NoVA Leaders’ Letter to Gov. Northam: “Each of our jurisdictions have been making preparations to support a transition into Phase 1 at midnight on May 28th”

Today, my regional colleagues and I provided a second letter to Governor Northam with a memo from the Northern Virginia Health Directors. As you will see in the letters below, the region now meets four of the significant criteria set by Governor Northam to move towards reopening. One of the two areas we don’t meet is contact tracing, but we are finalizing a contract hopefully this week to provide recruitment and staffing for the hundreds of contact tracers and investigators that we will need to increase our capacity of contract tracing. The other is PPE and we have sufficient supply for hospitals, but are working to increase in other areas and hope the Governor will be able to help us do that.

I share our community’s desire to reopen our businesses in the safest way possible. Fairfax County has made significant preparations should the Governor decide that Northern Virginia has met his criteria to reopen this Friday. Regardless, we will continue to monitor our local statistics to ensure Fairfax County doesn’t see spikes in cases and be transparent with the public on our progress.