Washington State CCP Virus Hospitalizations Drop 20 Percent: Officials

People wear masks as they walk past a CCP virus awareness sign outside the World Health Organization in Washington on March 30, 2020. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

Hospitalizations for Washington state residents with the CCP virus have dropped this week for the first time in more than a month.

The state Department of Health showed there was a decline in hospitalizations for symptoms of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus, which causes the disease COVID-19, from 251 last week to 193 this week. That includes symptoms such as shortness of breath and pneumonia, officials told the Seattle Times.

The data doesn’t count hospitalizations of 16 percent of Washington state’s emergency rooms.

“We have seen an increase in volume of COVID-19 patients but fortunately at a slower rate than we anticipated, which is great,” Dr. Douglas Wood, the head of the University of Washington Medicine’s surgery department, told the paper. “We have enough surgical masks to do our job. But we have to anticipate tomorrow.”

Washington’s King County, which includes Seattle, was the site of the first U.S. outbreak. A number of nursing home patients in Kirkland have died from the virus.

Dr. Jeffrey Duchin, an official who serves on the virus task force for Seattle and King County, told the paper that if residents “don’t continue to comply with these measures ... the outbreak will come roaring back, big time.”

The officials appeared to suggest that social distancing guidelines, which resulted in significant economic disruptions and job losses, is making a difference in curbing the spread of the disease. One of the main goals of social distancing is to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed with CCP virus patients.

“That the measures we put in place appear to be working and ... the number of deaths that we are seeing are likely to be significantly less than we would have experienced without these important measures,” Duchin remarked.

Duchin added to KUOW that expanded testing capacity is crucial for gaining a better understanding of how many people actually have the virus.

“The bottom line here should be that what we’re doing now appears to be working, that we should in no way take these findings as an indication to relax our social distancing strategy, that we need to continue this for weeks,” he said.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said that businesses who do not comply with his orders could lose their licenses. About a week ago, he ordered all nonessential businesses to close down or allow employees to telecommute.

“These people who are calling us are very concerned about their health, and the health of others, and how the actions of folks who aren’t on the team are putting so many people at risk,” Inslee said in a press conference this week.