Coronavirus updates: State passes 68k cases; report shows new rise in nursing home cases
This page includes coronavirus developments around Washington state for Tuesday, August 18.
Updated at 4:30 p.m.
The Washington State Department of Health on Tuesday reported 543 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 24 deaths.
Pierce County reported 53 new cases and no new deaths Pierce County had a total of 133 deaths likely caused by COVID-19 as of Tuesday, according to the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department.
Statewide totals from the illness caused by the coronavirus are at 68,264 cases and 1,809 deaths, up from 67,721 cases and 1,785 deaths on Monday.
Forty-six people with confirmed COVID-19 cases were admitted to Washington state hospitals on Aug. 10, the most recent date with complete data. Late March had two days with 88 people admitted, the highest numbers to date during the pandemic.
The total number of tests conducted is temporarily unavailable, according to the DOH.
The test numbers reflect only polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, whichare given while the virus is presumably still active in the body.
King County continues to have the highest numbers in Washington, with 17,908 cases and 698 deaths. Yakima County is second, with 10,665 cases and 227 deaths. Pierce is third with cases at 6,129.
All counties in Washington have cases. Garfield and Wahkiakum have case counts of fewer than 10.
On Tuesday, Washington had a 899-per-100,000-people case rate. The national rate is 1,613, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Louisiana has the highest rate in the United States at 2,972. Vermont is lowest at 244.
There had been over 5.4 million confirmed coronavirus cases and 171,636 deaths from the virus in the United States as of Saturday evening, according to Johns Hopkins University. More than 776,000 people have died from the disease worldwide.
Pierce County reports 53 new cases Tuesday
Updated at 4:30 p.m.
Pierce County on Tuesday reported 53 new COVID-19 cases and one additional death.
The death was a man in his 80s from Gig Harbor with underlying health conditions, according to the health department.
County totals are now 6,129 cases and 133 deaths since the first case in the coronavirus pandemic was recorded March 6.
The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department has reported 930 cases in the past 14 days. The 14-day case rate per 100,000 people is 103.1. The goal for counties in Phase 2 is 25 or fewer per 100,000.
The average cases per day over the past 14 days is 66.4
There are an estimated 2,228 still-active cases in the county as of Aug. 17, according to the health department.
The county ranks third for cumulative cases in the state.
Daily totals for cases and deaths can change as the county receives new information, finds duplicate data or is assigned cases originally attributed to other counties.
Testing is available at various sites in the county. For more information on testing sites, go to www.tpchd.org/covidtest.
Tuesday’s geographical case totals are listed below with previous day’s totals in parentheses:
▪ Bonney Lake: 148 (no change)
▪ Central Pierce County: 386 (no change)
▪ East Pierce County: 175 (no change)
▪ Edgewood/Fife/Milton: 244 (242)
▪ Frederickson: 234 (232)
▪ Gig Harbor area: 161 (no change)
▪ Graham: 210 (209)
▪ JBLM: No longer reported
▪ Key Peninsula: 41 (no change)
▪ Lake Tapps/Sumner area: 192 (189)
▪ Lakewood: 577 (574)
▪ Parkland: 338 (336)
▪ Puyallup: 361 (357)
▪ South Hill: 314 (313)
▪ South Pierce County: 148 (145)
▪ Southwest Pierce County: 65 (64)
▪ Spanaway: 284 (281)
▪ Tacoma: 1,925 (1,905)
▪ University Place: 248 (245)
▪ Unknown: 78 (73)
Washington state reports 260 new cases Monday
Updated at 8:40 a.m.
The Washington State Department of Health on Monday reported 260 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 and four deaths.
Pierce County reported 31 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 and no deaths on Monday. Pierce County had a total of 132 deaths likely caused by COVID-19 as of Monday, according to the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department.
Statewide totals from the illness caused by the coronavirus are at 67,721 cases and 1,785 deaths, up from 67,461 cases and 1,781 Sunday.
Twenty-nine people with confirmed COVID-19 cases were admitted to Washington state hospitals on Aug. 9, the most recent date with complete data. Late March had two days with 88 people admitted, the highest numbers to date during the pandemic.
The total number of tests conducted is temporarily unavailable, according to the DOH. On Aug. 9, 271 specimens were collected statewide, with 73.8% testing positive. The average positive test rate for the seven days prior was 42.9%.
The test numbers reflect only polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, which are given to patients while the virus is presumably still active in the body.
King County continues to have the highest numbers in Washington, with 17,745 cases and 694 deaths. Yakima County is second, with 10,645 cases and 221 deaths. Pierce is third with cases at 6,177.
All counties in Washington have cases. Garfield and Wahkiakum have case counts of fewer than 10.
Nursing homes see new rise in coronavirus cases, report says. What’s happening?
Updated at 8:40 a.m.
Nursing homes saw a jump in coronavirus infections after weeks of declining case counts, a new report finds.
Cases tied to care facilities surged from late June to July, when they reached a new high, the American Health Care Association said. A growing portion of affected nursing homes were in southern and western states, findings published Monday show.
