Allegheny County's covid-19 stats 'headed in a favorable direction,' health director says

All of the covid-19 metrics in Allegheny County right now are “headed in a favorable direction” as average daily case counts, testing positivity rates and hospitalizations tick downward after a particularly deadly January, county Health Director Dr. Debra Bogen said Wednesday.

“As we come out of the omicron surge,” she said, “the rates continue to slow.”

Average daily cause counts have dropped to around 350 from a peak of more than 3,000 in early January.

The positivity rate, at around 15%, is less than half what it was at the peak. Hospitalizations also are on the decline, Bogen said.

Bogen said the hope is that deaths will follow the same downward trend. The death toll for January has reached 284 as delayed reports roll in to the state Department of Health.

It was the third deadliest month of the pandemic and the deadliest since vaccines became widely available.

Bogen said changes are coming to the way the health department reports information, as at-home tests mean positivity rates and case counts are largely unreliable metrics. She said dashboards reflecting hospitalizations, wastewater surveys and more are on the horizon.

The state Department of Health released new post-vaccination data looking at cases, hospitalizations and deaths among the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated.

From Jan. 1 to Feb 11, about 29% of the more than 2 million cases across the state involved people who were fully vaccinated. Overall, since vaccines became widely available early last year, less than 30% of cases have been in vaccinated Pennsylvanians.

In terms of hospitalizations, from early January through Feb. 11, one-third of people hospitalized for covid-19 were vaccinated. In December, the most recent time frame for which statistics are available, about 24% of the state’s covid deaths were among people who were fully vaccinated.

Since Jan. 1, 2021, 80% of deaths in the state involved unvaccinated people.