PORT ANGELES – When Gov. Inslee extended the state’s “Stay Home, Stay Healthy” order on Friday and laid out his 4-phase plan to get people back to work, he listed 10 counties in Washington that may be able to skip ahead to the second phase weeks ahead of the rest. Clallam County is not on that list.
At Monday morning’s briefing, County Health Officer Dr. Allison Berry Unthank said a lot of people have asked her why.
“The reason why is that in order to be in one of those counties, you must have had no positive cases in the last two weeks prior to the order, which we don’t meet that criteria. So that’s the biggest reason why we weren’t in that group. A lot of folks wondered, in fact, what if we just advocated harder or whether or not we would have been in that group. No, because we had cases in the last couple of weeks. That’s really the primary driver in that.”
Unthank says there are 3 main factors that determine when to re-open a county. They are: disease activity, readiness of our healthcare system to handle a large surge of cases, and whether we have adequate testing and contact tracing capabilities.
“As far as where are we at in the county, I think we’re doing actually really, really quite well. But I would say we have significant vulnerabilities if we had a large outbreak. We have a very elderly population. We have a fragile health care system. And so even though we have relatively few cases, I think a large outbreak here would be very hard to manage. And so we have to be particularly cautious as we move forward. But long story short, we just don’t qualify to be one of those counties.”
For that reason, the earliest that Clallam County will be able to go into Phase 2 of the Governor’s plan is 3 weeks from now. Unthank said that with local parks opening in the coming days, it will be important for everyone to remain vigilant in maintaining social distancing and washing hands frequently.
“We should just work our way through these cases and then we can get the next three weeks and move forwards. What I think would make the most sense for our citizenry is to prevent outbreaks, prevent transmission, which we all have the power to do, and if we do that we can move through these days intact.”
Unthank also pointed out the somewhat sobering fact that this is the new reality until a vaccine against the virus is ready and, best case scenario, that’s at least a year out.
The counties on the list that may be able to move ahead faster are: Garfield, Columbia, Ferry, Pend Oreille, Lincoln, Wahkiakum, Skamania, Kittitas, Grays Harbor and Jefferson.