Tri-Cities to move to Phase 3 reopening March 22. More COVID vaccine available

Counties in Washington state will move to Phase 3 of reopening starting Monday, March 22, under an update to the Washington state Roadmap to Recovery announced Thursday.

In Phase 3, indoor public spaces — including restaurants, fitness centers and movie theaters — can be occupied at up to 50% capacity, with masking and distancing enforced.

Outdoor events also will be capped at 50% capacity up to 400 people maximum, with larger venues capped at 25% capacity or up to 9,000 people, whichever is less.

Changes to outdoor sporting events under Phase 3 include allowing fans to attend the opening game for the Mariners and to attend other professional sporting events.

Expanded spectator capacity for high school and youth sports is expected to start on Thursday March 18, four days before the start of Phase 3.

To remain in Phase 3, all counties will be evaluated every three weeks, starting April 12, to see if they meet new requirements. Evaluations will be done every third Monday, with any changes taking effect Friday of the week.

The state is switching to considering counties separately for reopening rather than groups of multiple counties in eight regions of the state. In addition, it will not consider Benton and Franklin jointly.

The new phases include requirements for case rates and COVID hospital admissions.

Counties with 50,000 people or more, which includes Benton and Franklin counties, must have fewer than 200 new COVID-19 cases confirmed per 100,000 people over two weeks.

Benton County meets that metric, with 143 new cases per 100,000 people, for the two weeks ending March 4. There is a lag in the weeks considered because positive case results are backdated to the day a person was tested for infection the coronavirus.

Franklin County does not meet that metric, with 248 new cases per 100,000 people for the two weeks ending March 4.

But it has until the first evaluation April 12 to meet the requirement, since all counties are expected to automatically move to Phase 3 to start under the revised Roadmap to Recovery.

Counties also must keep admissions of new hospital patients to an average of fewer than five in a week per 100,000 people.

Information was not immediately available Thursday on whether Benton and Franklin counties are currently meeting the COVID hospital requirement.

COVID vaccine

Finding a COVID-19 vaccine for people eligible for the vaccination is getting easier in the Tri-Cities.

Employees of school districts and child care centers, who became eligible for the COVID vaccine early this month, are being notified of clinics being set up next week in the Tri-Cities area.

Those clinics are only for those educators who became eligible for the vaccine early this month and are not open to the general public. Educators and childcare workers will be notified by their employers on how to participate.

The Tri-Cities fairgrounds drive-thru vaccine clinic will be supplying some vaccine for those educators clinics and also is setting aside some of this week’s doses for Pfizer vaccine second doses next week.

As a result, organizers at the Benton County Fairgrounds did not have a holding line for any extra unused doses on Thursday, but planned to open a holding line at 10 a.m. Friday.

Before the reallocation of some doses, hundreds of appointment times for Thursday and Friday were open at the Kennewick fairgrounds. When the clinic starting scheduling appointments in January, all appointments filled within hours.

Kadlec Regional Medical Center vaccine appointments in Richland also are taking longer to fill.

Appointment openings for Friday were posted at 4 p.m. Wednesday on the Tri-Cities hospital’s Facebook page, and there were still openings Thursday morning. In the past, appointments had filled nearly immediately.

Many Tri-Cities area pharmacies also have the vaccine and many are prioritizing appointments this month for teachers, at the direction of the federal government, which provided the doses.

The fairgrounds drive-thru clinic had been having a high number of “no shows,” up to 20%, which has also been an issue for other vaccine clinics across the Tri-Cities area.

But as the Southeast Washington Interagency Incident Management Team looked into why people were not keeping appointments at the fairgrounds, it found that people were mistakenly making multiple appointments for the same day. But they were showing up for their vaccination.

Confirmation of a fairground appointment is sent by email and is required to be shown at the fairgrounds for first doses. But there may be a delay in receiving the confirmation, causing some people to keep signing up for appointments.

If holding lines are formed at the fairgrounds for any unused doses, those doses are given to people who are eligible for the vaccine.

There may have been some flexibility in the earliest days of the drive-thru clinic. But more recently, as organizers know more about what to expect, the only exceptions are a possible couple of doses at the end of the day after eligible people in the drive thru line are vaccinated to make sure not a single dose goes to waste, according to organizers.

Organizers at the fairgrounds are considering whether to change hours to make them more convenient to workers as Washington state officials are expanding vaccine eligibility. More workers who are considered essential workers during the pandemic will be eligible.

