Inslee makes his case for extending restrictions aimed at slowing virus’ spread

One hundred days after Washington state had its first case of COVID-19, Gov. Jay Inslee made his case Wednesday for why many of the restrictions to combat the spread of the deadly virus will remain in place beyond early May.

“We’re not going to make giant mistakes of waking up and thinking the sun is shining so we can forget about this deadly virus. Look, we’ve lost over 700 people already because of this virus and we’re going to lose that again in the next several months if we do not stick with this,” Inslee said at press conference.

The governor’s current stay-at-home and partial business closure order runs through May 4, but Inslee said he will extend it. The governor said he will provide more details on Friday about the “phased-in approach about how we will open our economy in a safe way.”

Inslee announced Wednesday that the state is offering guidance to hospitals on what procedures qualify as “non-urgent” surgeries that might soon be allowed.

In making that decision, “clinicians should consider if a patient’s illness or injury is causing significant pain, significant dysfunction in their daily life or work, or is either progressing, or at risk to progress,” according to the guidance memo from Inslee.

Inslee said: “This will allow additional patients to have non-urgent surgery. It’s going to obviously help people get access to new joints and the like and will help with the revenue picture of hospitals as well. And I’m pleased we’ve been able to do this in a way that will make sure our nurses, our respiratory therapists, our physicians have access to personal protective equipment.”

On March 19, Inslee ordered a halt to elective surgeries and dental services, saying the state needed to make sure that health care workers had enough protective equipment to work the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic.

At Wednesday’s briefing, Inslee sat at a conference table and discussed several charts and graphs displayed on a large screen. Combining all of the data is what informs the decision to keep social distancing in place beyond early May, he said. Inslee said much of the data is available on the state Department of Health website.

“The fundamental principle we’re following is ‘let’s just do this once and get it over with.’ And I think it is much better to be disciplined now with this approach rather than have erratic steps at a later date. It’s much better to do something a 100 percent one time than have the sacrifice of 90 percent twice,” he said.

Inslee said the governor’s office has “five buckets” of metrics that it studies and he was sharing the highlights of them.

“All of them need to have reduced risk. All of them are in a position today that we have to improve our current situation if we’re really going to take the next step of reopening,” he said.

“There is no one number that is a magic number that can guide our actions. We have to use our judgment, which means we look at all of the numbers that go into the central question of `when we can reopen our business in a way that doesn’t dramatically increase fatalities in our state? ’ ” Inslee added. Among them:

▪ Disease activity: The number of newly confirmed COVID-19 cases per day — tracked by the date of when the illness begins — is in the range of 200 and that’s “too high,” Inslee said.

The number of deaths per day — also measured when people got sick — increased sharply in March, has declined in April but is still too high for the state to relax social distancing without risking more deaths, the governor said.

The number of cases of COVID-19 hospitalizations — by the date of the patient’s first admission — peaked in March and has declined since. “Again, the numbers are too large and we have to get these numbers down to a position where we can be confident that the numbers will not spring back up again, according to the epidemiologists,” Inslee said.

In King County, the effective reproductive rate of COVID-19 — referred to as R-naught (which is zero) — was nearly 4 in March. That means each person testing positive for COVID-19 infected nearly four people. The number now is 1 in King County — one person infecting one other person. “That’s good in the sense that the numbers would not grow over time, but neither would they shrink. The problem is we have only achieved this level by very vigorous social distancing,” Inslee said, saying the number needs to be closer to zero.

COVID-19 case projections in King County would dramatically increase in May if the state abandons social distancing, according to the Seattle-based Institute for Disease Modeling. “It means hundreds of people will die,” Inslee said. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington has made a similar projection, he said.

▪ Testing capacity and availability: Washington could do 22,233 tests for COVID-19 per day, but it is averaging about 4,650 per day because there aren’t enough swabs and viral transfer media, which is the material to move the sample to the lab, Inslee said. The Trump administration pledged Monday that more swabs will be sent to Washington in the next week or two, enough to quadruple the number of daily tests. “We are very hopeful that promise is met,” the governor said.

▪ Contact tracing: Washington currently has 565 people who are interviewing people with positive COVID-19 tests to identify who they’ve been in contact with, getting those people tested and then making sure they isolate themselves. The plan is for the number of case investigators to increase on May 4 to 1,378, including 750 national guardsmen, and to 1,500 people on May 11.

▪ Risk to vulnerable populations: The number of long-term care facilities with COVID-19 cases has reached 225, Inslee said. “This is an extremely important metric for us because these are the most vulnerable citizens in Washington state. And our ability to restrain fatalities is significantly dependent on our ability to make sure these people get the closest infection control humanly possible,” he said.

Demographic data shows that Hispanics make up 13 percent of Washington’s population, but 30 percent of COVID-19 cases.

Inslee said the governor’s office is trying to reduce the “inequities” of the virus by setting standards for agricultural workers that include hygiene and testing.

▪ Health care system readiness: Over the past week, Washington has maintained about 1,000 additional hospital beds available for COVID-19 patients “if the pandemic springs back upon us,” Inslee said. “This virus has shown to, frankly, explode. That has happened in New York and it’s happened in Louisiana.”

Washington has received 13 million pieces of personal protective equipment through the state’s procurement system, about 3 million from the federal government, and 2 million in donations from businesses.

“But this is well short of what we need. We’ve been dedicated to obtaining this material and have not been able to get as much material as we need from any source,” he said.

This story was originally published April 30, 2020 at 5:45 AM.