Pittsburgh Seemed Like a Virus Success Story. Now Cases Are Surging.

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Sun, 2020-07-12 19:53 — mike kraft

PITTSBURGH — A little more than three weeks ago, officials in Pittsburgh announced a milestone enviable for almost any major city in America: A day had gone by without a single new confirmed case of the coronavirus. It was good news for a city that had seen only a modest outbreak all along, even as the virus raged through places like Philadelphia and New York.

That was then.

Western Pennsylvania is suddenly experiencing an alarming surge of infections. Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, reported more than 100 new cases for the first time on June 30; two days later, the daily case count surpassed 200. Over two weeks in late June and early July, the county recorded more new cases than in the previous two months combined, and on some recent days has accounted for nearly half of all new known cases in Pennsylvania.

“Allegheny County is the big area of concern at this point,” Gov. Tom Wolf said at a news conference last week. “There have been others more modest,” he said, “but right now Allegheny County is the area.”

The spike in the Pittsburgh area offers a cautionary tale: Even after months of vigilance, an outbreak can flare up all of a sudden. While the nation’s current flood of new cases is being driven primarily by the spread of the coronavirus in the South and the West, experts fear that other parts of the country — including places like Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Kansas City, Mo., which are all seeing new growth — could be close behind.

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