12 New Deaths As Bucks Pushes For Coronavirus Reopening Leeway

BUCKS COUNTY, PA — Twelve new deaths were attributed to the novel coronavirus on Thursday in Bucks County, as officials continued pushing for leeway on state standards to reopen businesses and other public spaces.

Those whose deaths were reported Thursday ranged in age from 42 to 105 and all had underlying health conditions, according to Bucks County health officials. All but two of them lived in long-term care facilities.

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Meanwhile, 106 new positive cases were reported in the county. Of those, 51 were residents or employees of long-term care facilities and only seven were attributed to community spread.

Thursday brought Bucks County's death toll from the coronavirus to 300. There have been 3,706 cases, with at least 986 having been confirmed to have recovered and released from isolation.

On Thursday, 198 coronavirus patients were hospitalized in Bucks County, with 20 in critical condition and on ventilators.

The concentration of cases in nursing homes and other care facilities has been key to the county's push for leniency on Gov. Tom Wolf's reopening plan.

"What’s really important to look at is who gets sick and why," said Dr. David Damsker, director of the Bucks County Department of Health, during an online news conference Thursday. "And so the number of 50 per 100,000 is arbitrary."

Damsker was referring to a guideline set out by Wolf that before reopening, counties average less than 50 cases per 100,000 people over the course of 14 days. For Bucks County, that would mean an average of 23 new cases per day over a two-week span. The county has not seen that level since late March.

But Damsker and others in Bucks say the county's aggressive contact tracing shows that actual spread in the community at large has been limited, with less than 10 cases a day recently.

Bucks is not expected to be among the counties Wolf will announce Friday may move from red to yellow status under the state's color-coded reopening plan.

On Thursday, Damsker said county-run Neshaminy Manor and other nursing homes are on the "tail end" of virus outbreaks.

Statistics, charts and other coronavirus-related information for Bucks County can be found on the county's coronavirus data portal.

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