The district has seen more new cases in the last week than in any other seven-day stretch in the pandemic, part of a broader surge in the nation’s Mid-Atlantic region.
While Mayor Muriel E. Bowser of Washington, D.C., was grappling with the riot that tore through the Capitol last week, another crisis was slowly unfolding: a surge of coronavirus in the district. Washington averaged 290 new coronavirus cases a day in the seven-day period that ended Sunday, the most the city has seen during any week of the pandemic. The surge is part of a broader upward tide throughout the nation’s Mid-Atlantic region: Virginia, Maryland and Delaware also set weekly case records on Sunday. On Monday, Ms. Bowser urged vigilance against the virus, noting that the district’s hospitals were strained by coronavirus patients and the rate of positive test results was high. “We remain concerned — as the rest of the country remains concerned — about the increase in cases,” she said. Public health experts warned that the district could be headed for an alarming wave of coronavirus infections in the next few weeks, following the riot in the Capitol, when lawmakers and staff members huddled in small rooms to hide from attackers. “The district is operating under a double whammy,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University. The district has the challenges of any large urban center, she noted, including concentrated poverty and large numbers of vulnerable residents, making fighting the virus very difficult. “On top of that, the district has this unique risk factor, which is exposure to thousands of people who poured into town, maskless, packed into very concentrated areas, and simply ignoring every public health safety precaution,” Ms. Rosenbaum said. “We won’t know for the next couple of days whether we have a further skyrocketing of cases, but it had all the attributes of what we have all come to understand is a superspreader event — which is huge numbers of people packed together indoors, screaming.” Washington’s latest surge predates last week’s riot, and not enough time has elapsed for the scale of infections that occurred that day to show up in the district’s data.