The regions, sometimes collectively called the Sun Belt, increasingly saw COVID-19 hotspots around the same time period, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the time, some states had relaxed coronavirus-related restrictions and ramped up efforts to test for the disease, McClatchy News reported.
The recent increase in nursing home coronavirus cases is “due to community spread in Sun Belt states,” the American Health Care Association said in its report. Many hotspots had previously been in the Northeast.
On May 31, about 32% of nursing home infections were in the South and West, data show. Two months later, that figure jumped to 78%.
Also, coronavirus-related deaths tied to care facilities have been increasingly reported in the Sun Belt, according to the report.
Across the United States, the American Health Care Association said nursing homes had 9,421 confirmed cases of the virus as of May 31.
The count dipped as low as 5,480 in late June before rising back up to 9,715 on July 26. That figure, a new peak, was the latest one available in the report.
To come up with its findings, the American Health Care Association said it analyzed data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The figures it shared went back to May 31.
Nurse at Coyote Ridge in Connell describes ‘petri dish’ of ‘inhumane conditions’
Updated at 8:40 a.m.
As chaotic conditions at an Eastern Washington prison have deteriorated, COVID-19-positive inmates with severely restricted access to bathrooms are refusing to drink water, according to one prison nurse’s account.
With clothing changes only once per week and little privacy in the COVID-19 tents outside, sick inmates fear the “humiliation” of soiling their clothes and sitting in filth for days, the nurse wrote.
These are just two of the many concerns Katrina Pinkerton laid out in a July 28 email to 30 Department of Corrections staff about what she described as the department’s “serious neglect” in managing the coronavirus’s spread at the Coyote Ridge Corrections Center in Connell.
The DOC confirmed in a statement that Pinkerton worked as a contracted nurse for the prison from late June to mid-July and worked mostly graveyard shifts.
Pinkerton, a Yale School of Nursing graduate, described temporary nurses having no medical information about their patients, staff losing track of where virus-positive inmates were housed, officers using handcuffing maneuvers reserved for punishment to deal with sick inmates and “inhumane conditions” she feared would lead to inmates’ “irreversible psychological trauma.”
She also praised DOC leaders for working despite fatigue to get resources like masks and water bottles in bulk for the facility, writing “you’re doing what you can to deal with an impossible task.”
“No one at any given organization is going to get things just ‘right,’ ” she wrote. “And yet all of us are capable of always striving to do better, no matter how hard the circumstance. Especially when our present efforts fail to help, and even cause harm, to thousands of others.”
A DOC statement from Communications Director Janelle Guthrie said the department takes the allegations in the email “very seriously” and that the department’s health care quality team and other staff plan to meet with the Coyote Ridge health team to review processes and “ensure continuous improvement.”
Two inmates have died from coronavirus at Coyote Ridge and 233 others have tested positive. Victor Bueno, the first of two Coyote Ridge inmates to die from the virus, was about three months away from his expected release date.
Coyote Ridge has had more positive cases than any other Washington prison, the DOC statement said.
As of Aug. 7, seven inmates from Coyote Ridge were “considered to have active COVID-19 symptoms,” and three of them were housed there on that date.
COVID-19 might have spread ‘unseen’ through Puget Sound as early as Christmas, study shows
Updated at 8:40 a.m.
Our current enemy, COVID-19, most likely loomed large in our lives earlier than we realized, according to new research.
In a study published Aug. 12 on The Lancet’s EClinicalMedicine journal, researchers from the University of Texas at Austin tested samples from patients with COVID-like symptoms in Wuhan, China, and the Seattle metropolitan area, including King and Snohomish counties.
Their conclusion: “The spread of COVID-19 in Wuhan and Seattle was far more extensive than initially reported.
“Given that COVID-19 appears to be overwhelmingly mild in children, our high estimate for symptomatic pediatric cases in Seattle suggests that there may have been thousands more mild cases at the time.”
Lauren Ancel Meyers is a professor of integrative biology and statistics and data sciences who leads the UT Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium. Meyers spoke to the university’s UT News about the study.
“Even before we realized that COVID-19 was spreading, the data imply that there was at least one case of COVID-19 for every two cases of flu,” Meyers said.
Researchers re-examined swabs taken from people with symptoms of acute respiratory illness “during periods where SARS-CoV-2 may have been spreading undetected,” according to the research report.
Wuhan at the time of its lockdown Jan. 22 reported 422 cases. But, according to UT News, the new research suggests undetected cases may have numbered more than 12,000 at the time. By March 9, the researchers estimate that more than 9,000 people in the Seattle area symptomatic with flu-like symptoms actually had COVID-19, with about a third of that total involving children.
The researchers estimate that the Wuhan pandemic started with one person who developed symptoms “sometime between Oct. 26 and Dec. 13, 2019; in Seattle, the seeding likely occurred between Dec. 25, 2019 and Jan. 15, 2020.”
March 6 was when the first case was reported in Pierce County.
This story was originally published August 18, 2020 at 8:41 AM.
