Come May 8, select regions will be allowed to relax some of the coronavirus restrictions that have been in place since mid-March.

And the state could unveil which will be the first to begin reopening at the end of this week.

Gov. Tom Wolf’s color-coded plan to restart Pennsylvania early next month will give businesses permission to open back up to the public, so long as safety measures, such as social distancing, are maintained.

On Friday, the state plans to announce which four regions and counties will move from the current red phase and statewide stay-at-home order to the yellow, Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine said in a press briefing Tuesday.

“We’re looking at different regions, and we’re looking at the counties within those regions,” Levine said.

She noted that it would be “unlikely” for a county or region to reopen without meeting one quantitative measure being utilized in the governor’s three-phase strategy; the number of new coronavirus cases over a 14-day period must total fewer than 50 per 100,000 people.

Neither Wolf nor Levine made clear how areas or regions will be designated for reopening. After it was introduced last week, Levine said the plan looked at regions, clumping together counties rather than assessing them individually on whether or not they met the bench marks for resuming operations.

The Health Department’s six-part regional map has not been explicitly named as the one Wolf will use in his phased reopening.

Another variable being considered for a region or county’s reopening is testing capacity. The state recently expanded testing to include a larger number of symptomatic individuals, but widespread testing of jails and nursing or personal care homes - whose COVID-19 case counts would factor into an area’s ability to reopen, according to Levine - is not possible.

“It will be very challenging in terms of testing resources to be able to test every inmate in a correctional facility and then every resident, and staff, of nursing homes and personal care homes,” the health secretary said.

“We’re not able to do that.”

Pennsylvania’s coronavirus case count increased by 1,214 positive tests Tuesday, bringing the statewide total to 43,264. The death toll stands at 1,716.

In Carbon County, there have been 169 cases of the novel coronavirus and 13 deaths. Monroe County has just under 1,100 cases, Schuylkill has 330, and Lehigh, 2,685.

Of the 2,700 people currently in the hospital due to COVID-19, more than 600 have needed a ventilator, the department of health reports.