PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney is back in quarantine after being exposed to COVID-19 for a second time. The mayor has no symptoms but is being cautious as the city experiences a post-Thanksgiving surge in cases.
Health Commissioner Tom Farley said the fall surge was flattening in Philadelphia until Thanksgiving. Then trend lines started going up again in every measure: New cases are averaging 910 a day, 12.7% of those tested are positive, 886 people are currently hospitalized and deaths are rising sharply.
“So this is an extremely dangerous period in this epidemic. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of people following safety precautions now,” he said.
Farley doesn’t think any new precautions are necessary but he thinks the ones the city took — closing indoor dining, gyms and other activities — kept the spike from being worse, and he continues to ask for similar measures in the suburbs.
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There was also some good news on the vaccine front.
If the Pfizer vaccine is approved, as expected, this week, the city would start administering it next week. Farley said the city will get a limited number of doses — exactly how many is not yet known — but it should cover front-line health care workers.
How quickly others get it depends on manufacturing.
“We can probably administer and distribute those doses as quickly as they can produce them, we just don’t have good information on how quickly they can produce them,” he said.