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The state Department of Health does not want its half-century-old grouping of counties into health districts to interfere with reopening the state safely from its coronavirus shutdown, Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine said on Saturday's coronavirus webcast.
"We don't want any specific scheme of regions to hinder our progress with this," Levine said in answer to a question about how the groupings originated.
But she didn't suggest the administration would back off its plan to use those districts -- created in the 1960s according to a rationale she's unfamiliar with -- as a basis for the reopening plan outlined Wednesday by Gov. Tom Wolf, then lambasted by local lawmakers because many of Blair's fellow southcentral counties have high recent infection rates that are likely to delay the district's coming-out, despite the low case count here.
The reopening plan calls for all counties in a district to have infections calmed to the point where none have more than 50 new cases per 100,000 people in the previous 14 days.
Blair's current 14-day rate is 11, but seven of the other 12 southcentral counties are above the threshold -- three with numbers at least double that threshold level.
The DoH is worried that opening a low-infection county situated among high-infection ones that continue to be closed would invite the virus to invade the newly opened area.
Local officials have argued that Blair doesn't have much commerce with those high infection southcentral counties, all of which are to the southeast.
U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey recently revealed a reopening plan that would open most of the state immediately.
It's a plan that pleases state Rep. Jim Gregory, who said he looks forward to Toomey's leadership on the matter.
Such a reopening would go county-by-county, dispensing with the DoH regions and letting those like Blair benefit from their low infection rates, according to Gregory.
It's key that the pandemic here hasn't overwhelmed the state's health care systems, Toomey wrote in a news release Saturday.
Among its features would be "the flexibility to account for isolated statistical anomalies," like nursing homes with high infection rates that lift a whole county past acceptable levels, Toomey wrote.
Levine doesn't see such facilities as anomalies, because they have connections with their communities via workers who go in and out every day, she said on a recent webcast.
In addition to calling for all the counties within districts to meet the per-capita two-week infection threshold for reopening, the DoH hopes to ensure enough testing for people with symptoms and those in high-risk situations, including health care workers and first responders; the capacity for "robust case investigation and contact tracing" along with isolation and quarantines to suppress potential outbreaks; and sufficient training, screening and protective equipment in high-risk settings like prisons and long-term living facilities, according to a DoH news release Saturday.
There is a shortage of testing supplies, including sampling swabs and extraction and test reagents, although the shortage shouldn't hinder reopening, Levine said Saturday.
"(Still), we need to watch the supply chain carefully," she said.
The state is doing OK with N95 masks, having just received shipments from the federal government recently, but not so well with traditional surgical masks, gowns and gloves, which are in short supply in the federal stockpile, Levine said.