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COVID-19

J&J’s vaccine cleared

WASHINGTON — Nearly 4 million doses of the newest COVID-19 vaccine were to be shipped out Sunday night, and will begin to be delivered to states for injections starting on Tuesday. White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients announced that the entire stockpile of the newly approved single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine will go out immediately. J&J will deliver about 16 million more doses by the end of March and 100 million total by the end of June. Though the new shot is easier to administer and requires only one dose, the administration is not altering its distribution plans. ...

Area virus cases fluctuate

The trend of improvement for the region seen in Friday updates of the state’s early-warning COVID-19 dashboard in recent months seems to have halted, at least temporarily and in some respects. Last Friday, all 12 key metrics for the six local counties showed improvement, while this week, four of those metrics went back in the other direction. Last week, there were fewer new cases in all the counties than in the previous week, but this week, there were more new cases in Cambria than the week before. Conversely, the news was a bit better regarding the thresholds of concern for the ...

Beam under fire by state lawmakers

The state House Appropriations Committee on Thursday grilled acting Health Secretary Alison Beam on the Wolf administration’s requirement early in the pandemic that nursing homes accept COVID-19 readmissions from hospitals and the administration’s recent massive expansion of the top-priority vaccination group, leading to frustration among people who can’t get appointments for shots. Committee members said those readmissions allegedly added to the homes’ devastating death counts, and both decisions appear to be blunders. In both cases, the administration was following federal ...

Pa. asks to waive school tests

HARRISBURG — The issues surrounding the return of elementary and secondary schools to regular in-person education amid the COVID-19 pandemic were the subject of a House Education Committee meeting Tuesday. Two state Education Department officials and education leaders fielded questions from lawmakers about changing guidance from Washington about resuming in-person instruction and scheduling the Keystone Exam and Pennsylvania System of School Assessment. But on Wednesday, the chairs of Pennsylvania’s state Senate Education Committee asked the Biden administration to waive this ...

Nursing home admissions explained

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the state Department of Health issued its controversial order that nursing homes accept people discharged from hospitals with COVID-19 in order to comply with guidance from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, acting Health Secretary Alison Beam said Tuesday in a virtual news conference. Beam reiterated that explanation when asked whether in retrospect issuing that order was a good idea — given ongoing criticism that it contributed to the catastrophic number of deaths in ...

Blair COVID-19 hospitalizations decreasing

HOLLIDAYSBURG — The amount of people hospitalized in Blair County with COVID-19 conditions continues to decrease, Public Safety Director Mark Taylor said Tuesday. A week ago, Taylor told commissioners that 28 people were hospitalized with COVID-19, the fewest cases in weeks, and a reason to be optimistic. When updating commissioners Tuesday, Taylor reported that for each of the last four days, fewer than 20 were hospitalized in Blair County with COVID-19 symptoms. And very few of those hospitalized were on ventilators, Taylor said. The county’s positivity rate for those being ...