More changes to our COVID Update report:

Earlier this week the Snohomish Health District announced that it will cease maintaining its COVID-19 Daily Case Count web page effective Friday, June 12. Up to now, this has been the source of data that generate the charts and tables provided in our regular COVID Update reports to you, and because it will be no longer available,Friday’s report will be the last to utilize these data.

In place of the information it has been providing on its Daily Case Count page, the Health District announced today that it will provide a new weekly document (see the first one here) including many of the same metrics, but in a different format. The district will also provide data to the Washington State Department of Health, which will fold it into the information provided on its Coronavirus web page.

Since the data from which we build our report will now be refreshing on a weekly basis, we will not be running our reports biweekly as previously announced, but rather follow the health district’s lead and report to you once per week, usually on Saturday. While the format may change from what you have been seeing, we will continue to strive to make the information useful, clear and easy to interpret. Be assured that we remain committed to tracking and reporting on countywide infection trends, and keeping you informed every step of the way as we navigate the path to reopening.

Teresa Wippel, publisher

The Friday, June 12 data from the Snohomish Health District, continues to show a slow but steady progress in our local battle COVID-19. Looking at the big-picture trends over the full reporting period (Countywide Trend chart), note that the total case counts (blue and yellow lines) continue to flatten, albeit very slowly, and that our county seems comfortably past the steep increases of late March and early April. This virus is looking for one thing – targets – and efforts to contain the spread by social distancing, wearing mask and avoiding large group are making fewer targets for the virus to find.

Since our last report summarizing Monday’s data, 72 new cases have been added (see incremental new cases by day – yellow chart), with 25 over just the past 24 hours. The accretion of new cases has been uneven however, with the count dropping to single digits for two of the four days resulting in a downward tilt to the seven-day rolling trend line (red dashed line). While total Active Cases (red chart) has also behaved erratically over the past four days, it is holding mostly steady overall.  The latest count shows 337 Snohomish County residents now down with the virus.

Number of recovered cases (green chart) rose by 32 since Monday’s count. As of today, 3,057 Snohomish County residents successfully recovered from the infection. The hospital count has risen steadily this week, with 36 now receiving hospital care for COVID-19.

The good news in all this is that for the first time during the reporting period Snohomish County has gone for five consecutive days without a single COVID-related death (gray chart). The total number of fatalities remains steady at 153, or 4.29 percent of the total number infected (confirmed plus probable).

Testing activity in Snohomish County continued apace this week (green and red bar chart), with a preliminary count of 2372 tests administered countywide between 6/2 and 6/8 (the count will be finalized in the coming days).  Since testing began (yellow and green bar chart) the county has recorded 39,130 tests (4.76% of the total population of 822,083) of which 36,071 have tested negative (97.05%) and 3,059 positive (2.95 percent). Note that the proportion of positive tests has been steadily dropping over the reporting period, yet another indicator that our efforts at containment are having the desired effect and making it harder for the virus to find new targets.

For comparison, the Washington Department of Heath COVID information page reports 439,862 tests administered statewide (5.64% of the 7.8 million total population) with 414,691 testing negative (94%) and 25,171 positive (6%).

The Health District has also announced its testing schedule for week of June 15:

• Tuesday, June 16 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at McCollum Park located at 600 128^th St. S.E. in Everett
• Wednesday, June 17 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Sno-Isle Libraries branch located at 9701 271st St. N.W. in Stanwood
• Thursday, June 18 from noon to 7 p.m. at McCollum Park
• Friday, June 19 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Sno-Isle Libraries branch located at 4675 Harbour Pointe Blvd. in Mukilteo

The local numbers for Tuesday, June 9 through Friday, June 12, 2020:

— By Larry Vogel