'Very Comfortable With Moving Forward': UPMC, County Say We've Done Enough Testing To Safely Reopen
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) - Have we passed the reopening test to justify moving our southwestern region from "red" into the "yellow" phase?
In two of the three main categories of Gov. Tom Wolf's reopening plan, our region has done quite well.
The number of new cases has remained low throughout the pandemic, and our hospital systems have never been stressed. UPMC now has less than 40 COVID-19 cases in all of its Southwestern Pennsylvania hospitals and has used less than 2 percent of its beds.
"Our hospital system has never been even close to stressed, even at our peak," said Dr. Steven Shapiro of UPMC.
One lingering question is whether we've done enough testing.
Including Wednesday's tally of 19 new coronavirus cases, Allegheny County has averaged 22 cases a day over the past two weeks — well under the state's metric of 50 cases per 100,000 residents over 14 days.
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But Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine has indicated that more testing is needed. So far, there have been 19,200 tests conducted in the county — less than 2 percent of the population.
Still, the county and UPMC's Shapiro says that testing gives a very good indication that the virus has a low prevalence here. The tests have been done on people who show symptoms and only about 5 percent are now testing positive for the virus. And most of of those have been confined to nursing homes.
"In the community our case rate is very low. It's really a nursing home problem and we need to really focus on that, which we can, but think it's fairly safe in the community right now to move forward," Shapiro said.
And, Shapiro says says we've been doing a good job in contact tracing — alerting and quarantining people who have come in contact with an infected person. If and when we reopen, the county believes it's in a good position to identify, isolate and contain any flare-ups.
Shapiro says he's very comfortable moving into a reopening phase.
"We're very comfortable because we think we can live with this virus at low levels and keep case rates down in our community, so yes we're very comfortable with moving forward," he said.
