For the third day, Butler County saw a stay in its positive cases of the coronavirus with an ominous Tuesday looming.

Butler County's continued plateau at 180 positive cases and six deaths has given many residents hope that Gov. Tom Wolf's restrictions may be lifted soon, but the state Department of Health typically sees spikes in cases and deaths on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Last week Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine said the spikes can be attributed to a lag in reporting and consolidation of data being collected. Reports Tuesday are the culmination of Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

One point of measurement state officials are using as one of its multiple benchmarks for reopening a county or region is that an area would have to have less than 50 cases per 100,000 residents.

Butler County was left out of the first wave of counties moving from red to yellow distinction, which would remove some of the restrictions to residents and businesses.

Wolf said in his news conference Friday, the department already is looking at more regions that could move from red to yellow.

In a Monday news conference, Levine said the department will be getting data from its metrics on Tuesdays and Thursdays moving forward and will also receive new data from the Carnegie-Mellon University modeling. She said contact tracing and lab testing also will continue to be evaluated.

“We'll be putting all of that together,” Levine said. “We'll be discussing that with the governor starting today and ongoing and then the governor will make his decision.”

Levine also said it will be unlikely that any relief comes to the red zones, when asked if some restrictions may be lifted in those areas. She said lifting any restrictions in red areas could be devastating for the state's recovery and defeat the purpose of the last few weeks.

“All of our modeling suggests that if we release mitigation efforts too soon in areas that are very affected by COVID-19, areas that still have significant community transmission, then we could go right back into a type of exponential rise and it could even be higher than the rise we saw before,” Levine said.

Levine said as counties move from red to yellow to green, they should keep in mind the goal behind Wolf's orders, which was to keep people safe.

“We were able to bend and straighten the curve so that we did not have the size of the peak, the surge that we were talking about and it didn't overwhelm health care systems,” she said.