When can social distancing be relaxed? UW model keeps moving date later for Washington
One question that’s loomed on people’s minds as Washington’s stay-at-home order has continued is: When does it make sense to relax social distancing?
A new forecast from a leading pandemic modeling group does not suggest we should be in a hurry to make that happen.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) is an independent health research center at the University of Washington.
In an update posted April 27, the institute predicts that in Washington: “After May 30, 2020, relaxing social distancing may be possible with containment strategies that include testing, contact tracing, isolation and limiting gathering size.”
That date has grown later with each recommendation from the researchers, with projected dates for easing restrictions moving from May 18 to May 28 in its last round of updates last week.
The new report came on the same day Gov. Jay Inslee set a date of May 5 for limited outdoor recreation to resume in Washington. At Monday’s news conference, Inslee also noted several models were used to help officials gauge timing of relaxed measures and said the state was still far from a return to normal.
“If we see a sharp uptake in the number of people who are getting sick or are not following appropriate steps, then we won’t hesitate to scale this back again,” Inslee said Monday.
IHME now predicts the nation’s death toll from COVID-19 will be higher than originally forecast, estimating 74,073 cumulative deaths, with an estimated range of 56,563 to 130,666.
“The total ... is higher than average predictions published on April 22 (67,641, with an estimate range of 48,058 to 123,157), though the uncertainty intervals still overlap considerably,” IHME’s COVID-19 team wrote.
Part of the reason for the upward shift, the team noted, “is due to many states experiencing flatter and thus longer epidemic peaks. Further, updated data indicate that daily COVID-19 deaths are not falling very quickly after the peak, leading to longer tails for many states’ epidemic curves.
“In combination — less abrupt peaks and slower declines in daily COVID-19 deaths following the peak — many places in the U.S. could have higher cumulative deaths from the novel coronavirus.”
The five states with the largest shifts upward include New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Connecticut and Texas.
For Washington, it lists a cumulative peak of 841 deaths by May 21. A month ago, it projected an estimated 1,429 COVID-19 deaths statewide by July.
IHME added in its April 27 update: “Our current modeling framework does not yet capture how the risk for more COVID-19 cases — and potentially deaths — could increase due to increased interaction among individuals. This is particularly true if locations have not fully instituted strong containment strategies like widely available testing and contact tracing.”
As more states, including Washington, start their own processes of reopening, the model could eventually forecast how much of an effect these changes could have on the spread.
IHME has become a prominent forecaster in modeling the pandemic, offering data on peaks in states, nationwide and for other countries and suggested dates for relaxed social distancing measures.
The latest IHME report cautioned that “many states are seeing daily COVID-19 deaths falling more slowly than the speed at which deaths rose to peak levels. These slower trajectories are contributing to higher cumulative COVID-19 deaths being estimated through the epidemic’s first wave.”
For more information, go to http://www.healthdata.org/covid/updates.
This story was originally published April 28, 2020 at 1:44 PM with the headline "When can social distancing be relaxed? UW model keeps moving date later for Washington."
