Calli Knight, Deputy Director of External Relations for King County Executive Dow Constantine shared some further answers to questions that were raised regarding the quarantine sites for coronavirus patients in White Center and Kent.
She provided a "site update and answers to a couple of key questions that were asked on last Friday’s call:"
- Executive Constantine and King County Public Health issued new guidelines for who will be able to occupy both the White Center and Kent isolation/quarantine facilities this morning: Public Health will not be placing any individual in the facilities who is able to quarantine or isolate without the need of social services or additional supports (behavioral health, etc.)
- Public Health and Facilities Management staff clarified for me the unique criteria that parcels and facilities need to meet in order to qualify as an isolation/quarantine facility: The current Public Health criteria* on isolation and quarantine facilities are as follows:
- Doors that face outward
- No shared corridors
- Individual hygiene facilities in each room
- Individual, self-contained HVAC systems in each room
For the siting of modular units, additional screening criteria is applied:
- To the extent possible, County-owned sites in unincorporated King County (for ease of permitting)
- Parcel large enough to accommodate multiple modular
- Parcel able to hook up to utilities
*These criteria will be updated as additional Public Health guidance is issued.
3. Finally, there was a question regarding how many parcels King County owns in our unincorporated areas, and how many met the unique criteria for pandemic quarantine:
King County owns 4,202 partials of land across the county. Filtering out parcels not in unincorporated King County, those smaller than 0.5 acres, and those designated for incompatible uses (e.g. land use restrictions, environmental limitations and legal encumbrances, etc.) leaves 34 properties. Identifying other pertinent characteristics (such as access to utilities) requires extended analysis or a site visit to each of these properties. Given the urgency of the situation, based on the emergency declaration, King County relied on staff knowledge of the remaining sites to determine sites that met the original criteria.
