Washington will not be lifting many restrictions by May 4

During his Wednesday press conference, Governor Jay Inslee revealed that based on new data, Washington’s bans in place will not be lifted by the previously estimated date of May 4.

Although the city has started the process of reopening by allowing low-risk construction to resume and several parks to open, the coronavirus count remain too high to reopen the economy.

According to Governor Inslee, the government is hoping to be “transparent” and will announce steps for opening on Friday.

• See also:
  • Global coronavirus count now exceeds three million
  • Washington to begin allowing low-risk construction to resume
  • Washington reopening state parks and golf courses next week

“The quickest way to reopen our economy is to make sure we get the job done [now]. We don’t want to go through this pain [of another wave of coronavirus] again,” said Inslee during the press conference.

He went on to explain the various metrics that they’re looking at before making the decision to reopen the economy.

The first metric is disease activity graphics, the status of the virus in our state. They also look at case counts by day as “we have to continue to lower the numbers so that we can move on to the next phase… We are not out of the woods yet.”

Screen capture from tvw.org

The next metrics looked at are the deaths per day by date of illness onset and cases of coronavirus hospitalization by date of admission.

“Again, the numbers are too large and we have to get them lowered so that we don’t have them springing back up.”

The governor is also taking coronavirus projections into consideration and says he hopes Washington can lock down more test kits in order to hit the maximum testing capacity of 22,333 tests per day — Washington is currently testing only about 4,650.

Washington State currently has 13,842 cases of coronavirus, including 786 deaths.

As of Tuesday, the global known cases of COVID-19 passed the 3.1 million mark, according to Johns Hopkins University.