Berks continues to see falling COVID-19 case numbers, so much that the county has been reduced to low risk, and the number of vaccinations have been unusually high in the past week.
But new threats have appeared in the U.S. with the arrival of nonomicron variants previously only known in South Africa.
It’s on the strength of two-plus weeks of declining cases, most recently quantified in the Pennsylvania Department of Health’s Early Warning Monitoring Dashboard.
The numbers:
• Berks: Down 47 cases from the prior week with an infection rate of 106 per 100,000 and a positivity rate of 14.2%.
• Pennsylvania: Down 1,759 cases from the prior week with an infection rate of 132 per 100,000 and a positivity rate of 14.1%.
For Berks and Pennsylvania all metrics were down.
Berks has had a case rate below the state’s during the entire second omicron surge.
Of the counties bordering Berks, only Schuylkill was listed as high risk. But that was a demotion from moderate risk a week earlier.
That county saw a case increase of 30 in the state dashboard, a rate of 137 per 100,000 and a positivity rate of 16.3%. Schuylkill has about a third of the population of Berks.
It was only a few weeks ago that Berks had a higher case rate and a higher positivity rate and remained a moderate-risk county.
Counties adjoining Berks remaining moderate risk were Lehigh, Montgomery and Chester, with Lancaster and Lebanon continuing as low risk, where they have been for the entire surge.
Pennsylvania dropped daily updates on May 4 and went to weekly Wednesday updates of its main COVID dashboard, Saturday updates of the Early Warning dashboard and monthly press releases about cases, hospitalizations, deaths and vaccinations.
Vaccinations updates
The state dashboard shows Berks having had a surge in vaccinations for the week, with an increase of 1,387 residents finishing the initial two-dose completed phase, the most in a week since early in 2022.
That category now contains 249,146 of the 429,000 Berks residents.
The number of Berks residents getting a first booster or a third full shot for the immunocompromised increased by 1,201, another big step up compared to the past few months, for a total of 116,785.
The number of Berks residents getting a second booster or a fourth full shot for the immunocompromised increased by 1,286 to 17,770. That number for a week has been typical since that round of vaccinations became available.
It’s unclear what has spurred on the increase in completions and first boosters. Both categories had been limping along at about 100 to 300 additions weekly for a couple of months.
There had been several cleanups of vaccination statistics in 2021, in which duplications and bad entries were purged, but there have been none in 2022, at least that the state health department and the CDC have announced.
The other matter is that any vaccinated person who dies of any cause isn’t purged from the vaccination rolls. About 12 people per 1,000 die annually in Pennsylvania, CDC statistics show.
Because of these factors, the CDC has capped vaccination categories at 95%. The only capped category in Berks is people age 65 and older with one shot.
The CDC lists 76,887 Berks residents age 65 and older with one shot but the census data used by the CDC shows that there are only 74,000 Berks residents age 65 and older.
For Pennsylvania overall, the CDC has capped 12 and older one dose, 18 and older one dose, 65 and older one dose and 65 and older completed.
Census data used by the CDC calculates to 2.4 million people age 65 and older with 2.76 million having had one shot and 2.3 million as completed vaccinations. The death rate would play a much greater role in that age group.
The national picture
According to the CDC, the third omicron derivative, BA.2.12.1, continues to be the dominant source of COVID in the country at 62.2%, including 80.2% in the mid-Atlantic.
The second derivative of omicron, BA.2, remains another significant source of cases. Last week’s CDC update showed that the first omicron derivative, BA.1.1.529, as it is called, had rebounded from being nearly squeezed out of existence to making up 6.1% of the cases nationally.
BA.1.1.529 has disappeared in this week’s CDC update.
What has appeared is BA.4 and BA.5, completely new COVID variants that had previously been documented in South Africa. The CDC believes they make up about 13% of the cases nationally, including about the same level in the mid-Atlantic.
In South Africa, those variants were documented to be about as mild as omicron and its offspring.
The latest seven-day average is 106,874 cases, down slightly from the second omicron surge high of 110,387 on May 26, but up about 10,000 in a week, according to the CDC. The 2022 low point in the seven-day average was 24,843 on March 29.
The statistics indicate that COVID isn’t going away.
Source: Berkshire mont
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