HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Hospitals, nursing homes and child care centers are asking Pennsylvania state government for more money to avoid closures amid a surge of coronavirus -related demands on staffing and equipment, while the union representing state corrections officers wants the prison system to stop transferring inmates.

The demands came as the new coronavirus continued to spread in Pennsylvania, with the state reporting more than 200 additional cases — an increase of more than 30% from the day before — and another death.

Lawmakers, meanwhile, took another step to delay Pennsylvania's April 28 primary election.

With hospitals warning they could run out of masks and other protective gear in about three weeks as COVID-19 spikes, the administration of Gov. Tom Wolf said it is rushing to procure more medical supplies from the federal government's stockpile, from other states and countries, and from manufacturers repurposing their factories.

"There’s a full-on effort across the administration to make sure we have the supplies for our healthcare personnel to deal with the surge of patients from COVID-19,” Health Secretary Rachel Levine said Tuesday.

Officials have been vague about the state's readiness, however.

Levine has steadfastly refused to say how much protective gear Pennsylvania has in its possession, and how much it still needs to help healthcare workers safely treat the anticipated surge of coronavirus patients. Nor have officials answered questions about the state's supply of respirators, or how many more hospital beds it might need to meet demand.

Elsewhere, as millions of Pennsylvanians hunkered down at home — many of them under order from the governor — another legal challenge came to Wolf's edict closing the physical locations of businesses determined to be “non-life-sustaining."

A look at coronavirus-related developments in Pennsylvania:

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CASES

The state Department of Health on Tuesday reported more than 200 new cases, with the total to date now exceeding 850. Case counts in Pennsylvania have been doubling every two or three days.

Allegheny County reported one more death, bringing the statewide total to at least seven. The victim was a woman in her late 70s and the county medical examiner was handling the case, the county said.

For most people, the coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia, or death. The vast majority of people recover.

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PRIMARY DATE DELAY

The House voted preliminarily on Tuesday to delay Pennsylvania's April 28 primary election for five weeks, until June 2.

The House is expected to send the bill to the Senate with another vote on Wednesday.

The Republican-sponsored amendment would also let counties consolidate polling places, in part because some are currently located within long-term care facilities and because many poll workers are older people who are particularly at risk from COVID-19.

Primary voters will choose candidates for the presidential race, congressional seats, both chambers of the Legislature and the row offices.

The House employed special remote voting procedures adopted as a result of the pandemic, and one leader, Minority Whip Jordan Harris, D-Philadelphia, wore rubber gloves and used a mask to protect himself.

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PRISON TRANSFERS

Moving inmates between prisons poses an unnecessary risk of spreading the virus between institutions, where it will be very difficult to stop it from spreading to other inmates and employees, said Larry Blackwell, president of the 11,000-member corrections officers' union.

“The governor has called for all non-essential movement to halt, and this isn’t essential,” Blackwell said Tuesday. “And the governor has the authority to shut down the movement of these prisoners. The counties, the state, let’s just freeze everything until we figure out what’s going on.”

No case of the coronavirus has been discovered in the state prison system where roughly 45,000 inmates are housed and 16,000 people work, prison and union officials say.

Corrections Secretary John Wetzel said through a spokeswoman that halting all transfers is not a “realistic plan at this point" and he urged corrections staff across Pennsylvania to “pull together” against the virus.

“We are doing everything we can to minimize the exposure to the system as a whole, but we are a system — and each facility in the system has a role,” Wetzel said.

The Department of Corrections has shut down some routine transfers between prisons, according to prison and union officials.

But the department is emptying Retreat state prison in northeastern Pennsylvania of hundreds of inmates by transferring them to other prisons, and it announced Monday that it will use Retreat to receive new male commitments from county jails and male parole violators.

Other prisons, previously, had been used as reception facilities. Retreat, ultimately, is slated to be closed.

At the federal level, some members of Congress are calling for the Bureau of Prisons to stop transferring prisoners between institutions, at least until the inmates have been tested for the coronavirus.

