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PITTSBURGH (Newsradio 1020 KDKA) - For the seventh day in a row, Allegheny County is reported triple digit increases in the number of new COVID-19 cases.
125 cases on Wednesday, and while the number has stabilized, there’s no indication it’s about to go down.
What is changing is that patients are getting older again.
Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald tells KDKA Radio, “With closing the bars and some of those other things that occurred, we’ve seen the spread occur to people that are older, middle age and above.”
It’s also taking longer for some test results to come back. Wednesday’s positive test results stretch back as far a July 8, that’s three weeks.
Fitzgerald says that kind of lag time makes it hard to do effective contact tracing.
“And where have they been since then if they haven’t been quarantined, so it does, it becomes very difficult, not all numbers are the same,” said Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald says it’s the nation labs that are getting overwhelmed by more testing and that local testing is doing everything possible to keep up.
He is calling for a national testing strategy coordinated by the federal government and adds it should’ve been done back in March.
While there have been 30 hospitalizations in the past two days, Fitzgerald says local hospitals have more than enough beds to handle the current pandemic.
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