Tracking COVID-19 Improvement In Chester County: Update

CHESTER COUNTY, PA — New COVID-19 cases are down by 255 over last week, and the prior week also saw a drop of 315 cases, according to Friday afternoon's update from the state health department.

Also encouraging are the positivity rates and incidence rates in Chester County, both figures also lower this week, according to a Jan. 29 update of the Pennsylvania Department of Health.

New case counts fell from 1,094 last week, to 839 in the week ending Jan. 29.

The incidence rate here dropped from 208.4 cases per 100,000 residents in the week ending Jan. 22 to 159.8 in the week ending Jan. 29, the state DOH dashboard shows. The incidence rate is a way of seeing how deeply the virus has spread into an area's population.

In the latest count, the rate of 159.8 per 100,000 residents means about 1 in every 625 Chester County residents test positive in the last week. The incidence in the previous week approximated 1 in about 500.

The percent positivity rate shows how many COVID-19 tests are coming back positive, as a percentage of all the tests given, a way to understand the activity of the virus in a place more clearly than merely looking at raw case counts. In Chester County, the percent positivity rate has been falling for several weeks. It went from 10 percent to 8.4 percent to 7 percent in the past three seven-day periods, according to Pennsylvania Health Department reports.

The state health department notes that because many people are routinely tested and repeatedly test negative, percent positivity rates reported may be lower than if only first-time tests were counted.

Fewer were hospitalized this week in Chester County. The daily average of COVID-19 hospitalizations across the county went down from 118 last week, to 114 this week. Persons on ventilators remained almost the same from last week to this week.

The lower numbers mean Chester County is one of 27 Pennsylvania counties no longer in the "red" zone for coronavirus outbreak severity, according to the most recent report by the White House Coronavirus Task Force. See the full story about the task force report here.

Statewide, the same metrics also fell. The incidence rate state wide fell from 248 per 100,000 residence to 203, at the Jan. 29 report. New COVID-19 cases in Pennsylvania dropped from 31,808 in the week ending Jan. 22 to 25,985 in the week ending Jan. 29.

The Chester County Health Department reports 646 have died here of COVID-19.

To read a story on vaccinations in Chester County, go here.