The director of the Allegheny County Health Department said Wednesday that with an ongoing, daily rise in COVID-19 cases, she does not expect to rescind the county’s order banning the sale of alcohol in bars and restaurants for weeks at least.
“Allegheny County ended June with some of the worst COVID numbers in the state,” said Dr. Debra Bogen, noting the 722 new COVID-19 cases since June 20 in the county, and more than 100 new cases each of the last two days alone. “Frankly, I don’t expect these numbers to decline for at least a couple of weeks.”
As a result, she said at the county’s weekly online COVID-19 press conference, “we really don’t expect to see a big change [in the county alcohol ban] for a couple of weeks, at the soonest.”
The decision to ban the sale of alcohol was based on contact tracing information by the health department’s staff calling people who are infected, aided by other county staff who don’t normally do contact tracing, all of whom have been working 14- to 15-hour days to make calls on each case to try to pin down where people are becoming infected.
The result, Dr. Bogen said, is that the cases are clearly from two main sources: people going out to bars and restaurants locally —which resulted in the alcohol ban — and from people who traveled out of state, primarily to the Carolinas’ and Florida coasts, where they also went into bars and restaurants. The reports of out-of-state travelers testing positive led to the county’s recommendation that travelers self-quarantine for two weeks, or get two negative tests.
Those testing positive now are rapidly changing the makeup of the demographics of positive cases.
On June 20, people ages 19 to 24 had only tested positive 148 times, or just 7% of the 2,158 cases in the county since the first case here in March.
By Wednesday, just 10 days later, the number of people ages 19 to 24 who tested positive more than doubled to 385 cases overall, now representing 13% of the 2,870 total cases.
That means that of the 722 new cases in the county since June 20, “that small sliver of our population [ages 19 to 24] accounts for one-third of our recent cases,” Dr. Bogen said, noting that the median age of the 722 new cases was just 27.
The only age group that had more cases since June 20 was the next age group the county tracks, ages 25 to 49, which have had 295 new cases in the last 10 days, and now make up 36% of all of the county cases.
“The change in our case numbers going from near zero to over 100 in just a few weeks should really be a wakeup call that we have asymptomatic spread in our community,” Dr. Bogen said. “You don’t know who has it and who doesn’t.”
The spike in cases not only in Allegheny County, but the surrounding counties, over the last week is troubling, county Executive Rich Fitzgerald said at the press conference.
“For many months … this region was one of the best in the country as far as keeping the numbers down, positive cases down, low percentage, low raw numbers,” he said. “Then over the last 10 days we’ve seen an uptick of our numbers to the fact that we’ve really gone up much higher than any of us really feel comfortable with.”
The rapid spike came so fast it outpaced the health department’s plans to hire more contact tracers for a projected fall increase in cases.
“I was personally planning for this rise in cases really in the fall when I thought we’d see it, and was surprised by the rapid rise in cases,” Dr. Bogen said.
Dr. Bogen said she discussed the spike in cases with the state Department of Health, but she said the decision to ban alcohol in bars and restaurants “was really my decision.”
Though there has been some pushback, Mr. Fitzgerald said he fully supported Dr. Bogen and her staff’s decision.
“They’re going to follow the science and I’m going to be there to support what they’re doing,” he said.
The hope, he said, is to avoid what is happening in Florida, Texas and Arizona where hospitals are becoming overwhelmed with more serious cases of COVID-19.
The fact that 74 % of the new COVID-19 cases since June 20 in the county are among those 19 to 49, and not in the older, higher risk groups who suffer the most serious impacts of the disease, is not necessarily going to prevent the region’s hospitals from seeing a surge, Dr. Bogen said.
“Although younger adults in general fare better with COVID-19, as case counts increase, we’ll see a small percentage of young and healthy adults get sick enough to require hospitalization,” she said.
Though the numbers are small so far, Dr. Bogen noted that hospitalization numbers are starting to “creep up” with 13 in just the last three days. Seven of those 13 hospitalizations were people in their 20s or 30s.
Though many have wondered whether the ongoing police brutality protests that have occurred in the Pittsburgh area over the last month have led to COVID-19 cases, Dr. Bogen said of the new cases since June 20, only four of those infected said they had attended a protest, and two of those four said they had also attended a bar or restaurant.
The county’s contact tracing team got information from infected residents that among them they had attended at least 40 different bars, restaurants and nightclubs. Fifteen of those locations were reported more than once by different people who tested positive.
“Many reported [to the contact tracing team] that neither patrons nor employees [at the bars, restaurants and nightclubs they attended] wore masks or were practicing physical distancing,” Dr. Bogen said.
Allegheny County on Wednesday topped its highest single-day increase of positive COVID-19 cases with an additional 110 new cases, according to the county health department.
It marked the second day in a row the county has seen a daily increase of more than 100 new cases and a day after the county imposed a ban of alcohol sales for on-site consumption at bars and restaurants.
The statewide total for COVID-19 cases is 87,242, with an additional 636 cases being reported by the state health department on Wednesday. Western Pennsylvania accounts for 194 of those new cases. Allegheny County had the highest increase in cases, followed by Westmoreland County with 29 new cases of the virus.
Due to the increase in cases being seen in Pennsylvania, the state health department released a new early warning dashboard on its website.
The Early Warning Monitoring System Dashboard allows users to pick a county and see a comparison of the past two weeks in categories such as new case counts, the incident rate per 100,000 residents and the average number of COVID-19 hospitalizations, among others.
