s projection gauges health system capacity based mainly on available hospital beds, researchers are working on projections that take ventilators into account as well, Brett Sholtis reported in a story highlighted in Saturday’s Context. PennLive did this post about a model created by the Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation that predicts the pandemic will peak in Pennsylvania in mid-April, at which point the state will need 728 respirators to care for COVID-19 patients alone and nearly 1,500 intensive care beds (Levine said Sunday that there are 3,400 ICU beds in the state, but only 40% are currently available).

• The state Department of Corrections announced Sunday the first positive test among state prison inmates SCI-Phoenix, prompting the quarantine of 250 at-risk prisoners identified by contact tracing. One man on death row told PA Post’s Joseph Jaafari and Spotlight PA’s Cynthia Fernandez just over a week ago that he couldn’t get a test despite asking for one and showing symptoms such as a cough and high fever; a court ordered to administer the test also didn’t seem to move corrections officials, The Philadelphia Inquirer later reported. The DOC could end up back in court soon, too, because the ACLU of Pennsylvania tells us its attorneys intend to file a court action today to try to force the state to release certain prisoners as some other states and county jails in the commonwealth have done.

• Wolf’s administration has laid off about 2,500 seasonal and part-time workers and interns across several departments. Announced Friday, this round of layoffs could be the first of multiple by a state government “bracing for hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenues as businesses shut down, unemployment claims spike to unparalleled levels, and more people seek other public assistance benefits,” Spotlight PA’s Angela Couloumbis and Rebecca Moss report.

• The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board isn’t about to reopen the commonwealth’s state-run wine and spirits stores, but expects to start selling alcohol again “in some form or fashion” sometime soon, PennLive’s Jan Murphy writes.

Coronavirus must-reads:

• StatNews: Two new roadmaps lay out possible paths to end coronavirus lockdowns

• USA Today: How we respond to the coronavirus crisis will be defining, historians say

• New York Times: Coronavirus Slowdown in Seattle Suggests Restrictions Are Working

• CBS 60 Minutes: Doctors on the front lines describe surge in coronavirus patients

• Post-Gazette: As COVID-19 response shifts, former HHS secretary Shalala wants health experts out front

• New Yorker: The Fate of the News in the Age of the Coronavirus

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Correction: Sunday’s Context contained an item about Sen. Pat Toomey (R) posting a video encouraging Pennsylvanians to wear facemasks to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Toomey was recommending the use of homemade or other non-medical-quality masks. He made clear that the professional medical-grade masks should be reserved for the physicians, nurses and other health care workers fighting the virus on the front lines. His video is online here, and The Morning Call’s Laura Olson wrote more about it here. Tim Fallon from Lehigh Valley Public Media reached out to urge this correction. Thank you Tim!