Washington state sees plateau, possible uptick in COVID activity, officials say
Things are no longer going in the right direction, state health officials said Wednesday during their weekly briefing about the state’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“In summary, after six weeks of decline, COVID-19 activity plateaued and now is starting to increase statewide,” State Health Officer Dr. Kathy Lofy said at the virtual briefing, after showing various graphs about case counts and other data.
Statewide totals were 87,522 cases and 2,126 deaths Wednesday, up from 87,042 cases and 2,124 deaths the day before.
The health officials said social distancing, masks, hand washing, limiting contact with others, and keeping activities outdoors whenever possible remains crucial as the weather gets cooler.
And when indoors, keep thinking about ventilation, they cautioned.
“We really just simply can’t let our guard down anywhere in the state,” Secretary of Health John Wiesman said.
Wiesman called out ads from groups in Yakima that he said are “creating a false and dangerous impression” that things can go back to normal.
“More work is definitely needed,” he said.
Preparing for a vaccine
Wiesman said the state has gotten about $5 million in federal funding for vaccine response preparation, such as for vendor contracts and staffing, as the state gets ready for limited amounts of vaccine to arrive sometime later this year.
The National Academies will release a final version Friday of their framework for prioritizing who gets the vaccine first.
“We’ll be looking at that report when it comes out and it will continue to inform our planning,” Wiesman said.
15-minute test results
Dr. Charissa Fotinos, who leads the state’s testing effort, said she expects Washington to get about 149,000 antigen tests from the federal government in the next five to 10 days.
That’s part of the 150 million tests the federal government announced it is distributing.
The state “will have a lot of these,“ and they “think they’ll be very useful,” Fotinos said.
Lofy said for now the state plans to report antigen test results separately from others. The results are ready in about 15 minutes, but they’re not quite as accurate as molecular tests and it’s not really known how well they work on asymptomatic people, she said.
They make up a small amount of total tests done in the state now, but Lofy said she expects they’ll be used more and more and might affect trends in the data.
An antigen is part of a virus that your immune system uses to recognize it as a foreign substance – this signals your body to start making antibodies to fight the virus. Antigen tests detect the presence of a specific viral antigen, which implies current viral infection.
This story was originally published September 30, 2020 at 5:57 PM with the headline "Washington state sees plateau, possible uptick in COVID activity, officials say."
