Washington Governor Jay Inslee Coronavirus Press Briefing Transcript April 29

Jay Inslee: (00:18)
Good afternoon. As you know we’ve made the first steps in reopening our economy. We’ve lifted some restrictions on low risk construction and outdoor recreation like fishing and hunting and we’ve done this in a responsible way at the right time I believe. Today we are also pleased to be able to issue additional guidance to our hospitals on what procedures qualify as non-urgent surgeries. As some surgeries that doctors and hospitals were uncertain about how to go forward in our home stay healthy initiative and this will allow additional patients to have non-urgent surgery. It’s going to obviously help people get access to new joints and the like and it will help with revenue picture of hospitals as well. And I’m pleased that we have been able to do this in a way that will make sure that our nurses, our respiratory therapists, our physicians have access to personal protective equipment and that’s an important part of this because we want our heroes working in our hospitals to be adequately protected.

Jay Inslee: (01:24)
I think we found a way to have both more non-urgent surgery and protection for our medical staff. We know that in every instance of reopening our economy, our guidance for lifting these restrictions are based on data and science. They’re based on our ability to appropriately guard our health. Over a week ago I said that I did not expect that the entirety of our Stay Home, Stay Healthy measure could be lifted on May 4th and today I’m confirming that based on the data and science that that is the case. So based on the data at our disposal, the current order of Stay Home, Stay Healthy will remain in effect and we will have more details Friday on the phase in approach about how we will open our economy in a safe way. And we want to be comprehensive and transparent about that decision making that’s one of the reasons we’re here today.

Jay Inslee: (02:28)
So today we’re going to go through the metrics that were the numbers that we will be looking at to determine when we are able to start the next stage of that reopening process. You might think of it that we have started down that process by reopening construction. We have started down that process by opening outdoor recreation businesses and for the next steps what we’re going to talk about today is the metrics that will inform us about when we start the next step of the next phase. Friday we will talk about what those phases will be, so you might want to think about that today we’re talking about when we will be making those decisions and how we will make those decisions and Friday we will talk about the what of how those phases will actually work. So this is a two part discussion starting today. In general, I know this recovery has seen long, but if we can avoid having to reinstate these restrictions, we know this very simply, the quickest way to reopen our economy is make sure that we get this job done.

Jay Inslee: (03:37)
We do not want to go through this pain again. We want to make this a one and possibly done situation that we then can restrain this virus through testing and contact tracing in isolation of the relatively few people who become infected. So the fundamental principle we’re following is let’s just do this once and get it over with. And I think it is much better to be disciplined now with this approach rather than have erratic steps at a later date.

Jay Inslee: (04:11)
I think one way to look at it, it’s much better to do something 100% one time than have the sacrifice of 90% twice. And that guides our decision making in this very difficult challenge that we have today. I’m joined today by retired Navy vice admiral Raquel Bono, a State Health Officer Kathy Lofy and Katherine Guest, who is the deputy intelligence section chief of the State Emergency Operations Center and they’ll be available to answer questions after I talk a bit.

Jay Inslee: (04:44)
Today marks 100 days since our first case of COVID-19 was identified in our state and we know our statewide community has changed greatly in ways large and small. And I think this may be one of our most difficult times that we’ve had in the state of Washington, but it is also the perhaps the best time to demonstrate our community commitment to lean a sustainable foundation for the health of our state. It was, FDR’s prolific first 100 days where the concept of 100 days of action I think was started. We will see how history treats us about our leadership during these first 100 days in the days to come. And I hope that we will see great success and we have seen considerable success already. We know those first 100 days have been extremely challenging and life changing for all of us.

Jay Inslee: (05:41)
And thankfully the vast majority of Washingtonians have really responded admirably. That’s why we’ve been successful. And we recognize that people want to go back to work. We want to open our businesses. We still can’t do that for many of our folks safely, but we can give a picture of what the spread of the virus looks like and what we can do to mitigate it. So every day we review the data, in fact hourly sometimes. And the public can view almost all of the data we have at the department of health website. That’s at coronavirus.wa.gov, coronavirus.wa.gov. So we have five buckets of metrics that we look at in this process and I just want to show you what they are in general. All of them need to have reduced risk. All of them are at a position today that we have to improve our current situation if we’re really going to take the next step of reopening.

