Coronavirus In Pierce County: Week In Review

PIERCE COUNTY, WA — Washington state continues to see case counts and hospitalization rates trend in the right direction and Pierce County is improving right along with it.

The White House's latest COVID-19 State Profile Report on Washington shows the state improving over almost every metric, including a 26 percent decrease in COVID-19 cases and 35 percent decrease in deaths over the week before.

Those improvements have also been reflected in local data as well: last Friday, Pierce County had a rate of 218.2 COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents over 14 days, which has since decreased to a rate of 198.3. It's the first time the county has had a rate under 200 since early November.

Other important metrics are also holding strong. While earlier this week Gov. Jay Inslee announced that regions would no longer be able to fall back into earlier phases of the Healthy Washington plan, the county was in no danger of shutting down regardless. The Healthy Washington plan judges regions based on four metrics and Pierce, as part of the Puget Sound region, has succeeded in all of them with declining case counts and hospital admission rates, low ICU occupancy and low percent positivity for COVID-19 tests.

Meanwhile, despite the recent snowstorms interrupting vaccine deliveries, efforts to vaccinate the state's most vulnerable populations continue. In the week ending Feb. 24, Washington administered an average of 26,982 vaccines a day. In Pierce County, providers have administered more than 157,113 vaccine doses — with nearly 22,000 doses administered in just the last week.

The increase is perhaps unsurprising, as the Tacoma - Pierce County Health Department has also dialed up their vaccine response, offering multiple free vaccination clinics over the past few days, with more to come in the weeks ahead.

As of the latest update from the health department, the county has had a total of 36,186 COVID-19 cases and 464 deaths since the pandemic began last spring.

Catch up on the latest developments:

Health officials wait for word on third COVID-19 vaccine

Friday, the FDA approved a third COVID-19 vaccine, but it still needs to meet CDC approval before it can be deployed en masse. If that happens, however, Washington health leaders say they'll be ready and the state could receive 60,900 doses of the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine by the end of the next week.

Unlike the current Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, which are both 95 percent effective at protecting against symptomatic COVID-19, the J&J shot is only about 66 percent effective at preventing moderate to severe COVID-19 illnesses, and 85 percent effective against serious illnesses. However, the J&J vaccine also only requires one dose. Unlike the previous vaccines, which require two shots taken weeks apart to confer full immunity, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine provides relative immunity in an instant.

Read more: New COVID-19 Vaccine Could Help WA Make Up For Lost Time

South African COVID-19 variant found in Washington

A new COVID-19 variant has been detected in a Washington resident, and state health leaders say there's likely more cases out there.

The B.1.351 variant was first identified in South Africa in December, but has since been found in 10 states — including this latest case in Washington. According to the state department of health, the case was identified in a King County patient who tested positive for the coronavirus back on Jan. 29.

Unlike the United Kingdom variant, B.1.1.7, this second COVID-19 variant does not appear to spread more easily or quickly than the predominant strain. However, it may be more resilient to vaccines.

The U.K. variant was first discovered in Washington in late January. A third variant, the P.1 variant, has been discovered in Brazil and has made its way to America, but has not yet been detected in Washington.

Read more: South African COVID-19 Variant Confirmed In Washington

Inslee pauses phase rollbacks

None of Washington's 39 counties will be moving back into phase 1 for the foreseeable future, according to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee.

Initially, the Healthy Washington plan allowed the state to push counties that were seeing spikes or growths in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations back into earlier phases — forcing some businesses in those counties to shut their doors once again. Now, the state says that won't happen, at least until they finish re-tooling other parts of the Healthy Washington program.

"We're making this pause in recognition of the fact that we've made incredible progress in knocking down the infection rate of COVID in the last several weeks," Inslee said Thursday. "We know we need to follow the science and the data in making these decisions, but I think it is clear that we have had enough success in the recent weeks to be able to put a pause on any alternatives that regions would go backward."

Read more: Inslee Pauses Rollbacks, All Washington Counties Stay In Phase 2

Total coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths in Pierce County:

Editors note: Patch is now updating these totals on a weekly, rather than daily, basis. Readers should keep in mind that the increases below represent infections and deaths over a seven-day period.

The above numbers are provided by the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, and some numbers differ from the totals provided separately by the Washington State Department of Health.