At a time when COVID-19 vaccines are widely available for people over 12, state health experts say cases in Washington have nearly quadrupled since July and fear hospitalizations have reached an all-time high.
“This pandemic is not slowing down,” said state Health Secretary Umair Shah during a Wednesday news briefing. “If anything, it has sped up.”
Data from the department’s latest COVID situation report shows that the state was averaging 2,262 new cases a week on Aug. 6. Washington was averaging just 375 cases per week on July 3. The Aug. 6 weekly average is only hundreds of cases fewer than the state’s peak weekly average — 2,941 — set in January of this year.
The numbers for average hospitalizations are just as grim.
On July 3, roughly 30 people a week were admitted to a hospital with COVID. By Aug. 6, that number was 96. But that data is weeks old, and state officials say the number of weekly hospital admissions has likely eclipsed the January 2021 apex of 116 admissions per week.
“Hospitals throughout our state are full and are at the highest levels of occupancy that our state has ever seen,” said Steve Mitchell, the emergency room director at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. “This means that many, many patients are waiting in emergency departments for a long period of time before getting a bed in the hospital.”
Health experts at Wednesday’s briefing were very clear about what’s driving the surge: Not enough people in Washington are vaccinated, and that makes them more susceptible to the highly contagious and highly dangerous Delta variant of the coronavirus.
They cited stats to back up that assertion: 96% of the state’s new COVID cases are linked to the Delta variant, and 95% of those now in Washington hospitals were not vaccinated against the virus when admitted, they said.
“In just a couple of months, the Delta variant has ravaged our state. It has preyed particularly on those who are unvaccinated,” Shah said. “Those unvaccinated persons, unfortunately, have largely driven our rising cases and hospitalizations.”
Currently, 54% of Washington residents are fully vaccinated.
During Wednesday’s briefing, Mitchell illustrated the strain that the dramatic spike in hospitalizations has placed on Washington’s health care system. He described a situation in which a severely ill man arrived at a hospital in Western Washington and was immediately put on a ventilator. Health care workers were unable to find an open intensive care unit bed in Washington after hours of searching and the man was eventually sent to Idaho for treatment.
There is one silver lining in the state’s latest batch of COVID data: Despite rising cases and hospitalizations, the number of deaths has remained stagnant. Average weekly deaths peaked in January of this year at 32. Since March, that figure has oscillated between five and ten. By July 30, Washington was seeing an average of six deaths per week.
Recognizing the damage the Delta variant could do to Washington if left unchecked, state leaders have taken significant steps in combating the virus. Gov. Jay Inslee has made vaccination a condition of employment for hundreds of thousands of workers in Washington’s state agencies, schools and private-sector health care facilities. Affected employees have until Oct. 18 to be fully vaccinated; if they choose not to, they could be fired.
The governor also reinstated a statewide mask mandate for indoor public settings. That went into effect Monday.
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