Jay Inslee: (06:47)
And as this chart indicates, these are first, disease activity, second, testing, third, contact tracing, fourth, risk to vulnerable populations and fifth, the status of our healthcare system and its ability to respond to the pandemic and its readiness. And I’d like to talk about them with you today so we can be completely transparent with Washingtonians about how we’re making these decisions. One thing to note under each of these buckets of metrics, there are multiple metrics and I’m sharing just a few of them the highlights today. You’ll notice that there is no one factor in our discussion today that is completely dispositive and that’s by necessity. There is no one number that is a magic number that can guide our actions. We have to use our judgment which means we look at all of the numbers that go into the central question of when we can reopen our business in a way that doesn’t dramatically increase fatalities in our state.

Jay Inslee: (07:56)
So the first metric is our disease activity graphics and this is place we should start obviously because it’s the status of the virus in our state. And I want to show you some of the metrics that we look at. They are not all, there are other things we do look at, but these are some of the highlights. First, we look at the cases per day judged by the date of the illness onset. This is a bar graph obviously starts in February at a very low level. It rises through March, begins to go down in April and you’ll see we have case counts right now in the 100 to 150 range. By the way, the couple of the last bars are somewhat incomplete by the way because we accumulate numbers late in the day sometimes. So what we’ve seen is on the cases we’re having by day. Now these are cases that where we have confirmed a person that has COVID-19 by a test, they’ve gone up and they have gone down to some degree, but they are still significant.

Jay Inslee: (09:05)
We still are seeing on a daily basis as to the diagnosis of the disease in the range of 200 Washingtonians a day that’s too high and we have to get these numbers down to a level where we have wrestled them down to the ground so we can move to the next phase of our recovery. The next phase of opening our business and the next phase of how we really insulate and isolate people who are infected so they don’t infect other people in the community. Nonetheless, this is showing some progress, but we are not out of the woods yet. The next metric we look at are deaths per day by the date of the illness onset. So what this graph shows is it shows the deaths that happened judged by the date that a person’s illness started. And that’s important because obviously people are in the hospital for some period of time between the time they get ill and between the time of their demise.

Jay Inslee: (10:08)
So we backdate these to look at the date that people actually got sick and you’ll see that this has gone up significantly during early March, reached a generalized peak and has come down during the April period. But we are still not at the level where we can be confident that if we release our social distancing, these numbers will not begin to go up as well. Our next metric that we look at, we look at our cases of COVID-19 hospitalization by the date of first admission. So we compile the hospitalization of people as they come into the hospital. And this chart shows that number by the date of the first admission, again, goes up through March, reaches a peak, and has come down. And this is a good sign because it gives you some hopeful projection of the upcoming weeks-

Jay Inslee: (11:03)
… of people’s course, while they’re in the hospital. But again, the numbers are too large and we have to get these numbers down to a position where we can be confident that the numbers will not spring back up again, according to the epidemiologists. By the way, I’m very appreciative of our expertise, some of which is on the phone today. It’s very, frankly makes me proud. When I talked to Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx and Dr. Redfield, who are in the administration who run the CDC, and they tell me repeatedly that they believe our public health agency here is one of the best in the nation and they certainly have been doing great work in the last 100 days. We’ve seen some progress but we’re not down where we need to be.

Jay Inslee: (11:51)
The next chart is the cases of COVID-19 hospitalization by illness onset and that is a little different because it looks from the date the illness started, rather than the date that people actually came into the hospital, but fairly similar curve in that regard. Coming down, but not far enough. The next slide, and if you’ll bear with me, this is a bit complex, but it’s very, very important into our calculations. This shows the effective reproductive rate, as best judged for the illness in King County. This is for data in King County. We really don’t have a data to allow this evaluation statewide yet, but King County is instructive. This is called the R0 number. That means letter R, number zero and basically what it tells you is how many people become infected for each person that is infected. You’ll see that that number was over three.

Jay Inslee: (12:51)
It was approaching four in February, or excuse me, in March, early March of this year. That meant that for every person who became infected, almost four other people became infected. In order to stop the spread of this disease, obviously you have to get that number down dramatically. Now, in King County it looks like we have accomplished that. The R0 number is down this by this dash line, which represents one. As you’ll see on the sort of beige to the right of the screen, it shows the spectrum of the most recent evaluations. Again, this was a few weeks ago, down around the level of one. What that means, is for every person who’s infected, they would infect one other person. Now that’s good in the sense that the numbers would not grow over time, but neither would they shrink.

