HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania counties still under strict coronavirus restrictions — including hard-hit Philadelphia and its suburbs, as well as the Lehigh Valley — will move to the “yellow” reopening phase on June 5, Gov. Tom Wolf said Friday.
The announcement comes as several counties are still far from reaching at least one of the metrics established by the Wolf administration to determine when areas can safely begin loosening lockdown orders.
So far, state officials have moved 49 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties to the yellow phase, allowing some businesses to resume in-person operations and the public to move more freely.
In this phase, limitations on public gatherings remain, and restaurants and bars remain closed to in-person business. Gyms, salons, malls, and movie theaters also remain closed.
By June 5, Wolf said all counties will at least be in the yellow phase. That includes ten counties that are still seeing high case counts — Berks, Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Lackawanna, Lancaster, Lehigh, Northampton, Montgomery, and Philadelphia.
“My stay-at-home order did exactly what it was intended to do: It saved lives,” Wolf said Friday. “Over the past two weeks, we have seen sustained reductions in hospitalizations. … Our new case rate has been shrinking.”
For Southeastern Pa., a Two-Week Wait for Relief
Gov. Tom Wolf announced that eight additional counties will move to the "yellow" phase of reduced restrictions by May 29. Wolf said he anticipates that the remaining 10 "red" counties — almost all in Southeastern Pennsylvania — will be allowed to enter the yellow phase on June5.
Also, 17 counties on May 29 will move to the "green" phase, which lifts the stay-at-home order and allows all businesses to reopen, but with many limited to 50% capacity.
Public health experts were split on the wisdom of the governor’s move to reopen every county, if only partially, including the hardest hit ones in the southeastern part of the state.
Officials have said counties need to have sufficient levels of testing and contact tracing to identify and track new cases and prevent them from becoming outbreaks.
Mike LeVasseur, an epidemiology professor at Drexel University, said the state still does not have enough contact tracers in place to pinpoint where clusters of the coronavirus are occurring.
“There hasn’t been enough staff to be able to handle the epidemic that we’ve had,” he said. “Why don’t we just hold off for a bit, and wait a couple of weeks until we have a better idea of what the situation is?”
Chrysan Cronin, director and professor of public health at Muhlenberg College, said she’s always viewed one of the administration’s key metrics for partially reopening a county — fewer than 50 positive cases per 100,000 people over a two-week period — as arbitrary.
“That is not a scientifically proven number,” said Cronin. “We don’t learn about that in epidemiology school. They set a bar so they could watch the trends over time.”
