Here's Where COVID Levels Stand In PA As Fall Arrives

PENNSYLVANIA — As summer heaves it's last hot breaths and a cooler season that has traditionally been associated with a spike in illnesses and infections gets underway, some counties in Pennsylvania are already seeing their coronavirus levels rise and categorizations change.

A total of 14 counties are now under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's "high" category of infections, an increase from just 9 last week.

The CDC recommends masking in counties with "high" COVID-19 community levels — a metric based on hospitalizations and case rates that the agency adopted in late February. The agency updates its color-coded COVID-19 maps each Thursday.

High counties now include Wayne, Susquehanna, Lackawanna, Bradford, Sullivan, Columbia, Clinton, Mifflin, McKean, Warren, Indiana, Armstrong, Crawford, and Mercer.

Preparing for another fall surge

For two years in a row now, Pennsylvania has seen a devastating spike in cases that has overwhlemed the state's healthcare systems with the colder weather.

The fall surge in 2020 began in October and November and saw case loads increase expotentially into Jan. 2021, peaking with a daily rate over 10,000. A year later, increases started at around the same time, with the new omicron variant tripling 2020's highest daily case load to over 30,000 by Jan. 2022.

Heading into the 2022-23 winter, officials are ready. A new targeted booster shot designed to combat the omicron subvariant of coronavirus was approved by federal officials two weeks ago. Up until now, booster doses of the vaccine have targeted the original strain of COVID-19. The new booster dose will tweak the existing vaccine produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to take aim at the BA.4 and BA.5 omicron subvariants, both of which are dominant in the United States.

Vaccines starting arriving in Pennsylvania shortly after Labor Day, the Department of Health said.

"The updated COVID-19 booster shots will help restore protection that may have waned since previous vaccinations and provide added protection against the Omicron variant, including the highly transmissible BA.4 and BA.5 strains," Acting Health Secretary and Pennsylvania Physician General Dr. Denise Johnson said in a statement.

More than 44 percent of the adult population has received at least their first booster shot. About 70.7 percent of the state's population has been fully vaccinated.

Where Pennsylvania stands

Here's where Pennsylvania's coronavirus numbers stand this week compared to last week, according to the state's early warning monitoring dashboard.

Most metrics have gone down, but ventilator usage notably increased for the second straight week. The average daily patient use of ventilators is up to 56, over 48 from two weeks ago.

Overall hospitalizations are decreasing as well, but more emergency room visits are attributed to coronavirus causes.

Here's the data:

• 12,441 total new cases, a decrease from 12,530
• An incidence rate of 96.9, a decrease from 97.9
• A positivity rate of 15.6 percent, a decrease from 16.3 percent
• 1,151 average daily hospitalizations, a decrease from 1,169
• 56 average patients on ventilators per day, an increase over 51
• 0.9 percent of all emergency room visits are due to COVID-19, up from 0.7 last week