Allegheny County is “well into our fourth wave of cases here,” Dr. Debra Bogen, health director, said Wednesday.

Daily covid-19 case counts have set records for 2021 in the past several days, she said, with 418 new cases reported Wednesday. The test positivity rate is also nearly 9%, and hospitalizations are slowly increasing. Deaths due to covid-19, once on a steady decline since mid-December, began to increase again the week of March 21, Bogen said.

“And we know the cause,” she said. “Large gatherings, combined with no physical distancing or masks, mixed with the variant viruses in our community. The next few months are the final push, and we must all exercise self-restraint. This is not the time to give up.”

There have been at least 75 variant cases recorded in Allegheny County, almost all of which being B.1.1.7, the variant first identified in the United Kingdom. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control, said Tuesday the B.1.1.7 variant is now the dominant strain of covid-19 circulating in the U.S.

Bogen’s report came the same day Gov. Tom Wolf visited the county at the health department’s newest vaccine distribution site at the Bethlehem Baptist Church in McKeesport.

The McKeesport clinic will operate in addition to the county’s sites in Castle Shannon, Ross and Pittsburgh’s Hill District.

More than 243,000 people are fully vaccinated in Allegheny County, according to data from the state Department of Health. County officials said more than 75% of the county’s population aged 65 and older is now at least partially vaccinated — a critical group, Bogen said, because older individuals are most at risk for experiencing severe cases of covid-19.

County officials also said they expect vaccine distribution to accelerate even more than in recent weeks, especially after the announcement of several mass vaccine clinics: the Allegheny County Health Department partnered with the region’s two largest health systems, Allegheny Health Network and UPMC, to administer a combined 25,000 Johnson & Johnson shots at clinics in the next several weeks.

“The simultaneous expansion of eligibility and the opening of mass vaccination clinics is by design,” Bogen said. “And while AHN and UPMC run these large sites, the health department will continue to focus most of its attention on filling the gaps and meeting unmet needs.”

The county last week officially launched a new online registration system for scheduling vaccine appointments, which was quickly inundated with glitches for some users. The transition to the new system presented “data challenges,” but as of Wednesday officials expect to be able to schedule anyone who wants an appointment, Bogen said. To date, she said, more than 20,000 people have used the tool to register for an appointment, and nearly 9,000 have pre-registered on the county’s waiting list.

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