Some Pennsylvania counties have called for the exclusion of nursing home lawsuits from the reopening ceremony, but experts warn that. COVID-19

Spotlight PA is an independent, nonpartisan newsroom operated by the Philadelphia Inquirer in partnership with Pittsburgh Post Gazette and PennLive / Patriot-News. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter.Harrisburg — As the coronavirus continued to tear Pennsylvania’s nursing homes and nursing homes, we took those cases when deciding which counties could be deregulated so that people could resume some of the usual patterns of daily life. The Wolf administration is under pressure to exclude it.

Officials in some counties, where the number of deaths in nursing homes is skyrocketing, have suggested that administrations should adjust reopening standards. This week, they joined several state legislators to raise their perspectives in legislative hearings and in a letter to the governor.

However, some public health officials warned that removing these numbers from the equation for resumption could have a devastating effect on some of the state’s most vulnerable populations, and the region could be affected. Opening prematurely may increase the risk of virus death.

Nursing homes are highly confined groups of people most vulnerable to viral morbidity and mortality, facilitating detection of their presence. This can distort the data and make it appear to deviate from the general population.

However, across the state, little is known about the spread of the virus throughout Pennsylvania (since only 2% of the population is tested), making comparisons difficult.

“I think there’s a mistake about how these numbers are being interpreted,” said Krysan Cronin, Dean of Public Health at Muhlenberg College, state officials said Pointed out that prioritizing health examinations. Worker.

Adam Marles, president and CEO of LeadingAge PA, which represents more than 365 non-profit nursing homes, said the biggest threat to seniors in nursing homes was “ asymptomatic employees get sick, as the community reopens. The people who live there who notice and go unnoticed are so vulnerable that they create new infections with these settings. “

“The risk doesn’t diminish until extensive testing is done,” he said.

So far, state authorities have declined a call to rule out what is happening in nursing homes. Health Secretary Rachel Levine this week said that while most of the reported deaths occurred in nursing homes, no one accounted for the majority of the more than 54,000 positive cases in the state. She said they were happening in the community.

The state uses a color-coded three-tier system to restart the county. The primary benchmark for canceling home orders and resuming some operations is that the county or region reports less than 50 new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people for 14 consecutive days.

The first 24 counties, mostly in the north and northwest of the state, entered the yellow stage on Friday. This means that certain companies can resume with limited restrictions. The Governor announced that 13 counties in the Pittsburgh region will move to the yellow stage next Friday.

However, in densely populated areas, such as Philadelphia and its collar counties, it can take weeks for the threshold to escape lockdown to be reached.

According to state health data, these areas have the highest number of reported deaths from nursing homes. In Montgomery County, 429 home caregivers die, accounting for 83% of the county’s deaths.

Approximately 35% of county positive cases occur among the elderly at these institutions, according to data released daily by the state Department of Health.

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Similarly, in Delaware County, nearly a quarter of the total 4,680 cases in the county were carers, but nearly 300 of the 382 deceased lived in nursing homes or similar facilities ..

Earlier this week, the Delaware County Council asked Wolf to exclude the number of new cases of nursing homes from the overall total when making its decision to reopen. And recently, in Bucks County, authorities appealed to Wolfe for flexibility. Although he did not specifically require him to abandon the high prevalence in county nursing homes, they did ask him to alleviate his requirements for a particular declining trend over 14 days. I wanted.

At a virtual press conference on Thursday, Bucks County officials pointed out that their counties, which have their own health departments, are doing extensive contact tracking, which means that communities that extend outside the nursing home may It shows that it is decreasing.

“It’s really important to find out who gets sick and why,” said David C. Damsker, head of the Bucks County Department of Health. The number “50 therefore 100,000” is arbitrary. … We are investigating trends. I am investigating people who are ill. This will give you more about what’s happening in Bucks County than a certain number. “

Damsker also said hospital capacity, including the number of ventilators available, is an important indicator. He also said that the infection rate in the entire county is declining.

“It’s the information you see as a whole,” said Damsker.

Val-Arkuche, a Montgomery County committee chairman, said at a Senate hearing this week that discounting positive cases in long-term care facilities was fundamentally inappropriate. Told.

“First of all, they are humans,” Arkoosh told the Senate. “And I’m worried that someone shouldn’t be counted. It bothers me as a doctor on many moral and ethical boards.”