GOP lawmakers challenge, demand transparency, of Wolf’s plan to reopen economy

State Senators this week challenged Wolf administration officials on their plan to reopen Pennsylvania’s civic life, citing an alleged lack of transparency and “arbitrary” metrics used to determine when counties may begin easing social distancing restrictions.

After new confirmed COVID-19 cases in the commonwealth plateaued at around 1,500 new cases a day in mid-April, Gov. Wolf announced last week his administration would implement a phased transition back to work for Pennsylvanians. On May 8, 24 northwest and northcentral counties are slated to resume certain in-person operations as part of their move from the state’s “red” to “yellow” phase, Wolf announced last week.

However, state officials haven’t issued a timeline for the remaining parts of the state.

“Over the past several weeks, one of the challenges we have faced as we have helped the business community is our inability to provide clear and unambiguous answers to them,” said Senator Scott Martin, R-Lancaster, during a hearing of the Senate Local Government Committee. Martin is the chairman of committee. “The people that we work for deserve answers to their questions, especially during the course of this pandemic.”

State Health Department officials say they will watch for the rate of coronavirus incidence in counties in the coming weeks to drop below 50 confirmed cases per 100,000 people, at which point it’s eligible to transition from red to yellow.

“The metric that we set is necessary but not sufficient,” state Health Secretary Rachel Levine said in her testimony Monday. To determine a county’s ability to safely reopen, Levine said health department officials are monitoring intensive care unit capacity rates, population density, population-age risk and reopening contact risk — for which northwest and northcentral counties have the lowest rate.

Levine said it’s critical that the commonwealth’s transition to its “new normal” in the green phase is gradual, because of the lingering threat of an outbreak and a resurgence of COVID-19 cases, which would cause the state to re-initiate a shutdown process.

“One of the biggest risk factors to seeing a surge in June or July is if we open up too soon, if we go from red to yellow too soon,” Levine said. “That’s why a county like Lancaster cannot go to yellow at this time.”

Sen. Bob Mensch, R-Montgomery County, asked why an entire county has to be shut down when the incidence of COVID-19 is centered largely in densely populated regions and long-term care facilities. Why not use more specific geographic markers such as zip codes instead, he asked.

“People travel significantly between different zip codes,” Levine responded. “We’re not going to take it by zip code because of the amount of traffic and movement when people go out and go shopping.”

Asked why some industries were required to close while others were considered “life-sustaining,” Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency Director Randy Padfield said mandated closures were based on modeling and projections at the start of the pandemic, which didn’t account for mitigation efforts.

Initial projections, he said, suggested roughly 20,000 Pennsylvanians would die from COVID-19 and hundreds of thousands more would be infected. As of Monday, 50,092 people in the commonwealth had tested positive, and 2,458 died, according to the latest figures from the state Health Department.

“As I usually tell people, our crystal ball was very clouded,” Padfield testified Monday. “If this was a natural disaster, we’d be able to forecast where we’d be three or four weeks into it.”

There’s still a disagreement between Republican lawmakers and the Wolf administration about the closure of non-life-sustaining businesses for the past month and a half, said Martin in a Tuesday morning interview. Martin said the state’s modeling should have been adjusted as mitigation kept the number of cases lower than expected and centered in long-term care facilities, potentially allowing businesses to reopen sooner under social distancing best practices.

“At least they’re admitting that the model was wrong at the beginning, that things didn’t materialize like they thought they would in the beginning,” he said.

Pennsylvania ranks fifth among states with the most restrictive social distancing orders, according to a WalletHub study. Pennsylvania also has the distinction of being the only state that doesn’t allow its real estate industry to function, according to Martin.

Health and emergency officials said the commonwealth’s approach to social distancing allowed Pennsylvania to avoid the levels of stress to its health care system seen in New York and New Jersey by implementing strict social distancing measures.

“We have not overwhelmed [state hospital facilities],” Levine said. “That’s a great success of our mitigation and prevention efforts. We did not see the situation that happened in New York, New Jersey or even Italy because of the governor’s stay-at-home orders and other mitigation efforts.”