The cabin fever that often comes during the winter months received an extension this year due to quarantines put in place to slow the spread of COVID-19.

Late Thursday, Gov. Tom Wolf and Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine extended the orders for the Northeast and other parts of the state to stay at home until June 4.

Twenty-four counties graduated today to yellow phase: Bradford, Cameron, Centre, Clarion, Clearfield, Clinton, Crawford, Elk, Erie, Forest, Jefferson, Lawrence, Lycoming, McKean, Mercer, Montour, Northumberland, Potter, Snyder, Sullivan, Tioga, Union, Venango and Warren.

Wolf said he would announce today additional counties to move to the yellow phase, but the Northeast has been a hot spot for the coronavirus.

Stay away from beach

Residents coping with staying indoors for days on end might feel those urges intensify with Memorial Day just a few weeks away and some Jersey Shore beaches beginning to reopen.

But Levine cautioned against making any plans for a road trip to the Garden State.

“There is no enforcement against travel in Pennsylvania, or between states,” she said. “There’s no law or regulation that prevents travel within Pennsylvania or between Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

“My recommendation, however, is not to do that. I know it’s tempting, given the warm weather that will hopefully be coming soon. But going into New Jersey can have risks, because New Jersey has had a very high incidence of COVID-19.”

On Wednesday, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy extended the Public Health Emergency for another 30 days. As of Thursday at 1 p.m., New Jersey had 133,635 positive coronavirus cases and 8,801 total deaths among 261,869 total tests reported.

As Pennsylvania works through its own gradual reopening process, Levine warned that the risks of any kind of travel were simply too great.

“If you go to the shore, I bet you other people are going to go to the shore,” Levine said. “And then it will be almost impossible to practice social distancing.

“So my recommendation is for people to stay home.”

Mask mandate

Even when counties move to yellow, some businesses will still be in limbo, leaving some to question to effectiveness and usefulness of the mask mandate.

“The issue is that masks work, but they don’t work 100%,” Levine said.

“We have always said that my mask protects you, and your mask protects me. But these are not the N95 masks that health care personnel use when they’re taking care of patients with COVID-19; these are cloth masks. Cloth masks are not infallible, and so even though there is protection, it’s not 100%.

“And that has led to the mitigation and prevention measures that the governor has taken. And overall, the goal was to bend the curve, to flatten that curve. We were successful in doing that. We did not overwhelm our health care system, but we have to be careful in the future, because COVID-19 is not gone from Pennsylvania, and can resurge again,” Levine said, “It’s still very prevalent, unfortunately in the southeast and the northeast. But we are making significant progress.”

Virtual Mother’s Day

Levine discouraged travel for Mother’s Day this Sunday.

“My recommendation in the red zones is to do that visit virtually,” she said. “The safest thing that you can do for yourself, the safest thing that you can do for your mother and your family and your community, is to do that visit virtually.

“In the yellow zones, I think that people could do visits. But not to a nursing home or a long-term care living facility; I mean if you’re going to go to their home. We are not allowing visitors in any type of nursing home or long-term care living facility or personal care home. They still have to be locked down because of the severe risk of spread in those settings.”

In information released Thursday, the department confirmed as of midnight that there were 1,070 additional positive cases of COVID-19, bringing the statewide total to 52,915.

A continued effort to reconcile data from various sources also brought an increase of 310 new deaths, bringing the statewide total to 3,416 deaths in Pennsylvania.

In nursing and personal care homes, there were 10,506 resident cases of COVID-19, and 1,489 cases among employees, bringing the total to 11,995 at 514 distinct facilities in 44 counties. Out of our total deaths, 2,355 have occurred in residents from nursing or personal care facilities.

“One of the reasons that the number is up is that we had a ‘data dump,’?” Levine said.

“We had a whole bunch of results come back from LabCorp, one of our commercial laboratories, and so that tends to skew things.

“So we’re going to see what the numbers are tomorrow, and then over the weekend, and into next week, to follow trends. Overall, the number of new cases, over time, continues to go down. We know today’s was a little over 1,000, but we’ll see how tomorrow’s is,” Levine said Thursday.