SPOKANE, Wash — On Tuesday, Washington Governor Jay Inslee spoke one-on-one with KREM 2 News about the state's COVID-19 response.
Looking to the future, he discussed what Washington's reopening process might look like, the importance of making the process responsible, and the factors that may affect it.
The full transcript of the interview, edited for clarity, is included below. Questions from KREM are in bold.
I'll start by asking what really everyone wants to know, which is when quarantine will end. Obviously, you can't give us a hard date. But I think would be helpful to at least have parameters for what the scope of reality looks like here. What's the range being discussed, in terms of most optimistic to least optimistic timeline?
The optimistic version is that we will make a transition from phase one – which is social distancing – where we've wrestled the number down to zero or close to zero, as far as fatalities we're experiencing per day. We're not close to that now. We hope we're approaching the peak, or at it. We don't know that yet.
And the second condition we need to have exist, at that same time, is the ability to do the testing and the contact-tracing, to make sure that we're not going to rebound after we get down to those low numbers. Both of those are important.
What we know today is, and it’s just kind of like life, there's a lot of things we can speculate about. But what we know today is that if we release the social distancing too soon, the numbers are going to go up again. This is a scientific certainty. The modeling has been done.
Now, some of the modelers have suggested we need to keep this through May. But we're going to look at data as the days come close to May 4 to make a call on that. And as we go forth beyond May 4, what I suspect we're going to see is kind of a phased approach, where we remove some of these restrictions on a phased basis.
Taking restrictions off businesses, then schools, then large gatherings, and perhaps even kind of a boutique approach inside industries. [I] cannot tell you those dates right now. All I know is we should pick a date that does not allow us to lose the gains we've made, does not expose us to increased fatalities.
We know how painful that is. I spent very painful moments with the widow of a Bainbridge Island police officer; he works about a mile from my house. She couldn't stop crying. And those are tears we're experiencing all over the state. We want to minimize those.
So I wish I could give you a specific date, but what I do know is that the faster we buckle down on social distancing, the faster we can get out of this and move to phase two, which is having a kind of fire department approach – where you call the people, they come protect you and the people around you.
So if we use a graduated approach, could you give some examples of some of the things that might be on the table for reopening sooner and some things that would definitively have to wait much longer?
Well, look, we want to help everybody. But the things that just spring to mind: residential construction. Maybe we can do things to allow that to start to reopen, maybe with some restrictions on numbers of people on the job site or need for masks and the like. That's something that springs to mind. We are talking to the construction industry right now about that, about protocols that might allow that to occur.
Maybe there's things you can do in retail shops that limit the number of customers and the like. Those kind of phased approaches. We don't have any hard and fast metrics on that right now. But it is the kind of things we're thinking about.
But I do want to make this central point. It's a very difficult one right now. As our fatalities per day start to go down, and they really have not yet; we've sort of been plateaued for the last week and a half or so. We hope they're going to start to go down. There's going to be a real human tendency, of all of us, to think that victory is ours and we can just let up. We just can't until we've driven this thing down to a place where it's not going to rebound again.
I make this point because I think that the job that we all have as parents and business owners and elected officials right now is going to be even more difficult in the next few weeks, which is to make sure we keep our eye on the ball. Our task is every bit as important as when that curve was going to go up.
I think our degree of diligence, which has been very successful here – the rest of the country has been asking how we've been as successful as we have – it’s a credit to Washingtonians. It's a credit to people in Spokane County who have stepped up to the plate and done difficult things for the community and their loved ones. It's something people ought to have some pride in. And I think that's worthy of continuing for a while.
Now, obviously the curves look different county to county. Would there be any consideration given to that, and to having a localized reopening approach? Or does this necessarily have to be a more one-size-fits-all unified reopening approach?
My sense is having a statewide approach on this is the right route to go. To have multiple county-by-county approaches, my sense is the situation will not be so different to justify sort of taking our foot off the pedal.
One of the reasons for that is we're having travel from county to county; we have state to state, to some degree nation to nation, even. We just have to recognize that these infection risks are going to continue with us for some period of time. That's why it's really important for us.
The most important thing I believe, is our ability to build… a sort of COVID Fire Department. That means if somebody gets a fever, we want to have a person right there that day talking to them and getting them to isolate themselves, maybe even before the testing is done. And also, have an army of people go out and contact everyone they've had contact with, to get those folks to self-isolate, maybe even before the test results are back.
