Lives, reopening economy jeopardized by new surge of COVID-19 in Pierce County, officials say
With a pause in place for Pierce County to expand reopenings amid the pandemic, members of the health department on Wednesday gave details on where outbreaks were happening and admitted community spread was setting back previous efforts to loosen restrictions on business and society.
While Gov. Jay Inslee and the state Department of Health on Thursday doubled down on mask requirements, requiring businesses to refuse service to those not wearing masks, local businesses are already feeling the effects of a pandemic spinning out of control.
Thursday was another day of more than 50 new cases reported in Pierce County, the same day the state saw a record day of new case totals: 716.
“The message for everyone to remember is the disease is widespread now, it’s affecting wherever people are going, and ... it is also affecting the businesses that we’re trying to keep open,” Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department director Dr. Anthony Chen said.
As new cases grow, metrics to move ahead to Phase 3 of the states Safe Start plan, or even just an expanded Phase 2, become harder to reach.
Pierce County businesses and essential services are seeing more COVID-19 outbreaks since the advancement into Phase 2, according to a presentation made Wednesday to the county’s Board of Health.
The surge in Pierce County cases stems from residents spending more time together, according to staff from the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department.
The county is seeing about two outbreaks of COVID-19 cases per week, though that can vary, according to communicable disease director Nigel Turner.
“We’re seeing more outbreaks in workplaces and probably less in adult residential facilities, but generally we’re around the target level of two per week,” Turner told the Board of Health on Wednesday.
Outbreaks are considered at least two cases at a site, with Pierce County’s Safe Start metric allowing for two or fewer.
A spike of seven was logged the week of June 13, according to the health department’s dashboard. The week of June 20 saw 2 outbreaks.
The change in outbreaks now, according to Wednesday’s presentation, is that they are being seen in places that either didn’t see them in Phase 1 or had not registered any cases for awhile.
Chen said the health department is now working with 11 businesses.
In response to questions last week about what measures go into curtailing outbreaks, a representative for the health department told The News Tribune that when an outbreak occurs: “We focus on educating facilities about the steps they need to take to control the spread of disease. These are typically collaborative conversations where orders to shut down are not necessary.”
The source of outbreaks happening now might not be the business itself, but gatherings outside the business, such as at parties or restaurants, or in general situations where people aren’t taking precautions and are together for a prolonged time.
“It’s really around settings where people are spending time,” Stephanie Dunkel, assistant communicable disease director, said Wednesday.
Chen used the example of hardware stores, deemed essential and also open through Phase 1.
“We weren’t really having outbreaks in hardware stores a month ago,” he noted. “It’s not anything per se about the hardware store. It’s the fact that the big difference between a month ago and now is that people are moving around more.”
Grocery stores also are seeing new cases.
“We’ve had ... a few cases in some of them in the past, but we’re seeing cases in them again now. And it’s not necessarily the nature of the ... grocery store, it’s the fact that people are moving around more (so) there’s more disease now spreading in the community,” Chen said.
On Wednesday, Pierce County reported 34 new cases and one death. Tuesday, it reported 47 new cases and over the weekend pushed past 50 in a one-day spike.
The county is not alone, as the state warned late last week about the growing number of cases in the Puget Sound area.
The county has reported 447 cases in the past 14 days, according to case totals reported Thursday. The 14-day case rate per 100,000 population is 49.6, and average cases per day over the past 14 days is 31.9.
As of Thursday, the county had seen 2,642 cases and 90 deaths since the county’s first case was reported March 6, and has an estimated 630 still-active cases, according to health department totals updated each day.
There has been a slight increase in the proportion of cases among those 40 or younger, Turner said at Wednesday’s meeting.
The disparate impact on minority communities remains. Black, Hispanic, Native Americans and Hawaiians and Pacific Islander communities account for 20.8 percent of the Pierce County population but are seeing 39.1 percent of COVID-19 cases, according to July 1 data.
Moving forward, Chen said there is no date or target to reach before the health department considers moving forward in an expanded Phase 2 or Phase 3.
“It’s really more looking at what is going on in terms of transmission in the community,” he told the board.
Contact tracing
With contact tracing and case investigations, timing is critical. The sooner people are alerted, the sooner the spread can be controlled.
“We continue to focus on rapid case in contact investigations to get people into isolation and quarantine to prevent community transmission. And we’ve reached our target for reaching contacts within 48 hours,” Turner said Wednesday.
The county is close to hitting its goal of reaching contacts within 24 hours, at 85 percent now against the target of 90 percent or more more, work that’s benefited from having more case investigators on hand, as a department representative told The News Tribune last week.
Dunkel, at Wednesday’s meeting, noted that with the increased case count of recent weeks, the department has been doing “daily monitoring of anywhere between 375 to 450 people.”
Pierce County has allocated nearly $8 million from federal CARES funding to observe cases.
Thus far, the funding has added 45 positions on the investigations team.
According to Turner, “So far we’ve trained 91 people to fill key roles and have two more trainings scheduled in July to train 60 more. Forty-eight of the 91 trained are regular health department staff.
“So we’re on track to train 200 staff needed to be able to respond to up to 350 cases per day, and we should achieve this by Aug. 15.”
Will it be enough to make a difference in curtailing community spread? That depends on how rapidly,and how much new cases grow. For now, the county is estimating need based on modeling.
Testing
In June, the health department did nearly twice the amount of testing than previously. The TPCHD reported conducting about 2,400 tests per week in May. By the end of June, that number increased to 4,000 tests a week.
The department’s dashboard still shows the county isn’t hitting the state target of people tested per each positive test result, which should be 50 or more.
Pierce County is at 24.8.
As the number of positive cases grows in the county, now at 3.9 percent, that target grows more challenging to hit, Turner noted Wednesday.
Different outreach efforts hope to boost those numbers.
Turner said the health department equipped two trailers with testing supplies and sent them out into the community on Wednesday. The trailers will help clinics, churches and other locations to reach certain populations. One was sent to East Pierce County and another is in east and central Tacoma.
Among testing centers, the drive-thru testing site operated by Kroger at the Tacoma Dome performed 1,584 tests in the month of June, QFC media representative Tiffany Sanders told The News Tribune via email.
Additionally, Kroger recently gained FDA emergency authorization for an at-home COVID-19 test kit for its front-line workers. The tests are not yet available to its Washington state workers but are set to be distributed to more states in the coming weeks.
‘Learn new routines’
What will it take to get to the next phase?
For now, counties are paused in moving forward, an action the state took on Thursday.
Chen on Wednesday said Pierce County needed to get back to respecting the virus and following the same protocols the department has been preaching since the start: remembering your mask, washing your hands and being mindful of physical distancing are critical.
“Learn new routines, you know, be compulsive about it,” he said. “I think the same general principles about hygiene, sanitation, physical distance, reducing the amount of physical and social interactions you have all add up.
“So, for example, you’re probably better off like if you have a friend or a family member that you go on walks with, on a regular basis, you’re probably better off than if you were meeting up with a different friend walking at lunch and with a different friend walking at dinnertime, so on and so forth.
“If you decide you’re going to go hike and you get to the trailhead and there’s a mob and people rushing past each other on the trail, you might want to find another trail. Everyone needs to really think back to the basics here of what is causing the transmission, what puts them at risk of transmission, and also the risk of them transmitting to other people.”
This story was originally published July 3, 2020 at 7:05 AM.
