Coronavirus hits Tri-Cities senior and nursing homes with 45 cases. All cases climb

Forty-five residents or employees at five senior living centers have been diagnosed with COVID-19, according to the Benton-Franklin County Health District on Monday.

“It is the elderly population that is still the hardest hit,” said Heather Hill, the local health district’s communicable disease program supervisor, in an interview with Kadlec Regional Medical Center.

Total cases in the Tri-Cities area jumped to 139 on Monday, up from 75 as of Friday for the two counties.

They include 102 cases in Benton County, with 73 confirmed by testing and 29 in people who had symptoms after having close contact with someone with a confirmed case.

In Franklin County the total is 37, with 24 cases confirmed through testing.

Testing has been limited in the Tri-Cities, with Western Washington given priority for receiving testing supplies because of more cases there.

The number of deaths from complications of the new coronavirus remained at five Monday. The fifth death was a Benton County man in his 80s, as reported by the health district on Friday.

All deaths have been in Benton County in people 70 or older, with no deaths yet reported from COVID-19 in Franklin County.

“It is so extremely important to keep our seniors safe,” Hill said. “We are watching situations in long-term care facilities very, very closely and helping to give them guidance and bringing in Department of Health experts to help guide the facilities.”

The long-term care facility with the most cases of new coronavirus is Regency Canyon Lakes, a Kennewick nursing home with 21 cases. Last week the nursing home reported that two workers there had tested positive.

Life Care Center of Richland, a nursing home, had 12 cases as of Monday, up from one case on Friday.

Bonaventure Senior Living in Richland, which has independent living apartments and an assisted care center, had nine cases as of Monday.

Solstice Senior living in Kennewick had two cases, and Parkview Estates, a retirement and assisted living center in Kennewick, had one case.

Part of the increase in overall cases in the two counties is attributed to more testing being done.

Statewide

The Washington State Department of Health reported late Monday that it would not be releasing its usual daily update of cases from around the state.

“Due to technical difficulties related to a high volume of data, the Department of Health will not be posting new numbers today,” said the daily bulletin from the State Emergency Operations Center at Camp Murray.

The bulletin referred people to its website for the latest counts as of Sunday.

COVID-19, the illness caused by the fast-spreading novel coronavirus, has caused 195 confirmed deaths in the state as of March 29. And there were 4,896 confirmed cases in the state at that point.

COVID-19 testing

The turnaround time for test results in the Tri-Cities is improving, dropping to three to four days at the end of last week to as much as 10 days two weeks ago, said Dr. Brian York, an infectious disease specialist with Kadlec clinics.

But supplies for collecting samples from patients and preserving them to get them to the lab remain in short supply.

“It is still a frustrating problem (that) we are not able to test everyone who wants a test or not even anyone who we would want to be able to test as physicians,” York said.

Kadlec doctors now have enough kits to test those patients in the top two priority tiers, as set by the Centers for Disease Control, York said.

In the top tier are hospitalized patients with symptoms and health care workers with symptoms.

The second tier includes people with symptoms in high risk groups, including long-term care facilities, people who are older than 65 or who have underlying health conditions tied to higher risks from COVID-19. It also includes first responders with symptoms.

Within the next one to two weeks there may be enough test kits available for people ranked on the third tier — those key to critical infrastructure who have symptoms, York said.

Coronavirus social distancing

Statewide as of Monday morning 195 people had died in Washington state from complications of COVID-19, according to the Washington state Department of Health.

The number of people who tested positive for the new coronavirus was 195, with 4,896 cases total. Some 7.5 percent of the 65,462 tests administered in Washington state have been positive.

The Department of Health said that in late March the new availability of drive through testing in some communities has increased the number of tests administered statewide. However, there is no drive through testing in the Tri-Cities.

About 12 percent of cases are in people 80 and older; 28 percent in people ages 60 to 79; 33 percent in people ages 40 to 59; 25 percent in people 20 to 39; and 2 percent in those younger than 20.

The public health staff at King County, which has had 2,159 cases, says that social distancing measures appear to be making a difference in slowing the spread of COVID-19 there.

Research by the Institute for Disease Modeling in Bellevue, Wash., found that the number of new transmission stemming from each infection dropped from 2.7 in late February to about 1.4 on March 18.

To sustain a drop in new cases, each infected person must infect fewer than one person, on average.

People with COVID-19 may be contagious for 24 to 48 hours before symptoms occur, Hill said.

“While the (research) results indicate an improvement, the epidemic was still growing in King County as of March 18,” said Daniel Klein, computational research team lead at the Institute for Disease Modeling. “The main takeaway hers is though we’ve made some great headway, our progress is precarious and insufficient.”

This story was originally published March 30, 2020 at 2:22 PM.