[LEAVENWORTH, Wash.] – (MTN) He went by bloodytnvc5 on Tik Tok and was infamous for using a Pharoh’s face and headdress as his alter ego and for wearing blue medical gloves. A three-month investigation would reveal one of the most prominent creators of hate and Covid-19 misinformation on Tik Tok was a cook at Cascade Medical Center in Leavenworth, Washington.
Cascade Medical Center, a 25-bed acute care hospital nestled in a Bavarian-themed town in the Eastern Cascades, fired two employees earlier this month, according to the Director of Public Relations, Clint Strand. Matthew Wilson of Leavenworth, 33, and Alyssa “Lyssa” Riggs of Cashmere, 21, presented themselves as a doctor and nurse on social media, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake.
Wilson was meticulous in hiding his identity, using the Pharoh’s face and only showing his hands, encased in blue medical gloves. He would use a whiteboard to share his content to bypass artificial intelligence moderation while filming himself in examination rooms and surgical suites. His videos frequently used medical equipment as props. As Wilson and Riggs spread their lies, residents of Chelan County were flooding the emergency department gasping for breath, infected with Covid-19.
After months of investigation, Tik Tok creators ThatDaneshGuy and Guilt, along with a team of researchers, tracked down Riggs. Once they discovered her identity, they learned Wilson was the man behind bloodytnvc5.
For months, Wilson, with help from Riggs, created thousands of videos seen by millions of people. Along with medical misinformation, Wilson spread hate and intolerance unchecked by Tik Tok and its moderation staff.
He claimed to have acquired a military “explosive device,” even showing the serial numbers as proof in one video. Investigators concluded the serial numbers were not related to any kind of explosives or component to a bomb but a commercially available gun rack. Despite the bold claims, Tik Tok allowed the video to be viewed and shared by hundreds of thousands.
Content included sharing Nazi images from World War II and tap dancing around the edges of content guidelines while attacking Jews. He created sexist content within the walls of Cascade Health while sharing images and boasting he allegedly owns illegal firearms. Incredibly, he offered to sell fake vaccination cards with impunity from Tik Tok management.
While wrapping himself in patriotism, white nationalism, and a love of the Second Amendment, he pushed medical misinformation. Covid-19 was a hoax, Covid-19 wasn’t that bad, the vaccine was gene therapy, and the government is out to control everyone. His smooth voice and presentation, the gloves, the medical gear, and what appeared to be an understanding of medical terminology made him credible to his audience. His core audience was already thoroughly indoctrinated in medical misinformation and hungry for content to fuel their confirmational bias.
Additionally, he brutally attacked Black people and Black culture. But Wilson had a secret behind his online persona, and a trail of tiny breadcrumbs led to his downfall.
Several small mistakes and the unique architecture of Leavenworth lead to a big reveal
Wilson and Riggs made one critical mistake, each in separate videos, despite efforts to hide their identities. Additionally, Wilson left a trail of smaller clues that led to his identification.
Riggs revealed herself in a single video dressed as a nurse wearing a surgical mask and glasses. A graduate of Cascade High School in 2018, Riggs was feted by former Leavenworth Mayor Cheri Kelley Farivar in 2017 for being part of “Citizens of Washington in a Contemporary World.” According to LinkedIn and WenatcheeWorld, Riggs was on the dean’s list at Wenatchee Valley College, where she studied dental hygiene. The Washington State Department of Health Provider Credential Search portal indicated Riggs does not hold a license in any dental or nursing discipline.
Wilson went to great lengths to hide his identity, and attempts to find him by cross-referencing other social media channels were fruitless. He likely never considered the unique architecture of Leavenworth would provide the critical clue that would end his reign over social media.
Leavenworth, Washington, was founded as a logging town located on a railroad line. The town boomed through the late 1800s into the 1940s. Timber for construction, aircraft manufacturing during World War I, and a need for wood during World War II brought prosperity to the region. After the war, the railroad moved the line, bypassing Leavenworth and the town’s economy collapsed. By 1960, it appeared Leavenworth would disappear off the map.
City leaders came up with an idea to revitalize Leavenworth that forever changed the community. They adopted building codes to match Bavarian architecture and turned the town into a German-themed tourist destination. Almost overnight, Leavenworth became a picturesque mecca nationally known for Oktoberfest, Christmas lights, and the closest village to Stevens Pass and its ski area. Located just a couple of blocks off U.S. Route 2, Cascade Medical Center adopted the same Bavarian architecture when it was built. The unique construction requirements would be the undoing of Riggs and help identify Wilson.
In another video, Wilson revealed a distinctive area of Cascade Medical Center for a brief moment, showing the exposed beam German-inspired architecture. From that single view, investigators identified the facility.
Human resources at Cascade Medical Center was able to identify Riggs when researchers presented their findings, including the small video clip where she appeared just once. There is an old saying that there is no honor among thieves. When Riggs was confronted by Cascade Medical about her online activity and was accused of being the person behind bloodytnvc5, she gave up Wilson.
The hospital told the team of Danesh and Guilt, two employees were fired, and they waited for the story to break in the news. They believed they had revealed a doctor spreading medical misinformation, selling fake vaccination cards, and spreading racial hatred – but the news never came.
The final clues
Investigators went back through the cesspool of content they had gathered, looking for any additional clues for the true identity of bloodytnvc5. The deeper review discovered Wilson had made a critical error in a single video. Ironically, the historical roots of Washington state being part of the Oregon Territory when the Black Exclusion Act was passed in 1844 worked against him.
Almost 200 years later, Washington state is only 4% Black, while the United States is 13%. In a single video, Wilson forgot to put on his blue medical gloves revealing his race. Wilson is Black and lives in a community with 2,057 residents – slightly more than one percent are Black. Investigators believed they were looking for a Black doctor because Wilson presented himself as a medical expert with access to exam rooms, surgical suites, and medical equipment with apparent impunity.
Sprinkled among Wilson’s misinformation, weapons violations, selling fake vaccination cards, and racial hatred, there were morsels of content about food. The pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place. Scanning through photos from Cascade Medical Center, investigators had an epiphany. Wilson was in plain sight the whole time, but he wasn’t a doctor or even medically trained – Wilson is a chef. In one photo provided in hospital marketing materials, Wilson’s name was clearly visible on his employee badge, wearing a chef’s uniform, smiling over a table laden with food.
Despite being Black himself, Wilson expressed racial hatred and mocked Black culture. Some of his tamer content can still be found on (parental advisory, not safe for work)the website iFunny, including an iteration of the Pharoh iconography he would use.
Epilogue
Wilson and Riggs were both terminated from Cascade Medical Center, but they have not faced additional consequences for their actions to date. Wilson boasted of having illegal weapons in his possession and provided pictures. However, his whole persona online appears to be a complete illusion.
Wilson allegedly has been reported to the FBI, ATF, and local animal control for the crimes he self-documented on social media. An inquiry is being made with the Washington Department of Health to determine if the state will investigate Wilson, Riggs, or both for impersonating a doctor and nurse, respectively. Because this story broke over the weekend, we plan to reach out to the Washington Department of Health on Monday.
Riggs doesn’t hold any medical license (to the best of our research abilities) in Washington state. In theory, if she has completed her education in dental hygiene, she could become a licensed medical professional in the future.
ByteDance has never responded to multiple inquiries we have made about other medical misinformation creators on Tik Tok that operate with apparent impunity on the platform. Wilson and Riggs will likely maintain a low profile, but plenty of other videos already exist spreading harmful content.
We would like to thank ThatDaneshGuy, the creator Guilt, and their researchers for sharing their content with Malcontent News.
Knowledge is the best tool to fight against fear. A wise person chooses to be informed so they can make sound decisions. To join the fight against COVID misinformation, you can share this update through your social media platform of choice.
[KING COUNTY, Wash.] – (MTN) The big news today is about a little brown capsule called molnupiravir. The Phase 3 trial of the oral medication cut COVID hospitalizations and deaths by 50%, and Merck has applied for Emergency Use Authorization with the FDA. The impact of this new medication could go far beyond COVID with researchers at Emory University claiming it could be useful against other viral diseases.
New COVID cases and hospitalizations held steady statewide. A report in the Seattle Times indicated more than half of rural Washington transfer patients ended up in King County hospitals.
The Bellevue School District updated its COVID dashboard and revealed there are 37 confirmed COVID cases. In the Northshore School District, cases continued to grow at Bothell High School and Crystal Springs Elementary School reported 11 confirmed cases.
There are an estimated 604 adult acute care and 132 ICU beds available statewide, and approximately 56% of COVID patients in the ICU are on a ventilator.
The Nisqually Nation was forced to evacuate a COVID quarantine site in Roy, Washington after multiple threats were made. A post on Facebook falsely claimed it was a newly built government quarantine site for rounding up the unvaccinated.
Amazon continues to promote dangerous COVID treatments on its website.
Alaska Air Group announced they will require all employees to get vaccinated, but a hard deadline was not set.
Alaska, Idaho, and Montana continue to struggle with surging COVID cases.
Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor denied an emergency request by New York educators to block the state’s vaccine mandate. That’s a bigger deal than you think, and it wasn’t unexpected.
In the misinformation section, we tackle “it’s just the flu” very graphically.
New cases held steady statewide with no statistical difference from yesterday. In the South Central Hospital Region, which includes Benton, Franklin, Klickitat, Walla Walla, and Yakima counties, the 14 day moving average for new cases increased to 727.9 per 100K. The Puget Sound (Central) Hospital Region, which represents King County, was statistically unchanged at 244.5.
Percent of Total Population Fully Vaccinated
Average 14-Day New Case Rate (unadjusted)
60.00% or above (3)
171.9
50.00% to 59.99% (12 counties)
506.9
40.00% to 49.99% (15 counties)
653.9
28.40% to 39.99% (9 counties)
734.4
14-Day New COVID Cases per 100K average by Vaccination Rate, Not Adjusted for Population
Through September 30, Washington’s statewide 14-day rolling average is 426.6 COVID cases per 100K, statistically unchanged from yesterday.
For the first time in over a month, no counties reported a new case rate over 1,000 per 100K residents. Based on this change we are updating how we report county performance.
Counties in the 800.0 to 999.9 per 100K range include Ferry, Frankin, Grant, Grays Harbor, Lincoln, Okanogan, Pend Oreille, and Stevens. Ferry County is a new hot spot, while cases in southeast Washington are on the decline. Stevens County is just under 1,000.
Counties in the 600.0 to 799.9 per 100K range include Adams, Asotin, Columbia, Klickitat, Cowlitz, Benton, Walla Walla, Garfield, Douglas, Lewis, Chelan, and Spokane. Adams County is just under 800 and Yakima County is just under 600.0.
We will keep descending these brackets until most counties fall below 450 per 100K residents. Currently, 28 counties still have widespread transmission of COVID.
New cases were up for 12 to 19-year-olds while hospitalizations were down for the same age group.
Age Group
7-Day Case Rate
7-Day Hospitalization Rate
Ages 0-11
195.0
0.6
Ages 12-19
220.6 (up)
1.3 (down)
Ages 20-34
191.7
5.2
Ages 35-49
189.8
8.8
Ages 50-64
137.6
15.2
Ages 65-79
104.3
20.0
Ages 80+
108.3
32.6
7-day case rate and 7-day hospitalization rate is per 100K within the age group – the target for 7-day case rate is <25.0, but there are other factors such as vaccination rates within the age groups, how many total tests within the 7-day period, and the positivity rate within each age group
The USA Today COVID Tracker reported 72 deaths on Thursday. The state of Washington is not reporting the percentage of positive cases.
Nisqually Nation forced to evacuate COVID quarantine site after threats
Because three or four generations can be living under the same roof, a COVID-positive person can have a significant impact on the entire household. The Nisqually Nation started using a 26-acre property in Roy, Washington last year enabling tribal members to quarantine away from family members. The tribe was forced to evacuate the site after an online misinformation campaign labeled the location a concentration camp.
The Facebook group Americans Against 2nd Class Treatment posted on September 28, 2021, about the site, claiming it was a “new COVID quarantine site” and they were “just getting to work on it.” In reality, the site has existed for more than a decade, and the Nisqually Nation bought the 26-acre parcel in 2014. Earlier this month, they cleared some timber between the buildings and Highway 702, making the location more visible from the road.
Comments quickly developed with people calling it a “concentration camp” and a “gulag.” The group went on to post that the Nisqually Nation was forced to hire security and block the access road with boulders due to ongoing threats at the property.
“Who does that,” said Nisqually Tribal Councilmember Hanford McCloud, “It’s beyond ridiculous.”
McCloud said about 30 people have stayed on the property in the last 18 months, giving them a safe place to recover and prevent the spread of COVID-19.
A caretaker and his family, along with two COVID-19 patients, were placed in a hotel, said Tribal Health Officer Mary Szafranski.
Amazon continues to recommend dangerous COVID treatments on its website
A surge of social media videos in the last two weeks on YouTube and Tik Tok has advocated nebulizing hydrogen peroxide as a preventative and home treatment for COVID. Content creators have danced around guidance medical guidance to spread the misinformation.
For the third time in 60 days, Amazon is at the center of controversy with the AI designed to drive more sales, recommending medical saline and hydrogen peroxide with nebulizer purchases.
Amazon recommendation for hydrogen peroxide and medical saline when purchasing a nebulizer – October 1, 2021
In August the online behemoth was called out for promoting Ivermectin, and publishing reviews with veiled dosing instructions for humans. A couple of weeks later, Amazon was dinged again for recommending books that spread COVID misinformation.
Multiple medical groups have appealed for people not to drink or nebulize hydrogen peroxide. The human body does not have a finite capacity to process hydrogen peroxide and the solution hasn’t been recommended for wound care in years.
The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America wrote, “A concerning and dangerous trend is circulating on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. People are breathing in hydrogen peroxide through nebulizers to try to prevent or treat COVID-19.”
“DO NOT put hydrogen peroxide into your nebulizer and breathe it in. This is dangerous!”
Alaska Air Group mandates vaccination for all employees
Alaska Air Group joined Delta and Hawaiian Airlines, mandating all employees of Alaska Airlines, Horizon Air, and McGee get vaccinated against COVID. The airline stopped short of setting a hard deadline, but employees who prove they are fully vaccinated by December 1 will receive a $200 bonus. The mandate impacts certain vendors and contractors also.
“Since our company does significant work for the federal government, we have determined that Alaska Airlines, Horizon Air, and McGee employees – all part of Alaska Air Group – do fall under this federal vaccine mandate, along with other major U.S.airlines,” Alaska Air Group said in a statement.
The airline reported on September 1, that 75% of its workforce was already fully vaccinated.
United Airlines reported yesterday that 320 of 67,000 employees decided to quit over the vaccine mandate they implemented earlier this year. Nationally compliance for vaccine mandates has ranged from 89% to virtually 100% across cities, counties, states, schools, hospitals, and private employers.
More than half of rural Washington COVID transfer patients ended up in King County
A Seattle Times analysis found that from July 1 to September 23, 229 of 414 COVID transfer patients in Washington state ended up in King County hospitals. The Seattle Times story is behind a paywall and The Slog written by The Stranger is more politically charged on this topic for our COVID coverage specifically. You can see this summary by the author Joseph O’Sullivan on Twitter.
NEW: Slammed by #covid19, rural WA hospitals have transferred hundreds of patients to metro areas since July 1.
We recommend avoiding recreational travel to Spokane, Yakima, Klickitat, Benton, Franklin, and Walla Walla counties. If the number of new cases in the South Central Hospital Region continues to decline, we will likely lift our advisory for this region in the next 3 to 10 days. We strongly advise against all nonessential travel to Alaska, Idaho, and Montana. Hospital resources in these regions are constrained, and you may receive inadequate care if you experience a medical emergency.
We may implement a travel advisory for Eastern Washington, based upon renewed hospitalization data now available from the Department of Health.
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Vaccination
Deadline for single dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine and second dose for Pfizer and Moderna vaccine looms for state workers
Thousands of state workers have until Sunday to receive their second Pfizer or Moderna dose or the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Over 68% of state workers reported last week they were fully vaccinated. Data from companies, schools, and other states such as Hawaii and New York, indicates final acceptance would likely exceed 95%.
Multiple unions have reached agreements at a municipal, county, or state level, to extend the deadline past October 18 for individuals who received at least their first dose. Additionally, workers with denied exemptions requests will be given extra time.
Pfizer vaccine booster shots are now available
Booster shots for eligible individuals are now available statewide. Individuals who received both doses of the Pfizer vaccine more than 6 months ago, are 65 or older, or are immunocompromised can receive their third dose immediately.
In the Kirland-Bellevue-Woodinville area, Walgreens, Rite-Aid, Bartell’s, and QFC are offering booster shots. Additionally, the third dose is available at the CVS located within the Target store at 17,700 NE 76th Street in Redmond.
Most locations require an appointment, which can be scheduled online.
King County, Washington is reporting over 86.2% of age eligible residents are vaccinated with at least one dose. The highest rates of positivity are in areas with low vaccination rates statewide. The FDA has provided full approval of the Pfizer vaccine for anyone 16 and over and EUA approval for the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines.
COVID vaccines are free for anyone over 12 years old, and no appointment is necessary at most locations. Lyft and Hopelink provide free transportation, and KinderCare, the Learning Care Group, and the YMCA offer free childcare during vaccination appointments or recuperation.
According to the DoH COVID Dashboard, 18.7% of all acute care patients hospitalized in Washington have COVID. Currently, 91% of all staffed acute care beds are occupied statewide with approximately 604 available. ICUs are at 89.0% of capacity statewide, with 30.0% of ICU patients fighting COVID – an estimated 354 patients with 56% on ventilators. The state has approximately 132 ICU beds available.
