CORONAVIRUS: Friday 1/22/2021 roundup

| Coronavirus | West Seattle news

47 weeks have now passed since the Friday night announcement of the first King County case of COVID-19. Here are tonight’s updates:

KING COUNTY NUMBERS: From the Public Health daily-summary page, cumulative totals:

*73,801 people have tested positive, 356 more than yesterday’s total

*1,214 people have died, 8 more than yesterday’s total

*4,683 people have been hospitalized, 19 more than yesterday’s total

*810,109 people have been tested, 5,123 more than yesterday’s total

And from the COVID Vaccination Among King County Residents dashboard, our weekly check:

*126,474 people have received one dose

*21,910 people have received both doses

*214,425 doses have been allocated to King County

One week ago, the first four totals were 71,231/1,180/4,566/788,074, and the vaccination totals were 82,382/11,640/141,375.

STATEWIDE NUMBERS: See them here.

WORLDWIDE NUMBERS: 98.1 million cases, 2,107,000+ deaths – see the nation-by-nation numbers here.

PHASE 1 FOR WEEK 3: In the third “Roadmap to Recovery” report since the governor’s announcement of a new reopening plan, everyone’s still in Phase 1 for the week ahead. This week’s announcement also included the launch of this dashboard to monitor how regions are doing.

COUNTY HEALTH OFFICER’S BRIEFING: Dr. Jeff Duchin provided his weekly video briefing – see it here. He said we’re still on a “COVID rollercoaster,” though right now it’s going down. He also discussed the vaccination situation.

SPEAKING OF VACCINATIONS … still no mass vaccination sites planned on the peninsula. But as we mentioned last night, several local pharmacies are expected to offer it – eventually. As for large health-care providers, they’ve been vaccinating off-peninsula – CHI Franciscan‘s closest location, for example, is St. Anne Hospital in Burien. Sea Mar says it’s been vaccinating at locations including White Center BUT it does not have any vaccine available right now. Dr. Duchin said in his briefing today that more than 300 King County providers have signed up to offer vaccine – but many haven’t received any at all, yet.

COVID CLOSURE: West Seattle Grounds says it’ll be closed again Saturday because its staff is dealing with possible exposure.

NEED FOOD? Reminder – the Greater Seattle Filipino-American SDA Church has another food distribution tomorrow, 2:30 pm Saturday (January 23rd), 2620 SW Kenyon, first-come first-served.

GOT INFO OR PHOTOS? westseattleblog@gmail.com or text/voice 206-293-6302 – thank you!

HS January 23, 2021 (9:49 am)

“COVID rollercoaster” – great phrasing.

flimflam January 23, 2021 (11:12 am)

i’ve been having a difficult time making sense of the reopening phase dashboard. i know where to view the numbers, i know what the 4 categories are being watched and that will determine where we are but i can’t seem to see exactly where the numbers need to be. there doesn’t seem to be a simple “our region is here – it needs to be there” in an easy to read, uncomplicated language…………………………………maybe i’m missing something – i’d love some advice here. i work in restaurants and i would like to be able to follow progress or lack thereof so i can plan schedules, etc in the event we open further.

trickycoolj January 23, 2021 (12:42 pm)

They’re tracking the change in a rolling 14 day window. So how did we do in the last 14 days compared to the 14 day window that was measured a week ago. That 14 day average positive cases has trended up 23% in king county. It needs to stay flat or go down to move up in phase. By using a rolling average with a 14 day window it should hopefully encourage people to stick to the established methods of prevention: diligent mask wearing, avoiding groups outside of your household, work from home if possible, etc. If our region collectively buckles down (unlike the holiday season) we have a good chance to get that average to trend the other way. But it will take 2+ weeks to see the trends so from a scheduling standpoint (I’m a project manager) I would recommend scheduling in 2-3 week blocks per phase. It would help if the state would plot the rolling 14 day averages on a line graph so we could see the trend. Likely still seeing a lot of Christmas/New Years and back to work/school surges. In a normal non pandemic life Sept/Oct and Jan/Feb are when illnesses spike in my workplace as kids go back to school and get mom and dad sick who come to work and get their colleagues sick.
AMD January 23, 2021 (1:13 pm)

In the dashboard there’s an option to look at metrics by Region. When you select “Puget Sound”, two of the four metrics have a light red dashed line that definitively says “you need to be below this”. The other two are based on a percentage of improvement, rather than concrete numbers, but you can see if we’re trending up or down and how close we are to the averages we need. It isn’t super clear, but to my reading our case rates need to be dropping more than 10% over a 14-day period (our region is currently trending up, so it’s going to be at least two weeks on that alone), hospitalizations need to be down 10% over a 14-day period (we’re down 9% so super close, but hospitalizations tend to follow cases, so that may swing upward soon), we need to have less than 90% ICU occupancy on average over the last 7 days (we’re at 84%, so good there), and also an average test positivity rate under 10% for the last 7 days (we’re at 9%, so close but still good there). If I’m reading that right, it will be at least two weeks until we move into phase 2, and probably another week or two after if an increase in hospitalizations do indeed follow the increase in case rates.
- flimflam January 23, 2021 (2:56 pm)
  
  i just wish it were laid out in a much simpler, straightforward fashion – unless i’m dense or missing something, which is entirely possible on both accounts. its almost too much info/numbers.

Carol Stoner January 23, 2021 (1:37 pm)

WSHS 62Kudos to CHI Franciscan at St. Anne’s in Burien! They offered us appointment slots, and the process was organized, friendly and efficient. In 30 min. we had our vaccinations, our 15 min. wait for possible reactions, and our appt. for our second shot. Wonderful!

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