On Monday, Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine made several announcements related to the commonwealth’s coronavirus efforts.
The announcements were related to testing at nursing homes, a new information dashboard and a new health care emergency preparedness vendor.
During Levine’s livestream update on Monday, she announced that universal testing was being ordered in Pennsylvania’s nursing homes. Baseline testing in all nursing homes is to be completed by July 24.
She noted that she previously issued guidance to nursing homes on universal testing in May, and to date 75 of those facilities have completed widespread testing.
Levine said the percent of positive cases in this population has been brought to its “lowest level since the start of this outbreak.”
Also, in the commonwealth’s continuing efforts “to provide accurate and transparent data,” Pennsylvania on Monday launched a dashboard that provides not only the county- and ZIP code-level data, but also expands data to include hospital preparedness demographic data, testing information and reopening status, Levine explained.
Links to the new dashboards can be found on https://www.health.pa.gov/topics/disease/coronavirus/Pages/Coronavirus.aspx
According to the new dashboard, all four local counties — Cameron, Elk, McKean and Potter — have stable, decreasing or low confirmed case counts for the past two weeks compared to the previous two weeks. Hospital bed use is 90% or lower per district population. Less than 10% of people in these counties who took a PCR test over the past two weeks tested positive.
The number of cases in the local counties remains the same as last reported.
Levine announced that Pennsylvania “selected a new vendor for our health care and emergency preparedness efforts”: the Public Health Management Corp. of Philadelphia.
She said the partnership makes the state “well positioned” to move forward in not only the current health crisis, but also future emergencies.
The move is “part of our annual federal preparedness grant and an integral part of our efforts to contain and mitigate disease spread in Pennsylvania,” said Levine.
A press release from the Pennsylvania Department of Health explained, “Health care coalitions (HCC) are a formal collaboration among health care organizations and public and private partners that are organized to prepare for, respond to and recover from an emergency, mass casualty or catastrophic event. The key components include comprehensive health care membership; regional presence developed within states/territories to cover larger geographic areas; and preparedness capability operationalization through plans, exercises, trainings, response, and after-action reports.”
The Department of Health announced that, as of Monday, the state has an additional 351 positive cases of COVID-19, which brings the statewide total to 75,943. The addition of 10 new deaths brings the total death count to 5,953.
There are 620 probable cases, too, which include those who have a positive serology test and either COVID-19 symptoms or a high-risk exposure.
To date, 451,387 patients have tested negative.
