Franklin’s COVID rate now 2nd highest in nation. Benton County not far behind

Franklin County had the highest rate of new COVID cases in the lower 48 states over the last week, according to a map updated daily by the New York Times.

Benton County ranked 9th in the nation outside of Alaska.

Whitman County, home to Washington State University, Pullman, ranked 5th in the U.S.

The Brown School of Public Health compiles similar data to the New York Times, but it found a few counties in the nation with higher seven-day case rates.

It put Franklin County as 8th highest in the nation for the past seven days, and 5th highest in the lower 48 states, as of data last updated on Tuesday.

Within Washington state, Whitman County ranked 2nd and Benton County ranked 3rd, according to the Brown School of Public Health.

Washington had the 4th highest case rate of states in the nation, even after Gov. Jay Inslee said Thursday that case rates appear to have started to trend downward after reaching a new peak in some counties of Western Washington.

But East of the Cascades “we would expect to see a continued rapid increase in these cases,” he said.

The highly contagious omicron variant spread later in Eastern Washington than in the Seattle area, with the peak of its cases likely not reached for the Tri-Cities yet.

The Washington state Department of Health reported on Dec. 4 that the omicron variant had first been detected in Washington state in three counties, all along the Interstate 5 corridor of Western Washington.

The omicron variant was not detected in the Tri-Cities area for another two weeks.

Now it makes up almost all of the Tri-Cities area cases for which sequencing is randomly done to check for the strain of the coronavirus responsible for a positive test result.

The new case rate for Benton and Franklin counties is by far the highest it has been since the start of the pandemic, according to data from the Benton Franklin Health District.

The New York Times put the Nome area of Alaska as the place with the most new COVID cases in the nation over the last seven days with 831 new cases per 100,000.

Franklin County had 541 new cases per 100,000 over the week; Whitman County had 457 and Benton County had 407.

Douglas County in Central Washington ranked 19th with a case rate of 381, and Adams County, which shares a county line with Franklin County, ranked 38th with a rate of 351.

The Brown School of Public Health report found that Loving County Texas topped the nation with a rate of 2,705 new cases per 100,000 people over seven days.

Another county in Texas, a Louisiana county, a South Carolina county and three Alaska counties were the only others with rates higher than Franklin County, according to its data.

COVID vaccination rates

Only King County and San Juan County in Washington made the New York Times list of the 100 counties in the United States with the largest percentage of the population fully vaccinated.

According to the Washington state Department of Health, 65.8% of residents of the state are fully vaccinated.

In King County the rate is 78.1% and in San Juan County the rate is 79.8%.

That drops to 54.1% in Benton County and 49.3% in Franklin County.

“The people who are dying today in our hospitals — dozens every single day — they are dying because they are not vaccinated,” Inslee said Thursday.

People may be 10 times more likely to be hospitalized if not vaccinated and about 20 times more likely to die, he said.

The booster shot makes people two to five times safer than if they just get the first two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, which is considered full vaccination, he said.

This story was originally published February 2, 2022 at 11:54 AM.