The third week of hefty COVID-19 case declines in the Pennsylvania health department’s weekly Early Warning Monitoring Dashboard was across the board, with Berks falling faster in terms of case rates than the state overall.
The plunging case rates are the inverse of the soaring numbers of less than two months ago.
Researchers believe omicron is running out of targets and that the case levels will not go to zero but will “normalize” for the future, unless another variant comes along that is a game changer.
Berks was a minus 1,314 COVID cases for the week ending Thursday versus the week ending Jan. 27 in statistics available Saturday. The three-week total was a decline of more than 5,000.
The infection rate fell to 242 cases per 100,000, less than half of 557 from the prior week and a sixth of the peak last month at 1,407.
The positivity rate, a measure of positives versus all tests, was down to 21.2%, less than half of the peak in January.
Pennsylvania overall saw a decrease of 34,828 COVID cases for the week, with a three-week total of about 120,000 fewer cases.
The infection rate was down to 330 per 100,000. The positivity rate dropped to 18.4%.
All counties showed a decline in cases.
No infection rates had fallen below 100 per 100,000, however. That would be the criteria to get out of the “high transmission” classification.
Philadelphia County is closest at 176, with no others below 200. The Berks rate at 242 is well below the overall Pennsylvania rate at 330.
Nationally, cases are about half of the peak but across the country 99.6% of the counties are in high transmission, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In short, there’s still a long way to go.
The Early Warning dashboard is based only on the nasal swab test, the PCR. Before the delta surge, Berks had a much higher percentage of non-PCR tests than the state average.
At the time, then, the Berks results in the Early Warning dashboard were skewed by the fewer tests proportionately that counted. Since then, the Berks percentage has come down and the state percentage has come up, so the Berks picture in comparison to the state is more accurate now.
Berks daily stats
It was mostly more of the weekly report for Berks in the health department’s daily pandemic dashboard update on Saturday.
The case levels have generally been on a plateau the past few days, though hospitalizations continue to decline.
Berks added 232 cases and reinfections on Saturday and the pandemic total reached 99,968. It’s likely the Sunday update will push Berks over 100,000.
That level was distant in early July when the delta variant surge began with Berks at about 48,500 cases. More than half of the 23-month pandemic in terms of cases has occurred in the past seven months.
The seven-day Berks COVID case average — which had been declining every day since Jan. 11 — ticked up one Saturday to 184.
The 14-day average was down to 286. It has been falling daily since Jan. 16.
The daily update is the composite of the previous day's statistics, in this case Friday. The averages smooth the uneven processing of test results.
The processing slows on weekends.
The health department began counting reinfections in early November but says it doesn't know how many there have been. A reinfection means a positive test more than 90 days after an initial positive.
The state dashboard on Saturday showed the number of COVID hospitalizations in Berks fell by 18 to 74, which includes five in intensive care.
It was the fewest hospitalized since Nov. 21. On Nov. 21, the more severe delta variant had 20 people in the ICU in Berks.
The number of COVID admissions over a week to Berks hospitals fell to 76 in the latest CDC update, which was through Feb. 3.
There were 10 more COVID deaths of Berks residents among 165 Pennsylvania residents in the Friday pandemic dashboard update.
The pandemic totals reached 1,519 for Berks and 41,524 for Pennsylvania.
The state records deaths of Berks residents wherever they occur, and the coroner's office records deaths within Berks. The coroner's count stands at 1,392, though it includes scores of nonresidents.
Berks is the ninth-most-populous county in the state and has the seventh-highest death toll. The more populous counties below the Berks toll are Chester and York.
State data
Pennsylvania tacked on 8,434 COVID cases and reinfections in the Saturday update, the most in a week, pushing the pandemic total to nearly 2.7 million.
Statewide, COVID hospitalizations continued the downward trend, with a total of 3,758 inpatients, a drop of 210 in one day.
In the state overall, there were 642 in intensive care, down 12 from the Friday update.
Berks had 2.7% of the state's cases in the Saturday update at 3.3% of the state population.
For the pandemic, Berks has 3.7% of the state's cases.
Berks residents make up nearly 3.7% of the state's pandemic deaths
Cases among kids
As COVID cases and reinfections declined in the general population, cases among children also declined to similar proportions of the entire population.
For the week ending Tuesday, the Department of Health presented these statistics:
• Berks had 121 cases and reinfections among children under age 5 and 343 for others up to age 18 for a total of 464.
• Similarly, the state overall had 3,341 in the younger age group and 10,632 in the older for a total of 13,973.
The state began publishing statistics about children and youth with the week ending Aug. 16.
The cumulative total for Berks is 2,153 and 8,608, respectively, for a total of 10,761. The state overall is 57,168 and 242,282, respectively, for a total of 299,468.
Berks had has nearly 3.6% of the state's total cases.
Flu update
The flu season has nearly faded away in Berks and across Pennsylvania after peaking in late December.
Berks reported 57 cases for the week ending Jan. 29 and the state overall 1,139. It was a continuation of four weeks of generally falling numbers statewide, though Berks cases ticked up week over week.
This flu season is falling well behind other recent seasons in case numbers, but not to the level of the nearly nonexistent 2020-21 season.
The details from the health department:
• A total of 31,245 laboratory-confirmed influenza cases have been reported season to date.
• Emergency department visits associated with influenza-like illness decreased slightly for the week.
• A total of 27 confirmed influenza-associated deaths have been reported during the current season. That was an increase of four from the prior week.
• The deaths by age group: zero, 18 and younger; four, 18 to 49; seven, 50 to 64; and the other 16 were 65 and older.
Three of the four most recent deaths were among those under age 65.
Berks, with 1,198 flu cases, has about 3.8% of the state total for the season. It's not known if any of the deaths were of Berks residents.
COVID in Berks
The update on Saturday of the Pennsylvania Department of Health pandemic dashboard yielded the following statistics for Berks County:
232: new cases and reinfections
99,968: pandemic total
286: 14-day average
1,519: pandemic deaths, state
1,392: pandemic deaths, coroner
74: hospitalized
5: ICU count
245,617: fully vaccinated (CDC); 61.8% of the population age 5 and older
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