HomeMy WebLinkAbout02062021_Cannon_Letter to GovenorFrom:Charles Cannon
To:Board of Health; publichealth@co.clallam.wa.us
Subject:Please get us to Phase 2!
Date:Saturday, February 6, 2021 12:56:49 PM
Attachments:Analysis 1 WA Regions Data 01-29-2021.pdf
Analysis 2 WA Regions Data 01-29-2021 Split NW Region.pdf
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Dear Drs. Locke and Berry,
FYI, we are sending this to Gov. Inslee and our state congressmen. Many thanks to you and your
hard working staffs for your excellent work during this pandemic. Hopefully WA State will recognize
the effort our counties have made to limit the contagion and move us into Phase 2 ASAP.
“As concerned citizens residing in Jefferson County, we are writing to express our extreme
disappointment with Governor Inslee’s decision to leave this region in the Phase 1 of his Covid
-19 Recovery Plan. There are multiple reasons why this makes no sense whatsoever in
relation to the “Puget Sound Region” moving to the much less onerous Phase 2.
First, the Regions are based on the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) regions as previously
defined . Criteria for Regional boundaries is not clearly stated in the Jan 22 “Roadmap to
Recovery” document. Are EMS that similar to medical requirements of a pandemic? It is
apparent to us that these Regional groupings were used out of bureaucratic convenience
rather than a County by County approach.
Second, the “Road Map to Recovery” is based only on 14 day “trends” of new Covid cases,
new hospital admissions, as well as previous 7 day % occupancy of ICU staffed beds and
previous7 day % positive Covid tests. We question the use of these percentages, which only
show a small window of time across the whole pandemic event. Data sources for these
trends are admitted to be incomplete in the “Recovery” report itself!
There is no consideration given at all of historical totals of positive tests, hospitalizations, or
deaths per County from the very start of the pandemic. It’s like judging a player by his batting
average over 2 weeks versus a whole season. Additionally there is no mention of
unemployment loss by County. We believe these factors are better indicators of how well a
given County is coping overall with containing the most serious cases of Covid, as well as the
necessity to get people back to work.
The two attached spreadsheets show selected critical data from Jan 29, 2021 for the
Northwest, Puget Sound, and West Regions. You will find that Analysis 1 shows a higher
Death rate/100K, as well as a higher % Deaths/case for the Puget Sound Region than both
adjacent Regions. It also shows a lower % Employment Loss than the other two poorer
Regions. It therefore seems illogical to allow Puget Sound into a less onerous category than
the others.
Our Analysis 2 breaks out Jefferson and Clallam Counties into a separate sub-Region from
Mason & Kitsap Counties. This shows an impressively lower number of Cases, Deaths, Death
Rate/100K, and %Deaths/case than the other groups, and an even higher %Employment loss
(10% for Jefferson & 6% for Clallam).
Based on these important long term statistics, we believe it is quite clear that Jefferson &
Clallam Counties have done an exceptional job of combating Covid 19 for almost a year now.
Our citizens and health care providers have shown they can keep total deaths and
deaths/case much lower than counties in neighboring regions. And this has occurred while
seeing an employment loss much worse than our neighbors.
Our local Health officers and providers are discouraged to see their good work going
unrecognized due to an arbitrary grouping with other Counties and use of short-sighted
sighted statistics. Residents have done a good job containing the virus spread as you can see
by the % of cases shown here.
Please correct these mistaken policies ASAP and get our local businesses back up and running
in Phase 2, as they deserve to be, as soon as possible. There is not a moment to lose!”
Sincerely,
Charles & Harriet Cannon
234 Cass St., Port Townsend 98368
cjcannon@seanet.com
cc: Representative Mike Chapman
Representative Steve Tharinger
Senator Kevin Van De Wege
Secretary of Health Umair A. Shah, MD, MPH
Governor Inslee