How Kirkland is managing after becoming an epicenter for WA coronavirus outbreak

In many ways, ground zero for the coronavirus outbreak locally has been the city of Kirkland. So now that we’re into the outbreak and it has some significant implications statewide and countrywide, how are they handling the situation on the ground in Kirkland?

Kirkland City Councilman Toby Nixon joined The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH to discuss the current state of the Kirkland coronavirus outbreak.

“I think people are concerned there, especially concerned for our kids and our families. They’re really concerned for our businesses, which have largely been shut down in order to maintain the social distancing,” he said. “We’re really worried that some of our restaurants and other small businesses are just going to go out of business because they can’t sustain having no income for this period of time.”

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Is Kirkland acting from a city government position in trying to help these businesses? Or just financially speaking, is this something that’s going to have to come from either the county or the state?

“It’s a tough problem because city budgets are really tight, and we really don’t have a surplus to be able to make grants directly to our local businesses the way that the state government and the federal government can,” Nixon said. “So we’re focusing with the Kirkland Chamber of Commerce on doing what we can locally. But mostly what we’re doing is coordinating the access to the state and federal programs that will be hopefully deployed very soon.”

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Twenty-nine deaths in King County were linked to the Life Care Center nursing facility in Kirkland, and other long-term care facilities have confirmed additional cases, reports KIRO 7. Regarding Inslee’s actions, Nixon believes they may be necessary considering what’s happened in other countries.

“We’re looking at what happened in other countries with the explosive growth of the epidemic and now the pandemic, and we want to avoid that happening here. We want to keep the number of active cases, especially serious cases, below the capacity or within the capacity of our hospitals, and there’s not really any other way to do it,” he said.

“There’s no medication to treat people. The vaccine is still in the process of being developed, and so the social distancing is really the only thing we have available to help slow the spread.”

His concern at the moment is what lays ahead for hospitals, which may soon seen a serious rise in patients.

“My main level of concern is with the capacity of the hospitals. We just don’t have the surge capacity, the excess capacity in the system to handle a huge number of serious cases all at once,” Nixon said. “The number of ventilators they have is not really high and it takes a while to build more. I’m concerned about that, and if we can have fewer people get sick in a quick rush, then we can get through this.”

Listen to the Jason Rantz Show weekday afternoons from 3 – 6 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3). Subscribe to the podcast here.

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