Gov. Inslee says stay-at-home order will extend beyond May 4

Gov. Inslee said the entire state will not open on Monday, May 4, and that he’ll have more details on Friday about what can reopen through a phase-in approach. He did not have a date.

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The governor said Wednesday’s news conference, largely focused on the data that his office looks at daily, is really part one of a two-part discussion, with the follow up coming on May 1.

Inslee announced partial reopening of outdoor recreation on Monday, which takes effect on Tuesday, May 5. He announced Friday relaxed restrictions on construction.

Inslee said there are five buckets of metrics his office looks at every day, “sometimes hourly,” to make decisions about the state’s response to the spread of coronavirus. Those buckets are hospital capacity, disease activity, testing capacity, contact tracing, and risk to vulnerable populations.

Inslee showed three other slides with projections from the Institute of Disease Modeling, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, and the Youyang Gu Projections. He emphasized that these data points aren’t just numbers, they’re people with sisters, brothers, moms and dads.

“We have to go further to get these numbers down to go to the next stage of reopening our economy,” Inslee said.

Gov. Inslee emphasized the importance of testing in the state, hoping to test about 22,000 people each day. Currently, the state is capable of about 4,600 tests daily. He said the current challenge in ramping up testing capacity is the lack of swabs and transport medium.

“We have scoured the globe for this material on a daily basis,” Inslee said. “We simply have to manufacture more of these products.”

The governor said data will continue to lead decision making. He said he’s operating under he principal of “let’s just do this once and get it over with?”

Inslee said that Wednesday marks 100 days since COVID-19 was first identified in Washington state. That case was first reported in Snohomish County with the patient recovering at Providence Medical Center. The Snohomish County Department of Emergency Management released a video on Wednesday looking back at the past 100 days.

Inslee said history will determine how local leadership performed in these past 100 days.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that there are over 1 million cases in the United States with 19 states reporting 10,000+ cases. It recommended continuing to wear a cloth face covering and keeping six feet of distance between yourself and other people when in public.

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