By Pepper Fisher
PORT ANGELES – As reported last week, an agreement was reached between a half dozen Clallam County restaurants who filed a lawsuit against the county’s health officer Dr. Allison Berry to lift the indoor mask mandate for restaurants on March 11.
Dr. Berry appeared on KONP’s Todd Ortloff Show Thursday and was asked about how they came to that agreement.
“We had a good meeting with the restaurant owners and talk through some of their concerns. And there’s this feeling that the mandate might never go away. And you know, we had decided that we would lift it when we had case rates less than 200 per 100,000. And so what we were able to do is really walk through the modeling of when we expect to reach that case rate and that’s really around mid-March. And so we came to an agreed time frame that we would lift the mandate March 11.”
Dr. Berry also agrees to lift the ban on unvaccinated people dining inside restaurants earlier than March 11 if the COVID case rate drops below two hundred per 100,000 for a two-week period and the ICU rate is less than 90 percent. The restaurants agree within five days after she lifts the order to dismiss their action.
Gov. Inslee says he will announce a date sometime next week for ending the indoor mask mandate altogether, making Washington state one of the last to do so. Even Dr. Berry doesn’t know what he’s going to say, but she has her own ideas about when that date should be.
“I do think that by, you know, by end of spring, early summer, would be a very safe time to remove the masking orders. May, June, that kind of time. I’m certainly seeing some Governors around the country moving a little faster on that, and some of that is that different parts of the country are in different places when it comes to the pandemic. Places like New York had their surges earlier than we did. And so their case numbers are about a fifth of what we’re seeing in Washington state right now. So removing their masks order now makes more sense than it does here. We have to wait till our case numbers are at that same safe range before we would remove ours.”
Dr. Berry agrees with other health officials in predicting that, while the Covid-19 virus isn’t going to just go away, it will likely transition this year to endemic status, meaning it’s always around but we have tools to fight it, much like the flu.
“A lot more people got infected in this wave and, for better or worse, that is increasing immunity in our community. But it’s hard to know what’s on the horizon. I am hopeful that this is our last big wave, at least for a while, because so many people have achieved some degree of immunity due to either vaccination or infection, and that’s what makes me feel hopeful that we will get to that safer place in the spring and summer.”
Dr. Berry is also hopeful that later this year home tests will be widely available so people can test whenever they want, and antiviral pills and monoclonal antibodies will be much more widely available.
“There’s a common misconception that I think is sometimes spurred on more than it needs to be that, you know, we’re just not trying hard enough to get treatments. And the truth is, there just aren’t enough treatments to go around. In our community, for example, week over week we’ve been getting 20 doses of Paxlovid for the entire community of Clallam County. But we should start seeing some more here soon. So far, we just haven’t seen much.”