The 7-day rolling average hospital admission rate for new COVID patients dropped to 105 – finally below the January 7, 2021 peak of 113. The Department of Health reported 1,274 COVID patients statewide on September 30 with 197 on ventilators. Hospitalizations dropped slightly while the number of patients on ventilators is unchanged.
Hospital Region
ICU Occupancy
ICU COVID Patients
Acute Care Occupancy
Acute Care COVID Patients
East
88.6%
44.6%
89.6%
26.7%
North
80.8%
28.5%
88.0%
13.1%
North Central
96.4%
58.9%
75.7%
26.3%
Northwest
92.3%
38.3%
95.4%
24.6%
Puget Sound
91.8%
23.4%
94.6%
14.4%
South Central
85.7%
34.9%
83.2%
25.4%
Southwest
74.3%
37.3%
88.3%
24.9%
West
89.1%
31.4%
87.6%
21.8%
Hospital status by region – September 30, 2021 – ICU Occupancy should be below 80%, ICU COVID Patients should be below 20%, Acute Care Occupancy should be below 80%, and Acute Care COVID Patients should be below 10%
There was very little change in the status of Hospital Regions.
– Alcott Elementary (1*) – Barton Elementary (1*) – Dickinson/Explorer Elementary (2*) – Ella Baker Elementary (3*) – Eastlake High (1*) – Evergreen Middle School (1*) – Franklin Elementary (2*) – Finn Hill Middle School (1* – see below) – ICS (1*) – Inglewood Middle School (2*) – Juanita Elementary (1*) – Kamiakin Middle School (3* – see notes below) – Keller Elementary (2*) – Kirkland Middle School (1*) – Lake Washington High (1*) – Lakeview Elementary (3*) – Muir Elementary (1*) – Redmond Middle School (1*) – Redmond High School (1*) – Renaissance Middle School (1*) – Rush Elementary (2*)
See notes below
None
Northshore
RED
– Arrowhead Elementary (14) – Canyon Creek Elementary (31**) – Canyon Park Middle School (12**) – Cottage Lake Elementary (17) – East Ridge Elementary (16) – Fernwood Elementary (13**) – Frank Love Elementary (30) – Hollywood Hills Elementary (29) – Inglemoor High School (8) – Innovation Lab High School (11) – Kenmore Elementary (13) – Kenmore Middle School (49**) – Kokanee Elementary (60) – Leota Middle School (6) – Lockwood Elementary (32) – Maywood Hills Elementary (21**) – Moorlands Elementary (48) – North Creek High School (27) – Northshore Middle School (17**) – Ruby Bridges Elementary (9) – Secondary Academy for Success (16) – Shelton View Elementary (20**) – Skyview Middle School (63**) – Sunrise Elementary (23) – Timbercrest Middle School (44) – Wellington Elementary (74) – Westhill Elementary (38) – Woodin Elementary (17**) – Woodinville High School (23) – Woodmoor Elementary (23**)
– Bothell High School (14*/137) – Crystal Springs Elementary 11*/45)
Local Districts Scorecard – * indicates positive cases only ** indicates 5 or more confirmed positive cases
We redefined the school district statuses. Information for classroom and building closures has been a challenge to obtain, both for closures and reopening. We are adopting moving any school with more than 10 active COVID cases reported into the red, and we’ve adjusted the third column to reflect this change.
in the Northshore School District, Bothell High School currently has 14 confirmed COVID cases between students and faculty and Crystal Springs Elementary has 11. The number of quarantined students at Bothell High school swelled to 137.
The Bellevue School District updated its COVID dashboard overnight. The district will be providing updated data daily, but no longer reports on the number of students and faculty quarantining.
We received a confirmed parent report on Wednesday of one new COVID case at Finn Hill Middle School with 52 students moved to quarantine.
We received a confirmed parent report on Thursday of two new COVID cases at Kamiakin Middle School with 27 additional close contacts.
We received a parent report on Thursday of one new COVID case at Old Redmond Schoolhouse (preschool) with an unknown number of close contacts.
Because Lake Washington doesn’t update its dashboard daily, we are adding these as footnotes. We have not added the Old Redmond Schoolhouse to the scorecard above because it is not officially listed on the Lake Washington School District dashboard.
Karen James, who taught 4th Grade at Barnes Elementary, died on Monday, September 27, according to the Kelso School District.
A district spokesperson said they could not comment on the cause of death, however, they later said, “Late yesterday [Thursday, Sept. 30] afternoon we learned of one additional positive COVID-19 case in Miss James’ classroom.”
We continued to encourage parents to request improved daily data reporting from the Lake Washington School District.
Kirkland-Bellevue-Woodinville
No update
National Round-Up
Johns Hopkins University Cumulative Case Tracker is reporting 110,010 new cases, 2,718 deaths nationwide, and 699,000 COVID-related deaths since February 29, 2020. Based on the Johns Hopkins University data, the United States will reach 700,000 confirmed COVID-related deaths tomorrow morning (other dashboards reported 700,000 deaths last night and earlier today).
Merck seeking FDA Emergency Use Authorization for pill that treats mild and moderate COVID
Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics have been studying an oral antiviral medicine called molnupiravir which, during Phase 3 testing, reduced the risk of hospitalization and death by 50%. Phase 3 testing has been so successful Merck is submitting an application for Emergency Use Authorization in the United States and plans to submit marketing applications to other regulatory agencies worldwide.
The test program was a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, multi-site study done in 23 countries across 5 continents. There were 1,550 patients enrolled and to date, they have data from 775 people. Molnupiravir reduced the risk of hospitalization or death by almost 50% compared to the placebo group. Through Day 29, no deaths were reported in patients who received molnupiravir, as compared to 8 deaths in patients who received a placebo.
“More tools and treatments are urgently needed to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, which has become a leading cause of death and continues to profoundly affect patients, families, and societies and strain health care systems all around the world. With these compelling results, we are optimistic that molnupiravir can become an important medicine as part of the global effort to fight the pandemic,” said Robert M. Davis, chief executive officer and president, Merck.
Unlike monoclonal antibodies which must be administered in a clinical setting by injection or IV, molnupiravir is a pill that can be prescribed by a doctor and taken at home.
“With the virus continuing to circulate widely, and because therapeutic options currently available are infused and/or require access to a healthcare facility, antiviral treatments that can be taken at home to keep people with COVID-19 out of the hospital are critically needed,” said Wendy Holman, chief executive officer of Ridgeback Biotherapeutics. “We are very encouraged by the results from the interim analysis and hope molnupiravir, if authorized for use, can make a profound impact in controlling the pandemic.”
An Axios report this evening states that in the fall of 2019, an Emory University professor presented the drug to the Trump Administration. The professor reported the school had developed a new powerful antiviral medication that could treat influenza, Ebola, and many other viruses. In February 2020, as COVID arrived in the United States, the professor came forward again, asking for funding for Phase 2 and Phase 3 testing to evaluate the effectiveness of the medication against COVID. The Trump administration declined to fund the research.
The drug could be a game-changer in the battle against COVID worldwide. Pills are easier to transport and store, don’t need preparation, and don’t need to be administered at a hospital or clinic. The medication is also being tested as an emergency preventative for individuals exposed to COVID but who have not tested COVID positive. The impact for the immunocompromised and elderly could be dramatic.
Approval by the FDA and ramping up distribution is likely months away. If molnupiravir can deliver these results globally, it has the potential to end the ongoing public health crisis. If Emory University has successfully created a broad-spectrum oral antiviral, this discovery has the potential to rival penicillin.
JetBlue requiring employees to get COVID vaccination
Kavanaugh, who is fully vaccinated, tested positive on Thursday night, the court said in a statement. The justice’s immediate family tested negative and he has no symptoms.
His positive diagnosis for coronavirus means he won’t be on the bench Monday, the start of the new term, and what would be the first in-person session with all nine justices.
Alaska
Alaska reported 1,044 new COVID cases today and a new case rate of 1,066 per 100,000 residents, indicating that the state may have hit a peak. The remote state continues to have the highest new case rate on the planet. Hospitals in Anchorage Bethel, and Valdez continue to operate under crisis standards of care protocols.
The 202 hospitalized COVID patients are essentially unchanged from yesterday. The number of available ICU beds jumped to 23 and the number of ICU patients dropped to 107. There are 83 ICU patients on ventilators, 35 with COVID.
Amanda Frey, a nurse at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, sat down after a long day at work recently and made a brief video describing what it’s like to die with COVID-19: gasping for breath, terrified and beyond comfort.
“COVID-19 patients that die transition from being OK to actively dying very suddenly, and often without warning. They start to experience a state of panic and air hunger that is very difficult to manage and causes severe anxiety,” Frey says. “The medications that we usually use for patients at the end of life don’t help as much with COVID-19 patients when they’re dying. So what we’re seeing are deaths that are not only isolated but they’re also very traumatic.”
Newsom’s latest order, the first of its kind nationwide, will roll out in two phases for students learning in person. The mandate will first take effect for students ages 12 and over after the FDA grants full approval to that entire age group.
California is the first in the nation with a statewide vaccination mandate for primary school students. Implementation depends upon fully FDA approval of at least one of the COVID vaccines for children 12 to 15. Although no date has been set, full approval is expected during the first half of 2022.
Earlier this week, we blasted Jordan Herget, the CEO of Portneuf Medical Center, for reporting that the hospital in Pocatello was operating normally and they didn’t expect to have to move to crisis standards of care. From ambulance bays to emergency departments, any medical professional can tell you the worst thing you can say aloud is, “gee, it sure is quiet tonight.”
“Our situation hasn’t improved. A week later we’re very much in an emergency just like we were a week ago and our staff are being pushed to our limits,” Hergett said.
“In our adult ICUs, our youngest patient today is 22 years old,” St. Luke’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Jim Souza said. “About 70% of our patients are 55 years or younger in the intensive care unit. And in the intensive care unit, 25% are younger than 40. They’re sicker. They’re staying longer. The average length of stay in the ICU is up by two whole days, and their mortality rate is significantly higher than it was in the December surge.”
The VA Hospital in Boise requested a mobile morgue to support the hospital facility which is at capacity. Idaho has struggled with the influx of corpses in the last two weeks. Officials have been forced to stack bodies, store them in railroad cars, and store embalmed bodies in non-refrigerated areas.
Typically, ivermectin is rarely used on humans, Edge said, and he filled only three legitimate prescriptions for the drug in the past year. The most recent prescriptions he’s received came from out-of-state doctors, he said, “which is always a little bit of a red flag anyway.”
When he looked up one prescriber online, Edge found a list of doctors that people can call and, for a fee, get a consultation over the phone and then a prescription for ivermectin.
Asked later if she felt that speaking at an event where the tone seemed overwhelmingly against school boards that have voted to install mask mandates, Arntzen said, “I don’t believe this disrespects anyone in the educational community.”
“My role is here,” she continued. “My role is, number one, in the healing process in the discord we have between the school board room, where they might be in Montana, and to parents, whoever they might be, and putting the emphasis on children.”
Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor denied the emergency request without comment. A federal appeals court earlier in the week permitted New York’s mandate.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1905 in Jacobson vs Massachusetts, that municipalities, counties, and states had the power to mandate vaccines as part of public health efforts. The decision has been litigated dozens of times over the last 116 years, as recently as August.
When an emergency filing is made with the court, the Justice that is assigned to that region can render a decision or request that the entire court to hear the case. In August, Associate Justice May Comey-Barrett ruled independently on a challenge filed by students at the University of Indiana. Justice Comey-Barrett also denied the appeal without comment.
In the landmark 1905 case, the Supreme Court ruled that the 10th Amendment gave states the power to make public health decisions.
It’s just a cold. It’s just the flu.Content warning, some viewers may find this disturbing.
Tik Tok user Mae Mae documented her hospital journey in August and September after she caught COVID. She was partially vaccinated when she became ill and ended up hospitalized. In her videos, her condition continued to deteriorate, and the cannula she is wearing indicates she was on high flow oxygen.
You read stories from respiratory therapists, nurses, and doctors of COVID patients who become exhausted as they struggle to breathe – but we don’t see it. Mae Mae went to the line of needing to go on a ventilator before she bounced back.
This is COVID – this is what it looks like. It is not a cold, it is not the flu. Mae Mae survived and is still dealing with lingering symptoms.
Knowledge is the best tool to fight against fear. A wise person chooses to be informed so they can make sound decisions. To join the fight against COVID misinformation, you can share this update through your social media platform of choice.
New cases dropped statewide except in the least vaccinated counties. The three most vaccinated counties have new case numbers below 100 (7 day moving average) while the least vaccinated county has the highest new case rate in the state.
There are an estimated 615 acute care and 132 ICU beds available statewide, and approximately 55% of COVID patients in the ICU are on a ventilator.
Organizers of an anti-mandate rally failed to gather a crowd for the planned march, and the day was uneventful on First Hill and at Harborview Medical Center. It’s possible the high vaccination rate among healthcare professionals was a factor.
We received information on new COVID cases in the Lake Washington School District from parents.
In regional news, there is a good news story out of Idaho tonight, although the Hunger Games continue. The surge in Alaska is relentless, while Montana remains on the edge of a knife.
In national news, in-home rapid COVID tests aren’t as accurate as you think, rural America is being decimated by COVID, Health and Human Services clarifies that your employer is not violating HIPAA when it asks to confirm your vaccination status, and another study out about long COVID indicates this will be a problem for years to come.
In misinformation, we examine a Zero Hedge blog that claims that a Pfizer therapeutic in testing for COVID symptoms is essentially the same drug as Ivermectin.
Jefferson and King County reported under 100 new COVID cases per 100K residents using the 7 day moving average, joining San Juan County in dropping to double digits. Simply put, the three most vaccinated counties in Washington have the lowest number of new cases.
New cases dropped statewide except in the least vaccinated counties. In the South Central Hospital Region, which includes Benton, Franklin, Klickitat, Walla Walla, and Yakima counties, the 14 day moving average for new cases plunged to 707.1 per 100K. The Puget Sound (Central) Hospital Region, which represents King County, held steady at 245.1.
Percent of Total Population Fully Vaccinated
Average 14-Day New Case Rate (unadjusted)
60.00% or above (3)
175.5
50.00% to 59.99% (12 counties)
505.4
40.00% to 49.99% (15 counties)
645.4 (down)
28.40% to 39.99% (9 counties)
735.4 (up)
14-Day New COVID Cases per 100K average by Vaccination Rate, Not Adjusted for Population
Through September 29, Washington’s statewide 14-day rolling average is 422.8 COVID cases per 100K, statistically unchanged from yesterday. New case rates were flat or down for all but the least vaccinated counties.
The only county in the 1,000.0 to 1,399.9 range is Stevens (1,014.8), which is also the least vaccinated. The county’s new case rate is more than 17 times higher than San Juan, the highest vaccinated county in the state.
Counties in the 800.0 to 999.9 per 100K range include Franklin, Garfield, Grant, Grays Harbor, Lincoln, and Okanogan. Adams and Pend Oreille are just under the 800 threshold.
New cases were statistically unchanged in every age group. Hospitalizations were down slightly for ages 20 to 49, and up slightly for ages 65 to 79.
Age Group
7-Day Case Rate
7-Day Hospitalization Rate
Ages 0-11
189.8
0.7
Ages 12-19
206.7
1.7
Ages 20-34
191.2
5.1 (down)
Ages 35-49
192.8
9.2 (down)
Ages 50-64
140.7
15.1
Ages 65-79
100.0
19.5 (up)
Ages 80+
106.9
31.2
7-day case rate and 7-day hospitalization rate is per 100K within the age group – the target for 7-day case rate is <25.0, but there are other factors such as vaccination rates within the age groups, how many total tests within the 7-day period, and the positivity rate within each age group
The USA Today COVID Tracker reported 63 deaths on Wednesday. The state of Washington is not reporting the percentage of positive cases.
Antivax protest at Swedish and Harborview Medical Center doesn’t materialize
Despite the promotion on multiple websites, coordination by several organizations, and plans shared on Facebook, Telegram, and some dark corners of the web, the anti-vaccination community took a loss today. After a large rally in Spokane and a “Town Hall” in Woodinville over the weekend, organizers could not rally groups to protest at the only Level 1 trauma center in the state.
Lewis County Commissioner Gary Stamper dies of COVID
Q13 Fox is reporting Lewis County Commissioner Gary Stamper died from COVID after a three-week battle at PeaceHealth hospital in Vancouver, he was 67 and vaccinated.
Travel Advisories
We recommend avoiding recreational travel to Spokane, Yakima, Klickitat, Benton, Franklin, and Walla Walla counties. If the number of new cases in the South Central Hospital Region continues to decline, we will likely lift our advisory for this region in the next 4 to 11 days. We strongly advise against all nonessential travel to Alaska, Idaho, and Montana. Hospital resources in these regions are constrained, and you may receive inadequate care if you experience a medical emergency.
We may implement a travel advisory for Eastern Washington, based upon renewed hospitalization data now available from the Department of Health.
Thank you
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Vaccination
Deadline for single dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine and second dose for Pfizer and Moderna vaccine looms for state workers
Thousands of state workers have until Sunday to receive their second Pfizer or Moderna dose or the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Over 68% of state workers reported last week they were fully vaccinated. Data from companies, schools, and other states such as Hawaii and New York, indicates final acceptance would likely exceed 95%.
Multiple unions have reached agreements at a municipal, county, or state level, to extend the deadline past October 18 for individuals who received at least their first dose. Additionally, workers with denied exemptions requests will be given extra time.
