Comply with contact tracers, Levine urges
State Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine urged Pennsylvania residents to stay vigilant as COVID-19 cases continue to rise. Almost 50 of the state’s 67 counties have seen an increase in coronavirus cases in the past seven days. Of the hospitalizations in the state, 114 of those patients are on ventilators.
During a press conference Thursday, Levine urged people who are diagnosed with the virus to comply with contact tracers.
“If you test positive and a case investigator reaches out to you, please answer the call to participate in the interview. This interview is completely confidential and anonymous. You could save a life by being honest about who you have been in contact with and the places you have visited,” Levine said.
“Answer the call if a contact tracer reaches out to you. Yes, if you have been in contact with someone who has COVID-19, they may tell you you need to stay home for 14 days. Even if you never get sick, you could save a life by following their directions.”
It’s difficult to predict what future COVID-19 rates will be and what mitigation efforts will be needed, Levine said, but she noted that the state is better prepared to handle the pandemic than it was in the spring. That includes increasing testing, with about 35,000 test results per day, and mass testing in nursing homes, she said.
Levine also called for additional federal funding for the Regional Response Health Collaboration Program, which aims to prevent and respond to COVID-19 in long-term residential care facilities, including long-term care nursing facilities, personal care homes, and assisted living residences.
Other mitigation efforts include limiting how many people eat indoors at restaurants and the size of gatherings.
“As we see the case numbers increase, what we will be watching really carefully are potential downstream impacts. That includes hospitalizations, that includes the number of individuals in intensive care units on a ventilator, we will be watching our PPE,” Levine said.
“We are in a better place than we were in the spring. The intensive care units have improved, we have therapeutics such as remdesiver and dexamethasone. And so, that has improved. Although our death rate is going up slightly, it’s nothing near what it was in the spring,” she said.
At this time, Levine said, the state has no plans to return to the red, yellow and green zones that existed at the beginning of the pandemic to initiate quarantines based on how high cases were in each county.
Much of the current increase in COVID-19 is caused by various types of gatherings, including small gatherings like dinner parties and birthday parties, she said. Because gatherings are a significant culprit in the spread of COVID-19, the holidays will be very different this year, Levine added.
“I understand it is a sacrifice to ask individuals and families not to gather outside the people in their households, but that’s what we’re asking them to do. … As we go into Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, we are asking people to stay in their households and contact their friends and families in a more virtual way. That’s a tremendous sacrifice we are asking people to make, but it’s absolutely necessary during this challenging time,” Levine said.
“I understand people get immune to numbers, but each of those numbers is a person, each of those new cases is someone who now has COVID-19, each of those hospitalizations is someone sitting in a hospital bed that might be on a ventilator, and tragically we are starting to see some more deaths.”