Bucks County Out Of COVID Red Zone: White House Task Force

BUCKS COUNTY, PA — Bucks County has been removed from the red zone, which marks the worst coronavirus outbreak severity, according to the latest report by the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

The report, released Jan. 31, sees Bucks being upgraded along with Philadelphia and its other three collar counties. It moves Bucks and Montgomery counties into the task force's orange zone and Philadelphia, Chester and Delaware counties into its yellow zone.

Counties listed as red have more than 100 new cases per 100,000 residents and a diagnostic test positivity rate of more than 10 percent. Counties in the orange zone reported between 51 and 100 new cases per 100,000 residents and a diagnostic test positivity result between 8-10 percent.

While there are still 29 Pennsylvania counties in the red zone, that figure is down 11 counties from the previous week. Counties that remain in the red zone include Berks, Lehigh, Northampton, Schuylkill, York and Erie.

Since the pandemic began, there have been 41,597 reported cases of the coronavirus in Bucks County, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Health, along with 1,060 COVID-related deaths.

But, in recent weeks — and after big spikes following the Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's holidays — the weekly total of new cases in Bucks has been on the decline. (Numbers actually popped up a bit last week, but officials blamed that on a backlog of data dumping weeks-old cases into the state system all at once).

According to Pennsylvania's COVID-19 Early Warning Monitoring System, the number of confirmed COVID cases in Bucks County over the past seven days is down 327 compared to the previous seven days.

Hospitalization and people on ventilators due to the coronavirus also was down, according to the system's dashboard, although the county's positivity rate had ticked up to 10.6 percent.

The latest White House report shows a 1 percent increase in new cases statewide from the week before, as well as a decrease in the test positivity rate. The state's test positivity rate stands at 8.9 percent as of Jan. 31, the report says. That's a decline of 1 percent from the previous week.

See the full Jan. 31 report here.