Pfizer vaccine booster shots are now available
Booster shots for eligible individuals are now available statewide. Individuals who received both doses of the Pfizer vaccine more than 6 months ago, are 65 or older, or are immunocompromised can receive their third dose immediately.
In the Kirland-Bellevue-Woodinville area, Walgreens, Rite-Aid, Bartell’s, and QFC are offering booster shots. Additionally, the third dose is available at the CVS located within the Target store at 17,700 NE 76th Street in Redmond.
Most locations require an appointment, which can be scheduled online.
King County, Washington is reporting over 86.2% of age eligible residents are vaccinated with at least one dose. The highest rates of positivity are in areas with low vaccination rates statewide. The FDA has provided full approval of the Pfizer vaccine for anyone 16 and over and EUA approval for the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines.
COVID vaccines are free for anyone over 12 years old, and no appointment is necessary at most locations. Lyft and Hopelink provide free transportation, and KinderCare, the Learning Care Group, and the YMCA offer free childcare during vaccination appointments or recuperation.
The Department of Health is reporting numbers on statewide hospital resources and providing information by Hospital Regions again. We have deep insight into the situation at a state and regional level.
According to the DoH COVID Dashboard, 19.0% of all acute care patients hospitalized in Washington have COVID. Currently, 91% of all staffed acute care beds are occupied with approximately 615 available.
ICUs are at 89.0% of capacity statewide, with 30.0% of ICU patients fighting COVID – an estimated 358 patients with 55% on ventilators. The state has an estimated 132 staffed ICU beds available. On a per-capita basis, staffed ICU bed availability in Washington is only slightly better than in Alaska, so the system remains very stressed.
The 7-day rolling average hospital admission rate for new COVID patients dropped slightly to 133. The Department of Health reported 1,288 COVID patients statewide on September 29 with 197 on ventilators. Both numbers increased slightly from yesterday.
Hospital Region
ICU Occupancy
ICU COVID Patients
Acute Care Occupancy
Acute Care COVID Patients
East
89.3%
45.5%
90.1%
27.3%
North
80.9%
27.0%
88.4%
13.1%
North Central
96.9%
59.0%
75.8%
27.2%
Northwest
92.5%
38.9%
95.4%
25.0%
Puget Sound
91.6%
23.4%
94.5%
14.7%
South Central
86.1%
36.5%
84.3%
26.4%
Southwest
73.1%
38.3%
88.1%
25.0%
West
88.8%
32.4%
87.7%
22.6%
Hospital status by region – September 30, 2021 – ICU Occupancy should be below 80%, ICU COVID Patients should be below 20%, Acute Care Occupancy should be below 80%, and Acute Care COVID Patients should be below 10%
With the return of this critical information, we can better assess region by region status. We will hold our travel advisories and watch for trends in the East, North Central, and South Central Regions. It is very likely we will drop the travel advisory to South Central counties next week, but may add an advisory to the East Region counties.
– Alcott Elementary (1*) – Barton Elementary (1*) – Dickinson/Explorer Elementary (2*) – Ella Baker Elementary (3*) – Eastlake High (1*) – Evergreen Middle School (1*) – Franklin Elementary (2*) – Finn Hill Middle School (1* – see below) – ICS (1*) – Inglewood Middle School (2*) – Juanita Elementary (1*) – Kamiakin Middle School (3* – see notes below) – Keller Elementary (2*) – Kirkland Middle School (1*) – Lake Washington High (1*) – Lakeview Elementary (3*) – Muir Elementary (1*) – Redmond Middle School (1*) – Redmond High School (1*) – Renaissance Middle School (1*) – Rush Elementary (2*)
See notes below
Northshore
RED
– Arrowhead Elementary (16) – Canyon Creek Elementary (25**) – Canyon Park Middle School (11**) – Cottage Lake Elementary (15) – Crystal Springs Elementary (54**) – East Ridge Elementary (23) – Fernwood Elementary (13**) – Frank Love Elementary (29) – Hollywood Hills Elementary (27) – Inglemoor High School (8) – Innovation Lab High School (11) – Kenmore Elementary (12) – Kenmore Middle School (49**) – Kokanee Elementary (61) – Leota Middle School (5) – Lockwood Elementary (32) – Maywood Hills Elementary (21**) – Moorlands Elementary (49) – North Creek High School (26**) – Northshore Middle School (14**) – Ruby Bridges Elementary (9) – Secondary Academy for Success (15) – Shelton View Elementary (20**) – Skyview Middle School (68**) – Sunrise Elementary (23) – Timbercrest Middle School (46) – Wellington Elementary (74) – Westhill Elementary (33) – Woodin Elementary (18**) – Woodinville High School (20) – Woodmoor Elementary (22**)
– Bothell High School (13*/124)
Local Districts Scorecard – * indicates positive cases only ** indicates 5 or more confirmed positive cases
We redefined the school district statuses. Information for classroom and building closures has been a challenge to obtain, both for closures and reopening. We are adopting moving any school with more than 10 active COVID cases reported into the red, and we’ve adjusted the third column to reflect this change.
The Northshore School District numbers only wiggled across a number of schools while the Bellevue School District is unchanged from yesterday.
We received a confirmed parent report on Wednesday of one new COVID case at Finn Hill Middle School with 52 students moved to quarantine.
We received a confirmed parent report on Thursday of two new COVID cases at Kamiakin Middle School with 27 additional close contacts.
We received a parent report of one new COVID case at Old Redmond Schoolhouse (preschool) with an unknown number of close contacts.
Because Lake Washington doesn’t update its dashboard daily, we are adding these as footnotes. We have not added the Old Redmond Schoolhouse to the scorecard above because it is not officially listed on the Lake Washington School District dashboard.
We continued to encourage parents to request the Bellevue and Lake Washington School Districts to improve their COVID data reporting.
“As of (Wednesday) September 29 one classroom is closed,” according to the district’s COVID-19 dashboard and school status map. “Otherwise, the building is open and offering in-person instruction to students in the remaining classrooms. The school contacted all impacted families of the closed classroom on September 29.”
Kirkland-Bellevue-Woodinville
No update
National Round-Up
Johns Hopkins University Cumulative Case Tracker is reporting 123,269 new cases and 2,531 deaths nationwide. The United States will reach a tragic milestone of 700,000 confirmed COVID-related deaths since February 29, 2020, this weekend.
At-home rapid tests aren’t as accurate as PCR tests
Dr. Rachel Liesman, director of clinical microbiology, said there haven’t been a lot of false positives reported with the rapid tests.
“If you’re symptomatic it will give you a really quick result and that can be helpful,” she said. “But I think given … the potential ramifications of missing a case, I would recommend that if you get a negative (and you have COVID symptoms), you go and get a PCR test because those have much better sensitivity.
Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy report indicates COVID is decimating rural America
Rural Americans are currently twice as likely to die from COVID-19 infections compared with their urban peers, according to Kaiser Health News and data from the Rural Policy Research Institute (RPRI) at the University of Iowa.
Since March 2020, 1 in 434 rural Americans has died from COVID-19, compared with roughly 1 in 513 urban Americans. And unlike deaths in urban areas, the vaccine rollout has not slowed COVID-19 fatalities in rural parts of the country due to low uptake. Short-staffed hospitals and limited access to healthcare are also contributing factors, the researchers say.
Virus incidence rates in September were roughly 54% higher in rural areas than elsewhere, and in 39 states, rural counties had higher rates of COVID than urban counties.
In related news, health officials in Idaho, a predominately rural state with some of the lowest vaccination rates in the country, said more kids and babies are being hospitalized with COVID-related complications. As of this week, 1,700 new COVID-19 cases were reported in children in Idaho, according to the Associated Press.
Health and Human Services Releases Guidance on employer verification of vaccination status and HIPAA
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued guidance to help the public understand when the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Privacy Rule applies to disclosures and requests for information about whether a person has received a COVID-19 vaccine.
The guidance reminds the public that the HIPAA Privacy Rule does not apply to employers or employment records. This is because the HIPAA Privacy Rule only applies to HIPAA-covered entities (health plans, health care clearinghouses, and health care providers that conduct standard electronic transactions), and, in some cases, to their business associates.
Today’s guidance addresses common workplace scenarios and answers questions about whether and how the HIPAA Privacy Rule applies. This information will be helpful to the public as we continue to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic.
China study on long COVID mirrors results of similar studies in the United States and U.K.
The study followed up with 2,433 adult patients who had been hospitalized in one of two hospitals in Wuhan early on in the pandemic. Most had nonsevere cases, but a small number had severe COVID-19 and required intensive care. All of the patients were discharged between February 12 and April 10, 2020, and the study follow-up took place in March of 2021.
Alaska
Alaska reported 1,270 new COVID cases today and a new case rate of 1,165 per 100,000 residents. The remote state continues to have the highest new case rate on the planet. Hospitals in Anchorage, Bethel, and Valdez are operating under crisis standards of care protocols.
“It’s been Hell,” said Heidi DeCaro, a respiratory therapist at Providence Alaska Medical Center, whose job includes assisting COVID-19 who are struggling to breathe.
In a Thursday interview, DeCaro and a few of her co-workers described generally untenable work conditions. The team has been caring for up to twice their normal patient loads, their shifts have stretched as long as 15 hours, and they’ve lost “about a third” of their co-workers due mainly to burnout, exhaustion, and a demoralizing work environment, they said.
The 203 hospitalized COVID patients are essentially unchanged from yesterday. The number of available ICU beds dropped to 16. Of the 113 ICU patients statewide, 87 are on ventilators, 36 with COVID. The majority of new cases are among people under 40 years old and unvaccinated.
Linda Gaines talked to KTOO about the situation in Haines, Alaska, after her husband was airlifted to Anchorage. Some models are now predicting hospitalizations won’t peak until November, and oxygen supplier Norco, Inc. is already struggling to keep up with demand.
“As I went up into the lobby area, there was probably 50 more people standing to get into the emergency room,” she said. “And then going outside, there was more people in the parking lot, waiting to get up to the main entry to go to the emergency room.”
Doug Williams of Guardian Flight described a similar situation ground ambulances face in urban hotspots. Aircraft that would normally arrive, load, and fly off are forced to wait on the tarmac while doctors try to find a bed for a sick patient. This takes the aircraft offline while it waits, slowing down the entire system.
California
The deadline for healthcare workers to get vaccinated has almost arrived, and in Sacramento, hospitals are preparing to discipline and terminate employees.
Dignity Health also reported about 90% of employees are vaccinated and employees suspensions will start tomorrow. Sutter Health said 98% of employees are vaccinated in a system with more than 55,000 employees. Sutter Health will terminate “out of compliance” employees on October 15.
UC Davis Health told KCRA that 94% of more than 15,000 employees are vaccinated. Between exemption requests and partially vaccinated employees, a spokesperson said about 50 employees have not gotten vaccinated in defiance of the requirement.
“While there is not an immediate shortage of oxygen, there is a tremendous amount of growing stress to the supply chain network,” Elias Margonis, President of Norco, Inc. wrote in a letter. “Many hospitals have already pushed their bulk storage systems to limits of requiring emergency upgrades.”
In an interview with the Idaho Statesman, Margonis said Norco’s storage systems are generally designed to require shipments of new oxygen every three weeks or, in some cases, every six weeks. These days, many hospitals that Norco supplies are needing new shipments every three or four days, and some have had to use their reserve tanks.
The gaps between the haves and have nots extend into the universe of COVID. People with means and resources cant get monoclonal antibody treatments through private clinics and send their children to private and charter schools, which ironically, support remotely learning, mask mandates, and vaccination requirements for staff.
Jenn Thompson, the Director of the Idaho Public Charter School Commission says population growth makes that seem like a big increase, but it’s only a roughly 1% increase from the previous academic year.
“About 60% of the growth we saw last year was very specifically parents enrolling in virtual schools and the data we can look at right now is about half of that is holding,” Thompson said.
Idaho state representative Greg Chaney is mourning the loss of his mother, who died of COVID less than a week after becoming symptomatic. Chaney said his mother, who was 74, was unvaccinated.
Rep. Chaney said he believes that his mom was misled by misinformation
“I think she was skeptical about whether it was really as bad as it was billed to be,” Rep. Chaney said. “I think she viewed it as ‘I’ve been through a lot of stuff in my time on this planet and this is just another thing in the stuffing box.'”
“I think there was enough out there that validated her skepticism.”
In an interview with KTVB, she discussed a change of heart after seeing the reality first hand and doing her own research. After Craig traveled out of town for surgery and returned, she saw firsthand how the pandemic was overwhelming Idaho’s hospitals.
“I didn’t believe them when they said it was 98% or 96% unvaccinated and through my own research, it truly is,” she said. “I looked in the ICU today and it’s 27-year-olds, it’s 33-year-olds, it’s 60-year-olds. I had another good friend and her brother-in-law died at 40.”
At this point, Craig decided she had seen enough and received the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine.
“I have peace now. It’s funny, there are some like my parents. They never said anything to me but now that I am vaccinated they are like, ‘Phew’ you know? Because you worry about your kids.”
The emergency lawsuit asks a judge to intervene and order the Indianapolis hospital to respect a prescription for ivermectin issued to Eliot by a physician assistant named Maria Carson, according to the lawsuit.
Marion Superior Judge Kurt Eisgruber ordered Ascension St. Vincent to give Eliot the drug pending a response to the lawsuit by the hospital. After lawyers representing the hospital challenged the order in court Wednesday, Eisgruber backtracked with a new order saying Ascension St. Vincent did not have to give Eliot the drug.
The extension comes one day after state health officials offered cautious optimism with the state’s waning COVID-19 trends, including decreasing cases and hospitalizations. State Health Commissioner Dr. Kris Box emphasized, however, that they do not expect these declines to be “linear.”
“We may see cases bounce back up and bounce back down,” Box said. “If you look at other states, that’s what they see — kind of a ‘sawtooth’ pattern. That is the nature of this disease.”
Montana reported its 2,000 COVID death last night, with the official total at 2,009 this evening. Governor Greg Gianforte released a statement according to the Montana Free Press. High blood pressure and diabetes were each recorded as a factor in about 1 in 5 of the state’s 2020 COVID-19 deaths. Chronic lung disease was a factor in about 1 in 7. Dementia was a factor in about 1 in 9.
“The governor joins all Montanans whose hearts go out to the family, neighbors, and friends of those we have lost to the virus,” the statement read. “As the governor has said repeatedly, vaccination remains the best solution to protect ourselves and our loved ones from the virus, and we continue to make progress with the millionth dose of vaccine administered in the state yesterday.”
The emergency injunction request was filed Thursday, a day before Department of Education employees must receive at least their first COVID-19 shot to continue working.
“While a temporary interruption of work is not actionable, the mandate here would have a permanent effect: it is open-ended, where if a teacher never gets vaccinated, he or she will never be able to return to work,” the plaintiffs said in their petition.
The petitioners say an immediate injunction is necessary, arguing the “Court will lose the opportunity to provide meaningful relief” to public school employees if it does not issue an injunction before the Friday 5 p.m. deadline for DOE staff to get their first shot.
The Supreme Court has reviewed other emergency case requests from students and faculty and rebuked all challenges. The Supreme Court case of Jacobson vs. Massachusetts in 1905 found that municipalities, counties, and states can mandate vaccinations as a matter of public health, and the case law has been challenged multiple times.
Oregon also reported similar data to Washington state and national data from the CDC on breakthrough cases. Of all the breakthrough cases, only 4.6% of people were hospitalized and less than 1% died. The average age of vaccinated people who died was 80.5.
“Over the last 14 days, our positive tests are down about 20% in the state, and so there are good indicators that we have summited the peak of the delta variant,” Cox said during his monthly PBS news conference.
Meanwhile, on Thursday, the Utah Department of Health reported 1,704 new coronavirus cases and 12 deaths.
The rolling seven-day average for positive tests is now 1,355 per day, and the percent positivity rate of those tested is 14.2%.
“We support businesses in their decisions on whether or not to require vaccines, and I continue to do that,” the governor said during his monthly PBS Utah news conference.
“I know that position can be maddening to some, and that’s fine. But I’m a huge believer in free markets, and a mandate not to allow businesses to have mandates is a mandate in and of itself, and it’s government still telling businesses what they can and can’t do. And I’m opposed to that. I think that businesses should be able to have a mandate.”
Jacque, a Republican from De Pere who has been a vocal opponent of mask and vaccine mandates, tested positive for the virus last month.
“He and his family wish to thank everyone for the prayers and good wishes that are making his recovery possible,” a spokesperson for the senator said Tuesday. “Sen. Jacque is doing much better; he is in touch with his staff on legislative and district issues, and he is reaching out to his friends and colleagues.”
Jacque will continue respiratory and occupational therapy, but he’s feeling well mentally, the spokesperson said in a statement.
While he was hospitalized his wife, Renée Jacque, appealed for people to get vaccinated and to place “their trust in medical professionals.”
Wyoming
Wyoming hospitals are reporting 211 COVID patients hospitalized, 43 on ventilators, and only 33 ICU beds available statewide. Wyoming has 37 hospitals including Veteran’s Administration facilities. Only 13 have available ICU beds. More alarming, over 21% of COVID tests performed at hospitals are positive.
Misinformation
The latest one on social media is a drug that Pfizer is studying that is “suspiciously similar” to Ivermectin. The misinformation is coming from a blog on Zero Hedge that claims the Pfizer drug is essentially the same as Ivermectin.
The blog post is based on an article from the Reuters news agency about a Pfizer drug known as PF-07321332. The article said Pfizer has begun a study of the pill in up to 2,660 healthy adults who live in the same household as someone with a confirmed symptomatic COVID-19 infection.
