Pierce County COVID Cases 'Beginning To Plateau' Health Dept Says

TACOMA, WA — Pierce County has suffered an outsized number of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations compared with its contemporaries during this fifth wave of infections, but there is a growing hope that the county is starting to turn the situation around.

According to the latest update from the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, the county's COVID-19 case rate was 557 new cases per every 100,000 residents between September 15-28. That's still high — higher than it ever was before this fall — but it may be an early indication that case counts are plateauing.

In the health department's most recent blog post, TPDCH Community Assessment Manager Naomi Wilson says it is still too early if the plateau will continue, or if case counts will go down, but it's a welcome improvement from the explosive growth the county saw just months ago.

The hospitalization rate remains high, with 11.6 people hospitalized out of every 100,000 residents over the past seven days. According to the health department, hospitalizations are overwhelmingly among the unvaccinated, and DOH data shows unvaccinated Washingtonians are between 10 to 26 times more likely to be hospitalized than their vaccinated counterparts.

An improving vaccination rate can also be credited for the decline in new cases, the health department said. Case counts are dropping in parts of the count with vaccination rates of 56 percent and above, meanwhile rural Pierce County (which has the lowest vaccination rates) is seeing the highest number of new cases.

In particular, the health department says South and East Pierce County are still wracked with high case counts, and account for a quarter of the county's school outbreaks, despite having less than 10 percent of the county's school aged kids.

Still, the start of a plateau is an encouraging sign, as is the increase in vaccination rates from the low in July.

Pierce County will need to see significant improvement if it wants to catch up to its neighbors to the north: at a briefing Friday, King County's top health official confirmed that his county's number of hospitalized patients had dropped 40 percent compared to the month before.

Related: King County's Delta Surge Is On The Decline