Washington Resumes Coronavirus Updates, Reporting 25 More Deaths

SEATTLE — After several days without updating the death toll, the Washington State Department of Health has confirmed 25 more coronavirus-related deaths, bringing the state's total to 1,978 Washingtonians killed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Deaths Wednesday were reported in Adams, Benton, Clark, King, Mason, Okanogan, Pierce, Spokane, and Yakima counties.

The 25 deaths do not represent the deaths of a single day, but rather the culmination of a four-day period without any death toll updates. A recent DOH policy change has experts no longer releasing data on new deaths over the weekend, no update was posted on the Labor Day holiday Monday, and Tuesday's extreme weather forced the state to pause updates for the day. In short, those 25 deaths could have all happened any time between Friday and Tuesday.

Regardless of how and when the numbers have been reported, the DOH says their latest report is good news: at a conference Wednesday state health leaders said they believed that deaths had peaked near the end of July, and have now entered a sustained decline.

Unlike the death toll, coronavirus case counts were updated on the weekend and on Labor Day, meaning the latest report, showing 464 new lab-confirmed coronavirus cases, represents all coronavirus cases confirmed over just the last 48 hours. Split evenly that's an average of 232 cases per day, significantly lower than the peak just weeks ago when the state often reported in excess of a thousand daily cases. That said, it could also be that the state is underreporting cases as the DOH repairs services lost in Tuesday's outage.

Either way, those new cases mean a total of 78,009 coronavirus infections have been confirmed in Washington state since the pandemic began.

A total of 1,583,903 total coronavirus tests have been performed in Washington, and recently as few as 3.3 percent of tests have been coming back positive for the virus.

That too is a large improvement. For months the state hovered between a positivity rate of 5 to 6 percent. Health officials say the goal is to increase testing until just 2 percent of coronavirus tests come back positive.

But while the recent trends have all been fairly positive, one complication has arisen in the weather. The coronavirus is at its most dangerous when a patient has underlying health issues in their respiratory system, and with Washington bathed in wildfire smoke, experts say low air quality could complicate treatment for some patients.

"If you already have a heart or lung condition like asthma or COVID-19, breathing in wildfire smoke can make it worse," the DOH said in a release Tuesday.

As a precaution, they're urging anyone who has the coronavirus, asthma, or who is over 65 to stay indoors, in well-filtered spaces.

Total coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths by county:

The above numbers are provided by the state Department of Health, and some numbers differ from the totals provided separately by county health agencies.