Pfizer described the drug as a protease inhibitor, which is “designed to block the activity of the main protease enzyme that the coronavirus needs to replicate.” That would stop symptoms from worsening, a spokesperson said.
Zero Hedge seized on the protease inhibitor fact, claiming “that’s exactly what ivermectin” does.
Pfizer’s protease inhibitor is not similar to that of animal medicine and does not use the same mechanism, a Pfizer spokesperson told us.
Benjamin Neuman, the chief virologist at Texas A&M University’s Global Health Research Complex, said ivermectin’s main job is to block ion channels that parasites use to store up positively and negatively charged atoms. SARS-CoV-2 does not have any ion channels like the ones that ivermectin blocks, so there is not an obvious way for ivermectin to work in COVID-19, he said.
Knowledge is the best tool to fight against fear. A wise person chooses to be informed so they can make sound decisions. To join the fight against COVID misinformation, you can share this update through your social media platform of choice.
[KING COUNTY, Wash.] – (MTN) The most vaccinated county in Washington, San Juan, became the first county to see the number of new COVID cases drop into an acceptable range today. Across Washington, the number of new COVID cases and hospitalizations continues to decline.
The percentage of acute care patients treated for COVID dropped below 20% for the first time in weeks, adding more evidence that the fifth wave peaked.
Protesters plan to try and enter Swedish and Harborview Medical Center tomorrow as part of a protest against vaccine mandates for healthcare workers. A large anti-mandate protest is scheduled for Sunday in Olympia and includes speakers from The Post Millenial, Turning Point USA, and failed gubernatorial candidate Loren Culp.
Washington state will start disciplining doctors and nurses who spread COVID misinformation.
The CDC urges pregnant women to get vaccinated, reporting 97% of pregnant people hospitalized are unvaxxed. The deadline to get vaccinated to meet the Washington state employee mandate arrives on Sunday.
A new study out of the U.K. indicates 36% of people who have symptomatic cases of COVID become long haulers, in the most extensive study to date.
Alaska has two more hospitals move to crisis standards of care, Idaho continues the Hunger Games while Montana takes a bold new approach to its COVID problem – stop reporting data.
If Alaska were a country, it would have the highest COVID infection rate on the planet, and if Idaho were a country, it would have the highest COVID death rate on the planet.
In misinformation, we do a rerun to the questions, “what about Israel?”
Editor’s Note: A security upgrade took our site offline for a few hours last night. We apologize for any inconvenience. This was not related to any malicious activity but was required to fix a critical security flaw.
The first wave has ended in San Juan County, where 73.2% of the eligible population was vaccinated. The 7 day moving average for new cases dropped to 23.1 today, showing the archipelago has COVID under control.
New cases continued to drop statewide. In the South Central Hospital Region, which includes Benton, Franklin, Klickitat, Walla Walla, and Yakima counties, the 14 day moving average for new cases decreased to 742.9 per 100K. The Central Hospital Region, which represents King County, declined to 245.1.
Percent of Total Population Fully Vaccinated
Average 14-Day New Case Rate (unadjusted)
60.00% or above (3)
172.2 (down)
50.00% to 59.99% (12 counties)
509.3 (down)
40.00% to 49.99% (15 counties)
660.3 (down)
28.40% to 39.99% (9 counties)
724.7 (down)
14-Day New COVID Cases per 100K average by Vaccination Rate, Not Adjusted for Population
Through September 28, Washington’s statewide 14-day rolling average is 429.8 COVID cases per 100K, the lowest number since August 18. Counties in the 1,000.0 to 1,399.9 range include Lincoln (1,049.8)and Stevens (1,069.3), the least vaccinated county in Washington. Counties in the 800.0 to 999.9 per 100K range include Franklin, Garfield, Grant, Grays Harbor, and Okanogan.
New cases were down for all ages except 50 to 64 years old, which was statistically unchanged. Pediatric patients increased while geriatric patients decreased.
Age Group
7-Day Case Rate
7-Day Hospitalization Rate
Ages 0-11
194,8 (down)
0.7 (up)
Ages 12-19
213.0 (down)
1.7
Ages 20-34
200.7 (down)
5.6
Ages 35-49
201.5 (down)
9.9
Ages 50-64
142.8
15.0
Ages 65-79
102.5 (down)
18.5 (down)
Ages 80+
106.5 (down)
31.5 (down)
7-day case rate and 7-day hospitalization rate is per 100K within the age group – the target for 7-day case rate is <25.0, but there are other factors such as vaccination rates within the age groups, how many total tests within the 7-day period, and the positivity rate within each age group
The USA Today COVID Tracker reported 63 deaths on Tuesday, with data from the weekend included in the number. The state of Washington is not reporting the percentage of positive cases.
“We’re seeing some hopeful signs, and disease is still very, very high. Hospitalizations are still very, very high. Hospital admissions are still significantly higher than they were at the peak of the 3rd wave. And those are new admissions every day, and so that means occupancy is still very high. It continues to be high. And so, hospitals continue to they’re having to delay care for non-urgent procedures,” said Lacy Fehrenbach, Deputy Secretary for COVID-19 Response at the Washington State Department of Health.
Antivax protesters plan to enter Swedish and Harborview Medical Center tomorrow
At least one promoter of the Waking up Washington “Seattle March for Healthcare Workers Against COVID Mandates” is calling for marchers to enter Swedish and Harborview Medical Center to force people to “hear inconvenient truths.”
The march will start at 11:30 a.m. tomorrow, with protesters against vaccine mandates told to gather at Swedish before marching through Seattle to Harborview Medical Center.
On September 21, organizer Palmer Davis shared with her followers, “If our goal is to demand action from those inside the building, standing outside [emphasis hers] of it is kind of a waste of time.”
“What works is to get inside.” [emphasis hers]
“Face-to-face discussion forces people to hear inconvenient truths and answer inconvenient questions.”
Ms. Davis provided no additional specifics on what action could happen when they enter the hospitals, but she didn’t indicate they plan to disrupt patient care.
Available data doesn’t support large-scale resistance among the medical community over receiving the COVID vaccination. New York was the first to reach the deadline for a statewide mandate for healthcare workers. Over 92% of the state’s 692,326 impacted healthcare workers had received at least a first dose by Monday. More than 15,000 additional workers have told officials they will start their vaccination series.
Vaccination rates among patient-facing staff are even higher. The vaccination rate for nurses is estimated to exceed 97% and for doctors was almost 100%,
Large anti-vaccination protest planned in Olympia on Sunday
Local activists are planning a large anti-vaccination mandate rally at the Washington State Capitol on Sunday. Listed speakers include Ari Hoffman, writer at the Post Millenial, Katie Daviscourt of Turning Point USA, serial lawsuit filer Glen Morgan, Loren Culp, the former police chief of Republic, Washington State Representative Jim Walsh, and Winlock mayor Brandon Svenson.
“October 4s the deadline to receive the 2nd dose of the MRNA injection in order to be considered “fully vaccinated” by October 18 [sic] OctoOctober [sic] 3 thousands of State Workers and others from 1–4 p.m. as we stand united against this unreasonable and un-American mandate. Only by standing together do we have any hope of pressuring this Governor to reverse course. If he will not, then we must demand that our Representatives in the Legislature hold a special session to end this lawless and harmful action.”
The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1905 vaccination mandates at the municipal, county, and state levels are Constitutional. The court’s finding has been litigated dozens of times in the 116 years since, including August of this year. Several students at the University of Indiana filed a case with the Supreme Court over the university’s vaccine mandate. Justice Amy Coney-Barrett issued a ruling in favor of the school after determining it didn’t warrant an emergency hearing with the entire court.
About 1,700 state employees have had exemptions approved but could still lose their jobs if a non-public facing position can’t be found for them.
Washington doctors face discipline for spreading COVID misinformation
The Washington Medical Commission says practitioners who misrepresent prevention measures, including vaccines and mask-wearing or prescribe non-approved medications such as Ivermectin, will be subject to disciplinary action.
Patients concerned about a provider’s conduct can file a complaint with the commission.
Washington nurses will face the same action.
Travel Advisories
We recommend avoiding recreational travel to Spokane, Yakima, Klickitat, Benton, Franklin, and Walla Walla counties. If the number of new cases in the South Central Hospital Region continues to decline, we will likely lift our advisory for this region in the next 5 to 12 days. We strongly advise against all nonessential travel to Alaska, Idaho, and Montana. Hospital resources in these regions are constrained, and you may receive inadequate care if you experience a medical emergency.
Thank you
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Vaccination
CDC urges pregnant women to get vaccinated as deaths, premature births, and stillbirths rise among the unvaccinated
The CDC strongly recommends COVID-19 vaccination either before or during pregnancy. As of SeptemSeptember 27, more than 125,000 laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases have been reported in pregnant people, including more than 22,000 hospitalized cases and 161 deaths. The highest number of COVID-19-related deaths in pregnant people in a single month was reported in August 2021. Data from the COVID-19-Associated Hospitalization Surveillance Network (COVID-NET) indicate almost 97% of pregnant people hospitalized (either for illness or for labor and delivery) with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection were unvaccinated.
In addition to the risks of severe illness and death for pregnant and recently pregnant people, there is an increased risk for adverse pregnancy and neonatal outcomes, including preterm birth and admission of their babies to an ICU. Other negative consequences, such as stillbirth, have been reported. Despite the known risks of COVID-19, as of SeptemSeptember 18, 31.0% of pregnant people were fully vaccinated before or during their pregnancy.
Although the absolute risk is low, compared with non-pregnant symptomatic people, symptomatic pregnant people have more than a two-fold increased risk of requiring ICU admission, invasive ventilation, ECMO, and a 70% increased risk of death.
Deadline for single dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine and second dose for Pfizer and Moderna vaccine looms for state workers
Thousands of state workers have until Sunday to receive their second Pfizer or Moderna dose or the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Over 68% of state workers have reported they are fully vaccinated, and data from companies, schools, and other states such as Hawaii and New York, indicated that final acceptance would exceed 95%.
Multiple unions have reached agreements at a municipal, county, or state level, to extend the deadline past October 18 for individuals who received at least their first dose. Additionally, workers with denied exemptions requests will be given extra time.
Pfizer vaccine booster shots are now available
Booster shots for eligible individuals are now available statewide. Individuals who received both doses of the Pfizer vaccine more than 6 months ago, are 65 or older, or are immunocompromised can receive their third dose immediately.
In the Kirland-Bellevue-Woodinville area, Walgreens, Rite-Aid, Bartell’s, and QFC are offering booster shots. Additionally, the third dose is available at the CVS located within the Target store at 17,700 NE 76th Street in Redmond.
Most locations require an appointment, which can be scheduled online.
King County, Washington is reporting over 86.2% of age eligible residents are vaccinated with at least one dose. The highest rates of positivity are in areas with low vaccination rates statewide. The FDA has provided full approval of the Pfizer vaccine for anyone 16 and over and EUA approval for the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines.
COVID vaccines are free for anyone over 12 years old, and no appointment is necessary at most locations. Lyft and Hopelink provide free transportation, and KinderCare, the Learning Care Group, and the YMCA offer free childcare during vaccination appointments or recuperation.
According to the DoH COVID Dashboard, 19.5% of all acute care patients hospitalized in Washington have COVID. This is the first time the Washington state hospital system is not under “severe stress” in weeks. ICUs are at 89.3% of capacity statewide, with 30.5% of ICU patients fighting COVID. Although these numbers are very encouraging, thousands of vital surgeries and other medical procedures have been delayed for months. Some hospitals are starting to do elective procedures again, which will continue to keep ICU beds full.
The 7-day rolling average hospital admission rate for new COVID patients dropped to 137. The Department of Health reported 1,267 COVID patients statewide on SeptemSeptember 2897 on ventilators.
Hospitals in Eastern and Southwest Washington remain very strained due to low vaccination rates and, to a far lesser extent, out-of-state transfer patients.
– Alcott Elementary (1*) – Barton Elementary (1*) – Dickinson/Explorer Elementary (2*) – Ella Baker Elementary (3*) – Eastlake High (1*) – Evergreen Middle School (1*) – Franklin Elementary (2*) – Finn Hill Middle School (1* – see below) – ICS (1*) – Inglewood Middle School (2*) – Juanita Elementary (1*) – Kamiakin Middle School (3*) – Keller Elementary (2*) – Kirkland Middle School (1*) – Lake Washington High (1*) – Lakeview Elementary (3*) – Muir Elementary (1*) – Redmond Middle School (1*) – Redmond High School (1*) – Renaissance Middle School (1*) – Rush Elementary (2*)
See notes below
Northshore
RED
– Arrowhead Elementary (16) – Canyon Creek Elementary (25) – Canyon Park Middle School (11**) – Cottage Lake Elementary (13) – Crystal Springs Elementary (52**) – East Ridge Elementary (21) – Fernwood Elementary (13**) – Frank Love Elementary (25) – Hollywood Hills Elementary (26) – Inglemoor High School (8) – Innovation Lab High School (11) – Kenmore Elementary (12) – Kenmore Middle School (50**) – Kokanee Elementary (62) – Leota Middle School (5) – Lockwood Elementary (31) – Maywood Hills Elementary (21**) – Moorlands Elementary (51) – North Creek High School (26**) – Northshore Middle School (13**) – Ruby Bridges Elementary (9) – Secondary Academy for Success (12) – Shelton View Elementary (18**) – Skyview Middle School (75**) – Sunrise Elementary (21) – Timbercrest Middle School (46) – Wellington Elementary (77) – Westhill Elementary (30) – Woodin Elementary (17**) – Woodinville High School (19) – Woodmoor Elementary (21**)
– Bothell High School (13*/121)
Local Districts Scorecard – * indicates positive cases only ** indicates 5 or more confirmed positive cases
We redefined the school district statuses. Information for classroom and building closures has been a challenge to obtain, both for closures and reopening. We are adopting moving any school with more than 10 active COVID cases reported into the red, and we’ve adjusted the third column to reflect this change.
Bellevue School District went back to status yellow, with 10 confirmed COVID cases between students and staff in the district.
We received a confirmed parent report of one new COVID case at Finn Hill Middle School with 52 students moved to quarantine. Because Lake Washington doesn’t update its dashboard daily, we are adding this as a footnote.
Kirkland-Bellevue-Woodinville
No update
National Round-Up
Johns Hopkins University Cumulative Case Tracker is reporting 111,162 new cases and 2,543 deaths nationwide. COVID-related hospitalizations have declined to 79,000. The Pacific Northwest and Appalachia have become the new COVID hotspots, while Alabama leads the nation in per capita COVID deaths.
Dwindling COVID data is hampering efforts to track and report the real situation
“The fact that they created it, the infrastructure sits there, they put resources towards it, and then they decided not to make it sustainable is really concerning and just disheartening,” says Lauren Gardner, an associate professor of engineering at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s like they started going down the right path and then pulled back.”
By the first week of June, 24 U.S. states reported cases and deaths less than seven times a week, and four states reported only one to three times a week, according to JHU. More states followed suit, even as cases began to rise again due to the Delta variant. Currently, 36 states have pulled back from daily reporting, and seven of them are reporting only three times a week or less, including hard-hit Florida, which is reporting weekly.
New study finds 36% of people who had COVID are long haulers
The study, led by University of Oxford scientists in the United Kingdom, searched anonymized data from millions of electronic health records, primarily in the United States, to identify a study group of 273,618 patients with COVID-19 and 114,449 patients with influenza as a control.
Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corp. made the crisis care decision as many of the hospitals that typically take patient transfers in Anchorage and elsewhere continue to operate at capacity, officials said Wednesday. Hospitals in outlying areas already say they have to treat more challenging patients in-house because they can’t move them out for higher levels of care.
Dr. John Cullen described the likelihood of a much higher mortality rate “similar to a battlefield scenario” until COVID-19 cases start to drop to the Valdez City Council.
Alaska has 207 COVID patients hospitalized and 22 ICU beds available statewide – both numbers are an improvement from yesterday. Of the 106 patients in the ICU, a staggering 84 are on ventilators.
More than 300 Alaska doctors and other medical professionals, who are frustrated about inaction and incivility around COVID-19, signed an open letter this week asking people to think of what’s best for their fellow Alaskans and consider getting vaccinated.
The letter signers also say they stand in solidarity with their colleagues who spoke at an Anchorage Assembly meeting earlier this month after their impassioned testimony was met with jeers and denials.
Robin Ninefeldt told Alaska Public Media, “I personally know a young gentleman who lost his life because the health aide clinic ran out of a supply of oxygen. That’s a reality. And when I talk with my colleagues who are in the ICU, you’re dealing with the people doing your very best to keep them alive through supportive therapies, watching them pass away, watching families literally erupt into screams in tears because it is tragic to have someone taken from you so quickly.”
Idaho
Boise State University has provided insight into how much impact “crisis standards of care” are having in Idaho. At the start of the surge tearing through the state, 4.04% of residents who became infected with COVID died. This is well above the region and national average and exacerbated by distrust in the medical community, uninsured residents, and significant comorbidities in the state. Today, the rate is over 9% – if Idaho were a country, it would rival Peru.
That backlog not only limits the accuracy of reported COVID-19 cases in real-time but also limits local public health districts in their ability to contact trace properly. According to local health districts, this backlog of cases has developed due to a lack of necessary staffing to process cases in real-time. However, hiring more staff hasn’t been easy.
“There is a stigma against public health across much of Idaho, including our district, which makes it so people don’t want to work for public health simply because they don’t want to face the harassment public health workers are facing right now,” said Brianna Bodily, public information officer for South Central Public Health District.
“I want to remind everybody the monoclonal antibody treatment is a second to people getting vaccinated. We’ve got to get our numbers down.”
