Bucks Nursing Homes On 'Tail End' Of Virus: Health Director
BUCKS COUNTY, PA — Bucks County's top health official said Thursday that nursing homes and other long-term health facilities are on the "tail end" of coronavirus outbreaks that have been responsible for a large share of the county's coronavirus cases, and deaths.
"Many of those residents are recovering," said Dr. David Damsker, director of the Bucks County Department of Health. "They've been sick for a month, they've been sick for a few weeks, and now they're doing fine.
"We're still having some issues with the nursing homes, but we're starting to see light at the end of the tunnel, in terms of the outbreaks."
Get the latest updates on coronavirus in Bucks County by signing up for Patch news alerts.
According to figures released Wednesday by the Bucks County Department of Health, nearly 82 percent of the county's 288 coronavirus-related deaths have been in nursing homes and other care centers.
At an online news conference Thursday afternoon, Damsker said that death toll had topped 300.
While the number of daily cases of COVID-19 reported in Bucks County, including those in nursing homes, has remained fairly consistent, Damsker and other officials point to data detailing the onset date of those cases.
According to figures released by the county, the highest onset date for reported coronavirus cases in Bucks County was April 15 and the number of cases has been trending downward since then.
Damsker's comments came as Bucks County political leaders are asking Gov. Tom Wolf to consider the nursing home cases differently than those in the rest of the community in deciding when businesses and other public spaces may begin reopening.
Last week, the county's three-member board of commissioners sent a letter to Wolf asking for flexibility under the reopening standards he's set forth for the state. In the letter, they said that roughly half of all reported coronavirus cases in the county have been in nursing homes or other long-term care facilities.
Both Wolf and Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine seemed cool to the idea, however.
"We have been asked this question before and we are not going to separate nursing home cases from other cases in counties," Levine said during a news conference. "What we have certainly learned in this global pandemic of COVID-19 is that we are all interconnected."
On Thursday, though, commissioners said they're still hopeful. They noted that they never asked the state to not count nursing home cases, but simply to consider them differently.
"We weren't asking him to discount the deaths in our nursing homes," said Commissioner Gene DiGirolamo. "Every one of those deaths was heartbreaking and tragic. We were just asking the governor for a little bit of flexibility here in Bucks County because we think we've done a really good job of managing the spread here."
The governor's plan would require an area to have fewer than 50 new cases per day for every 100,000 people. In Bucks County, that would mean about 320 cases in a 14-day period.
The case that Bucks officials hope to make is that, while nursing home numbers push the county's overall number higher, they are contained and community spread is actually quite low.
"We're looking at who's getting sick and that tells us a lot more about what's happening in Bucks County than any specific number," Damsker said. "The overall onset-date curve has gone up and it's on its way down. Were taking all this data together and we're realizing the 50-per-100,000 number is not the best way to go forward."
Statistics, charts and other coronavirus-related information for Bucks County can be found on the county's coronavirus data portal.
>>>Full coverage of coronavirus in Pennsylvania
This article originally appeared on the Bensalem Patch
