COVID-19 death toll in Washington state passes 900
The Washington State Department of Health reported 157 new COVID-19 cases and 14 additional deaths Friday.
Statewide case totals have reached 16,388, while the state’s death toll is now at 905, up from 16,231 cases and 891 deaths Thursday.
King County continues to be the hardest hit, reporting 6,863 cases and 487 deaths. Snohomish County has reached 2,634 cases and 115 deaths, and Pierce County is reporting 1,634 cases and 58 deaths.
Of the state’s 39 counties, all but Garfield County have reported cases, with Benton (559), Chelan (140), Clark (347), Douglas (102), Franklin (404), Grant (180), Island (172), King (6,863), Kitsap (154), Pierce (1,634), Skagit (391), Snohomish (2,634), Spokane (381), Thurston (115), Whatcom (329) and Yakima (1,579) all reporting more than 100 cases.
Twenty-two counties have reported at least one virus-related death. All but four of those counties have reported multiple deaths, with Benton (48), Clark (20), Franklin (16), King (487), Pierce (58), Skagit (13), Snohomish (115), Spokane (27), Whatcom (33) and Yakima (58) all reporting at least 10.
Gov. Jay Inslee announced Friday that five counties — Columbia, Garfield, Lincoln, Ferry and Pend Oreille, which have all reported two cases or less — have been approved to move on to Phase 2 of the state’s reopening plan.
Three more counties — Kittitas, Skamania and Wahkiakum — have also applied to move forward and are under review.
None of these counties have reported virus-related deaths.
There are 69 cases that have not been assigned to a county.
There have been 235,835 tests given in Washington, with positive results now at 6.9%.
The DOH is also now reporting downloadable datasets that break down cases and deaths by week, county and age. These datasets are updated each Sunday.
Preliminary data on total hospitalizations for confirmed cases — broken down by admission date, date of illness onset, age, sex and race and ethnicity — are also now available.
The DOH also added another hospitalization data update on its reporting site Tuesday.
“Effective May 5, the visualization of COVID-like illness (CLI) hospitalizations reflects hospitalizations identified using updated methodology,” the site says. “While it still may include hospitalizations where the patient is not tested or tests negative for COVID-19, this strategy is optimized to identify more patients with CLI, patients diagnosed with coronavirus of any type, and to remove visits in which the patient was diagnosed with influenza. The overall effect is that the proportion and number of CLI hospitalizations is larger than it was previously.”
This story was originally published May 8, 2020 at 6:48 PM.