“Compared to the vaccines we’ve had before, there’s been more follow up on this vaccine than anything in history,” Gov. Little said.
Hospital officials describe border communities, like Spokane and Coeur d’Alene, as the ‘stopgap’ for ineffective Covid practices in Idaho, which Gov. Inslee mentioned during his trip to Spokane.
As nurses and doctors fought to keep a critically ill woman alive at St. Luke’s McCall Medical Center, which has just 15 beds, someone was busy painting swastikas outside. The staff is now demoralized and fearful.
“It was heartbreaking,” said Paddy Kinney, a physician and the on-duty hospitalist that night. “The timing of it was tough. Anytime you leave the hospital after you’ve worked all night trying to save somebody and you go home to your family, it’s hard to leave the hospital. You’re wondering if you could have done more or if that person is going to ultimately survive the night.
“But then to leave and be faced with that on your way out the door was really heartbreaking for people.”
“It’s disheartening to hear that our healthcare workers went from feeling like heroes to feeling at risk,” Idaho Department of Health and Welfare (DHW) Director Dave Jeppesen told reporters Tuesday.
Kootenai Health, in northern Idaho, increased security after people got into disputes with staff over masking requirements and staged protests outside the hospital. “I mean, we had a protest outside the hospital against masks and vaccines a couple of weeks ago that the patients that were dying of COVID inside could see,” Kootenai Health chief of staff Dr. Robert Scoggins said. “I think that was awful.”
Dr. Ryan Cole, who heads the public health efforts in Ada County, was blasted for making false claims that the COVID vaccine caused a twentyfold increase in cancer rates.
Cole claimed that he saw an uptick in cancers in vaccinated people, such as a “20 times increase in endometrial cancer”. However, he offered nothing in the way of data to support his claim, meaning that viewers only have his word for it.
Public health authorities haven’t reported a sudden cancer surge since the COVID-19 vaccination campaign began in the U.S. in December 2020. Furthermore, the spike that Cole alleged to be occurring would also have been observed worldwide if it were true. Yet, no reports have been corroborating Cole’s claim that people are now developing cancer at record rates.
The number of children and teens in Idaho hospitals for COVID-19 at the end of this summer was five times higher than what hospitals were seeing in June, according to data presented Wednesday afternoon in a briefing with doctors representing Saint Alphonsus, St. Luke’s, and Primary Health.
The number of hospitalized infants and children younger than five years old was ten times higher during the last week of August compared to June.
“That’s a scary figure,” said Dr. David Peterman, CEO of Primary Health Medical Group, who’s also a pediatrician.
Bethann Kierczak, 37, faces charges of theft or embezzlement related to a healthcare benefit program and theft of government property.
The complaint alleges that starting as early as May, the registered nurse distributed and sold real COVID-19 cards that had either been stolen or embezzled from a Veterans Affairs hospital. For the cards to look even more authentic, Kierczak used stolen or embezzled vaccine lot numbers for the cards, prosecutors say. Kierczak is accused of using Facebook’s Messenger feature to connect with potential buyers and sell the cards for between $150 and $200 each.
Montana
It continues to be very challenging to get meaningful information out of the state of Montana, beyond multiple hospitals operating at crisis standards of care or right to the line. The state reported more than 1,300 new cases but provided no information on total hospitalizations, ICU capacity, or the number of people on ventilators.
New Hampshire
Governor Chris Sununu condemned the actions of protesters that caused the postponement of Wednesday’s Executive Council. The protesters, part of an escalating COVID protest movement, were opposed to a state contract to expand vaccination efforts. The protesters’ yelling and threats led several state health department employees to leave the meeting under police escort.
“We will not allow our state employees to be put in harm’s way for simply doing their jobs,” Sununu said, echoing a statement he released earlier in the day. “That is not what New Hampshire is about.”
In a tweet posted shortly before 7 p.m. E.T., the production stated, “Through our rigorous testing protocols, breakthrough COVID-19 cases have been detected with the company of Aladdin at The New Amsterdam Theatre. Because the wellness and safety of our guests, casts, and crew are our top priority, tonight’s performance, Wednesday, September 29 has been canceled.”
North Carolina
3 Doors Down have begun canceling concerts on their ongoing The Better Life 20th anniversary U.S. tour that will require all artists, crew, and attendees to show proof of vaccination against COVID-19 or a recent negative COVID test. Two shows have been canceled so far.
Those concerts were originally scheduled for October 7 at the Red Hat Amphitheater in Raleigh, N.C., and October 9 at Cadence Bank Amphitheatre in Atlanta.
Teresa Makenzie Sperry, a student at Hillpoint Elementary School, was admitted to Children’s Hospital of Kings Daughters in Norfolk and died after her heart failed, her mother, Nicole Sperry, wrote.
Misinformation
“Look at Israel.” This is a common refrain from people who claim that vaccinations don’t work. They cite Israel’s high vaccination rate and the hospitalization rate among the vaccinated population. We wrote about the data fallacy when looking at percentages for new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths when evaluating vaccination performance. Let’s pull these claims apart.
Israel is highly vaccinated. In April 2021, that statement is correct. Israel was the global leader in vaccination. By the time Delta surged in Israel, the nation had dropped to 32nd place. Today Israel is tied with Saudia Arabia and Germany in 21st place, with 67% of the population with at least one dose, narrowly ahead of the United States and behind Sweden. Globally, there are 17 nations with a vaccination rate of 70% or higher.
The United Arab Emirates, where 84% of the population is fully vaccinated, has a population similar to Michigan. The Middle East nation is reporting under 300 new COVID cases a day. The country never had a significant Delta surge.
For our analysis, we went straight to the source – The Israel Ministry of Health COVID website and its COVID Control Panel.
Israel vaccination rate from JuJune 30o September 232021
The first graphic shows the vaccination rate in Israel stalled out and barely changed over three months. The booster shot program started on JuJuly 302021, and about half of the previously vaccinated residents had received the first dose by the end of September.
Severely ill patients over 60 years old by immunization status previous 90 days
The next chart shows the impact of the Delta wave as it rolled through Israel. The number of severely ill patients, defined differently than the United States, rises quickly among the unvaccinated, representing only 33% to 36% of the population, depending on the time within the surge.
The number of severely ill patients also increases at just 25% of the peak level among the unvaccinated, despite representing 64% to 67% of the population. Finally, the number of severely ill patients over the last 3 months is negligible among residents who received a booster shot.
We know that most breakthrough cases are among people over 65 years old. Israeli doctors found the same situation.
The majority of these patients received two vaccine doses at least five months ago, are over the age of 60, and have chronic illnesses known to exacerbate a coronavirus infection. They range from diabetes to heart disease and lung ailments, as well as cancers and inflammatory diseases that are treated with immune-system suppressing drugs, according to Reuters interviews with 11 doctors, health specialists, and officials.
Deaths by immunization status in Israel, last 90 days, under 60 years old
What about those under 60 years old? The overall rate of death among those under 60 is almost negligible. Unvaccinated residents have a slightly higher occurrence versus those who receive two doses. Once again, the unvaccinated group represents a much smaller number of people, about 3.3 million, versus the vaccinated group of 6.5 million. There is one more thing in this graph, in the last 90 days, the total number of deaths among residents under 60 who received a booster shot is 3.
Current hospitalizations “seriously” ill patients in Israel by age and vaccination status
The last chart shows the current situation among “seriously ill” patients in Israel. The majority of the 660 hospitalized patients are under 70 years old, and a vast majority are unvaccinated. It isn’t until you get to 80 and above that, the number of breakthrough cases comes close to the number of unvaccinated patients.
Of the 660 seriously ill patients, 285 are in the ICU, and 227 are on respirators, and the chart above shows, a vast majority are unvaccinated.
The argument that the vaccine didn’t work in Israel is a data fallacy. The vaccine is highly effective at preventing severe COVID and death, even when facing the Delta variant and an aged population. In the last 90 days, based on data from Israel, only 3 people who received booster shots died from COVID.
Knowledge is the best tool to fight against fear. A wise person chooses to be informed so they can make sound decisions. To join the fight against COVID misinformation, you can share this update through your social media platform of choice.
[KING COUNTY, Wash.] – (MTN) Cases moved upward while hospitalizations declined in Washington state. The number of COVID positive students in the Bellevue School District dropped significantly, while cases and quarantines expanded in Northshore, particularly at Bothell High School.
The rollout of additional monoclonal antibody clinics in Washington remains hobbled due to a tight supply and ongoing negotiations with potential locations.
Over 4,000 people joined Turning Point USA and former Washington state representative Matt Shea for a “medical freedom” rally in Spokane. An anti-vaccination rally is planned for September 30 at Swedish Hospital and Harborview Medical Center. At Harborview, staff spoke out over the weekend about getting threats from family members of COVID patients.
A 38-year old Washington State Trooper died of COVID over the weekend, leaving behind a wife and two children.
Vaccination rates in Washington climbed again but appeared to be slowing in many counties. The number of vaccinated adolescents in the Kirkland-Bellevue-Woodinville area increased dramatically last week.
Alaska and Idaho continue to operate under crisis standards of care. Help came to Montana in the form of the Veteran’s Administration opening its doors to non-veteran patients. We’ve added Wyoming to a state we’re tracking and consider it at risk of expanding crisis standards of care.
Data points to another plateau, following the pattern of the last three weeks. In the South Central Hospital Region, which includes Benton, Franklin, Klickitat, Walla Walla, and Yakima counties, the 14 day moving average for new cases is 797.4 per 100K, statistically unchanged from Friday. The Central Hospital Region, which represents King County, is 275.3, a slight increase. We have broken out the counties that have 60% or more of their residents vaccinated. The new case rate is 416% higher in counties that are under 40% vaccinated.
Percent of Total Population Fully Vaccinated
Average 14-Day New Case Rate (unadjusted)
60.00% or above (3)
182.6
50.00% to 59.99% (12 counties)
560.7
40.00% to 49.99% (15 counties)
730.6 (up)
28.40% to 39.99% (9 counties)
760.5
14-Day New COVID Cases per 100K average by Vaccination Rate, Not Adjusted for Population
Through September 26, Washington’s statewide 14-day rolling average is 463.9 COVID cases per 100K, indicating newly detected cases jumped over the weekend. Counties in the 1,000.0 to 1,399.9 range include Lincoln (1,257.9), Franklin (1.056,5), Okanogan (1,066.5), and Stevens (1,104.1). Counties in the 800.0 to 999.9 per 100K range include Adams, Asotin, Garfield, Grant, and Pend Oreille. Adams reported 978.0, and Grant reported 976.7 per 100K, putting the two counties just under the 1,000 threshold.
New cases were up in every age group, while hospitalizations were down for pediatric and geriatric patients.
Age Group
7-Day Case Rate
7-Day Hospitalization Rate
Ages 0-11
231.9 (up)
0.7 (down)
Ages 12-19
245.8 (up)
1.7
Ages 20-34
234.3 (up)
5.4
Ages 35-49
231.7 (up)
10.1
Ages 50-64
160.8 (up)
14.4
Ages 65-79
115.6 (up)
19.5 (down)
Ages 80+
118.1 (up)
31.5 (down)
7-day case rate and 7-day hospitalization rate is per 100K within the age group – the target for 7-day case rate is <25.0, but there are other factors such as vaccination rates within the age groups, how many total tests within the 7-day period, and the positivity rate within each age group
The USA Today COVID Tracker did not provide a number for reported deaths in Washington state. The state of Washington is not reporting the percentage of positive cases.
Expansion of monoclonal antibody treatment clinics in Washington remains stalled out
She said that the state was still working to identify partners that could provide the early stage COVID treatment outside of a hospital or urgent care setting.
Monoclonal antibodies are lab-engineered immune system proteins developed using similar processes as the FDA-approved mRNA Pfizer vaccine. For COVID-positive patients with mild symptoms and who don’t require supplemental oxygen, the therapy has shown to be highly effective in triggering a strong immune response. However, the treatment is not recommended for symptomatic cases that have lasted more than a week with worsening symptoms.
They are not an effective treatment for people who have been symptomatic for more than a week, have moderate or severe symptoms, or require oxygen therapy. Ms. Sauer said that some people were using the treatment as a “get out of jail free card” versus getting vaccinated.
Anti-vaccination protests planned at Swedish Hospital and Harborview Medical Center
Waking up Washington plans a “Seattle March for Healthcare Workers Against COVID Mandates” for September 30. The group announced they would march through Seattle from Swedish Hospital to Harborview Medical Center during the lunch hour.
Vaccination rates for doctors and nurses are high nationwide, with 97% doctors and 88% of nurses fully vaccinated. So far, hospital systems that have mandated vaccinations have seen very little attrition among the highest skilled workers.
Staff threatened at Harborview Medical Center over COVID treatment and mask wear
“At first, there was a feeling of camaraderie and people really applauding health care workers,” said Sam Conley, a neuroscience acute care nurse at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.
But nearly two years after the pandemic began, amid a new period of vaccine requirements, mask enforcement, and staff shortages, Conley said the strains of the job have been as difficult as ever.
“It’s the verbal and physical abuse from visitors and family members that’s been some of the most challenging aspects of providing care,” Conley said. “I’ll have to ask visitors several times, ‘Hey, I need you to put that mask back on.'”
38-year old Washington State Trooper dies of COVID
The WSP would not comment on how long he was sick, or if he worked while COVID positive, or his vaccination status. COVID has been the leading killer of law enforcement since 2020.
According to KOIN, Gunderson became ill on a business trip. Gunderson was assigned to District 1, which serves Pierce and Thurston Counties. He left behind a wife and two sons.
The Seattle Times reported that 68% of all Washington state workers impacted by the October 18 vaccination deadline are fully inoculated and have submitted their documentation.
Turning Point USA and former state rep Matt Shea lead anti-government/anti-vaccination rally in Spokane
Turning Point USA, founded by Charlie Kirk in 2021, created an offshoot organization called Turning Point Faith, collaborated with On Fire Ministries for an anti-vaccination rally in Spokane. An estimated 4,000 people gathered at Riverfront Park to hear Dr. Ryan Cole, Ada County, Idaho health officer, Leslie Monookian of Health Freedom Defense Fund, and former state representative Matt Shea. Washington state representative Jenny Graham (R-Spokane) was expected to speak but was a no-show at the rally.
Matt Shea recently formed his own church, On Fire Ministries, after a schism with Ken Peters and the so-called Church at Planned Parenthood (TCAPP). TCAPP, along with Covenant Church, was ordered by a judge last week to stop protests outside of the Planned Parenthood Clinic after a year-long legal battle.
Matt Shea has been a subject of controversy for over a decade. While serving in Iraq, his commander had to disarm him due to “anger management issues.” In 2018 he distributed a manifesto titled Biblical Basis for War. The Spokane County Sheriff reported Shea to the FBI and said the manifesto was racist, anti-Semitic, and based on the white supremacist ideology of Christian Identity. The group wants to create a white-ethnostate based on Christian dogma in the Pacific Northwest.
Dr. Ryan Cole is antimask, called the COVID vaccine, “needle rape,” and leads the public health efforts in Ada County, Idaho, where Boise is located.
On the same day, Turning Point USA hosted a “medical freedom” rally in Enumclaw.
The anti-vaccination movement has increasingly aligned with anti-government and white nationalist groups. Organizations like Christian Identity and the Proud Boys using the messages of government overreach and defending freedom as recruiting tools.
Travel Advisories
We recommend avoiding recreational travel to Spokane, Yakima, Klickitat, Benton, Franklin, and Walla Walla counties. If the number of new cases in the South Central Hospital Region continues to decline, we will likely lift our advisory for this region in the next 7 to 14 days. We strongly advise against all nonessential travel to Alaska, Idaho, and Montana. Hospital resources in these regions are constrained, and you may receive inadequate care if you experience a medical emergency.
Thank you
Thank you to our new subscribers and those of you who have made one-time contributions. On behalf of the entire team, thank you for helping us keep the lights on!
No promotional consideration has been given, or requested from the n95 project or any manufacturer of masks
Vaccination
Number of vaccinated Washington state residents continues to rise
The Washington State Department of Health released updated vaccination numbers for the state and its 39 counties. On Monday, 76.4% of all residents 12 and over have received at least one dose, and 69.7% were fully vaccinated.
The number of people fully vaccinated slowed down last week. All but one county, Skamania, reported at least a modest increase. With 73.2% of residents fully vaccinated, San Juan County continues to lead the state. At 28.4%, Stevens County was in last and is the only county with less than 30% of residents fully vaccinated.
The two counties have a stark difference in the number of new COVID cases. On Monday, San Juan County was down to 51.9 cases per 100K people, while Stevens County was 1,104.1.
Pfizer vaccine booster shots are now available
Booster shots for eligible individuals are now available statewide. Individuals who received both doses of the Pfizer vaccine more than 6 months ago, are 65 or older, or are immunocompromised can receive their third dose immediately.
In the Kirland-Bellevue-Woodinville area, Walgreens, Rite-Aid, Bartell’s, and QFC are offering booster shots. Additionally, the third dose is available at the CVS located within the Target store at 17,700 NE 76th Street in Redmond.
Most locations require an appointment that can be set up online.
King County, Washington is reporting over 85% of age eligible residents are vaccinated with at least one dose. The highest rates of positivity are in areas with low vaccination rates statewide. The FDA has provided full approval of the Pfizer vaccine for anyone 16 and over.
COVID vaccines are free for anyone over 12 years old, and no appointment is necessary at most locations. Lyft and Hopelink provide free transportation, and KinderCare, the Learning Care Group, and the YMCA offer free childcare during vaccination appointments or recuperation.
