Mayor Muriel Bowser made the call yesterday: With 15 days of decline in the community spread metric — one more than the goal — the city would make the move to Phase Two of its reopening plan on Monday.

Many gyms, spas, and retail stores are looking forward to welcoming guests inside for the first time since March. Restaurants have made plans to begin seating customers indoors. At least two museums said they would reopen immediately.

But Saturday’s data appears to show that community spread (which measures COVID-19 cases according to the date of symptom onset, while leaving out patients at nursing homes, homeless shelters, and the D.C. Jail) dropped back to 11 days of a sustained decrease.

The city sent out its daily coronavirus data a little later than normal on Saturday, prompting questions about whether the latest numbers would put D.C. off course. When they were released, a regular press release from Bowser’s office didn’t note anything amiss.

But a screenshot captured at 12:22 p.m. by Allison Hrabar showed the city registered a sharp increase in the community spread metric on June 11. That spike no longer appears on the official reopening tracker, which now stops at June 10, but it still says the city is currently at an 11-day decrease.

Meanwhile, the main view of the tracker briefly said the city had “not achieved” the metric — noting the metric was at “11 out of 14 days” — as captured by Hrabar. It later changed to achieved “over 14 days.”

“On Thursday, the sustained decrease metric reached 14 days. Although this metric is met, we continue to monitor the data, and have predetermined triggers in place to identify concerning changes that may result in a change in recommendations,” D.C. health department spokesperson Allison Reeves told DCist in an emailed statement.

While that appears to indicate that Bowser will continue as planned with the decision to move into Phase Two, officials have not answered that question directly. They have also not explained why the June 11 data no longer appears on the public tracker, or what exactly are the “predetermined triggers” that could prompt the mayor to reconsider.

Under Phase Two, mass gatherings will be allowed up to 50 people (an increase from 10), and places of worship can host services with up to 50% capacity, or up to 100 people. “Nonessential” retail stores and restaurants will be able to welcome customers back indoors at half capacity. The D.C. Public Library announced it would expand its offerings later this month, the Basilica of the National Shrine said that in-person services would resume, and the mayor announced today that in-person services will resume at the city’s DMVs — just some of the ways the District is set to return to a greater semblance of normalcy.

This isn’t the first time that the city has seen the clock reset on the community spread metric (the city explains that “a day of decrease is defined as a day where the number of new cases is less than two standard deviations of the five day rolling average from the previous low OR there has not been three days of consecutive increase.”) The city reported a new peak last week, moving the clock back by two days. A reset also happened near the end of last month, but D.C. was still able to move into Phase One as planned on May 29.

Meanwhile, the city reports that it is meeting its metric around hospital beds: keeping utilization below 80% at acute care hospitals for 14 days. It was above that rate for three days from June 10-12, prompting questions about why it was considered achieved.

Reeves said over email that the metric doesn’t need to be met continuously — only within the period of the current phase.

But city officials have acknowledged a failure to meet goals around contact tracing — reaching 90% of newly diagnosed people within one day of being notified of their positive test result, and 90% of a newly diagnosed person’s close contacts within two days — even when accounting for a lag in the data presented to the public. Reeves told DCist yesterday that they had made major strides on that goal within the past few days and they expect to hit the 90% figure “in the next week or so.”

On the flip side, the city is far exceeding its goals for the positivity rate — the proportion of positive results out of the total number of tests — buoyed by ramped-up testing capacity and large numbers of people seeking out tests amid weeks of sustained demonstrations. The District is aiming for a rate of below 15% for seven consecutive days. That has been the case for the entirety of this month so far, with the figure falling as low as 2.1% in recent days.

As of June 19, the city has seen 9,984 confirmed cases, and 531 people have died from COVID-19.

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