CLEARFIELD COUNTY – One year ago our world changed as the United States started reacting to the increase in COVID-19 cases and lockdowns began.
A shutdown was issued for the entire commonwealth of Pennsylvania by Gov. Tom Wolf on March 16, 2020, but it wasn’t until March 24 that the first case was reported in Clearfield County.
As the numbers increased around the state and especially in New York, our county remained a bit isolated and the numbers were not significant.
Prior to July 4, there were only 74 cases in the entire county with 28 of those being in DuBois. At the end of July, there were a total of 136 cases, again with most coming from DuBois.
The Clearfield County Fair was cancelled as people argued about restrictions on restaurants and mask mandates. Other than financial difficulties, we were still not seeing the impact of the virus on our population.
By the end of August, there were 227 cases in the county and we marked our first death on Aug. 2. This was reportedly a nursing home resident.
September was the first rough month due to a COVID outbreak at the DuBois Nursing Home, as cases in that area went up by 45 in just a few weeks. There were five deaths in September.
Things calmed down a bit and by the end of October, we had only 497 cases throughout the entire pandemic. And 136 of these were in DuBois with 69 in Clearfield. We added another death.
Then COVID really arrived in Clearfield County.
At the end of November, the number of cases jumped up to 1,693 with five new deaths reported and in December and January, we saw the worst of the COVID crisis.
By the end of December, we had 4,023 total cases with 1,418 added just in December, which was almost double what we had up until this point.
The virus became more lethal as we saw an additional 38 people die in December. Prior to this, we only had 12 deaths in nine months.
In January, the total number of deaths, 50, doubled in one month. There were 1,580 new cases, giving us a total of 5,603 cases.
Fortunately, things began to slow down a bit in February when we only had 681 new cases and 14 additional deaths.
During our worst time period, Clearfield began to overtake DuBois as the county’s leader in new cases.
In December Clearfield had 292 new cases while DuBois had only 291.
In January Clearfield marked 277 new cases and in February 54 while DuBois only added 131 in January and 49 in February. This continues to be the trend in so far in March with Clearfield adding 32 and DuBois only 11.
DuBois still has the most cases (and the biggest population) with 872 but Clearfield is close behind with 853 total cases.
The town totals since the beginning December to the end of February is Clearfield 623 and DuBois 471.
In the last few days, we have added seven deaths in the county, giving us a total of 121 during the pandemic. And 66 of these deaths occurred in either nursing homes or personal care homes.
According to the state Web site, the nursing home deaths reported deaths in the county as of March 11 are DuBois Nursing Home – 19, Christ the King Manor -18, Mountain Laurel Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center-17 and DuBois Village -8.
The nursing home reporting the most patient cases is Mountain Laurel with 111.
Overall, over 527,000 people have died in the United States from the disease in the past year with over 2,600,000 dying worldwide.
As of March 11, the state has had 958,382 cases of COVID with 92 percent of these people recovering. Pennsylvania has a total of 24,490 deaths.
Over 10 million people have been tested for the virus.
Currently the positivity rate for those being tested is only 5.7 percent after being as high as 14 percent earlier in the pandemic.
The vaccines seem to be making a difference.
In Clearfield County 8,872 people have been fully vaccinated and an additional 6,199 people have had the first shots from Pfizer or Moderna.
This means about 19 percent of our population has some protection against the disease, which gives us hope that someday soon we can get back to some kind of normal.
President Joe Biden had planned to get 100 million vaccines distributed during his first 100 days in office and his administration is well on its way to surpassing that goal.
(These numbers come from information provided by the state on its Web site and COVID Dashboard. City and town totals are calculated by zip codes.)