According to the DoH COVID Dashboard, 20.6% of all acute care patients hospitalized in Washington have COVID. A hospital system caring for this many COVID-positive patients in acute care is considered to be under “severe stress.” ICUs are at 89.4% of capacity statewide, with 31.7% of ICU patients fighting COVID. The number of ICU patients dropped significantly from last week.
The 7-day rolling average hospital admission rate for new COVID patients was down to 147, which is still higher than the January 2021 peak. The Department of Health reported 1,329 COVID patients statewide on September 26 and 220 on ventilators. Monday data is typically incomplete, so expect to see those numbers change tomorrow. If that number holds, hospitalizations have dropped 15%.
The number of patients at EvergreenHealth in Kirkland dropped 26% from last week. Currently, the hospital is treating 29 patients, 78% fully vaccinated (one patient, under 12, is not eligible). The ICU is caring for 9 patients, 78% fully vaccinated, with five on ventilators – none vaccinated. Only one vaccinated patient is under 60 years old. There was no additional information on the pediatric patient.
Cassie Sauer, CEO of the Washington State Hospital Association (WSHA), indicated she was “cautiously optimistic” about the declining number of hospitalizations. However, she cautioned that the future is uncertain with the arrival of cooler weather and, eventually, flu season.
At the same briefing, Dr. Radha Agrawal with Overlake Medical Center in Bellevue said the patients she is treating are younger, sicker, and not responding to treatment.
“Once they get on a ventilator, the rate of success has been really, really low,” she said, adding, “We’re seeing so many younger people this year. It’s tragic, and it’s tragic for the patients, and it’s tragic for the families, and it’s tragic for the people taking care of them.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Dr. Freudenberger. “It’s particularly bad among our nursing staff.”
He said the start of every day involves assessing how short of staff they will be and how they will staff a constant influx of new COVID-19 positive patients.
Unlike Idaho, Washington state has not declared what’s called ‘crisis standards of care,’ which is a decision that would force health care providers to systematically ration care because of a lack of space and resources.
“We are on a razor’s edge of that,” Dr. Freudenberger. “That would get at the very core of what we do as health care providers.”
Back to School
School District
Status
Less than 10 Active Cases
10 or More Active Cases
Bellevue
GREEN
– Bellevue (1) – Eastgate (1) – Enatai (4)
None
Lake Washington
YELLOW
– Alcott Elementary (1*) – Barton Elementary (1*) – Dickinson/Explorer Elementary (2*) – Ella Baker Elementary (3*) – Eastlake High (1*) – Evergreen Middle School (1*) – Franklin Elementary (2*) – Finn Hill Middle School (1*) – ICS (1*) – Inglewood Middle School (2*) – Juanita Elementary (1*) – Kamiakin Middle School (3*) – Keller Elementary (2*) – Kirkland Middle School (1*) – Lake Washington High (1*) – Lakeview Elementary (3*) – Muir Elementary (1*) – Redmond Middle School (1*) – Redmond High School (1*) – Renaissance Middle School (1*) – Rush Elementary (2*)
Northshore
RED
– Arrowhead Elementary (19) – Canyon Creek Elementary (24) – Canyon Park Middle School (8**) – Cottage Lake Elementary (15) – Crystal Springs Elementary (47**) – East Ridge Elementary (22) – Fernwood Elementary (13**) – Frank Love Elementary (31) – Hollywood Hills Elementary (19) – Inglemoor High School (7) – Innovation Lab High School (10) – Kenmore Elementary (16) – Kenmore Middle School (41**) – Kokanee Elementary (51) – Leota Middle School (5) – Lockwood Elementary (20) – Maywood Hills Elementary (20**) – North Creek High School (21**) – Northshore Middle School (12**) – Ruby Bridges Elementary (9) – Secondary Academy for Success (10) – Shelton View Elementary (18**) – Skyview Middle School (77**) – Sunrise Elementary (20) – Timbercrest Middle School (32**) – Wellington Elementary (67) – Westhill Elementary (19) – Woodin Elementary (16**) – Woodinville High School (20) – Woodmoor Elementary (20**)
– Bothell High School (13*/102)
Local Districts Scorecard – * indicates positive cases only ** indicates 5 or more confirmed positive cases
We redefined the school district statuses. Information for classroom and building closures has been a challenge to obtain, both for closures and reopening. We are adopting moving any school with more than 10 active COVID cases reported into the red, and we’ve adjusted the third column to reflect this change.
The Bellevue School District moved back to green status while new confirmed COVID cases were reported in four Lake Washington schools.
The number of positive cases between staff and students grew to 13 at Bothell High School over the weekend, with another 102 students are quarantined. The NECS reports the school has 1,607 students, and the Northshore School District website reports 236 faculty. Although the numbers in the district may appear to be bad, it is the only school district we are monitoring that is performing weekly universal COVID testing.
King County COVID vaccination rates – at least one dose ages 12 to 19 – by zip code as of September 27, 2021
Vaccination rates among adolescents 12 to 19 jumped significantly throughout the Kirkland-Bellevue-Woodinville area, although the sharp divide between the northern and southern half remains. Every zip code below 80% vaccinated for the age group saw an increase of at least 5% in a week.
We recommend that parents in the Bellevue and Lake Washington School District request better transparency on their publicly facing COVID dashboards.
Kirkland-Bellevue-Woodinville
King County Public Health updated the vaccination rates by zip code, with the numbers improving throughout the region. The northern half of Kirkland, Bothell, and Kenmore, continue to lag behind the rest of the local area.
King County, Washington, at least one dose of COVID vaccine, all eligible ages, as of September 27, 2021
Zip Code
Percent vaccinated, at least one dose, 12 and older
98155
92.7%
98028
89.5%
98011
85.9%
98034
84.7%
98033
92.3%
98072
90.4%
98052
94.8%
98004
>95.0%
98039
93.7%
98005
94.6%
98007
89.2%
Vaccination rates for those 12 and older by zip code – at least one dose
National Round-Up
Johns Hopkins University Cumulative Case Tracker is reporting 30,952 new cases and 286 deaths nationwide. Most states do not provide reporting over the weekend, so a significant amount of data is missing.
“Boosters are important, but the most important thing we need to do is get more people vaccinated,” Biden said before receiving his injection.
“The vast majority of Americans are doing the right thing. Over 77% of adults have gotten at least one shot,” he said. “About 23% haven’t gotten any shots. And that distinct minority is causing an awful lot of damage for the rest of the country. This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. That’s why I’m moving forward with vaccination requirements wherever I can.”
COVID is spinning out of control in Alaska, with the state reporting 21 COVID deaths on Monday and almost 4,000 new cases from Friday to Sunday. The state is leading the United States for new COVID cases with a staggering 7 day moving average of 1,225 new cases per 100K residents. Once the top state for vaccination, since April, it has slid to 32nd place.
Superior Court Judge Katherine Cooper ruled the ban on certain COVID-19 mitigation measures violated the so-called “single-subject rule” for legislation by being inserted into a state budget bill.
“The bill is classic logrolling – a medley of special interests cobbled together to force a vote for all or none,” Cooper said in her 17-page ruling.
Ninety minutes after the decision was released, Gov. Doug Ducey’s spokesman said the ruling by a “rogue judge” would be challenged:
Idaho
While Dr. Ryan Cole was exporting COVID misinformation in Spokane on Sunday, the Gem State set new records. The state is now treating 774 COVID patients, a new record. Among the 774, 207 in the ICU – Idaho only has 170 ICU beds.
St Luke’s Health was treating 303 COVID patients statewide and reported every ICU patient was unvaccinated.
303 COVID+ patients across @StLukesHealth & guess how many of those requiring the ICU are unvaccinated? 100%. All of them. Every COVID patient requiring intensive care today is NOT vaccinated. This is a pandemic of unvaccinated people. #VaccinesWork#OneSharedPurposepic.twitter.com/vZO2t835Qc
For the week ending Sunday, the state reported another 1,516 cases involving 5- to 17-year-olds. That’s a 10% increase from the previous week, as K-12-aged children continue to account for a growing share of Idaho’s coronavirus caseload. Nine children were hospitalized with COVID-19 in the past week.
In Yellowstone County, 129 people are hospitalized with COVID-19. Of those, 111 are unvaccinated. Between the two hospitals, 30 patients are in the ICU, and 20 are on ventilators. Of those, all are unvaccinated.
“With more hospital beds available, hospitals now have another tool in their toolbox to treat Montanans in need of care as their systems are strained,” Gov. Greg Gianforte said Friday in a statement.
Montana has the fifth-highest rate of new COVID cases in the country, with 15% to 19% of all tests coming back positive.
New York
The deadline for 450,000 healthcare workers to get vaccinated has arrived in New York with a wide range of reports from hospital systems across the state. Statewide, over 95% of nurses and almost all doctors got vaccinated or had an exemption approved. Hospital systems are reporting a wide range of results from “total compliance” to 15% attrition. The number of clinicians that left has been reported to be low statewide.
The hardest-hit system appears to be Erie County Medical Center in Buffalo. The hospital announced it has suspended elective inpatient surgeries and stopped accepting intensive-care patients as it prepares to fire “hundreds of unvaccinated employees,” a spokesman Peter Cutler said.
In New York City, up to 11% of the 43,000 public health system employees refused to get vaccinated.
About 460 patients — including 135 in intensive care units — are in the Clinic’s Ohio hospitals. This is more than double the number of patients that were hospitalized with COVID-19 at the Clinic one month ago. The majority of these patients are unvaccinated, the hospital system said.
Statewide, unvaccinated people account for close to 94% of recent coronavirus hospitalizations, according to data from the Ohio Department of Health.
Oregon
To our south, Oregon has 886 COVID patients hospitalized, which is an increase of 11 from over the weekend. Almost a quarter of all COVID patients are in the ICU, and although that number declined by 25 over the weekend, most of that was due to patients succumbing to COVID.
The current surge, fueled by the highly contagious delta variant, is slowly beginning to abate as the virus finds fewer people who aren’t immune either through vaccination or recent infection. However, the new forecast indicates that hospitalizations will remain at extremely high levels until October 5 and will stay high well into December.
Wyoming
The Wyoming Department of Health reported an additional 854 confirmed COVID-19 cases. The number of COVID-19 patients in Wyoming hospitals fell below 200 on Sunday to 198 and dropped further to 192 on Monday, according to the WDH. The most recent peak in COVID-19 hospitalizations occurred on September 8, when there were 233 COVID-19 patients in Wyoming hospitals.
Knowledge is the best tool to fight against fear. A wise person chooses to be informed so they can make sound decisions. To join the fight against COVID misinformation, you can share this update through your social media platform of choice.
[KING COUNTY, Wash.] – (MTN) Worsening problems with data from the Washington State Department of Health is hobbling efforts to understand the current situation and forecast the future. In counties where 40% or more of the total population is vaccinated, the number of cases per 100,000 people is down. Hospitalizations are up among people under 35 and have declined for individuals over 49. There is very little else that can be said with certainty.
Confirmed COVID cases between students and faculty at Bothell High School in the Northshore School District have grown to 12, with 100 more in quarantine. School officials in Eatonville moved its middle school to remote learning at least until mid-October due to an unspecified number of cases.
If you qualify for a Pfizer booster shot, we checked area pharmacies and grocery stores – they’re available now.
The Washington Department of Health data and reporting problems, which started in August and has only gotten worse, have become problematic. The new Modeling and Surveillance Situation Report, released by the DoH today, expressed uncertainty in the ongoing COVID situation because critical data is missing. Choose your path wisely over the next two months based on what is in the report. The first option makes for a harsh winter while the second path forecasts a sixth wave.
The City of Seattle has reached an agreement with three more unions today over modifications to the vaccine mandate. The Seattle Fire Department agreed to the compromise plan and incentives. The Seattle Police Officer Guild was absent from the negotiations.
Anti-vaccination advocates are becoming more desperate and violent. Hospital workers were threatened and attacked in multiple states this week, and the anti-vaccination group Waking Up Washington has resorted to telling their followers not to go to hospitals. The same group is planning an anti-vaccination “town hall meeting” at a Woodinville restaurant tomorrow. If you’re planning to attend, be sure to bring $20 cash and be ready to pay at the door.
Idaho and Alaska are still operating under “crisis standards of care,” and Alaska, in particular, is getting much worse. If you want to feel your blood pressure rise and have veins bulging out of your neck, please, read the Idaho section. We recommend not having anything breakable nearby. In Helena, Montana, where the city’s hospital is operating under crisis standards of care, state legislatures debated whether things are really that bad.
The situation in the Pacific Northwest is so deranged reporting Oregon has 60 available ICU beds statewide is now considered good news.
Data continues to show improvement across Washington, particularly in most of the highly vaccinated counties. In the South Central Hospital Region, which includes Benton, Franklin, Klickitat, Walla Walla, and Yakima counties, the 14 day moving average for new cases is 803.4 per 100K, statistically unchanged from yesterday. The Central Hospital Region, which represents King County, is 258.7, a slight drop from yesterday.
Percent of Total Population Fully Vaccinated
Average 14-Day New Case Rate (unadjusted)
50.00% or above (13 counties)
464.5 (down)
40.00% to 49.99% (17 counties)
683.3 (down)
28.10% to 39.99% (9 counties)
755.8
14-Day New COVID Cases per 100K average by Vaccination Rate, Not Adjusted for Population
Through September 23, Washington’s statewide 14-day rolling average is 446.4 COVID cases per 100K – the change is “statistically insignificant,” but it’s worth noting the margin was 0.4 cases!. Counties in the 1,000.0 to 1,399.9 range include Lincoln (1,257.9), Franklin (1.127.5) and Stevens (1,115.0). Counties in the 800.0 to 999.9 per 100K range include Adams, Benton, Garfield, Grant, Grays Harbor, Okanogan, and Pend Oreille.
New cases by age group are statistically unchanged. Hospitalizations were up for people under 35 years old and down for individuals over 49 years old.
Age Group
7-Day Case Rate
7-Day Hospitalization Rate
Ages 0-11
193.4
1.3
Ages 12-19
201.4
1.5 (up)
Ages 20-34
193.4
5.0 (up)
Ages 35-49
196.8
9.9
Ages 50-64
135.4
14.7 (down)
Ages 65-79
97.6
21.7 (down)
Ages 80+
94.9
33.3 (down)
7-day case rate and 7-day hospitalization rate is per 100K within the age group – the target for 7-day case rate is <25.0, but there are other factors such as vaccination rates within the age groups, how many total tests within the 7-day period, and the positivity rate within each age group
The USA Today COVID Tracker has not been updated since yesterday. The state of Washington is not reporting the percentage of positive cases.
COVID reports from the Washington Department of Health providing fewer details
As Washington state entered what local officials called the fifth wave, the state provided fewer details on the Washington State Department of Health COVID-19 Data Dashboard. Between August 30 and September 24, the state removed or has delayed granular information, including:
Total number of staffed adult acute care beds available
Total number of adult acute care beds occupied
Total number of staffed adult ICU care beds available
Total number of adult ICU beds occupied
Staffed acute care and ICU beds available by Hospital Region
Number of COVID patients in acute care and the ICU by Hospital Region
Percentage of positive COVID cases detected by daily testing by county and state – accurate data hasn’t been available since August 27, and all data stopped updating last week – there will be no reporting until November 1
Some metrics, particularly hospital occupancy, number of people in the ICU, and number of people on ventilators, have gone through multiple revisions. When these issues have occurred in other states, they became the subject of national attention.
Suppose you compare the quality and quantity of data from the DoH to other states such as South Carolina. In that case, it exposes a breakdown in the region’s ability to gather and analyze COVID information.
South Carolina reported 2,602 confirmed new cases and another 889 probable cases today. The state had 111 confirmed COVID-related deaths and another 11 probable fatalities under investigation. The state processed 36,766 PCR tests, and 9.4% were positive. Currently, 8,511 acute care beds are being utilized, 86.4% of staffed beds in the state. Of those patients, 2,196 have COVID, with 533 in the ICU and 369 on ventilators. There was 223 hospital admission for COVID patients, and 28 hospitals in the South Carolina are experiencing staffing shortages.
We were able to write that in five minutes. The analysis in the first section of the state update took over half an hour and required processing raw data in Excel.
Last year, Washington state moved quickly to create detailed reports during the start of the pandemic. The state was the first to have a confirmed COVID case, a confirmed COVID death, and the first super spreader event. EvergreenHealth in Kirkland and the Kirkland Fire Department literally wrote the books for hospital COVID response, initial case management, and EMS response to potential COVID cases.
The lack of data, while Washington is in the worst COVID surge to date, is glaring, considering these tools were once available. We once led the nation in the capacity to process PCR tests and report the data. It erodes public trust when the number of skeptics is declining, and the remaining are increasingly radicalized. Doctors and nurses in the United States are being assaulted, stalked, and getting death threats. Anti-vaccination organizations are now advocating for people not to go to hospitals and, in a few cases, have attempted to remove people, including ICU patients, on BIPAP and ventilators.
Finally, current reporting does not track pediatric hospitalizations or pediatric acute care, NICU, or PICU resources despite weeks of promises that information would be shared.
We are disappointed that other larger media organizations are not highlighting these issues, especially when you consider the number of headlines generated by the actions of Florida, Georgia, Iowa, and Nebraska.
Department of Health issues updated modeling and surveillance situation report
Testing shortages create uncertainty in how many active cases are missed as hospital admissions spiked to a level 60% higher than the peak in January 2021. At the end of August, the statewide R0, the rate of transmission, dropped below 1.0. It has since increased to 1.3 and was showing an exponential growth curve. The report estimates that 1 in 106 Washingtonians are experiencing an active COVID case, the highest rate recorded since August 2020.