Jay Inslee: (13:45)
The problem is, is that we have only achieved this level by very vigorous social distancing. The allied effort of millions of Washingtonians, particularly in King County here, have joined together to get a social distance that has made sure that we limit that to a one to one infection rate. But if we remove the social distancing, that number is just going to go back up again according to the epidemiologists and we’ll continue to see a growth of the disease. The fact is, we have to get this number down, to be in a position to assure ourselves that this virus isn’t just going to come roaring back and we need to see continued improvement on this R0 number, if we’re going to have confidence that we will be able to restrain the progress of this virus. The next three slides are important because they show projections of the future, according to our modelers, so we have access to some of the best modelers into the world.

Jay Inslee: (14:53)
These are folks who look at the daily data and plug it into their algorithms. They make certain assumptions about the course of the disease and they provide a projection into the future. Each model is based on somewhat different assumptions and data sets and we look at all of them. The first one is with the Institute of Defense, excuse me, Institute of Disease Modeling here in Washington State, a well-respected group. I’m going to take just a moment to go through this slide with you because it’s a very important metric in our thinking. Basically, the dots you see are data points and the model then, reaches, in a sense, averages or of these data points. What the line shows in the middle of this sort of beige area, you’ll see that the line went up in March, in a sense peaked or plateaued in late March and is projected to continue to go and somewhat flat, just maybe a little bit decline.

Jay Inslee: (16:03)
If, this is a big if, ,we continue our social distancing if we continue our efforts. But, the model also projects a gray line on the right side of your screen. You’ll see a gray line that starts to ascend again. That is the line that depicts what will happen to the number of people getting sick if we abandon our social distancing, at this time or shortly after this time. It goes up dramatically, and when I say dramatically, I mean that. It means hundreds of people will die and I have to tell you, I just don’t think we can become a nerd to death. We see numbers, but each one of these numbers is a person. It’s a son lost their mother or brother lost their sister. This is a serious slide to look at because it means if we stop our efforts today, we’re going to see a lot more people die in the State of Washington, in not too distant future.

Jay Inslee: (17:04)
This is the Institute for Disease Modeling. A second model is by the Institute For Health Metrics in Seattle. This shows a similar depiction of some of the historical events and then predicts some things happening in the future. The red line, the solid red line shows the historical numbers of the deaths per day and then make some projection in the red dotted line moving forward. The little vertical dash line is where we are today, in today’s date or close to it. Now unfortunately, I have a different slide that I meant to put in here, but the IHME modeling, essentially depicts the same thing that the previous model had depicted, if we abandon our social distancing. Their projection would then show that dotted red line, which today is going down, their projection is it will continue to go down, but only because we’re doing our social modeling or social distancing.

Jay Inslee: (18:17)
It would start to go up again fairly dramatically, if we were to abandon our social distancing. I’ll show you a third line. Youyang Gu, he’s with MIT. Again, has some projections going forward. If you look at the projections of their modeling, not quite as optimistic, given the rate of the curve is not as steeply down. But again, this is only if we continue our social distancing. The summary, if I can, of this first bucket of metrics, is that we have made progress. Washingtonians can be proud of the progress we have made, but we know that this disease will come roaring back if we abandoned our current operations. We have to go further to get these numbers down so we then can go to the next stage of reopening our economy and movie into our next stage of containing this virus, which I’ll get to in just a moment.

Jay Inslee: (19:15)
Our next bucket if you will, is testing capacity and availability. Now, this is very important because obviously, if you’re fighting a war, you need to know where the enemy is and our ability to know the status of the disease in general, amongst the population, is very important on what strategic decisions we make and when we make them. When can we open up some of these businesses? We need testing to be able to have an assessment of the status of the pandemic, in this regard. We also need testing to be able to identify the people obviously, who have the virus so that they can be isolated to prevent the spread of the disease. I have to tell you that our testing capacity has been sorely taxed. If we could look at the slide, this is a slide, if you look at the bar graph in the lower left hand corner, the beige and tan graphs.

Jay Inslee: (20:13)
There’s some good news in our testing capacity. If you look at the tan-colored bar, it shows that we can do ideally, 22,233 tests a day. That’s the possible maximum of the capacity to analyze tests. That means when you take the sample, you run it through a machine and they give you a result. The machine part of this, we have over about 22,000, we could do, run a day. That’s fairly good number. We would like it to grow over time, but it would be a good start. Unfortunately, because we don’t have additional swabs and the viral transfer media, that’s how they transfer the sample to the lab, we only can do about 4,650 which is the darker tan bar. What you see is we have to have increased testing material if we’re ever going to get to our, what should be the capacity for tests today, so that when someone calls up and said, “I’ve got a fever and I’ve got a cough,” boom, we can get you tested right away, within 24 hours and we can take the next measure.

