'Fourth Wave' Of Coronavirus Hits PA As Cases Continue To Rise

PENNSYLVANIA — For the second straight week, coronavirus case numbers increased across Pennsylvania and other parts of the United States, marking the start of what health officials are warning could be a "fourth wave" of the ongoing pandemic. This is despite a rapidly increasing vaccination rate that is teasing glimmers of herd immunity on the horizon.

It's unclear how long this wave could last. The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Policy Lab, which has an active model forecasting case levels in the Delaware Valley and other parts of the country, notes there is great uncertainty. They do believe the spike is unlikely to be brief, but it is also unlikely to be severe, at least in the context of previous surges in the pandemic.

"Our models project continued growth in case incidence in the coming weeks across the state," a team of medical experts with the Lab, including doctors David Rubin, Susan Coffin, Brian Fisher, and Jing Huang, shared Wednesday.

However, they added that "while increasing COVID-19 transmission across the country is certainly cause for concern, there are subtle indications that the severity of this resurgence, as measured by hospitalizations and deaths, will not be the same as we experienced last fall and winter."

This is due to several reasons, warming temperatures and increasing vaccination rates being the obvious ones. But the Lab also points to fewer hospitalizations among this resurgence, because it is driven by healthier young people, and at-risk groups are getting vaccinated. And, perhaps most importantly, the resurgence seems to have already peaked in Michigan, the place where this fourth wave began, health experts said.

The Lab notes the increases are occurring in nine states, with substantial increases in several major metropolitan areas including Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia.

The presence of more contagious variants of the virus is another oft-cited reason for the surge. The B.1.1.7 variant, first detected in the United Kingdom, is spreading in Pennsylvania. During a news briefing on Wednesday, Acting Secretary of Health Alison Beam said that state was looking into the spread of the variant and ramping up testing for it, but noted that the sequencing which must be done to confirm the variant is complex and time-consuming. For that reason, there are probably more cases of the variant than officials are aware of.

Meanwhile, the state is continuing its mitigation efforts.

“As we report thousands of cases each day, we continue to practice our proven public health practices such as case investigations and contact tracing,” she said in a statement earlier in the week.

The rises come as Pennsylvania rapidly increases its vaccinations. The state is now 12th in the nation in administration of first doses, a major improvement from January and February, when it consistently ranked in the bottom. This week, the state announced further accelerations to its timeline, and said that the vaccine would be available to the general public by April 19.

The rise in metrics is across the board. According to the Pennsylvania Department of Health's Early Warning Monitoring Dashboard, every key statistic has risen over the past week, with the percent positivity rate on tests back up to 7.6 percent, from 6.5 last week. That rise now includes all healthcare metrics, like ventilator use, emergency room stays due to COVID-19 symptoms, and overall daily hospitalizations.

The good news is that the increases remain light, for the most part, in most of Pennsylvania. Still, the state is "nowhere near" where we were in October, Montgomery County Commissioner and medical doctor Valerie Arkoosh said Wednesday.

"I'm very concerned about the direction this pandemic is going," she said. "We're so close...The more quickly that we can get shots into arms and make sure that we make those vaccines easily accessible to everyone in our community, that's how we beat this thing."

Residents were urged to exercise caution over the coming holiday weekend, and to avoid social gatherings in large or small groups outside of the household. Holidays have exacerbated existing spikes in other period of the pandemic, with officials commonly citing the spikes following Halloween and Thanksgiving social gatherings last fall.