By
Fenit Nirappil,
Rachel Chason and
Dana Hedgpeth
The greater Washington region recorded its highest daily coronavirus caseload in weeks Wednesday as the District lost more ground in its fight to quell the pandemic.
The District, Maryland and Virginia combined to report the region’s highest single-day case increase since June 4. Leaders in the region are monitoring a recent rise in cases in hopes of staving off outbreaks that have occurred elsewhere in the country.
While much of the increase is the result of infection spikes in Virginia’s Hampton Roads region, many other localities have also reported increases in recent days.
District leaders reported Wednesday that a key transmission rate metric rose to alarming levels for the first time since late April.
The transmission rate — the number of people a new patient is likely to infect — surpassed 1 earlier this month after steadily rising since mid-June. City leaders want the rate below 1 for five consecutive days before considering a shift into the third stage of coronavirus recovery, although the D.C. Health Department has cautioned that the metric becomes a less reliable indicator of transmission as cases decline.
D.C. public health officials have said the next stage of coronavirus recovery will be difficult to achieve because it requires drastically lower risks of the virus spreading.
The District also has struggled to achieve two weeks of declining new cases, measured by the date a person developed symptoms, excluding patients from confined facilities. Officials have measured seven days of declining cases as of Wednesday, but the clock has reset several times, with cases going up and down rather than a steady decline.
Hospitals in the city have been running at just short of 80 percent capacity — a threshold that could trigger additional restrictions or measures to handle a surge of coronavirus patients.
“Our message continues to be the same: The virus is still in our community, it’s still circulating, and we have to be very vigilant in wearing masks, practicing social distancing and washing our hands, and in being judicious about the activities that we participate in,” Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said at a Wednesday news conference.
Bowser also said the city has been testing record numbers of people, which might lead to a higher raw number of cases, but she noted that the rate of people testing positive has stayed below 5 percent in recent weeks.
In Maryland, Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich (D) said Wednesday that the state’s most populous jurisdiction will continue enforcing physical distancing and mask requirements and plans to focus next on construction sites, shutting down projects where workers are not wearing masks.
“We are going to double-down,” he said, noting that construction workers might go back to communities where residents live in close quarters, making community spread more likely. “We are not going to go the way of these other states where reopening has led to a reemergence of the virus.”
He said he was “a little surprised” by a letter that Gov. Larry Hogan (R) sent Tuesday telling local leaders they “have the responsibility to enforce the laws.” He said Montgomery County has been doing so already, and noted that Hogan could have offered to work jointly with the localities, using state police to help enforcement efforts.
Elrich said county officials will give businesses warnings before taking any actions.
The county reported 103 additional cases on Wednesday, though its seven-day average holding steady for weeks.
Statewide in Maryland, hospitalization numbers increased for a second consecutive day Wednesday, while the seven-day average increased for the fifth day in a row. At the same time, the state conducted a record number of tests with a decline in the positivity rate, as well as its rate of deaths.
The District, Maryland and Virginia reported 1,920 new cases and 25 additional fatalities Wednesday.
Maryland saw 759 new cases and seven deaths, while Virginia had new 1,084 cases and 15 deaths. The District’s caseload increased by 80, while three new fatalities brought an end to a five-day streak with no reported deaths in the city.
While each jurisdiction eclipsed its seven-day average caseload, the biggest spikes continued to occur in Virginia’s Hampton Roads region, which saw 494 new cases.
The seven-day average of coronavirus cases in that area has increased for 11 consecutive days, reaching 383 daily cases Wednesday. That’s five times higher than that region’s daily average in late June.
The Hampton Roads area recorded its highest caseload since the start of the pandemic in two of the past three days.
Northern Virginia’s 241 daily cases Wednesday was above its seven-day average and the highest daily total since July 5. Despite the increase, the seven-day average in the state’s D.C. suburbs is virtually unchanged since mid-June, standing at 167 cases.
A rise in hospitalizations across the greater Washington region has followed the caseload increase. The area’s seven-day average of covid-19 patients in hospitals has risen for six consecutive days.
But not every metric in the Washington region was worsening. The number of patients in intensive care or using ventilators has held steady, while the average number of daily deaths dropped to its lowest point since early April.
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