Jay Inslee: (21:27)
Now, our success in this is dependent on our ability to get test swabs and to get a viral transport medium. As you know, if you’ve been listening to some of our discussion, we have been urging the president and the federal government to give us greater assistance. We have scoured the globe for this material, on a daily basis. I talked to CEOs of companies around the world about the ability to get access to this material from Switzerland on east, but we simply have to manufacture more of these products.

Jay Inslee: (22:03)
So we have been urging the president for some time to use the Defense Production Act to essentially order companies to make these products. We are desperately in need of this so we can get people tested in our longterm care facilities, in our meat packing plants and everybody on the street who has symptoms can be promptly tested. There’s been resistance to that proposal, but now we’re seeing some glimmer of hope. I was told by the admiral in charge of this two days ago that more swabs would be sent to us from the federal government in the next week or two. We are very hopeful that that promise is met because it is necessary if we’re going to achieve our goal of getting this testing capability that is very necessary. We’ve been appreciative of people around the state helping us in this regard.

Jay Inslee: (22:56)
We’ve got some help from some local business people that have helped us find some access. But we need a guaranteed longterm stable supply in the millions of these test supplies to be able to help Washingtonians get tested in an inappropriate fashion. Our next bucket of information is a necessity to have a very vigorous effort to, once we have people who are positive, to make sure that we investigate all the people they have come in contact with. So that we can contact those people and get those people isolated so that they can protect their health and so that they don’t continue to spread the pandemic. This is a very labor intensive process. It involves armies of people being on the phone and email and text messages. First, interviewing the person who has a positive test and then going out to everyone around them and finding out who could potentially being effected, getting those people tested and isolated if in fact they need isolation.

Jay Inslee: (24:07)
So if we can look at what we have now about the potential of people working on this subject, if you look at this bar graph, it shows the number of case investigators that we now have, and we’ll have working on this. Today we have about 565 people statewide who are working on this issue. We hope by May 4th it’ll be 1,378 and by May 11th we’re shooting for 1500 people. We’re standing these people up. We are training them. We are training them in the privacy measures that we have to take care of and using the technology to use whatever appropriate technology we have to communicate. So that is going on. We’re very appreciative of the Washington national guard. They’re contributing about 700 members of the guard that are helping build this capacity. This is one of the highest priorities from the state of Washington right now.

Jay Inslee: (25:02)
We have to treat this like a fire department. When you call for a fire, the fire department comes. When you call with a COVID symptoms, we want you to get the same kind of response so that we can get on these diseases right away. So we’re working on that, making good progress. The next slide, shows some of our places where we have isolation and quarantine capacity in the state of Washington. It shows sort of where we’re in excess of our 50% goals, in that regard is in the green. So we have facilities in most of our locations. But we have more to provide and we’re looking for additional isolation capacity. Now I’d like to talk with you for a moment about a very challenging issue we’re going to be faced. That is that as we find more people who are positive for this disease and we will, because we will be doing more testing, most of those people, first of all of those people will have to isolate for all of our benefit.

Jay Inslee: (26:08)
Most of those people will obviously want to do that in their homes. That’s going to be very challenging because when people isolate in their homes, it’s not just them who have to isolate, their whole household has to isolate. That means they can’t be going outside of the house except maybe for moments walk around the house. So that’s going to be very challenging for our families. But it is one place where we can all be supportive of one another. Those folks are going to need people to do grocery shopping for them and friends can do that. We’re going to have some capacity to do that as well, but that isolation is absolutely critical if we’re not going to go back to a reemergence of this virus and I appreciate everybody’s work to help on that isolation capacity that we will be building to succeed on this.

Jay Inslee: (27:01)
The next bucket of information we’re looking at is risk to vulnerable populations. We know that we differ in our ability to sustain ourselves economically and otherwise and so we evaluate what kind of risks there are to the most vulnerable amongst us. So if we can look at the next slide, some of our most vulnerable clearly are people in longterm care facilities and this slide shows the number per day of additional longterm care facilities that are reporting COVID-19 infections in their facility on a daily basis. The blue line that’s climbing up there is the cumulative total of longterm care facilities that have COVID-19 in their facilities. This is an extremely important metric for us because these are the most vulnerable citizens in Washington state and our ability to restrain fatalities is significantly dependent on our ability to make sure these people get the closest infection control humanly possible.

