Gov. Jay Inslee urged gymnasiums to expand social estrangement measures and the number of others allowed internally at the same time.
SPOKANE, Washington – Gov. Jay Inslee made a video of Okanogan County thursday, one of the newest hot spots in a coronavirus pandemic that affected the counties of central Washington state.
The sparsely populated Okanogan County now has the COVID-19 case rate in the state with nearly 900 cases shown among its 42,000 residents, Inslee said in a conference call with journalists.
The city of Brewster, which has about 2,300 residents, is a specific hot spot with 514 cases, Inslee said.
A trend has made the impression on Washington’s central agricultural belt, with the Tri-Cities, Yakima and The Wenatchee regions, all heavily affected by the virus. All the percentages of massive agricultural economies that require thousands of agricultural employees to live and run nearby, Inslee said.
“The hot spots followed the harvest pattern,” Inslee said, crossing the Oregon border towards the Canadian border.
Downtown Washington grows most of the country’s apples, cherries and other agricultural products, and wants tens of thousands of seasonal ones to produce crops.
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Inslee said the percentage of other people dressed in mask paintings and buying food in Okanogan County turns out to be good, but that many other people don’t wear a mask when they socialize.
“There are too many parties and meetings,” Inslee said. “Other unmasked youth gather closely.”
To combat the epidemic, the Washington National Guard is sending a cell verification unit to Okanogan County to increase capacity, the Democratic governor said.
Inslee met Thursday with network leaders and also agricultural industry leaders in an effort to curb the spread of the virus.
“Labor-intensive agriculture provides an enabling environment for maximum transmission rates,” Inslee said, as agricultural staff paint intensively in fields and processing plants, live near and in combination to reach the paintings. Farm staff sometimes have less access to physical care. He said.
While Inslee issued state regulations earlier this year to make agricultural paints safer, he said he can publish more regulations if needed.
But he that the transmission of the virus occurs in all spaces of the community, not only on the farms.
“It’s as vital for The Wenatchee’s accountant to wear a mask as it is to those interested in agriculture,” Inslee said.
Earlier this week, Inslee announced a $40 million public fund for undocumented workers.
Washington has about 240,000 legally authorized citizens, according to the Pew Research Center, and they pay about $368 million in state and local taxes.
For those Americans and their mixed-status families, additional cash is the ability to offset rental, car and application expenses and other expenses.
The state will then seek a nonprofit base or organization to manage and distribute the money. The budget is expected to be distributed to families and immigrants this fall at a rate of $3,000 consistent with the family and $1,000 consistent with children.
Inslee said it seeks to withdraw the cash as temporarily as possible.
The governor also noted that there is little evidence that staff in Mexico have transported the virus from that country to Okanogan County.
“Most of TheArrayArray infections are transmissions that occurred in Okanogan,” Inslee said.
Washington state has recorded more than 60,000 cases of coronavirus since the onset of the pandemic and more than 1,620 deaths.