Beaver County News

Beaver County issued the following announcement on July 20.

State officials have no intention of returning Beaver, Lawrence and Allegheny counties to the “red phase” of reopening, according to a Department of Health spokesman.

A headline on a self-purporting conservative news site claimed Sunday night that Gov. Tom Wolf intended to move a series of 10 counties back to the red phase “or total lockdown.” That story, and screenshots of it, were shared more than 53,000 times on Facebook, according to the site’s analytics, including by state Rep. Aaron Bernstine, R—10, New Beaver.

But the headline and story are false, said Nate Wardle, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Health.

“The department, at this time, has no plans to return counties to the red phase,” Wardle said. “Any mitigation efforts needed, beyond those in place since July 15, would be targeted and surgical to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in Pennsylvania.”

The story included information from a Friday press release summarizing the weekly findings on the state’s early warning monitoring dashboard. The press release listed the 10 counties in Pennsylvania where the percent positivity of new COVID-19 cases — a number that shows what percent of new COVID tests come back positive — was higher than 5 percent for the prior seven-day period.

Public health officials are using that as a measure to determine where community spread of the virus is rampant rather than relying solely on raw case numbers.

The story listed those 10 counties — which include Beaver, Lawrence and Allegheny counties — as 10 that might “tip the scale and force Wolf to take action.” Later in the post, the unnamed reporter wrote “these counties are very likely to re-enter red phase under the direction of Tom Wolf and the Department of Health.”

Wardle acknowledged that the state is indeed monitoring those counties.

“Counties listed in the weekly early warning monitoring dashboard press release are those with percent positivity rates over 5 percent, where more monitoring from a state perspective is occurring,” Wardle said.

But that doesn’t mean that there will be a shutdown.

Bernstine said he shared the post because he wanted to get information that could impact his constituents negatively out as soon as possible. He chastised the Wolf administration for not sharing information directly with the Legislature.

“Any time information is out there like that, I want to find out what’s going on and give a direct answer,” Bernstine said. “But the governor and the administration and Secretary Levine and the health department is keeping the Legislature in the dark, so we’re really relying on the news articles out there.”

He said he regularly shares information he sees in the media with his constituents and then updates the original post as more details become available. When asked how he vets the information he shares, he acknowledged that there are news sites that have headlines that are not accurate.

“I think our local news folks do a good job — Beaver County Times, the Ellwood City Ledger, the New Castle News, the Butler Eagle — but unfortunately we’ve gotten into a situation, and there’s numerous examples of CNN articles that have literally different headlines directed at different people,” Bernstine said.

“I have no doubt this is an era, unfortunately, where news sometimes is difficult to filter out what is real and what is fake. I don’t necessarily think what I shared was fake, it was someone gathering information and putting it out there. I guess ultimately we’ll see what transpires with that. But what I do know is that the information that the Legislature gets, we often are getting that information from news sources.”

The site Bernstine shared the story from had several misleading and false headlines on it on Monday, including a story dated July 20 with a headline referencing new restaurant restrictions expected to be announced Wednesday.

However, all of the information included referenced data and reporting from two weeks ago, when state officials first started considering implementing restrictions on indoor dining in southwest Pennsylvania. The site also features numerous stories referring to Dr. Rachel Levine as “Richard” or as “him.” Levine is transgender.

Wardle said it’s important that people are watching where they get their news information from.

“It is important that people get information from reputable news sources,” Wardle said. “In addition, it is wholly inappropriate for organizations to misgender individuals.”

Original source here.