The District reported a new peak in community spread of the coronavirus on Saturday, moving the city back from 11 days of sustained decline to nine.
Fourteen straight days of a sustained decline in community spread is one of the six metrics needed to move into Phase Two of reopening. Sunday marked Day 10.
Since the beginning of the month, city officials have stood by June 19th as the earliest possible date of moving onto the next phase of reopening. It’s unclear how this reset could change that. The D.C. Mayor’s Office has not been responded to a request for comment.
This reset is similar to what happened at the end of May when D.C also reset the clock back by three days prior to the move Phase One. Ultimately, the District still began their phase reopened as planned on May 29.
How D.C. calculates the 14 straight days of sustained decrease in community spread of COVID-19 has been a source of confusion. The decline isn’t measured by the daily count of positive COVID cases, but rather when those people started showing symptoms, which can be days before they are tested. In addition, positive coronavirus cases in large congregate settings like nursing homes, homeless shelters, and the D.C. Jail are not being taken into consideration for this metric under the logic that they are not circulating freely in the community.
Last month, when asked if this data was in service of supporting a predetermined goal, Mayor Muriel Bowser said, “I can tell you we have no interest in cooking the book. We have put out proactively a lot of information on a daily basis and we will continue to do that.”
In recent days, the District has opened up more free, walk-up testing sites available to anyone who wants a test, but that has led to occasional long wait times. Non-profits are also providing free testing specifically along protest routes.
As of Sunday, 515 D.C. residents have died due to COVID-19 and 9,767 have tested positive.
Besides a decline in a community spread, the city is also looking at other metrics to determine the safety for moving into Phase 2. This includes a positivity rate of lower than 15 percent for over 7 days (according to June 8 data, that metric is currently at 7.5 percent) and the utilization of hospital beds needs to be below 80 for 14 days. On June 12, hospital bed use was at 80.5 percent. Contract tracing numbers are also being tracked but the city isn’t currently reporting those metrics yet.
Phase Two will include reopening museums, places of worship, and retail stores with limited capacity and indoor seating in restaurants at 50 percent capacity.
Northern Virginia entered Phase Two reopening on Friday with Maryland’s Prince George’s and Montgomery counties expected to move to Phase Two next week.
Matt Blitz