STATE: Pennsylvania COVID-19 Statistics
per Pennsylvania Department of Health
Data updated as of 12:00pm on 5/7/2020

¹ Total case counts include confirmed and probable cases.

STATE: Cases by Age Range to Date
per Pennsylvania Department of Health
Data updated as of 12:00pm on 5/7/2020

STATE: Hospitalization Rates by Age Range to Date
per Pennsylvania Department of Health
Data updated as of 12:00pm on 5/7/2020

REGIONAL: COVID-19 cases by county to Date
per Pennsylvania Department of Health
Data updated as of 12:00pm on 5/7/2020

REGIONAL: COVID-19 Cases Associated with
Nursing Homes and Personal Care Homes to Date
per Pennsylvania Department of Health
Data updated as of 12:00pm on 5/7/2020

State Coronavirus Updates

• FHLBank Pittsburgh and PHFA Speed Allocation of Home4Good Funding to Provide Rapid Assistance to Homeless during Pandemic: FHLBank Pittsburgh and the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency (PHFA) announced they will begin quickly disbursing 2020 Home4Good funding in order to provide the fastest support possible for individuals facing homelessness who are struggling during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. As they have for the past two years, FHLBank Pittsburgh is providing $3 million toward the effort and PHFA is providing $1.5 million, for a total contribution of $4.5 million. Read more: https://dingo.telicon.com/PA/library/2020/2020050772.PDF.
• Wolf Administration Receives Approval to Launch Food Access Program for Students During COVID-19 Crisis: The Wolf Administration received approval from the Food and Nutrition Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for a plan to provide Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to students who are eligible to receive free or reduced-price meals at school through the National School Lunch Program. This program, known as Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer (P-EBT), will be temporary and is designed to bridge the gap left by schools closing and help families who may have strained resources due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Read more: https://dingo.telicon.com/PA/library/2020/2020050762.HTM.
• Wolf: Office of Advocacy and Reform Announces Plan to Build a Trauma-Informed Pennsylvania:  The Office of Advocacy and Reform (OAR), established by Governor Tom Wolf’s 2019 executive order to protect Pennsylvania’s vulnerable populations, today Thursday May 7 announced the launch of a volunteer think tank comprised of 25 experts representing a diversity of fields and backgrounds who will develop a plan to make Pennsylvania a trauma-informed state. Read more: https://dingo.telicon.com/PA/library/2020/2020050773.HTM.
• Website ready for contractors, self-employed, gig workers to file for unemployment compensation:  Eligible self-employed people, independent contractors and gig workers who are not normally eligible for regular unemployment compensation can begin filing backdated claims on the state’s new Pandemic Unemployment Assistance website. Read more: https://www.pennlive.com/news/2020/05/website-ready-for-contractors-self-employed-gig-workers-to-file-for-unemployment-compensation.html.

