Why Sewickley Heights had a shockingly high case rate of covid-19

On paper, Sewickley Heights has had one of the highest case rates of covid-19 in Allegheny County.

In early January, the borough of roughly 800 residents had about 307 positive cases — a case rate of 3,700 per 10,000 residents, or 37%. Nationally, the rate was 7.5% on Jan. 25. In Pennsylvania, it was around 6.3%.

“I knew that number had to be wrong,” said John Bunce, a resident of Leet.

He said the Sewickley area is “very well-behaved” when it comes to following county, state and federal guidelines to curb the spread of the disease. Bunce’s daily routine includes going to Mass, a coffee shop and a bakery — where he observes people following all of the rules.

Bunce, 71, is a self-proclaimed “geeky engineer” who loves numbers and data. When covid-19 hit the East Coast, some of his buddies from MIT predicted the virus will sweep the country and that “we were all gonna die,” Bunce said.

“Well, 15143 is the safest place in America,” Bunce remembers saying to his friends, referencing the zip code that covers a number of small boroughs in the Sewickley area, including Sewickley Heights. So Bunce decided to post covid-19 numbers and data for Allegheny County on his Facebook page.

At first, his posts were for his friends — or “really analytic” friends — who were interested in tracking the numbers as they came in from county, state and federal officials. The posts became a daily dispatch, with more specific information, when he found out his readership had grown.

“I was at the local coffee shop one day, and I see a buddy of mine walk in. He says, ‘He’s the guy who writes the blog! I read it every morning, and my friends read it, too,’ ” Bunce said.

He estimated his daily Facebook posts now reach up to 300 people a day.

“People like the numbers,” he said.

Then, in mid-July, the cases of covid-19 in Sewickley Heights climbed from 12 to 20. It alarmed Bunce because it was the largest single-day increase since March 27, when he began watching the case counts closely.

The cases then corrected to 12 for Sewickley Heights through August, according to Bunce’s record. That number rose to 15 in September, but by November he began expressing doubt the numbers were accurate as the small borough’s case rate rose to around 300 cases per 10,000 residents.

Eventually, Bunce found out from speaking to Allegheny County Health Department officials the reason for the high case rate and case count in Sewickley Heights: The Heritage Valley Sewickley Hospital’s positive covid-19 tests were being dumped into Sewickley Heights’ cases.

The hospital’s property, according to Allegheny County real estate records, lies within Sewickley Heights and Sewickley, the majority of which is Sewickley.

“So for reasons but known to God, when the county is putting together their stats, they put the hospital in Sewickley Heights,” Bunce said.

Aaron Aupperlee, an Allegheny County health department spokesman, had an explanation. The Allegheny County Health Department populates its covid-19 website and map with data entered into the state’s National Electronic Disease Surveillance System, referred to as PA-NEDDSS.

Although the state system requires health providers to report test results with complete information about the patients, including their correct county of residence and the correct address, Aupperlee said some patients at the hospital who receive covid-19 testing have incomplete address information when a test sample is sent from the hospital to the lab.

“The program the Health Department uses to place results without a patient address defaults to the geographic center of the (testing site’s) zip code, which, for 15143, happens to be in Sewickley Heights, not Sewickley Borough,” he said in an email.

Aupperlee said positive cases often are reassigned to other communities through case investigation.

Negative tests, however, remain assigned to the hospital because there is no case investigation.

“The Health Department does not have the resources to investigate each negative case to learn the correct address,” Aupperlee said.

He said the county health department presumes the situation is similar in other municipalities because there are dozens of labs and testing facilities throughout the county that might leave out patient information when completing the tests.

“This issue is more visible in Sewickley Heights because of the size of its population relative to the number of cases and tests performed at the hospital,” he said.

Moving forward, the Health Department is “asking that providers and labs record accurate patient data so that we can make informed decisions for interventions.”

The county health department is not the only public entity urging health care providers to report complete information about its covid-19 patients and people tested for the virus.

Maggi Barton, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Health, pointed to a Health Alert Notice issued Dec. 28 to all health facilities reminding providers of the importance of collecting demographic data — including information such as date of birth, phone number, address, race and ethnicity of people being tested for covid-19.

The notice said the DOH continues to get a “large number of laboratory test results” that are missing patients’ date of birth, addresses and a telephone number.

The numbers for Sewickley Heights seem to have been reallocated recently. As of Jan. 26, Sewickley Heights had 69 positive covid-19 cases and 1 death reported, according to the Allegheny County Health Department’s map. One week before, the borough had more than 300 positive cases.

However, the communities of Bell Acres and Sewickley had sharp increases in cases Jan. 20, around the time the Sewickley Heights cases dropped. As of Jan. 27, Bell Acres was at 248 positive cases and Sewickley at 203. Bunce suspects those numbers are wrong, too.

“It’s like whack-a-mole,” Bunce said, laughing.

Heritage Valley Health System, which owns the Sewickley hospital, said in a statement through spokeswoman Suzanne Sakson, “All patient demographic information is entered into our electronic health record along with the patient physician orders.”

Sakson said the hospital’s testing facility is required by the state Department of Health to enter results of covid-19 testing performed into PA-NEDDSS.

“The patient results, positive and negative, are all reported with accurate demographic information,” she said.

In his Facebook post Jan. 21, Bunce wrote, “Now if ‘they’ cleaned out the hospital backlog, I doubt all cases were sent to Bell Acres and Sewickley borough and none to the other boroughs.”

Bunce said he is tempted to offer to clean up the data for the county health department, a task he estimated would take him about five hours to do.

For now, however, he will keep up with his daily Facebook posts. He sees it as a duty, similar to serving with a battalion in the Navy, which he did for four years.

“When I walk through Sewickley and the area, I have people constantly thanking me for what I’m doing. I’m just giving people access to information,” he said. “If people know what’s going on around them, they will not be as frightened. So I’ll keep doing it until no one wants to read it anymore. I’ll know when that is.”