The first Pennsylvania’s counties are set to go to the green phase under Gov. Tom Wolf’s plan to reopen Pennsylvania.
Wolf announced said 17 counties will move to the state’s green phase on May 29. On the same day, eight counties still in the red, including Dauphin and Lebanon counties, will be moved to the yellow.
The 17 counties moving to green include: Bradford, Cameron, Clarion, Clearfield, Crawford, Elk, Forest, Jefferson, Lawrence, McKean, Montour, Potter, Snyder, Sullivan, Tioga, Venango and Warren.
Counties moving from red to yellow on May 29 include: Dauphin, Franklin, Huntingdon, Lebanon, Luzerne, Monroe, Pike, and Schuylkill.
Updated guidance now allows swimming pools and summer camps to operate in the yellow phase, and in the green phase, restaurants can resume operations at 50% in-house capacity, according to the Wolf administration’s guidelines.
“We continue to increase testing every day and are continuing to build our contact tracing capacity, as well,” Wolf said. “We are able to do these things, to be successful, to reopen in this manner because of the Pennsylvanians who have made tremendous sacrifices since the virus emerged in our state.”
The final 10 counties yet to change to the state’s yellow phase will do so on June 5. Those counties include: Berks, Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Lackawanna, Lancaster, Lehigh, Northampton, Montgomery, and Philadelphia.
The remaining counties still in the red after May 29 are planned to move to the yellow by June 5.
“We know not only that we succeeded in slowing case growth, but that our actions, our collective decisions to stay at home and avoid social contact – we know that saved lives,” Wolf said. “My stay-at-home order did exactly what it was intended to do: It saved lives and it bought us valuable time.”
