PORT ANGELES – A 19th case of covid-19 was added to the Clallam County tally Thursday. Health Officer Dr. Allison Berry Unthank says the person contracted the virus out of state, recovered out of state, but has an address in Clallam County so it still counts as one ours. The good news is: all 19 people have recovered fully from the virus.
However, since the Governor’s latest 4-phase plan says that a county must go 3 weeks without a positive case before they can move on to phase 2, this new case sounds like bad news.
Dr. Unthank said at Friday’s briefing, that’s not necessarily true.
“One thing for folks to know that having to have no cases at all was just to get into that group of counties that could move forward earlier. It’s not actually a metric we need to meet going forward. We just need to keep a low number of cases, avoid any large-scale outbreaks, and we should be able to move forward in the reopening process, either with the state or potentially…there’s some conversation right now about a regional reopening. So, for instance, kind of, Jefferson, us, Kitsap, actually all moving together. But just to let folks know, we don’t have to have ‘no cases’ going forward. We just have to keep the case numbers low.”
Unthank says one major focus of her department going forward is developing an advisory plan for local businesses as they prepare to open, to make sure that when they do, we don’t have a surge in cases. In the meantime, she’s directing business owners to the Washington State Department of Health website for the latest advice.
Unthank also addressed the subject of herd immunity, when a population is protected from a disease after enough of them become immune to it, usually thought to be about 80% or more.
“Here in this country so far, we have already lost about 75,000 people to this virus. It’s quite serious. And that’s with what we’ve done so far. If we let this run and do it in an uncontrolled fashion, we would lose shockingly more than that. I don’t like to scare people, but I do want people to understand the gravity of the situation. It is only through these extensive efforts that we’ve been able to prevent deaths out here. But if we let everyone get infected, or 80% of people get infected, then we would lose quite a few more of our citizens. And that’s just from the virus alone, not from the very clear over-running of the hospital that we would have if we let that happen.”