Regional Coronavirus Updates

• Allegheny County Health Department
  • Of the 1,439 cases in Allegheny County, 1,375 are confirmed cases and 64 are probable. The increase in the number of cases is due to delayed reporting from a new lab. The positive tests span several days. Additionally, there are 254 past or present hospitalizations (+7). To date, there have also been 117 deaths (+6). Of those, 107 are confirmed (had positive test) and 10 are probable. All deaths are of individuals ranging in age from 42-103, with 84 being the median age of those who have died.
• McKeesport
  • McKeesport Mayor Michael Cherepko briefly talked about worries he has concerning lost and delayed revenues as a result of coronavirus-mitigation efforts during Wednesday’s in-person council meeting on May 6. “I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m very concerned for the economy,” Cherepko said. “I’m very concerned with the deficits that we have here in the city and whether those deficits are going to grow, which from a commonsense standpoint is going to happen. Like municipalities across the country, the mayor said, McKeesport is having to “work with” residents and business owners who are unemployed, have had to close their businesses or have had their hours cut as a result of pandemic mitigation efforts and are having trouble paying their property taxes and for municipal service fees.
• Allegheny County Courts
  • The judicial emergency declared by the president judge in Allegheny County has been extended to June 1. President Judge Kim Berkeley Clark on Wednesday May 6 signed an order of the court extending the emergency. The emergency first went into place March 16 after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court declared a judicial emergency to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. The emergency put a hold on orders for eviction. Some proceedings, such as those involving juvenile delinquency, juvenile dependency and protection from abuse, have been ordered to continue through telephone and video conferences.
• Allegheny County Executive
  • Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald said he hopes that southwestern Pennsylvania would be able to move from red to yellow phase on May 15. Fitzgerald said Gov. Tom Wolf may make an announcement on Friday May 8 about the next round of counties that will be able to reopen after COVID-19-related closures. Friday is the day when 24 counties, in the north and northcentral parts of Pennsylvania, will move to less restrictions. The rest of Pennsylvania, including the Pittsburgh region, are still under stay-home and business-closure orders.
• Beaver County
  • Conor Lamb, on Thursday May 7, demanded a federal investigation of the Brighton Rehabilitation and Wellness Center where the state’s worst nursing home outbreak of COVID-19 has claimed more than five dozen lives. Mr. Lamb, in a letter to Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, questioned both the facility’s management during the early weeks of the outbreak and the facility’s temporary manager appointed by the Pennsylvania Department of Health last month.
  • The Beaver County Board of Commissioners joined others in southwestern Pennsylvania asking the governor to move the region from red to yellow for stay-at-home orders. The board submitted a letter to the governor urging him to ease restrictions on the region, including Beaver County. Wolf announced on Friday May 1 that 24 northwestern and north central Pennsylvania would move to the “yellow” designation, allowing many businesses to reopen if they follow a series of social distancing and personal protective equipment directives. That included neighboring Lawrence County.

Federal Coronavirus Updates

• S. Supreme Court
  • The Supreme Court on Wednesday May 6 denied a request to halt an order Pennsylvania’s governor entered in March to close businesses in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The petitioners, a conservative political action committee and several businesses, told the justices that Gov. Tom Wolf’s executive order “has and is continuing to cause irreparable harm.” The court’s denial of the request, issued without comment, means fewer than five of the nine justices supported the petition. The outcome was unsurprising given the Supreme Court’s long recognition of broad government authority amid public health crises. Previously, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania also denied the petitioners’ request. Earlier this week, Pennsylvania’s attorney general filed a 43-page response to the justices defending the legality of Wolf’s order and urging the high court not to intervene.

National Coronavirus Updates

• According to CNN, as of 11:45 am on Thursday, May 7, 2020, there are 73,573 coronavirus-related deaths and 1,231,992 total positive cases in the United States.
• Layoffs continue to tear through the country, enveloping more industries even as states take tentative steps toward reopening the economy, with the government reporting on Thursday May 7 that an additional 3.2 million jobless claims were filed last week. The weekly tallies have declined since reaching a peak of 6.9 million claims in late March, but the numbers are still stupefying: more than 33 million people have joined the unemployment rolls in seven weeks. Officials in some states say more than a quarter of the work force is jobless. Economists expect the monthly jobs report from the Labor Department, due Friday, to show that the unemployment rate in April was 15 percent or higher — a Depression-era level. The figure will almost certainly understate the damage. Workers in the restaurant, travel, hospitality and retail industries were among the first to lose their jobs when the outbreak forced business shutdowns. But recent weeks brought scores of layoffs that affected engineers at Uber, advertising account executives at Omnicom, designers at Airbnb and other office employees.
• In the weeks before states around the country issued lockdown orders this spring, Americans were already hunkering down. They were spending less, traveling less, dining out less. Small businesses were already cutting employment. Some were even closing shop. People were behaving this way — effectively winding down the economy — before the government told them to. And that pattern, apparent in a range of data looking back over the past two months, suggests in the weeks ahead that official pronouncements will have limited power to open the economy back up. In some states that have already begun that process, like Georgia, South Carolina, Oklahoma and Alaska, the same daily economic data shows only meager signs so far that businesses, workers and consumers have returned to their old routines.