After nearly three months of stay-at-home orders and other guidelines targeted at slowing the spread of COVID-19, the gradual reopening of businesses, recreational opportunities and social activities is underway across King County.
And while some restrictions have been eased, Public Health – Seattle & King County says that it’s important that we approach reopening gradually and continue practicing infection control practices to help prevent an increase in COVID-19 cases.
Here’s more from the agency:
Public Health – Seattle & King County encourages everyone to follow these tips to continue to slow the spread of COVID-19:
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- Avoid extremes. Protecting yourself and your community is not an “all or nothing” approach. Continue to make cautious, risk assessment decisions about how you interact.
- Continue to follow safety principles, including frequent handwashing, wearing cloth face coverings in public, staying at least six feet from others, and avoiding group gatherings.
- Get tested at the first sign of illness. More information about testing, including free test sites, is available online.
- If you’ve attended protests or other large gatherings in recent weeks, help protect one another and reduce the risk of transmitting COVID-19.
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Adhering to these guidelines will help reduce the number of COVID-19 cases across King County and will move the county closer to further reductions in business and activities restrictions as part of the State of Washington’s “Safe Start” plan.
Additional information:
See our post, Coming together and still staying apart: Preventing an increase in COVID-19 as reopening begins on our Public Health Insider blog.
Visit our Safe Start King County webpage for more information.
Expanded data available through daily outbreak summary dashboard
Public Health is including much more information about the COVID-19 outbreak in King County, through updates to our data dashboard called, “Daily COVID-19 outbreak summary.” This dashboard expansion comes on top of a wide range of topic-specific dashboards that show the impacts of COVID-19 locally.
The expanded dashboard includes all of the details that were previously available on this dashboard, such as the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, the total number of deaths attributed to COVID-19, and the ages in each category.
In addition, the dashboard now shows a much more detailed picture of what’s happening in each city and zip code in King County. Dashboard users can use “tabs” to filter by race, age and gender for each city. They can also compare how each city or zip code area compares to the overall rates for King County. (Most unincorporated areas are also included, and more will be added.)
One filter enables dashboard users to view the trends for the most recent two weeks (as well as earlier two-week periods). For example, this shows how much the outbreak is currently disproportionately impacting residents in South King County. In coming weeks, additional information will enable viewing more demographics over time, and a downloadable data file will be available.