News & Politics

Two Weeks Later and Counting, There’s Still No Covid Surge in the DC Area After Protests

Washington is approaching 80,000 cases, a grim milestone. Yet new cases continue to decline overall.

Protesters on June 3 on 16th Street, NW. Photograph by Evy Mages
Coronavirus 2020

About Coronavirus 2020

Washingtonian is keeping you up to date on the coronavirus around DC.

New cases of Covid-19 in Washington continue to trend downward; this week we saw the lowest numbers of new cases since the very first days of April. The numbers stand in stark contrast with record upticks in several states, as well as concerns that mass protests over racial inequality might lead to an increase in illness.

Washington saw 376 new cases going into Wednesday. That continues a decline that’s been visible since June 5, a week into the protesting. The exception was June 9—the day of George Floyd’s memorial service—in which Washington saw a spike of about 1,300 cases. But that spike was likely an illusion, an effect of Johns Hopkins (from which Washingtonian culls county data) not publishing data from Virginia for June 8. When the days are averaged, the downward trend is clearer.

Meanwhile, the total number of cases ticked up to 79,508. Both data trends come from daily updates to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center. (Washingtonian’s full data set can be found here.)



Health officials have recently expressed a new appreciation for the importance of masks, and there’s a lot of ongoing discussion about the possibility that viral spread might be mitigated in the outdoors. The protests that erupted after the police torture and killing of Floyd have overwhelmingly been held outdoors, with masking at least somewhat widespread.

To examine the effect of the coronavirus on the area, Washingtonian examined only the data from the eight relevant jurisdictions that comprise the metro area.

Click here to see the full data set procured by Washingtonian, including county by county.

Benjamin Wofford
Staff Writer

Benjamin Wofford is a contributing editor at Washingtonian.