Over the past three days, Bucks County’s new COVID-19 infections have dropped to an average of 20 per day, the lowest three-day total in more than two months.   

Twenty-six new cases were reported on Saturday. Case reporting was not done on Sunday for the first time since the pandemic began, and the combined total reported for Sunday and today was 34.

“We are now meeting Gov. Wolf’s original metric to move to yellow when we use symptom onset date, as opposed to case report date,” said Dr. David Damsker, director of the Bucks County Health Department. “We are the only county in the area to have collected this piece of data on our cases.”

Wolf originally had imposed a metric on all counties to have no more than 50 new infections per 100,000 residents over a 14-day period to move from the shut-down red status to partially open yellow in the governor’s three-phase reopening plan. For Bucks County, that came to an average of about 22 new cases per day.

Bucks and the rest of Pennsylvania’s red-status counties are expected to move to yellow on Friday.  

Nine deaths of people who had COVID-19 also were reported over the three days. All had underlying health conditions, seven were residents of long-term care facilities, and all but one were over age 70.

Of the 60 new infections, 15 were the result of household contacts, 12 were from workplace contacts, 12 are residents or staff at long-term care facilities, 10 were attributed to pure community spread, two were spread at healthcare settings, one is a jail inmate and eight were  unable to be interviewed immediately.

It was the lowest three-day total of new infections since March 22-24, when there were 54 new cases reported.

Ninety Bucks County residents remain hospitalized, 18 of them in critical condition and on ventilators. Of the 4,819 Bucks County residents who have tested positive for COVID-19, 460 have died and 1,597 are confirmed to have recovered.

Statistics, charts and other coronavirus-related information can be found on the county’s data portal: https://covid19-bucksgis.hub.arcgis.com.  An interactive Bucks County map showing numbers