Pierce County's COVID Case Rate Nearly Doubled The Past 2 Weeks

TACOMA, WA — Pierce County's 14-day COVID-19 case rate has nearly doubled over the past two weeks as local health leaders and officials battle to contain the rapidly-spreading fifth wave of coronavirus infections.

Last week, Patch reported that Pierce County may have already been seeing the most COVID-19 cases yet, depending on which datasets were being analyzed: self-reported data from the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department showed that the county's 14-day case rate was the highest it had ever been. Washington State Department of Health data, on the other hand, did not.

Unfortunately, there is no question any longer, as the case rate has continued its explosive growth over the past week. As of the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department's latest update, the 14-day case rate per 100,000 Pierce County residents was 556 new cases between Aug. 2 - Aug. 15. Just two weeks before that, on Aug. 10, the department's reported case rate was 287.1.

"This is the longest and strongest sustained case rate increase we've seen since the beginning of the pandemic," wrote Aunya Butler, a spokesperson for the department. "Outbreaks in the community are increasing in frequency and size. Our 7-day hospitalization rates have increased 2.5 times since the beginning of July."

Unfortunately, the pandemic is now largely a pandemic of the unvaccinated. According to an update from TPCHD Thursday, between Feb. 1 and July 31, 2021 unvaccinated Pierce County residents made up:

• 95.5 percent of new confirmed cases.
• 95.4 percent of COVID-19 hospitalizations.
• 94.4 percent of COVID-19 deaths.

"We expect those numbers to change as the Delta variant becomes more prevalent and more people get vaccinated," wrote Nigel Turner, "Communicable Disease Director for the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department."Vaccines are extremely effective at preventing serious illness, hospitalization, and death."

As Turner hinted at above, state and local health leaders are largely blaming the recent surge of COVID-19 infections on the virus' delta variant, which spreads more easily and has become the predominant form of the coronavirus in Washington state. The delta wave pushed Pierce County Director of Health Dr. Anthony L-T Chen to issue a new mask directive last week, which was later superseded by the state's full-blown mask order, but health officials say that increased masking is only a stopgap measure, and that the only long-term solution will be addressing vaccine hesitancy and boosting the local vaccination rate.

And the vaccination rate is having a marked impact on COVID-19 rates. King County on Tuesday became one of the most-vaccinated parts of the country, with 70 percent of its eligible population receiving at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine across all age groups. In comparison, just over half of eligible Pierce County residents have received their first dose.

Data shows just how much that 20 percent vaccination rate difference means: despite being more densely populated than Pierce County, King County's 7-day case rate is only 187.1 per 100,000 residents. Granted, the 7-day metric doesn't directly correlate with the 14-day rate used by Pierce County, but it is a markedly smaller number of cases.

As a result, Pierce County health leaders continue to urge anyone who has yet to receive the vaccine, and even those who haven't yet gotten their second shot, to come forward and take a dose and protect their health.