Because we know that a good proportion of the transmission is taking place before people even have symptoms. And a lot of people who have the disease never even have symptoms, apparently. They can transmit it, apparently. So developing that infrastructure, that army of people and technology to do that, is the most important thing we can do right now. And I think having a statewide approach to that is probably the best.
There's also this new Western coalition approach. I think for a lot of people, it's easy to understand the benefits of shared resources. But a shared reopening timeline might raise some concerns. For instance, you’ve talked a lot about how Washingtonians have come together to comply with this stay-at-home order. I think many of them are under the impression that the faster they do this, then the faster we reopen. So, does this new agreement maybe put us in a place where if people a thousand miles away in Southern California don't comply, and there's a new outbreak in San Diego, that could negate all the hard work done here in Spokane and elsewhere?
No, that’s not something you have to fear. There's no agreement to have the same dates of whatever phased approach we take.
I think you are going to see states on the West Coast have a similar approach, which is to move to phase two of this. What I call “smart public health.” An individualized approach rather than the blunt instrument that we've used.
But, I think the dates are probably going to be different actually. They're going to fit our own circumstances, as you've indicated. But I think there is use communicating. I think there's use sharing information, to some degree resources if we can. I'm glad that we're moving together in this regard.
Now it's also important to retain our independence as a state. We're going to make decisions for our state. What's best for our state is not going to be dictated by the president or anyone else. And the west coast states have certainly taken that position.
Another concern on the east side of the state we have, is that we don't really have much of a relationship with California, but our whole region is bordered by Idaho, who's not in the coalition. Did you reach out to Governor Little, and what was his response?
We haven't yet, and the reason is that the governor has not been able to achieve the degree of consensus in his state that a state really needs to be able to move forward in this regard. We hope he's successful in that regard.
We would like to have as much communication as we can with all of our neighbors. So that could be in the offing. But we hope he’s successful having a little more consensus, so we can move forward. I'm looking forward to that.
Do you mean consensus in his legislature or just general sentiment within the state of Idaho?
Both, but certainly with the legislature to start with.
We've had a remarkable degree of consensus in our state and our state legislature. It's been very bipartisan. I've been very pleased Republicans and Democrats have all sort of worked together on this. There have been some modest disagreement on the fringes. But the bulk of it, Republicans and Democrats been on the same page in our state.
Now that might be because we've been bit earlier, and we've seen the fatalities in our communities, and we know how painful that can be. It might be because intrinsically we believe in science in our state. And it might be because we've done some bipartisan things in our state. But for whatever reasons, we've had a pretty good bipartisan approach. And that's been very gratifying.
And by the way, I want to tell you, I appreciate the leadership of Eastern Washington elected officials. I used to be one. I raised my family for 20 years in the Yakima Valley. And it's taken a little more courage, frankly, for elected leaders in Eastern Washington, because they haven't quite seen the number of their constituents who've died as they have in central Puget Sound. It takes a little bit of vision and moxie to lead your community as they have. And I just want to say I appreciate that at both parties.
The outbreaks haven't really been quite as severe on the east side of the state. Are you confident that the resources, though, are still coming here… the number of resources that are required?
We still have concerns about resources. I just got off the phone with the Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services about the need for more test kits.
Across the state of Washington there are many long-term care facilities we're really concerned about, that have had people COVID-positive in their facilities. We want to test a bunch of people. And until yesterday, we didn't have enough swabs and test kits.
So this is a concern across the state of Washington. And you bet we're concerned about every one of these spots. We have had some hotspots in Adams County and Benton County; we want to make sure we help them out.
We have been able to create what we think of as strike teams, that are going statewide wherever we have a long-term care facility with positive COVID in it. [That way] we can get experts into these long-term care facilities all across the state, to have the best infectious disease control we can possibly muster.
I appreciate that the public health service, federally, have sent us some experts on that. So look, wherever we've got an older person exposed to this disease, it's a top priority for us and we're going to do everything we can for them.
Would you be able to elaborate on what you would do in a scenario where President Trump tries to reopen the economy before Washington’s experts are ready to do so?
Well, we hope that he does not actually go down that route. We're hoping that this was kind of a one-day flurry of tweets rather than real policy.
And the reason is, it's clear that we don't have a royalty in our country. We do have a Constitution and we follow the Constitution. And what’s very clear to everyone who's read it, is that governors who put in measures to protect their constituents are the ones that can take them off. The President does not have authority… to remove those.
So, we hope that he listens to wiser counsel and does not go down that route. If he did, we'd have to have the judicial system get involved. And I'm relatively confident they’d take care of the problem, but let's not have that argument. Let's just fix the problem. That's what we should be working on.