Recently the fairgrounds clinic has offered appointments from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays and on Saturday mornings.

No decision has been made yet on new hours at the fairgrounds.

Much of the recent demand for vaccine has been for people ages 65 and older and people ages 50 and older who live in multigenerational households. They became eligible for the vaccine in January.

Healthcare workers, emergency medical technicians and employees and residents of long term care facilities for the elderly began receiving the vaccine as early as December.

The Benton County Fairgrounds Clinic had reached 30,000 COVID shots given as of Wednesday.

Kadlec announced Wednesday that it had given 13,000 vaccines.

A total of 75,055 doses of the vaccine have been given in Benton and Franklin counties, according to reports made to the Washington state Department of Health. Just over 27,000 people in the two counties have received both doses, it said.

Find a vaccine appointment

To check for any open appointments at the Benton County Fairgrounds, go to prepmod.doh.wa.gov and click on “Find a Clinic.” On the next page scroll down to find appointments by date and location. Be sure to check all pages.

Registration for any open appointments also may be made by calling the Washington state COVID-19 Assistance Hotline at 800-525-0127 and pressing #.

The Richland Senior Association also has a toll-free help line for people without internet access or without the computer skills to navigate online sign-up sites. Call 800-595-4070 and leave a voicemail message.

If this is your first COVID vaccine dose you will need to provide proof of eligibility, which is available at FindYourPhaseWA.org, to most sites offering the vaccine.

If it is your second dose, you may need to bring the COVID-19 Vaccination Record Card you were given when you received your first dose. If you have misplaced it, you may be able to access your vaccination record at the state Department of Health site wa.myir.net.

The record card or other proof of first dose is required at the fairgrounds, but some other places offering the vaccine may keep a record of your first dose.

For a list of places that may have vaccine available, check the Benton Franklin Health District’s list at bit.ly/BFHDvaccinesites. The list includes primarily pharmacies, hospitals and medical clinics.

The Washington state Department of Health also maintains a list by county at www.covidvaccinewa.org.

Tri-Cities cases

The Tri-Cities has 42 more COVID cases the Benton Franklin Health District announced on Thursday.

Since the weekend, new cases had been averaging 30 per day but announcements of test results sometime increase later in the week.

New cases are still down from 45 on average per day last week, with new confirmed cases dropping steadily in previous weeks from an average of 94 per day to 76 to 64 to 46 and then 43 before increasing slightly last week.

The new cases reported on Thursday included 15 in Benton County and 27 in Franklin County, which has about half as many people.

Public health officials have been concerned that the number of new cases in Franklin County may have hit a plateau rather than continuing to drop as Benton County cases have.

Washington state

The Washington state Department of Health reported 789 new cases of COVID-19 Wednesday and 23 deaths from the disease.

Statewide totals from the illness caused by the coronavirus are 347,131 cases and 5,100 deaths. Those numbers are up from 346,342 cases and 5,077 deaths Tuesday. The case total includes 20,131 cases listed as probable. DOH revises previous case and death counts daily.

Washington’s population is estimated at about 7.6 million, according to U.S. Census figures from July 2019.

As of Feb. 19, the date with the most recent complete data, 52 people with confirmed cases of COVID-19 were admitted to Washington state hospitals.

Preliminary reports indicate that average daily hospital admissions were trending downward toward 32 in early March.

Out of the state’s total staffed intensive care unit beds (1,244) approximately 76.4% (951) were occupied by patients Tuesday. Of those staffed ICU beds, 7.7% (96) held suspected and confirmed COVID-19 patients.

Cases by county

According to DOH data, King County continues to have the highest numbers in Washington, with 85,596 cases and 1,433 deaths. Pierce County is second in cases, with 39,485. Spokane County has the second-highest number of deaths, at 582.

All counties in Washington have at least 100 cases. Only 12 of the state’s 39 counties have case counts of fewer than 1,000.

There have been more than 29.1 million confirmed coronavirus cases and 529,067 deaths from the virus in the United States as of Wednesday evening, according to Johns Hopkins University. The United States has the highest number of reported cases and deaths of any nation.

More than 2.6 million people have died from the disease worldwide. Global cases exceed 117 million.

Craig Sailor with The (Tacoma) News Tribune contributed to this report.

This story was originally published March 11, 2021 at 2:58 PM.