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LEGAL ACTIONS

Several more businesses have filed a legal challenge to Gov. Wolf’s order closing the physical locations of businesses determined to be “non-life-sustaining.”

A petition filed in Commonwealth Court seeks to have Wolf’s shutdown order thrown out. The plaintiffs are a law firm, a laundromat, a timber company and a golf course, all of which appeared on the governor’s initial list of businesses that were to shut down as of Thursday night.

The Wolf administration has since revised the list, relaxing its blanket closure of law offices and placing laundromats and timber companies on the “life sustaining” list, allowing them to stay open.

But the lawsuit said Wolf “quite simply made up these categories and their terminology out of whole cloth,” and alleges his shutdown order and subsequent revisions “caused mass confusion and disturbance throughout Pennsylvania.”

Wolf has already beat back two other legal challenges to his authority to order businesses to close.

Separately, the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and other lawyers filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday seeking the release of 13 people from civil detention as they await resolution of their immigration cases. The lawsuit says the detainees are older or suffer from medical conditions that put them at greater risk of COVID-19. The detainees are currently being held in the Clinton, Pike and York county jails.

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HOSPITALS, NURSING HOMES AND CHILD CARE CENTERS

Hospitals, nursing homes and child care centers are pushing for emergency aid from state lawmakers and Wolf to help keep them afloat during the pandemic, and warning of closures without it.

There is a “legitimate, credible threat” that some hospitals, without financial support from either the federal government or the state government, will close, said Andy Carter, president and CEO of the Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania.

“It’s the sheer scale of the COVID-19 outbreak unfolding now that has the healthcare community saying, ‘we need government help,’” Carter said.

A state fund proposed by the hospital group would help hospitals build surge capacity, retrofit critical-care units for highly infectious COVID-19 patients, hire more clinicians, pay for housing, establish on-site childcare facilities for healthcare workers and purchase protective gear, Carter told reporters on a conference call.

He did not provide a dollar figure, but said “we know it’s going to be an extraordinary amount to match the size of the potential surge of care that we will be providing.”

Carter said hospitals are scrambling to obtain enough protective gear to meet demand. Some facilities could run out of masks and other equipment in a matter of days or even hours as they become flooded with COVID-19 patients, he said. Overall, hospitals across the state have about a three-week supply, he said.

With financial challenges looming over them, hospitals and nursing homes identified a possible funding source in the federal Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which was signed into law by President Donald Trump last week and provides about $1.5 billion in additional Medicaid funding for Pennsylvania.

Two nursing home associations, LeadingAge PA and the Pennsylvania Health Care Association, and labor unions that help staff the homes requested help getting protective equipment, a 3% increase in reimbursement rates and a minimum of $290 million in emergency aid to nursing homes.

They also asked for emergency aid to offer paid sick leave to all staff who have exhausted their sick leave benefits.

Child care advocates, meanwhile, said more than $100 million is needed to make up for the tuition and co-pays that the centers aren't collecting. They also urged passage of a law protecting the centers from coronavirus-related lawsuits.

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BUSINESS CLOSURES

On Monday, the first day of enforcement, Pennsylvania State Police troopers issued 27 warnings, but no citations, based on Wolf's directive that businesses deemed not life-sustaining close down their physical locations.

The state police commissioner, Col. Robert Evanchick, said Tuesday that the overwhelming majority of people and businesses were complying voluntarily with the order.

Other forms of enforcement will follow the warnings, if needed, Evanchick said.

The governor has also closed schools through at least April 6 and ordered 5.5 million people in the state's hardest-hit counties to stay home, other than to go to work at a business that’s still open, shop for medicine or groceries, go to the doctor or run an errand involving health and safety.

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INTERSTATE REST STOPS REOPENING

Motorists of all types, not just truck drivers, are getting access to indoor facilities at 23 interstate rest stops across Pennsylvania.

The reopened indoor bathrooms are on interstates 79, 80, 81 and 84, the state Transportation Department said.

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Follow AP coverage of the virus outbreak at https://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak.