When Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf issued his stay-at-home order Monday afternoon for the seven counties hardest hit by the coronavirus in the commonwealth, many wondered why the sleepy little rural county of Monroe in the northeastern corner of the state was one of them.
All of the others made sense. Allegheny County surrounds Pittsburgh, and the collar counties of Philadelphia — Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia — are all high-risk because they are densely populated and represent the types of regions where the coronavirus spread has accelerated. Of the 851 cases of the coronavirus in the state, most are concentrated in those six highly populated counties and Monroe, which has 45 confirmed cases.
The question is, why?
The answer is a sizable number of Monroe’s 160,000 residents, around 20,000 or so, don’t just commute back and forth from New York City for work — they do their commute in crowded buses several times a day.
At least they used to.
“A tremendous number of people who are residents here moved here after 9/11 but realized that the money they were making in the city they could not duplicate in good old Monroe County,” said John Moyer, one of three county commissioners who run the county government. “So, they kept their jobs in the city and the urban areas of New Jersey and commute back and forth. We’ve got five or six major pickup spots for buses that start running at about 5 in the morning and, on a typical day, don’t end until 11 at night. And it’s shoveling people back and forth from New York and New Jersey to Monroe County.”
“So, it’s fairly easy, even though I’m not an epidemiologist, to figure out that we’re being hit with the people in the metropolitan area that have contracted the virus somehow and are bringing it home,” he said.
“We’ve had a very difficult time,” he said, pausing. He received word late Monday from the Monroe County coroner regarding the death of a 56-year-old man due to complications from the disease.
Moyer said the estimate of how many commute is “roughly upwards of 20,000” in a county of “around 275” hospital beds.
Monroe County is mostly known for its sweeping scenery and a tourism industry that thrives off of visitors who utilize trail hiking the thousands of acres of mountains and valleys that make up the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, as well as the Big Pocono State Park, the Delaware State Forest, and the Tobyhanna State Park.
It is the land of the Pocono Mountains — so many resorts Moyer could not put a number on them or where people pass through along the Appalachian Trail.
“There is also Camelback, a ski area that also has a huge water park. Kalahari has the largest water park in the country. It’s shuttered. Great Wolf, another huge water park is shuttered. Then you’ve got the smaller Shawnee Inns Fernwood Resort. I mean, there are hundreds of resorts. Some of them are huge. And Kalahari, with having the largest water park in the United States or the world, is a huge employer of thousands of people in the Monroe, most of them coming from Monroe County,” he explained.
Moyer, who is at the beginning of his third term as a commissioner, said he would characterize the past two weeks in one word: “Hell.”
“We’re used to being prepared to deal with most emergencies that have a finite starting point and ending point. We’re less better prepared to deal with disasters of this type that didn’t really have a starting date and, more importantly, don’t really have a finishing date.”
The stay-at-home order for Monroe and the other six counties is ordered to continue until April 6.
