As state health leaders roll out their plan for living with COVID safely, they continue to monitor new surges in European countries.
The new “WA Forward” plan from the State Health Department focuses on three key areas. First, it’s about empowering you with the tools to protect yourself and your family, which includes a shift from a statewide risk assessment to the risk level in your community so you can make appropriate decisions. Next is prevention by making sure those tools, like vaccines and masks are available. Third is carefully monitoring COVID trends and being ready to react quickly if new case, hospitalization and death numbers shoot back up again. The idea behind the WA Forward plan is both so we aren’t surprised by a new variant or another surge, but it’s also so that we have supplies stockpiled so that any future supply chain hang-ups won’t prevent us from having what we need or what hospitals need to get through it.
State Epidemiologist, Doctor Scott Lindquist, says those surges overseas are happening in about half the countries in Europe. Lindquist says they can’t predict if we’ll again follow Europe’s trend, but he says they’re not seeing a new variant. “They are seeing Omicron be the predominant variant,” Lindquist says, “They are seeing this expand into areas where people were not infected before. So, for us, it could be people that are unvaccinated. We have all the tools on how to prepare ourselves and prevent this from going forward.”
Lindquist also says the Omicron BA.2 sub-variant activity remains low in Washington at just 7% of cases genotyped, and he says he has great confidence in our ability to detect new variants when they emerge. That includes genotyping, but there’s still community surveillance, like COVID testing and waste water sampling, which can show increases that are among the first signs something is happening.
One concern state health leaders have is about ongoing money from the feds, which helps pay for things like mask stockpiles, testing, and even anti-viral drugs and monoclonal antibodies because if that money stops, those things could become more scarce. They say that’s why it’s important the Governor’s pandemic emergency declaration remains active for now so that federal money keeps flowing.