Cases

PACIFIC COUNTY — Local health officials are encouraging people to look at a new risk assessment tool showing the number of new covid-19 cases per 100,000 to help understand disease activity in Pacific County.

In almost half a year, state, local and national health officials have gained a better understanding of covid-19, how it is transmitted, what people can do to protect themselves and how to measure the scope of the disease. With the national death toll climbing closer to 200,000, public health officials are urging people to take precautions against the disease.

On Monday, Aug. 17, Pacific County health officials were still waiting to confirm the cause of death for a county resident who died after being diagnosed with covid-19. If covid-19 caused their death, it will be the third pandemic related death attributed to the county. In the last week, the number of covid-19 cases climbed to 59, with public health nurses monitoring three active cases as of Monday. The disease has hospitalized eight county residents.

Four of the 59 cases involved people living outside the county. Of the remaining 55 cases, 37 of the people live in South Pacific County and 18 live in North Pacific County. Both ends of the county have similar population sizes.

Active cases and total case counts are just one way to look at disease activity. Health officials prefer to look at the number of new cases per 100,000 in the past 14 days to help decide whether transmission is slowing, said Katie Lindstrom, director of Pacific County’s Public Health and Human Services Department.

The most recent two-week period with a calculated rate was July 30 through Aug. 12, which showed a rate of 87.8 new cases per 100,000 people. Anything above 75 puts Pacific County in the high risk of transmission category. However, it was slightly down from the county’s highest new case rate, which was 110.9 new cases per 100,000 people during the two week period starting July 25 and ending on Aug. 7.

The risk assessment dashboard was placed at the bottom of the front page of the county’s covid-19 website, https://www.pacificcountycovid19.com/.

The health department wants cases to drop, and in order for that to happen, people need to take seriously the precautions being recommended, Lindstrom said. This includes wearing a mask while in public, staying home as much as possible and limiting social circles to no more than 10 people per week.

Social gatherings are where the health department continues to see disease transmission, Lindstrom said. If people keep their social circles smaller, it will be less likely for sprawling outbreaks, such as what was seen at the Ocean Park social clubs.

Covid-19’s increasing death toll

In 2017, the leading causes of death in the U.S. were heart disease and cancer, which combined killed more than 1.2 million people, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The next leading cause of death was accidents, also called “unintentional injuries,” which killed a little less than 170,000 people. As of Monday, Aug. 18, the CDC reported more than 169,800 covid-19 deaths in the U.S.

“In five months, covid-19 deaths have climbed to make it likely it will be the third leading cause of death for 2020,” said Dr. Steven Krager, public health officer for Pacific County.

While the disease did not cripple health systems across the country the way early models predicted, the mortality rate of the disease is high, Krager said.

In Washington, as of Aug. 16, the number of covid-19 deaths was up to 1,785, which is more than the population of the City of Long Beach, estimated to be about 1,400 people in 2018, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Covid-19 would be the seventh cause of death in Washington if ranked in 2017.

If people want schools to open, it is critical to drive down the infection rate, Krager said. Reopening schools in the midst of a case spike would send the county backwards in terms of disease transmission.

The disease is being passed through the community, and about one in every hundred people are estimated to have it. About 40 to 45% of those people are asymptomatic. People who later do develop symptoms are often shedding the virus at a high rate before they know they’re sick.

“In the two days before people develop symptoms, they’re not just infectious, they’re very infectious,” Krager said.

Krager stressed people follow the mask mandate to protect others, as well as themselves. While a person wearing a mask may still contract covid-19, some evidence shows the masks may reduce how large a “dose” of the virus a person gets, Krager said. People who wore masks and still got infected appear to have less severe symptoms, though this is something still being studied.

People who have contracted the disease and recovered should stay cautious. Having the disease in the past may not prevent people from getting the disease again, Krager said. The CDC has issued guidance that if three months pass between a first positive test and a second positive test, health officials should count that as a new infection.

Tourism

As the Labor Day weekend approaches, Krager said the county was beginning to look at what the holiday might do to case numbers in the area.

In the other counties Krager monitors, which include Clark, Cowlitz, Skamania and Wahkiakum, there are some direct ties to tourists and disease outbreaks, something public health nurses have not had a clear example of in Pacific County.

“What I would say about Labor Day is it’s more about gatherings, this is not the time to have large gatherings,” Krager said.

The county was also talking with the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries to come up with enforcement decisions regarding reports of businesses not following mask mandates and social distancing rules, Krager said.

If there were more concrete examples of tourism driving the numbers up, it might lead to closures similar to what the county did in early March. Without that clear association with tourism, businesses such as hotels and RV campsites will remain open, Krager said.

The vast majority of hotels and tourism related business owners are serious about making sure there are precautions in place to prevent visitors from endangering the local populations, said Tiffany Turner, CEO of Adrift Hotels Inc., and Board Chair for the Long Beach Visitors Bureau. Generally, her customers have understood this and complied with social distancing and the mask mandate, Turner said.

“The traveling population seems aware they need to be protecting the local population,” Turner said.

By and large business owners understand this isn’t just life and death for people, it’s life and death for businesses as well. She took the lack of a large volume of tourism related cases as a sign that businesses are successfully minimizing transmission of the disease. The hotel is stocked with Adrift branded facemasks for visitors.

“Oftentimes allowing visitors to be the scapegoat lets off locals who aren’t taking it seriously,” Turner said. “We all need to take the pandemic seriously, it is up to each of us.”