New date for end of stay-at-home order? We may know later this week
Gov. Jay Inslee later this week may give the public a new date for when the stay-at-home and partial business closure order will expire, a top aide said Tuesday.
“We’re certainly going to share that as soon as we can,” Inslee’s Chief of Staff David Postman said at a press briefing.
The current emergency proclamation runs through May 4, but Inslee has said several times it will be extended.
At a press conference Monday, Inslee said, “We are going to have to maintain plenty of restrictions after May 4. ... As time goes on, we intend to continue to turn that dial to open up our community. But that dial depends on data on when it can be opened up. And that data changes every single day.”
Inslee said the state tracks multiple metrics, including fatality rates, percentages of positive tests for COVID-19, daily hospitalizations for COVID-like illnesses, and computer modeling that attempts to project what will occur in the future.
On Friday, the governor has announced that low-risk residential and commercial construction can resume as long as builders protect their workers from the new coronavirus. On Monday, Inslee outlined the partial re-opening of state lands and outdoor activities, including fishing, hunting and golf.
Also at Tuesday’s briefing, Dr. Kathy Lofy, the state health officer and chief science officer, expressed concern about the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases reported daily.
“We’re still seeing 200 to 250 cases that are being reported per day, which is still a fairly high burden of disease. As we talked about at the very beginning of this outbreak, the cases that we are detecting right now are probably not likely to be all the cases that are occurring out there. And that’s why we need to increase the amount of testing we’re doing so we can be detecting more of the cases,” she said.
This story was originally published April 28, 2020 at 4:52 PM with the headline "New date for end of stay-at-home order? We may know later this week."