PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The magnitude of the pandemic was becoming clear one year ago. The battle to control COVID-19 would not be a brief one.
Philadelphia registered its 1,000th case on March 30, and the quickly spreading virus had been detected in every ZIP code in the city.
“It’s entirely clear that this virus is everywhere in the city,” said Health Commissioner Dr. Tom Farley at the time.
To address the increasing issue of hunger, the city established 20 distribution sites, where families could pick up packages of free food. A year later, the effort has expanded to 50 sites, which have delivered a total of 16 million pounds of food.
One year ago, SEPTA suspended overnight train service on the Market-Frankford and the Broad Street lines to do COVID-19 cleaning and disinfection. Today, while SEPTA has resumed a mostly regular city transit schedule, shuttle buses continue to run overnight on the El and the Broad Street Line.
In Harrisburg, the statewide COVID-19 closures imposed by Gov. Tom Wolf had come with expiration dates. That changed one year ago.
“Our business and school closures will no longer have a set date to resume operations,” Wolf said.
A week after that, Philadelphia Superintendent William Hite learned that the Pennsylvania Department of Education had declared that students could not return to classrooms for the rest of the academic year.
“I’m getting dinged right here. I think that announcement was just made,” Hite said as he read a text on his cell phone. “We now know that the schools will remain closed for the remainder of the year.”
Philly school classes remained all-virtual until this month, when about a third of the district’s students from pre-K through second grade opted for a hybrid model that has them in classrooms two days a week.
The district last week expanded the hybrid offer to students in third through fifth grade and students with complex needs in grades six through eight.
With teachers being vaccinated, Hite last week said he was aiming to have all students back in classrooms next year.
“Our goal is to get all students back to a full in-person experience in the fall,” Hite told the Philadelphia Board of Education. Hite could offer no time table, though, for how many students would ultimately be offered in-person instruction during the current school year.
COVID: Then and Now is a KYW Newsradio original monthlong series looking back at the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic in Philadelphia. Reporters revisit the news from exactly one year ago and examine how protocols, restrictions and science have evolved since then. Check back weekdays in March for more.