Should reopening Washington state be done on a regional basis?

Many in Washington state seem ready to safely and responsibly return to work in whatever the new normal will look like until there’s a coronavirus vaccine. State Rep. Chris Gildon (R-WA25) contends that we can have a nuanced and regional approach to reopening the economy as many of the goals of the stay-at-home order have been reached.

“The stated goal of that order was to flatten the curve to make sure that our hospitals were not overwhelmed and to date, we have dismantled the field hospital without seeing a single patient, we’ve exported ventilators to other states, and the halls of our hospitals are nearly empty right now because we have not seen the influx of patients that was expected,” Gildon said.

“I think we’ve achieved our phase one goals, and now it’s time for phase two. … Washington state is comprised of 39 diversely impacted counties, and each is experiencing various levels of difficulty with this particular virus,” he said.

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The data suggests that each county should not be treated the same. So what should that nuanced approach to reopening the economy look like in Washington state?

“What I’m advocating for today is a way to uncurl out of this stay-at-home order and to implement decentralization of some decision-making to the county level that allows us to begin recovering,” he said.

“We have 39 counties, like I said, and each has elected officials and staff that are capable of waging what I call the ‘tactical fight’ against the virus. They know their communities, they know the resources that are available, and I think they’re in a better position to determine which restrictions to impose or modify, which to remove, and what’s the proper time frame to do so.”

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As Jason noted, playing devil’s advocate, the counterargument goes that if you relax the social distancing now, we will quickly get into what we feared would have been the case earlier, which is that an influx of patients that could overwhelm our hospitals.

What’s Gildon’s response to that concern?

“Well, I think we have competent people in the counties,” he said. “They don’t even have to relax the social distancing standards, but certainly they can come up with some creative ideas. If we unleashed the creative power of those 39 counties across the state, certainly we’re going to find a number of best practices that we can then share across the rest of the state to speed our recovery efforts.”

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