WASHINGTON — After months of an economic shutdown, months of school closures and months of the coronavirus death toll rising every day, state health officials on Wednesday said something not often heard from them.
“We do have some good news today. We continue to see some positive signs in our data,” said state health officer, Dr. Kathy Lofy. “Over the past few weeks, we are continuing to see a decline in the number of cases that are detected.”
She pointed to more good news in emergency rooms. The number of people with COVID-19 symptoms like fever, cough or shortness of breath has been dropping over the last few weeks.
The credit goes to people wearing masks, social distancing and weather that encourages people to be outside.
When asked if it was premature to recommend remote learning for children in schools, Deputy Health Secretary Lacy Fehrenbach said, “Most of the countries that successfully reopened schools this year had case rates under 25 per 100,000 population over 14 days, and our rate as a state is 125 per 100,000 over 14 days.”
“You could be seeing a flattening in your data. But if there’s a lot of activity out there, COVID-19 is going to be fairly frequently introduced into schools,” Lofy added.
And while the rate of infection is slowing in eastern Washington, it is rising in western Washington — though at a slower rate.
“We’ve got encouraging signs. There’s starting trends down, but you know it doesn’t take much for them to go back up,” said Health Secretary John Wiesman.