Statewide, there was an increase of 38 new deaths, three of which were in Western Pennsylvania — Allegheny County reported one and Erie County reported two additional deaths.
The death toll for Allegheny County is 187, reported by both state and county health departments.
Here are the total number of positive cases reported Wednesday in Western Pennsylvania:
• Allegheny: 2,870 (up 110 from Tuesday)
• Armstrong: 76 (up 2)
• Beaver: 678 ( up 9)
• Butler: 311 (up 4)
• Cambria: 83 (up 3)
• Clarion: 35 (up 1)
• Clearfield: 72 (no change)
• Crawford: 57 (up 4)
• Erie: 620 (up 13)
• Fayette: 117 (up 1)
• Forest: 7 (no change)
• Greene: 41 (no change)
• Indiana: 111 (up 3)
• Jefferson: 24 (up 2)
• Lawrence: 103 (up 1)
• Mercer: 140 (no change)
• Somerset: 61 (no change)
• Venango: 19 (up 1)
• Washington: 230 (up 11)
• Westmoreland: 675 (up 29)
Here are the total number of deaths reported Wednesday in Western Pennsylvania:
• Allegheny: 187 (up 1 from Tuesday)
• Armstrong: 6 (no change)
• Beaver: 78 (no change)
• Butler: 13 (no change)
• Cambria: 3 (no change)
• Clarion: 2 (no change)
• Clearfield: 0 (no change)
• Crawford: 0 (no change)
• Erie: 12 (up 2)
• Fayette: 4 (no change)
• Forest: 0 (no change)
• Greene: 0 (no change)
• Indiana: 6 (no change)
• Jefferson: 1 (no change)
• Lawrence: 9 (no change)
• Mercer: 6 (no change)
• Somerset: 1 (no change)
• Venango: 0 (no change)
• Washington: 6 (no change)
• Westmoreland: 38 (The county coroner is reporting 32.)
Here’s a look at demographic data in Allegheny County, based on data reported recently:
Cases by age group (Wednesday’s data):
• 0-4: 23 (1%)
• 5-12: 38 (1%)
• 13-18: 58 (2%)
• 19-24: 385 (13%)
• 25-49: 1,023 (36%)
• 50-64: 644 (22%)
• 65 and over: 699 (24%)
Deaths by age group (Tuesday’s data):
• 20-29: 1 (1%)
• 40-49: 2 (1%)
• 50-59: 9 (5%)
• 60-69: 23 (12%)
• 70 and over: 151 (81%)
Cases by gender (Wednesday’s data):
• Female: 1,507 (52%)
• Male: 1,363 (48%)
Deaths by gender (Tuesday’s data):
• Female: 110 (59%)
• Male: 76 (41%)
Cases by race (Tuesday’s data):
• White: 1,691 (61%)
• Black: 648 (24%)
• Asian: 135 (5%)
• Other: 36 (1%)
• Race unknown: 250 (9%)
Deaths by race (Tuesday’s data):
• White: 148 (80%)
• Black: 35 (19%)
• Asian: 1 (1%)
• Race unknown: 2 (1%)
Nursing and personal care homes
The state has released data — organized by county — about cases and deaths at nursing and personal care homes. Here’s information about Western Pennsylvania, based on Wednesday’s figures, with changes in deaths noted in parentheses):
• Allegheny: 46 facilities, 539 cases among residents, 160 cases among employees, 147 deaths (up 1)
• Armstrong: 2 facilities, 8 cases among residents, 7 cases among employees, 5 deaths (no change)
• Beaver: 3 facilities, 392 cases among residents, 44 cases among employees, 82 deaths (no change)
• Butler: 9 facilities, 18 cases among residents, 13 cases among employees, 2 deaths (no change)
• Cambria: 2 facilities, 1 case among residents, 3 case among employees, 0 deaths (no change)
• Clarion: 1 facility, 2 cases among residents, 1 case among employees, 0 deaths (no change)
• Clearfield: 2 facilities, 2 cases among residents, 1 case among employees, 0 deaths (no change)
• Crawford: 2 facilities, 1 case among residents, 1 case among employees, 0 deaths
• Erie: 16 facilities, 50 cases among residents, 50 cases among employees, 9 deaths (up 1)
• Fayette: 3 facilities, 5 cases among residents, 5 cases among employees, 1 death (no change)
• Greene: 1 facility, 2 cases among residents, 1 case among employees, 0 deaths
• Indiana: 6 facilities, 16 cases among residents, 5 cases among employees, 4 deaths (no change)
• Jefferson: 1 facility, 1 case among residents, 3 case among employees, 0 deaths (no change)
• Lawrence: 2 facilities, 0 cases among residents, 2 cases among employees, 0 deaths (no change)
• Mercer: 3 facilities, 1 case among residents, 2 case among employees, 0 deaths (no change)
• Washington: 6 facilities, 8 cases among residents, 3 cases among employees, 2 deaths (no change)
• Westmoreland: 16 facilities, 147 cases among residents, 44 cases among employees, 29 deaths (no change)
• Pennsylvania: 699 facilities, 17,805 cases among residents, 3,291 cases among employees, 4,583 deaths (up 44)
For additional information on Allegheny County data, visit Allegheny County’s COVID-19 Dashboard. More information on statewide results can be found on the Pennsylvania Department of Health website.
Sean D. Hamill: shamill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2579 or Twitter: @SeanDHamill; Hallie Lauer: hlauer@post-gazette.com.
First Published: July 1, 2020, 3:41 p.m.
Updated: July 1, 2020, 10:09 p.m.