Statewide immunity to COVID is estimated at just over 60%, with 1 in 5 having some degree of natural immunity. With 40% of the entire population exposed, the Delta variant has a significant number of new hosts it can infect. Unvaccinated residents are ninefold more likely to be hospitalized than unvaccinated.
The state has two forecasted models. The first is based on the R0 at 0.9, which would support a declining number of new cases. Under that model, daily hospital admissions for COVID would return to levels seen outside of surges, less than 40 people a day statewide.
The second model assumes R0 doubles to 1.8 due to the Thanksgiving holiday and the state population becoming fatigued with mask wear. If this scenario becomes a reality, December daily hospital admissions will increase to 141 to 240 per day by the end of the year.
Eatonville Middle School moves to virtual learning due to COVID outbreak
Officials in Eatonville announced that Eatonville Middle School was moving to remote learning through October 11 at the minimum. The district didn’t release any specific information on the number of infected students, staff, or if there is significant transmission within the school.
Located between Olympia and Mount Rainier in Pierce County, the town had 3,000 residents. According to the DoH, only 47.9% of county residents are fully vaccinated.
Letter to parents announcing Eatonville Middle School is moving to remote learning
Seattle reaches agreement with major public employee unions over vaccination mandates
“Since the pandemic touched down in Seattle, our officers, firefighters, and frontline workers have worked day in and day out to provide nation-leading testing, vaccination, and relief programs for our residents. Those efforts are a key reason we have one of the highest vaccination rates and lowest cases and hospitalizations of every major American city,” said Mayor Durkan.
The agreement is expected to be ratified, provides 8 hours of paid time off for any employee who submits a vaccination form by October 5 and is fully vaccinated by October 18. Employees can begin the vaccination process by October 18 and not face termination. They will have to use their available accrued time off while going through the vaccination process, which can last from two to six weeks. Finally, each employee will receive 40 hours of supplementary paid leave for COVID-related reasons. Employees who are fully vaccinated by October 18 will receive an additional 40 hours of supplemental leave for a total of 80 hours.
“Worker safety and certainty are of paramount importance, and the unions involved with these negotiations centered those concerns throughout a complex and time-sensitive process,” said Shaun Van Eyk, PROTEC17 Union Representative and Coalition of City Unions Co-Chair. “We believe that these two tentative agreements honor the essential, public-sector workers whose work could not be performed remotely and create clear, transparent, and equitable pathways for all City workers with respect to the vaccine mandate. While both agreements took a great deal of time and effort to reach, the outcome is unquestionably worth it for the health and safety of our union members, their families, and our communities.”
We have reached a tentative agreement with nearly all unions to support employee vaccinations with incentives, frontline worker pay, & flexibility for telework until Jan 2022. These policies will protect the health of our workforce & communities we serve. https://t.co/s5T0s4sUvH
The city has now reached vaccination agreements with six labor unions. The Seattle Police Officer Guild, SPOG, was not part of the agreement. The city indicated they were still negotiating with police union leaders.
Almost 90 local, county, and state employees sued Washington state to try and block vaccine mandates earlier this month. One of the plaintiffs claimed up to 150 City of Seattle firefighters were ready to resign. In August, SPOG Union President Mike Solan said up to 200 officers were prepared to quit.
Anti-vaccination activist groups calling for the sick to “avoid hospitals”
As part of a national trend, the activist group Waking Up Washington is telling its followers to “avoid hospitals” because “they’ve fired many of their free thinkers.”
Ms. Davis is a central figure in the Washington state anti-vaccination movement, which has seen its numbers dwindle since the summer months. She told her followers to go to another website for medical treatment plans. The site includes access to an online doctor for prescriptions of medications, with a $149 fee for a consultation for Ivermectin. According to WebMDRx, 10 pills cost between $23 and $56.
The site also links to the discredit organization America’s Frontline Doctors and the FLCCC. We have elected not to link to that website as it provides dangerous medical advice.
Suggested treatments include hydrogen peroxide nebulization and taking dandelion, pine needle, and eucalyptus supplements. Neublizing hydrogen peroxide can be fatal, and none of these supplements have any therapeutic value. The website DNS is provided by Google, according to a whois search.
Anti-vaccination “town hall meeting” in Woodinville tomorrow at local restaurant
Tomorrow, the same group is holding a “town hall meeting” at Rooster’s Bakery and Cafe in Woodinville. The event touts legal resources to fight vaccine mandates and “expert testimony” about “rigged statistics.”
To attend, you are required to pay a $20 fee in cash at the door.
Editor’s comment: Nothing suspicious about that.
Anti-vaccination event flyer for Woodinville tomorrow
We recommend avoiding all travel to Spokane, Yakima, Klickitat, Benton, Franklin, and Walla Walla counties, along with Alaska, Idaho, and Montana. Hospital resources in these regions are constrained, and you may receive inadequate care if you experience a medical emergency.
Thank you
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Vaccination
No update
King County, Washington is reporting over 85% of age eligible residents are vaccinated with at least one dose. The highest rates of positivity are in areas with low vaccination rates statewide. The FDA has provided full approval of the Pfizer vaccine for anyone 16 and over.
COVID vaccines are free for anyone over 12 years old, and no appointment is necessary at most locations. Lyft and Hopelink provide free transportation, and KinderCare, the Learning Care Group, and the YMCA offer free childcare during vaccination appointments or recuperation.
According to the DoH COVID Dashboard, 22.0% of all acute care patients hospitalized in Washington have COVID. A hospital system caring for this many COVID-positive patients in acute care is considered to be under “severe stress.” ICUs are at 89.5% of capacity statewide, with 33.9% of ICU patients fighting COVID. There has been a slow decline for all data points over the last week.
The 7-day rolling average hospital admission rate for new COVID patients was unavailable today. The Department of Health reported 1,436 COVID patients statewide on September 23 and 233 on ventilators. We aren’t confident that these numbers are accurate. Hospital occupancy rates don’t support this much of a decline, and the state dashboard noted, “The “hospital admission rate” metric on the Healthcare System Readiness tab was not updated today due to an interruption in our data systems.”
Harborview Medical Center is only at 113% capacity, which is an improvement from last week when the Level I trauma center was at 117% capacity.
Chelsey Roos, a registered nurse who works at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Tacoma, spoke with KCPQ.
“You get into your car after work, and you just want to cry.”
“Not only do we have roughly 50% more cases than we had during the December surge, but we’re caring for all of those patients with fewer staff, because it’s been so challenging for particularly our nurses, that people are choosing to leave healthcare because of how stressful it’s been,” says Dr. Steven Mitchell, the medical director of Harborview Medical Center’s Emergency Room.
It’s a perfect storm, the stress of the job causing many to leave-which then leaves the remaining nurses with an even heavier workload.
“It burns people out, its burning people out so easily, we can’t seem to keep enough nurses working or wanting to work in acute care or a hospital, it’s just becoming too much, and I think people are wanting to reprioritize things in their lives,” says Roos.
“I don’t know what my daily census is today, but this is really the first time in the COVID surge this last week where we’ve seen an increase in children that have been admitted for the care of COVID.”
– Bellevue (1) – Big Picture (1) – Chinook (1) – Eastgate (1) – Enatai (36) – Interlake (2) – Lake Hills (13) – Puesta del Sol (2) – Wilburton (3)
None
Lake Washington
YELLOW
– Alcott Elementary (2*) – Ella Baker Elementary (3*) – Community School Elementary (7) – Dickinson Elementary (2*) – Eastlake High (1*) – Einstein Elementary (1*) – Evergreen Middle School (1*) – Finn Hill Middle School (1*) – Benjamin Franklin Elementary (2*) – Robert Frost Elementary (9) – Inglewood Middle School (3*) – Juanita Elementary (2*) – Juanita High School (1*) – Kamiakin Middle School (4* – see below) – Helen Keller Elementary (1*) – Peter Kirk Elementary (2*) – Kirkland Middle School (1*) – Lake Washington High (1*) – Lakeview Elementary (1*) – Muir Elementary (1*) – Redmond Elementary (2*) – Redmond Middle School (1*) – Redmond High School (1*) – Rose Hill Elementary (1*) – Rose Hill/Stella Schola Middle School (2*) – Thoreau Elementary (4) – Mark Twain Elementary (3*)
Northshore
RED
– Arrowhead Elementary (13) – Canyon Creek Elementary (24) – Canyon Park Middle School (8) – Cottage Lake Elementary (16) – Crystal Springs Elementary (47**) – East Ridge Elementary (24) – Fernwood Elementary (13**) – Frank Love Elementary (28) – Hollywood Hills Elementary (17) – Inglemoor High School (7) – Innovation Lab High School (9) – Kenmore Elementary (15) – Kenmore Middle School (39**) – Kokanee Elementary (50) – Leota Middle School (5) – Lockwood Elementary (8) – Maywood Hills Elementary (14**) – North Creek High School (21**) – Northshore Middle School (10**) – Ruby Bridges Elementary (7) – Secondary Academy for Success (10) – Shelton View Elementary (18**) – Skyview Middle School (82**) – Sunrise Elementary (21) – Timbercrest Middle School (28) – Wellington Elementary (64) – Westhill Elementary (10) – Woodin Elementary (9) – Woodinville High School (21) – Woodmoor Elementary (21**)
– Bothell High School (12*/100)
Local Districts Scorecard – * indicates positive cases only ** indicates 5 or more confirmed positive cases
We redefined the school district statuses. Information for classroom and building closures has been a challenge to obtain, both for closures and reopening. We are adopting moving any school with more than 10 active COVID cases reported into the red, and we’ve adjusted the third column to reflect this change.
We had a parent-reported confirmed COVID case at Kamiakin Middle School on Tuesday. Because the Lake Washington School District updates its dashboard weekly, we don’t know if this is in addition to the 3 cases reported on Monday or if any of those earlier cases have returned to class. We have set the number to 4.
The number of positive cases between staff and students has swelled to 12 at Bothell High School, with another 100 students quarantined. The NECS reports the school has 1,607 students, and the Northshore School District website reports 236 faculty. Although the numbers in the district may appear to be bad, they are the only school district of the three we are following that is performing weekly universal COVID testing.
We recommend that parents in the Bellevue and Lake Washington School District request better transparency on their publicly facing COVID dashboards.
Kirkland-Bellevue-Woodinville
Booster shots for eligible individuals are now available in the Kirland-Bellevue-Woodinville area. Individuals who received both doses of the Pfizer vaccine more than 6 months ago, are 65 or older, or are immunocompromised can receive their third dose immediately.
We canvased area drug and grocery stores to check for availability. Walgreens, Rite-Aid, Bartell’s, and CV are all offering booster shots immediately. Booster shots are also available at the CVS located within the Target store at 17,700 NE 76th Street in Redmond. Additionally, the QFC at Kirkland Urban is providing booster shots.
Most locations require an appointment that can be set up online. The Kirkland Urban QFC was already completely booked through the weekend.
National Round-Up
Johns Hopkins University Cumulative Case Tracker is reporting 128,731 new cases and 3,157 deaths nationwide.
Alaska
Alaska continues to operate in crisis standards of care as the situation in the vast and remote state continues to deteriorate. Officials reported 1,793 new cases and a staggering 41 deaths (yes, we know the headline says 1800 cases and 44 deaths – if you read the story, it says 1793 cases and 41 deaths, talk amongst yourselves – we’re over it) in the state of just over one million people. The numbers included hundreds of older cases due to a data entry backlog.
The state had a record of 217 COVID patients hospitalized. The statewide 7 day moving average for new COVID cases is a staggering 976 per 100K people, and currently, 9.2% of all COVID tests are coming back positive.
The state now has 20 ICU beds available, an improvement from yesterday, and 74 residents on ventilators.
Soldotna’s Central Peninsula hospital, about 150 miles from Anchorage, is operating at 133% capacity. Richards is worried about what will come next. “We all know that hospitalizations lag following these high-case days, so I don’t know what’s in store for us.”
The goal is to make more room at the busy Anchorage hospitals, which offer more intensive care and other services, especially sick patients that rural hospitals can’t support.
This practice is known as “load leveling,” and it’s done more regularly between hospitals in urban areas, where patients can be moved by ambulance. It’s far rarer in rural Alaska, though, since most hospitals in those areas aren’t connected by road and can be hundreds of miles apart.
“Once you start involving learjets and medevac companies, it gets infinitely more complicated,” Brunner said in an interview Thursday.
Patients that don’t need critical care are flown to acute care hospitals in rural areas. For many rural hospitals, the patients they receive are sicker than they usually see, straining staff. Worse, patients are separated from family and friends and face potential air ambulance bills in the tens of thousands of dollars.
In the 6,000 resident town of Bethel, Alaska, half the police force is threatening to resign over a recent vaccination mandate. The remote city is only accessible by boat or airplane during the warmer months, and ice road in the winter. The city is experiencing one of the highest COVID case rates in the state and country and doesn’t have the resources to deal with the surge. City officials decided to mandate vaccinations.
Resistance to the vaccine from police in Bethel is endemic of opposition the vaccine has seen from police departments across the country. Many officers have refused vaccine mandates, filed unsuccessful lawsuits, and decried the measures as unconstitutional.
But in Bethel, some say police have gone a step further, dangling the possibility of increased violence over remote residents’ heads if the city were to push half of the police force out of a job.
Among other highlights, Police Chief Richard Simmons baldly told KYUK earlier this week that the small city was “one of the most violent communities in the nation” and needed every one of its officers.
Available data shows that Bethell has a high crime rate but not one of the highest in the nation.
Alaska Chief Medical Officer Dr. Anne Zink, who also works in a hospital emergency department, said many retail pharmacists have stopped asking customers if they’d like the vaccine because of the fury it triggers.
“We see many triage nurses in the emergency department also afraid to ask that question,” Zink said, “because patients have been violent towards them in the emergency department when asking the question if they’re vaccinated or if they have COVID-19.”
Idaho
Idaho reported 1,646 new COVID cases and 34 new deaths on Friday. The state continues to operate under crisis standards of care. Unlike states such as Alaska, Oregon, and Washington, which use “load leveling” to maximize resources, Idaho hospitals can go it alone.
While people are dying in hospital waiting areas in the Panhandle, hospitals in the eastern part of the state are operating under “contingency care.” Both Oregon and Washington are running on “contingency care protocols,” which give medical providers options to defer certain treatments and take other steps to maximize resources.
While hospitals in the Magic and Treasure valleys and Northern Idaho have added beds in conference rooms, cafeterias, and other available spaces, Herget believes PMC should have adequate traditional bed capacity heading forward.
On Monday, Herget said PMC would open a special care unit with nine rooms equipped with negative pressure technology to treat patients with contagious upper respiratory diseases, such as the coronavirus.
According to ABC News, an advocacy group for older adults has filed a civil rights complaint against Idaho over the state’s “crisis standards of care” guidelines for hospitals overwhelmed by patients amid the coronavirus pandemic.
On Tuesday, the group Justice in Aging asked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to investigate Idaho’s health care rationing plan. They contend it discriminates against older adults, especially Black and Native American adults, by using factors like age when prioritizing which patients get access to life-saving care.
“Older adults are facing serious risk of discrimination, resulting in death,” because of Idaho’s crisis standards, Justice for Aging attorneys wrote in their complaint letter. Symptomatic breakthrough cases are overwhelming among people over 70 years old.
The school wrote in a statement on Friday, “In light of our declining campus positivity rates and high vaccination rates, the university will shift from testing all ticket holders in the student section to random sample testing of that population before next week’s football game.”
According to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, the percentage of Idaho’s eligible population (12 and older) fully vaccinated is just 51.5%.
Photo credit – Dr. Ashley Carvalho – photo after being a family member of a patient threatened to shoot her
“I received a slew of verbal abuse from a patient’s family members who called me an incompetent doctor, threatened me with physical violence, and demanded I give them my name and medical license number so they could sue. This was because I refused to prescribe Ivermectin, which is not proven to treat COVID-19 and is recommended only in clinical trials at this point, and hydroxychloroquine, which current research suggests is not effective or safe in treating COVID-19. My patient was struggling to breathe, but the family refused to allow me to provide care. A call to the police was the only solution.”
Several physicians from Kootenai Health were slated to speak during the meeting as the hospital hit two milestones this week: its highest number of COVID-19 inpatients and the highest number of COVID-19 ICU patients at 43. The hospital in Coeur d’Alene typically only has 26 ICU beds.
The group was described as a “mob” of 200 people who were “extremely hostile.”
BREAKING: The meeting has been postponed. Board members were worried about safety, per city fire code.
Editor’s Note: We remind you again, our state is supporting Idaho’s bad choices. In the coming weeks, it is likely at least a couple of the people in this “mob” will be begging the doctors who had planned to speak today to save their lives.
“When there’s that kind of things to compete against, we don’t have a chance,” he said. “We just don’t have employees. We’ve seen from 2 or 3 classified staff, all the way to 60 classified staff, that districts are missing across the state.”
He said three school districts were closed Friday, two due to staffing shortages and one because of COVID-19 cases among students. He said open schools are also struggling with lower than normal attendance.
Montana
Montana reported 1,326 new COVID cases across the state where officials aren’t reporting unvaccinated versus vaccinated cases. The state has 395 people hospitalized with COVID and didn’t share how many are on ventilators.
According to KHN, Billings Clinic said it might soon implement “crisis standards of care” that would force staff to save provisions for patients they can most likely save.
Yellowstone County is seeing the worst of the surge. The Montana Department of Health and Human Services reported 2,461 current active cases there, as much as the next two counties combined.
And in Helena, where a hospital is operating at crisis standards of care, state lawmakers questioned health officials on the severity of the situation.
