COVID-19 Update: May 29, 2020

Coronavirus update for Friday, May 29 as of 2:30 p.m.

Pennsylvania Update

Wolf Administration

The Wolf administration announced that 16 more counties will move to the green phase next Friday, June 5. This includes Allegheny County.
Today, eight counties moved from red to yellow, joining 49 others already in the yellow phase, and 18 went from yellow to green.
All counties currently in the red phase are still scheduled to move to the yellow phase next Friday.

Department of Health – by the numbers

Friday’s new COVID-19 case and death counts are similar to Thursday’s.
Three more long-term-care facilities now report cases of COVID-19 among patients or staff.
Nearly 5300 health care workers have tested positive for COVID-19.
604 people have now tested positive on serology tests.
1445 Pennsylvanians are hospitalized because of COVID-19.
298 of them are on ventilators.
45 percent of acute-care beds, 38 percent of adult ICU beds, and 24 percent of pediatric beds are currently unoccupied, as are 53 percent of Pennsylvania hospitals’ isolation rooms.

Friday’s Daily Briefing

Governor Wolf and Secretary Levine took questions from reporters.
Governor Wolf said Pennsylvania has more testing sites (318) than any other state.
But the state still does not have enough testing materials.
Secretary Levine said Pennsylvania’s testing sites are now performing up to 13,000 tests a day.
She noted that the numbers decline significantly on weekends.
And the state is still working to expand its testing capacity.
She said she hoped there might eventually be point-of-care tests that can be administered by non-health care professionals and provide accurate results in 15-20 minutes.
She explained that the value of antibody testing is still not known.
Governor Wolf observed that the state is nowhere near being able to perform surveillance testing and that is far off in the future.
He explained that as the state gets more data and learns more about COVID-19, the standard of no more than 50 cases per 100,000 population over 14 days has become less relevant to decisions about counties moving from one phase to another.
He said schools will reopen in September but did not commit to all children returning to the classroom in the traditional manner.
He said he wants to do everything possible to avoid another shelter-in-place situation if the pandemic surges again in the fall or winter.
Secretary Levine said the state hopes to have several thousand people across Pennsylvania working on contact tracing.

Federal Update

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

In the past week CMS issued five section 1135 waiversto give states greater flexibility to serve their Medicaid beneficiaries during the COVID-19 public health emergency. It issued waivers to Alaska, Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Vermont.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The CDC has issued emergency use authorizations (EUAs) for two specific commercial diagnostic tests for COVID-19 intended for self-collection in the home or in health care settings. Find them here and here.
The CDC has published information on considerations when preparing for COVID-19 in assisted living facilities.