Gov. Wolf is expected to announce in about an hour a new order requiring universal masking in all K-12 schools and day care. Gov. Wolf should have done this weeks ago instead of waiting for Republicans in the state legislature to act. Instead, our school board has invested a substantial amount of time deliberating over this issue and crafting their health and safety plan only for the governor to make it moot a week before classes start. This time and energy could have been spent planning for the new school year for our children instead of trying to resolve Covid safety on a district by district level. So, thanks for nothing governor.

According to NPR’s Covid dashboard, PA is averaging about 3,000 cases per day with little indication its slowing down yet. This week NPR moved PA from escalating community spread to the unchecked community spread category. According to the state data, Delaware County has more than 100 cases/day currently and also shows no signs of turning yet (last summer we were trending downward at this point). According to the state’s dashboard, there are 68 adult ICU beds in DelCo, of which 9 currently are occupied by Covid patients and 12 remain available. From the graphs, the number of ICU beds available is steadily falling.

I was at a fundraiser this past weekend where county council members reminded us that DelCo is no longer covered by the ChesCo health department. The new county health department won’t start before 2022, so currently we’re at the mercy of whatever the state’s doing to track Covid – which doesn’t seem to be enough. In hindsight, the decision to end the contract with ChesCo was optimistically premature.