Watch: Gov. Inslee giving update on the state’s response to the COVID-19

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee will give an update on the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic at 2:30 p.m. Wednesday (today).

He will be joined by Vice Admiral Dr. Raquel Bono, director of Washington state COVID-19 health care response; Kathy Lofy, state health officer; and Katherine Guest, deputy intelligence section chief for the Washington State Emergency Operations Center. They are expected to explain the data and projections being used to determine the breadth and depth of the state’s stay-at-home order.

Inslee has said the state tracks multiple metrics, including fatality rates, percentages of positive tests for COVID-19, daily hospitalizations for COVID-like illnesses, and computer modeling that attempts to project what will occur in the future.

Gov. Jay Inslee later this week may give the public a new date for when the stay-at-home and partial business closure order will expire, a top aide said Tuesday.

The current emergency proclamation runs through May 4, but Inslee has said several times it will be extended.

At a press conference Monday, Inslee said, “We are going to have to maintain plenty of restrictions after May 4. ... As time goes on, we intend to continue to turn that dial to open up our community. But that dial depends on data on when it can be opened up. And that data changes every single day.”

Also at Tuesday’s briefing, Lofy expressed concern about the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases reported daily.

“We’re still seeing 200 to 250 cases that are being reported per day, which is still a fairly high burden of disease. As we talked about at the very beginning of this outbreak, the cases that we are detecting right now are probably not likely to be all the cases that are occurring out there. And that’s why we need to increase the amount of testing we’re doing so we can be detecting more of the cases,” she said.

This story was originally published April 29, 2020 at 1:32 PM.