Jay Inslee: (28:03)
I’m pleased that we now have strike teams that are out into many of these facilities to make sure they use the best protocols to reduce infection in the facilities. I’m glad that we acted early to try to restrain visiting of people coming into these facilities. Very difficult for us not to be able to visit our loved ones, but critical for their survival not to interfere and inject these viruses into these facilities. You’ll see that this is a significant number, today it’s about 225 of our facilities have confirmed COVID-19. That’s why we were particularly vectoring in to make sure we do everything humanly possible for these folks in these facilities.

Jay Inslee: (28:48)
The next slide we are looking at is that divergent suffering dependent on vulnerable communities and a lack of equity. This virus is not totally equitable and we’re concerned about that. If you look at the demographics of the Washingtonians who are suffering from this disease, you see differences. This might be difficult for you to read. I’ll just read a couple of our numbers. For our Hispanic members of our community. Hispanic folks represent 13% of our community, but they represent a fully 30% of our cases. So the Hispanic folks in our community are having a disproportionate impact on them because of this disease for a variety of reasons. We want to see every way we can to reduce that disproportionality that exists for.

Jay Inslee: (29:45)
I’ll just leave it on that right now rather than leave the entire graph. It shows an interesting disparity. However, the fatalities are different. Hispanic folks represent 13% of the total population, but 8% of the fatalities. So this is a non-equitable virus and we are dedicated to finding all we can to try to reduce the inequities associated with this in part by doing things like having standards for workers in the agricultural community.

Jay Inslee: (30:18)
One of the things we’re working on right now to provide standards of hygiene so that folks to reduce the risk. Testing is obviously very important as well so that when we have folks that might be working in the ag community who are in difficult situations, we can increase the testing capability. This goes back to this testing capability that we talked about. The last bucket is our healthcare system readiness. We’ve been focused to make sure that our health system can take care of any surge of the pandemic and so we evaluate that on a daily basis. The slide I’ll put up now basically shows the available beds that are available in the state of Washington to care. These are additional beds that are available in our system where currently are not used by a patient. You’ll see that we have maintained a relatively healthy number of just under 1,000 additional beds that could be available if the pandemic springs back upon us.

Jay Inslee: (31:20)
This is important because this virus has been shown to frankly explode. That has happened in New York. It’s happened in Louisiana and we have to make sure that we have that maintenance. We also see a number of ventilators that are available on April 28th it was 848 as you know, because we’ve been successful, we’ve been able to send back ventilators to the federal government and that’s a good thing. This is frankly a testimony of this graph to the diligence of Washingtonians who have really abided by the social distancing strategy. Washingtonians ought to be proud that we have kept people out of the hospital because we’ve made decisions about not exposing ourselves to this virus and I want to thank everybody in that regard. If you’ll forgive me for a moment, I’m going to note a couple of notes.

Jay Inslee: (32:15)
The last slide I will show you is the status of our state personal protective equipment procurement. We have been intensely focused on improving our PPE access to people. We’ve been so frustrated. Many nurses have not been able to have the masks they needed. Emergency personnel have had to reuse masks. We need additional masks for our industrial components as we bring companies back online, they’re going to need additional masks as well. So we have been searching the globe for this material since day one. I’ll just give you some sense of where we’re getting our PPE from. There’s a pie chart. You see, we’ve got about 13,000 or excuse me, 13 million pieces of PPE through our state-

Jay Inslee: (33:03)
… procurement system. We’ve received just under 3 million from the federal government, which we appreciate, and we’ve got about 2 million in donations, which we appreciate. Many businesses have been very appreciative. They’ve found stockpiles of this and they’ve donated it to the healthcare system. We appreciate that, but this is well short of what we need and if I can, the right hand bottom chart shows what we’ve ordered and the top orange line shows what the dates we wanted to receive in this sort of broken stair-step line, in the little blue at the bottom is what we’ve actually received. So what you can see is we have been both dedicated to obtaining this material and have not been able to get as much material as we need from any source. This is again something we’ve urged the president to use the Defense Production Act to order companies to make this material. That is starting to happen and we’ll hope that that will accelerate.

Jay Inslee: (34:04)
I want to thank the business people that have been pitching in. Today, I had a visor that was manufactured by a company in Tacoma, Outdoor Research. Dan Nordstrom is now making masks for us. Many small companies are making all types of equipment. I want to thank the business community for helping on on this critical shortage.

