Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

When learning that some Seattle schools have closed down in response to COVID-19, and some companies (like mine) have asked that all employees who can work from home do so, an online contact wondered if this was overreaction caused by “blind panic.”

It isn’t.

Seattle is in the crosshairs.

As a port city with strong ties to nations around the Pacific Rim, with strong tourism from Europe and cruise ships that dock here, and with a technology industry that engenders traffic between here and Asia, it is not surprising that COVID-19 arrived here, nor that it arrived unannounced.

King County, wherein Seattle is located, has over thirty active cases of COVID-19, affecting patients aged from teenagers to folks their nineties. There are nearly forty cases in King and Snohomish counties. The only other state with that many cases is California, which is five times more populous than Washington. King County has also had ten deaths; many are from an outbreak in one senior nursing home, but not all. 

Forty cases doesn’t sound like a lot, and no one says that the ratio of cases:deaths here is indicative of COVID-19’s lethality, so folks beyond our borders can be excused for wondering if we might be indulging in a bit of over-dramatic hand-waving.

We aren’t.

You see, it all comes down to uncertainties.

For instance:

• We don’t know the mortality rate of the outbreak, which has been pegged at anywhere between 0.3% and 3.2%.
  • The current thinking is somewhere between 1–2%, but for comparison, the seasonal flu has a mortality rate of around 0.1%.
• We don’t know the transmission rate, which looks like it’s around 2 (one person infects two others), but could be much higher.
  • There are many unidentified cases of COVID-19 walking around already, but we don’t know how many.
• We don’t know how widespread the current outbreak is, or how many people have it/have been exposed to it.
  • Now that we have widespread testing capabilities, that should become clearer.

Seattle’s local public health officials, like everyone else, are working with an incomplete picture of COVID-19’s traits and, unlike the politicians in and around the White House, they are not soft-pedaling their message. Instead, they’re following the same playbook as the CDC, NIH, and WHO by preparing for the worst because, if we are in a worst-case scenario, we want to be ahead of this. When dealing with lives, it’s a lot better to have done more than necessary than to have done less than was needed.

Even if we take a low mortality rate of 1%, and a transmission rate that allows 50% of Seattle to come down with COVID-19, that still translates to over 3,500 deaths. That’s a lot—by contrast, Seattle had about 245 deaths from the flu in the 2018–19 season—and public health officials have a duty to protect us as best they can, and to keep us informed of the risks, the mitigations, and what we can do.

To that end, Seattle has been encouraged to limit our mutual face-time, work from home when possible, and up our game when it comes to personal hygiene. We’ve also closed some schools for a few days for cleaning (or longer, if there’s been exposure). And we’ve recommended postponing large gatherings.

These are not “blind panic” recommendations. They are standard, common-sense methods for isolation, containment, and prevention.

And, judging by the unusually light freeway traffic and empty streets at Pike Place Market, Seattle is listening.

As this outbreak is studied further, as we learn more about the size, scope, and severity of it, we may see some of these recommendations as overly cautious. But they’re not “blind panic.” 

Buying six months of toilet paper . . . that’s blind panic.

Sadly, Seattle is doing that, too, but we can’t blame our public health officials for that.

k