It’s not just elderly still dying from COVID in Tri-Cities, weekly death report shows

Three more residents of the Tri-Cities area have died from complications of COVID-19, and it is not only the elderly who are dying.

The deaths announced this week by the Benton Franklin Health District were of two men in their 40s and a man in his 50s.

They come as the death toll from COVID-19 in the nation reaches 1 million people.

The latest Tri-Cities deaths were despite low rates of confirmed disease in Benton and Franklin counties and low numbers of hospital patients with COVID-19.

Although numbers are low, they have increased over the past month.

They bring COVID deaths announced this month to five. The health district announces the deaths once a week.

The number of deaths announced in April dropped to eight, down from 27 recent deaths reported in March and 43 in February.

The total deaths from complications of COVID-19 in the Tri-Cities area since the start of the pandemic number 682. They include 468 residents of Benton County and 214 residents of Franklin County.

The most recent deaths included two Benton County men, including the man in his 50s, and a Franklin County man.

In the Tri-Cities, local public health officials verify that deaths are due to COVID complications by checking for a positive test result and that a coronavirus infection was named as a primary cause of death on the death certificate.

It can take several weeks for the district to receive and reconcile death information due to the reporting processes of medical facilities and coroner offices and the process of issuing and releasing death certificates.

Statewide, 12,791 residents have died of complications of COVID since the start of the pandemic, including 75 deaths reported in the last week, according to data from the Washington state Department of Health.

The rate of new confirmed COVID-19 cases has been higher in May than in April, but the past week ended with the case rate flat.

The Benton Franklin Health District reported a case rate for both Benton and Franklin counties combined of 44 new cases per 100,000 people in a week.

That is up from a case rate that dropped to a recent low of 17 a month ago, but the latest case rate remains far below all the previous peaks of the pandemic.

“Lately we’ve really enjoyed a long period of time when rates were very, very low,” Heather Hill, infectious disease supervisor for the Benton Franklin Health District, speaking on the Kadlec on Call podcast this week.

At the free community testing sites on George Washington Way in Richland and Columbia Basin College in Pasco a 15% increase has been observed in positive test results over previous weeks, she said.

The percentage of positive test results remains low, however.

In addition, data from testing wastewater from treatment plants in the Richland, Kennewick, Pasco and West Richland shows an increasing amount of genetic material from the virus, although the increase has flattened some this month.

It remains at its highest point of the spring.

Public health officials continue to keep a close eye on data from all sources, knowing there is a potential for another spike in cases if a new and more contagious variant of the coronavirus could start to spread, Hill said.

COVID in schools, hospitals

There are new cases from contact in school classrooms Hill said. However, the most recent dashboards of the Kennewick, Richland and Pasco school districts reported only 42 cases.

Public health officials are concerned about school proms this month.

Hill called proms the perfect environment for COVID-19 to spread with lots of young people indoors in close proximity to each other.

However, most concerning to Benton Franklin Health District are continued outbreaks in long-term care centers, such as nursing homes, in the Tri-Cities area. The elderly are vulnerable to severe and life-threatening cases of COVID-19.

The cases are being seen often in elderly residents who have not gotten their second COVID-19 booster shot, Hill said.

People age 50 and older are eligible for a second COVID-19 booster shot.

Benton and Franklin counties have long lagged the state of Washington in COVID-19 vaccination rates, and the percent of people eligible for an initial COVID-19 booster shot, is no exception.

In Washington state, 58.6% of people eligible for an initial booster, those age 12 and older, had received it.

The percentage drops to 50.5% in Benton County and just 42.5% in Franklin County.

Franklin County is catching up with Benton County in the rate of people age 5 and older who have competed their primary series of COVID-19 shots.

Statewide 72.3% of people 5 and older have their initial vaccinations. That drops to 60% in Benton County and 57.1% in Franklin County.

The number of people in hospitals in Benton and Franklin counties with COVID has about doubled over the past three weeks, but remains low at about 2% of all patients.

In the last week for which data were available, 13 people were admitted for treatment of COVID-19 at hospitals in Richland, Kennewick, Pasco and Prosser. That’s up from as few as seven reported about three weeks ago.