Pa. to ban alcohol sales at bars, restaurants for 1 night

State officials laid out new covid-19 mitigation efforts but stopped short of issuing a statewide stay-at-home order, instead advising Pennsylvanians to stay home and putting a one-night ban on alcohol sales Wednesday.

New orders also scale back the maximum capacity for indoor and outdoor gatherings, capping outdoor limits for the largest venues at 10% capacity up to 2,500.

The stay-at-home advisory from Gov. Tom Wolf on Monday is just that — an advisory — and is more a plea than a requirement. He asked residents to heed the advisory for the sake of the state’s health care system, which is seeing more hospitalized covid patients than at any point in the pandemic.

“We have been trying to do everything we can to make sure we never have to go back to that red-yellow-green set of draconian steps we did back then,” Wolf said, referring to the spring’s state shutdown and phased reopening. He noted he hasn’t “thought of anything” that would force the state into another shutdown.

“We’re trying to balance the needs of a very fragile economy with the needs for all of us to keep safe,” he said, pointing to the better knowledge, better treatments and better preparedness in terms of fighting the virus as opposed to early on in the pandemic. “I want to do everything I can to keep from trashing our economy the way we did back in March and April and, at the same time, keep people safe.”

Among the mitigation efforts is an order halting alcohol sales at all bars and restaurants at 5 p.m. Wednesday until 8 a.m. Thursday. The night before Thanksgiving, Wolf noted, is one of the biggest drinking nights of the year, and Wolf said the one-night stay on on-premise sales is eliminating one more opportunity for the virus to spread.

“That’s what we should be focused on, not whether we want to get transitory benefit from going out with friends … and having some drinks,” he said. “Let’s forgo that this one time, and if we do that and all these other things, we’re going to get back to life as we really want to and go to the bar anytime we want.”

Officials with the Distilled Spirits Council denounced the move.

“After shutting down all state liquor stores at the beginning of the pandemic, Governor Wolf once again takes the path of least resistance by shutting down alcohol sales for struggling restaurants and bars,” David Wojnar, Vice President of State Government Relations at the Distilled Spirits Council, said in a statement. “Times are hard enough for these small business owners. The governor should be looking for ways to boost these businesses not take away a critical revenue stream.”

Taking aim at large crowds, Wolf and Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine again scaled back capacity limits for large gatherings both indoors and outdoors, slashing the maximum capacity for the largest outdoor venues by 5,000.

The capacity for indoor events has been capped as follows:

• Capacity is capped at 10% for venues with a maximum occupancy of up to 2,000;
• Capacity is capped at 5% for venues with capacity of up to 10,000;
• No venues can have events with more than 500 people.

For outdoor venues:

• Capacity is capped at 15% for venues with a maximum capacity of up to 2,000;
• Capacity is capped at 10% for venues with occupancy of up to 10,000;
• For venues that hold more than 10,000 people, capacity is capped at 5% up to 2,500.

Levine also issued new orders pertaining to schools and hospitals. The recommendations for schools, she said, remain the same, including the recommendation that schools in counties seeing substantial spread of the virus for more than two weeks switch to fully remote learning.

School administrators in those counties must either pledge to adhere to all safety protocols or commit to remote learning. Those who don’t comply with the former will be required to go to online-only learning and suspend extracurricular activities until the county moves out of the “substantial spread” level.

In Southwestern Pennsylvania, counties considered to have substantial levels of transmission include Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Greene, Indiana, Lawrence, Somerset, Washington and Westmoreland.

Levine laid out a series of thresholds that, if met, will require hospitals in a region to reduce elective surgeries by 50%. The state previously broke the state’s health care systems into regions, and hospitals must scale back surgeries if two of three conditions are met in a particular region:

• 33% or more of hospitals in the region anticipate staffing shortages in the next week;
• 50% or more increase in the moving average of covid-19 admissions in the previous 48 hours;
• 10% or fewer of the medical and surgical beds in a region are projected to be available in the next 72 hours.

Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations across the state continued to rise, with the percent positivity rate Monday reaching 11.1% — up from 9.6% the week prior.

As of 8 a.m., 3,379 people across the state were hospitalized by the virus, with 775 in intensive care and 371 on ventilators. Officials noted the number of covid-19-attributable deaths has quadrupled in the past week, and the average daily case count is seven times higher than it was two months ago.

“The commonwealth is in a precarious place right now,” Wolf said.

He and Levine cautioned that modeling and projections from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington predict the state could run out of ICU beds in December, by which point cases could reach up to 22,000 per day in the state.

The modeling projects that if mitigation measures are ignored, the state could have more than 32,000 covid-19 deaths by late February.

“As our hospitals and health care system are facing greater strain, we need to redouble our efforts to keep people safe,” Wolf said.

Local medical experts sounded the alarm last week, warning the current exponential rise in cases could be catastrophic.

“We’re on a very, very, very dangerous trajectory right now,” Dr. Tom Walsh, an infectious disease specialist at Allegheny Health Network, told the Tribune-Review last week. “We’re seeing rapid, exponential increases and if we continue down this path … and people are still congregating and getting together with people outside the home and traveling, it could be a disaster.”

Concern from hospital leaders isn’t just about beds and ventilators, but also staff. As community transmission increases, so do the number of health care workers who become infected and need to quarantine.

Walsh noted hospitalizations tend to lag one to two weeks behind new cases, and deaths follow hospitalizations. Right now, hospitalizations are surging and case counts are climbing. That means that come a few weeks from now — barring some significant change — hospitalizations, intensive care and ventilator use will jump higher.