Some regions of Pennsylvania are tantalizingly close to escaping some pandemic restrictions. Other parts of the state could have a long way to go before residents and businesses begin getting back to normal.

As the administration of Gov. Tom Wolf considers when to allow residents to leave their homes and shuttered businesses to reopen, the state’s sprawling geography and highly variable population density are playing a big role in the shutdown calculus.

Wolf has said a swath of rural northern Pennsylvania — spanning some 230 miles from east to west — is likely to begin moving out from under his shutdown orders on May 8. That is partly based on a metric in Wolf’s reopening plan that says new infections of the coronavirus must total no more than 50 for every 100,000 residents over a two-week period.

It’s a different story in densely populated eastern Pennsylvania. In the southeast, which includes Philadelphia and its tightly packed suburbs, residents are still contracting the virus at a rate nearly five times above the state’s threshold to be considered for shutdown relief. And the northeast region, which includes Allentown, Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, is still four times over the state threshold.

Wolf’s gradual, color-coded reopening plan divides Pennsylvania’s 67 counties into six geographic regions.

Under Wolf’s plan, regions will move together from red to the less restrictive yellow, and then, eventually, to green, meaning that all pandemic shutdown orders are lifted except to the extent that federal or state health guidelines remain in place to limit the virus’s spread.

In the southwest, which includes Pittsburgh, only about 31 additional people per 100,000 were reported to have contracted the virus in the latest 14-day period. But the region includes a county on the Ohio border, Beaver, which is dealing with a large outbreak at a nursing home.