Jay Inslee: (34:25)
So that is a rundown of our metrics. I’ll just close before I stand for questions, have a comment about these metrics and that is I think what we saw is there is no one number that any of us can hang our hat on to make an independent decision based on one number. We have to look at all of these in compilation and we have to make sure that they all are significantly improved so that we can move to the next phase of reopening our economy that we will talk about Friday, but we’ve got the information that we need to make that decision. We just need to increased and continued discipline and determination and resilience and compassion that Washingtonians are showing big time across the state of Washington.

Jay Inslee: (35:15)
So for that, I’ll yield for questions.

Speaker 2: (35:17)
First question comes from [inaudible 00:35:20].

Speaker 3: (35:17)
Governor, you mentioned the [inaudible 00:35:24] that could be done, but isn’t there a number between the 4600 that are currently being done daily and the 22,000, that’s the goal that you’re looking for for the dialing up the economy. And then also is there a plan to do random statewide testing of asymptomatic people to get a better handle on how many people are out there may be contagious, don’t have symptoms and would need to be isolated as businesses start reopening and start going back to work?

Jay Inslee: (35:57)
Yes. Your first question is we think a realistic goal during the next month or so is in that 20,000 range capability and the reason we think that’s a reasonable goal, it’s A, it’s really what we need to be able to have that very rapid testing of everyone with symptoms so we can get them isolated. And this is critical because we’ve been dedicated and we have been effective in the blunt instrument of social distancing. But this is a surgical approach. This is like a smart weapon against this virus, which is testing contact tracing in isolation. But that starts with testing and we think that range of 20,000 is really necessary to give us high confidence. We’re going to be able to do that on a very rapid basis, so we need to have that tool ready to go as we go to the next phase.

Jay Inslee: (36:51)
The reason we think it’s reasonable is that if the federal government’s statement that they gave me two days ago, I was on a call with the president and the vice president, and Admiral [inaudible 00:04:04], who’s in charge of this process, and he told me flat that we would have enough of our swabs to quadruple our current testing in the next week or two. So we are basing this projection on that and I’m very hopeful that that comes through. I know the Admiral is sincere in his commitment to us, but I also know that we’ve run into glitches in the past, so that’s a realistic goal and we have it.

Jay Inslee: (37:34)
Your second question about broad scale testing of non-symptomatic people, we would like to be able to do that to have some better surveillance about the spread of the disease. There is start of a process to be able to do that by doing antibody testing, using serology testing, and that’s going on now in Seattle where we are looking at, when I say we, I mean the research labs, are looking at used blood that is left over from the blood bank and looking to see what percentage of those have antibodies for the virus. That means people have antibodies have been exposed to the virus, doesn’t mean they have that, so that is the start of validating that process to be able to move forward.

Jay Inslee: (38:23)
There are also some other companies that are coming up on antibody tests that might be able to do these antibody tests in mass. I talked to Siemens company yesterday about that. They think they have a technology that might come in and several weeks, it could do mass testing for antibody testing, and that will be useful for surveillance purposes so we can get a handle of what the percentage of people is that actually had the disease that may have been asymptomatic and they didn’t even know it.

Jay Inslee: (38:52)
But I want to offer a huge caution about this because there are some folks have argued that this is a get out of jail free card, that once we can do that broad scale antibody testing, we can all go back to work under the very mistaken assumption that because you might have a positive antibody test, you were therefore immune from the disease and immune from transmitting the disease to other people. There is simply not medical research to really show that that’s the case yet. In fact, the World Health Organization said that it’s just not an assumption that any of us can make at this time. So further research might show that plus or minus, but at the moment, we cannot, repeat, cannot depend on antibody testing to set us free. We cannot depend on getting an antibody test showing that we have the antibody and then feel free to go back to work and ignore social distancing. That would be a potentially fatal mistake.

Jay Inslee: (39:57)
Now there are some that are trying to trumpet that and suggest that’s why we should just abandon our current efforts, but that is a very dangerous bet and we cannot gamble on this.

Speaker 2: (40:08)
Okay. Next question comes from Jill at the Seattle Times.

Jill: (40:15)
Governor, you have given some specific net metrics on things like the number of testing that you want to see for things to open back up, but what are some specific metrics for the information you just shared from the charts, that you want to see before the state reopens? For example, what number of cases per day would you like to see? Where would you like to see…

Jill: (40:31)
(silence).