“I’m not sure I would feel really dismayed about the rate increase when you just think of it really mathematically,” Gillette said. “… Just put in simple terms, if you had two (cases) at one point and you increased to four, you’d increase by 50%, so you just kind of have to put it in … more broad terms and not … lose the other data. So, for instance, when we look at the number of COVID cases per 100,000, we’re pretty much just middle of the pack normal.”
If being the sixth-worst in the United States is “middle of the pack,” Montana is competing with its neighbor to the west in a race to the political bottom.
There were 855 COVID-19 hospitalizations, 30 fewer than the previous day, and 268 patients in ICU beds, which was an increase of five. There were 60 available adult ICU beds across the state of Oregon, which is an improvement from two weeks ago.
The OHA’s latest COVID-19 forecast shows a slowing in the decline of daily cases and hospitalizations through mid-October. The report estimates 495 cases per 100,000 people, or an average of 1,480 daily cases and 81 hospitalizations for the two weeks between September 29 and October 12.
In our neighbor to the south, new COVID cases among children now outnumber those among the elderly.
[SAMMAMISH, Wash.] – (MTN) An examination of the Epik Software data released by Anonymous has security experts concluding the claims made by the shadowy organization are true, and it will be a devastating blow. “This is the Panama Papers for hate groups,” a researcher told us after reviewing just part of the 180GB of information retrieved. “In all my years, I have never seen a breach of a domain registrar to this scale. The lack of security to protect this information is breathtaking.”
To understand the significance of the hack and the role Epik has played in platforming hate speech, the history of the company and its founder needs to be examined.
A Brief History of Epik and its CEO, Rob Monster
Epik, located in Sammamish, Washington, was founded in 2009 by Rob Monster, the CEO of the domain registrar and web hosting company. For the first ten years, the company largely remained out of the public eye. Mr. Monster (that is his real name) was known locally for founding a market research company, where the board of directors ousted him and serving as an interim CEO of Digitaltown. In closer circles, Monster’s extreme views on race were an open secret. Everything changed on November 5, 2018.
Gab, a Twitter alternative used by extremists and far-right groups, was thrust into the national spotlight after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting on October 27, 2018, which left 11 dead and 6 wounded. The massacre was carried out by Robert Gregory Bowers, 46 at the time. Bowers had used Gab to threaten Jews and posted his plans on the site shortly before the massacre happened. It received messages of encouragement and support, and site admins did nothing to warn authorities under the banner of protecting free speech. GoDaddy was the domain registrar for Gab and terminated their services, knocking Gab off the Internet. Epik became the registrar in November, and Gab returned.
In 2019 Epik made a series of acquisitions, including BitMitigate, a cybersecurity firm, and Sibyl Systems, a company providing hosting services for the website Gab. Little is known about Sibyl Systems, including the nation the company is located in or its services. In August of 2019, after 8chan lost its domain and hosting providers, Epik became the site’s host provider.
8Chan, a popular site among extremists and adherents of QAnon, was taken offline after the August 3, 2019, El Paso Walmart shooting that left 23 dead and 23 wounded. Patrick Wood Crusius, 21 at the time, posted a manifesto on 8Chan. That decision proved to be a bridge too far for many service providers and ultimately for Epik itself.
In the 12 months that followed, Amazon Web Services limited some services while Linode and PayPal severed ties with the company. PayPal terminated their relationship with Epik over concerns that the company had the potential to use the PayPal platform for money laundering and tax evasion. Epik created a currency for its customers called “Masterbucks,” which used PayPal as the backbone. In the end, Epik dropped 8chan.
Rob Monster became a cause celebre among Republicans, political conservatives, and those with more extreme views. Epik cemented itself as the domain and host provider for the far-right, and in January 2021, rescued the Twitter alternative Parler, another online platform used by political extremists.
Monster has described himself as a Chrisitan and a libertarian, while others describe a man who has become increasingly radicalized in the last five years. A recent article in Bloomberg Business Week about Nick Lim, the founder of VanwaTech, which provides technical and hosting services to some of the most extreme websites on the planet, highlighted the relationship between Lim and Monster.
“At that point, Epik had spent years in the mundane business of nonideological domain registration, and Rob Monster, its awkwardly named chief executive officer, had a reputation for personally handling customer service calls and posting on arcane industry forums. But Monster had also been radicalized during the Trump years, subjecting his staff to florid conspiracy theories in staff meetings and spending more and more of his energy on politically charged work at Epik.”
“Around this time, Lim and Monster began collaborating. It’s not clear how they met, but they quickly grew close, with Monster becoming a kind of mentor to Lim, according to Joseph Peterson, then Epik’s director of operations.”
In the years that followed, Epik’s business relationship with Gab was a honeypot for like thinkers. The Republican Party and its most extreme supporters, churches, hate groups, individuals, and platforms that support extremists rushed to become clients of Epik. Those decisions are going to prove to be very costly.
The Anonymous hack of Epik
On September 11, 2021, a Texas GOP website, texasgop.org, was hacked by Anonymous. The hack was done in response to a recently passed Texas anti-abortion law, the most restrictive in the United States. While the hack was schadenfreude fodder on social media, for Anonymous it was a lot more. It was the first shot over the bow of Epik, the domain registrar for texasgop.org.
On Monday, Anonymous reported that they had hacked Epik and released 180GB of data in a press release. Anonymous claimed they had 10 years of information in the release, including all domain purchases, domain transfers, whois history, DNS changes, mail forwarders, payment history (no credit cards), account credentials including passwords, and GitHub repositories. Our researchers’ conclusion last night? It’s true, all of it.
Reporter Steven Monacelli broke the hacking news on Twitter. A few hours later, Rob Monster replied to the tweet and called the hack “a nothing burger.”
Epik’s own website was hacked late Monday night, with an FAQ entry mocking CEO Rob Monster. The FAQ entry was public for hours before being removed.
Epik website was hacked on Monday night with an FAQ entry about the Anonymous hack
Last night, researchers were pouring through the information. Among the thousands of innocuous sites for yoga studios and home renovations, the information on who is behind some of the most notorious websites on the Internet was in plain view. Nazi sites, anti-Semitic sites, QAnon, misinformation on COVID, elections, and doxing sites. Sites that illegally sell guns, drugs and are involved in human trafficking and prostitution.
Epik customers who used the company’s anonymizing services were left unprotected. Although the information was stored in a different database, it was easily cross-referenced to the list of domain owners. Incredibly, none of the data was “encrypted at rest.”
The reaction has already been swift. Joey Camp, an agent provocateur from Colorado, was one of the first individuals outed from the hack. Within hours he has already issued threats online and is making claims the hack isn’t real. Not only is it real, but the information shows the list of websites Camp owns, including ones that aren’t as openly attached to his personal brand. A cluster of dozens of pro-Trump websites is connected back to a medical doctor in California.
Far-right extremist, Joey Camp, wants to dox me because I made a video about the Epik Hack that he claims is so fake that he feels he need to dox anyone who reports on it.
Not only do I have nothing to do with the hack, I'm not even a journalist. So, why so defensive? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/lJWdqscRN0
A security expert we talked to concluded, “It would be like locking the door of the bank at night but leaving the alarm off and the vault open.” For Republican leadership, religious conservatives, and the people backing misinformation, hate, and extremists websites, this is only the beginning of the problems that will lie ahead. Passwords can be changed and websites hardened to prevent transfers or attacks, but the who’s who behind online hate is available to the world.
Knowledge is the best tool to fight against fear. A wise person chooses to be informed so they can make sound decisions. To join the fight against COVID misinformation, you can share this update through your social media platform of choice.
[KING COUNTY, Wash.] – (MTN) Although Washington reached a grim milestone of 7,000 COVID-related deaths today, data on new cases indicated that the Evergreen State is reaching a peak. The divide between the most and least vaccinated counties continues to widen, and the number of patients in the ICU reached a critical level statewide.
The Lake Washington School District expands how much COVID data they are sharing and in the Northshore School District, a concerning trend has emerged at three schools.
Hospitals in Spokane are suspending all non-emergency surgeries as they struggle to support the lower vaccinated counties in Eastern Washington and the surge in Idaho. In Bellingham, officials report they are inching closer to crisis standards.
Edmonds canceled Oktoberfest for the second year in a row.
Almost 4,800 state employees have requested a vaccination exemption, about 8% of the 60,000 person workforce. Protesters are coming to Vancouver, Washington’s Skyview High School on Wednesday despite a court order, and they are bringing infamous Seattle street preacher Matthew with them.
The mayor of Puyallup is started a fundraiser to show appreciation to hospital workers.
We have expanded our travel advisory to include Spokane County and the state of Alaska, with the latter having the largest hospital move to “crisis standards of care.”
In the misinformation section, we discuss swollen testicles and Betadine.
Today’s data provided a strong indication that Washington state has hit a peak while demonstrating the effectiveness of vaccines. In the South Central Hospital Region, which includes Benton, Franklin, Klickitat, Walla Walla, and Yakima counties, new cases are 883.3 per 100K people, essentially unchanged from yesterday. In comparison, the Central Hospital Region, which represents King County, had a rate of 295.4. In addition, for counties that are 50% fully vaccinated or higher, the 14-day rolling average of new cases dropped below 500 for the first time since we started tracking.
Percent of Total Population Fully Vaccinated
Average 14-Day New Case Rate (unadjusted)
50.00% or above (12 counties)
494.0 (down)
40.00% to 49.99% (18 counties)
747.0 (down)
27.30% to 39.99% (9 counties)
781.4 (down)
14-Day New COVID Cases per 100K average by Vaccination Rate, Not Adjusted for Population
Through September 13, Washington’s statewide 14-day rolling average was 500.8 COVID cases per 100K, which is within the 500 to 535 range the state has bounced between. Lincoln (1,294.1 per 100K), Franklin (1,170.9 per 100K), and Stevens (1,121.5 per 100K) reported an extreme number of new cases. Counties in the 800.0 to 999.9 per 100K range include Adams, Asotin, Benton, Chelan, Clallam, Cowlitz, Douglas, Grant, Grays Harbor, Lewis, Okanagan, and Pend Oreille. Although Yakima County fell off of the report, its case rate is 799.4 per 100K.
The Washington State Department of Health reports a data backlog for test positivity, with the published number 14 days old. According to Johns Hopkins University Medicine, the positivity rate for the last 30 days is 13.40%, and over the previous 7 days, 13.67%. These numbers indicate the state is under testing. Further, there has been little change in the positivity rate for almost a month.
The 7-day case rate was up for birth to 34 years old, and down for 80 and over. Hospitalizations were mostly flat, with a slight increase for adolescents from 12 to 19 years old.
Age Group
7-Day Case Rate
7-Day Hospitalization Rate
Ages 0-11
34.0 (up)
0.1
Ages 12-19
26.3 (up)
0.2 (up)
Ages 20-34
59.1 (up)
1.5
Ages 35-49
50.2
2.5
Ages 50-64
37.4
3.9
Ages 65-79
18.7
3.7
Ages 80+
5.0 (down)
1.8
7-day case rate and 7-day hospitalization rate is per 100K within the age group – the target for 7-day case rate is <25.0, but there are other factors such as vaccination rates within the age groups, how many total tests within the 7-day period, and the positivity rate within each age group
The USA Today COVID Tracker reported 63 deaths on Tuesday and Washington state crossed a grim milestone of 7,000 COVID-related deaths since February 29, 2020.
Edmonds Oktoberfest canceled due to concerns about COVID
This change was made as a safety precaution given the current COVID-19 environment. The rate of new COVID cases reached an all-time high last week at 464 per 100,000 people, according to data released Tuesday, Sept. 7, by the Snohomish Health District.
“This decision was not made lightly,” said Maggie Peterson, Edmonds Rotary President. “We very much want Edmonds Oktoberfest to be a family-friendly traditional event but the current rise in COVID-19 cases, combined with the start of the school year, creates a situation where there would be many vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals co-mingling. We are looking forward to bringing back Oktoberfest (or similar event) including the Kids Korner and all corresponding fun activities in 2022!”
Edmonds Oktoberfest Founder and Committee Co-Chair David Kaufer added, “We are dependent on volunteers to run this event, with more than 170 volunteer slots identified. We do not feel comfortable placing them, as well as attendees and other participants, in a situation where they may be at a higher risk of catching or transmitting this highly contagious variant.”
Those who have purchased tickets for Edmonds Oktoberfest may request a refund by emailing david@edmondsrotary.com.
Almost 4,800 state employees ask to be exempt from vaccine mandate
State employees not represented by the WFSE have until October 4 to receive the single dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine to be in compliance with the October 18 deadline if they have not received their first dose of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines. Certain employees with the WFSE could go past that date if they meet certain requirements set in the compromise ratified last week.
Anti-vaccine protest planned at Skyview High School in Vancouver – again
The group Waking Up Washington is planning a protest at Skyview High School in Vancouver, Washington on Wednesday, and they are bringing infamous Seattle street preacher Matthew with them. If you have ever been to a protest, rally, concert, march, parade, or large sporting event in Seattle, you have likely heard Matthew.
This action is being driven by 14-year old Melanie Gabriel, a student at the school who was attempting to get a 504 exemption to not have to wear a mask. The anti-vaccination activity in Oregon and Washington is largely run by a handful of people. Michelle Morales-Walker is the most prominent voice and face of the movement. She is supported by Joey Gibson of Patriot Prayer, Ammon Bundy, Washougal Women, and Palmer Davis of La Center.
The group was withdrawn from a planned protest in Olympia on Saturday, due to a Proud Boys rally planned for the same day.
The Seattle Truth Network, in coordination with Wake Up Washington, is planning an anti-vaccination event on September 25 at Rooster’s Bakery and Cafe in Woodinville.
Puyallup Mayor organizing fund raiser for employees at MultiCare Good Samaritan Hospital
Door created the GoFundMe page on Sept. 2 and had $6,050 as of Sept. 10. She thought she could show support for the employees by raising funds to give each of them a $5 Starbucks gift card.
Editor’s Opinion: Not directed at Mayor Door, however, most medical workers would prefer for everyone to wear a mask and get vaccinated so they don’t show up in the emergency department sick due to COVID. It isn’t a lack of gratitude. They’re exhausted and see this current wave as preventable.
Travel Advisories
We recommend avoiding all travel to Spokane, Yakima, Klickitat, Benton, Franklin, and Walla Walla counties, along with the states of Alaska and Idaho. Hospital resources in these regions are so constrained that you may receive inadequate care if you experience a medical emergency.
Thank you
Thank you to our new subscribers and those of you who have made one-time contributions. On behalf of the entire team, thank you for helping us keep the lights on!
No promotional consideration has been given, or requested from the n95 project or any manufacturer of masks
Vaccination
No update beyond please get vaccinated.
King County, Washington is reporting over 85% of age eligible residents are vaccinated with at least one dose. The highest rates of positivity are in areas with low vaccination rates statewide. The FDA has provided full approval of the Pfizer vaccine for anyone 16 and over.
COVID vaccines are free for anyone over 12 years old, and no appointment is necessary at most locations. Lyft and Hopelink provide free transportation, and KinderCare, the Learning Care Group, and the YMCA offer free childcare during vaccination appointments or recuperation.
According to the DoH COVID Dashboard, 23.1% of all acute care patients hospitalized in Washington have COVID. A hospital system caring for this many COVID-positive patients in acute care is considered to be under “severe stress.” ICUs are at 91.4% of capacity statewide, with 35.6% of ICU patients fighting COVID. This is the highest level of occupancy within Washington state ICUs and the highest percentage of COVID patients under care.
The hospital admission rate Epidemiologic Curve dashboard wasn’t working today. It appears the daily hospitalization rate is in the 160s, which would be close to yesterday. This is another encouraging sign that the state may be hitting a peak. The Department of Health reported there were 1,683 COVID patients statewide on September 13 and 269 on ventilators. Both numbers indicate a decline although we have no way of knowing if the decline was due to fatalities or releases.
We got a response from the Washington State Department of Health on getting data on NICU, PICU, and pediatric COVID cases. The state is working on tracking that data and providing it as either a report or a dashboard. The date of availability was not provided.
News that Washington was still taking transfer patients from out state has created outrage on social media. The Washington State Hospital Association indicated they were taking patients but emphasized it was far fewer than in the past. Additionally, there are some hospital networks that have facilities between Washington and Oregon or Washington and Idaho, and patient transfers within those systems would be normal. In the same press conference, the WHSA indicated that a patient from Spokane was transferred to Idaho.
Everett Providence reported today that they are accepting “two to three” transfer patients a day, mostly from the North Puget Sound region. However, they currently have patients from Alaska, Idaho, and Montana. Officials also pointed out that Snohomish County is sending patients to King County.
– Alcott Elementary (1*) – Carson Elementary (2*) – Dickinson Elementary (1*) – Eastlake High (1*) – Einstein Elementary (1*) – Ella Baker Elementary (1*) – Robert Frost Elementary (9) – Juanita Elementary (2*) – Juanita High School (37) – Peter Kirk Elementary (1*) – Redmond Elementary (2*) – Redmond Middle School (1*) – Rose Hill Elementary (1*) – Rose Hill/Stella Schola Middle School (1*) – Thoreau Elementary (4*)
– Kamiakin Middle School (140) – Mark Twain Elementary (3*)
Northshore
YELLOW
– Arrowhead Elementary (7) – Bothell High School (28**) – Canyon Creek Elementary (12) – Canyon Park Middle School (4) – Cottage Lake Elementary (13) – Crystal Springs Elementary (13) – East Ridge Elementary (3) – Fernwood Elementary (7) – Frank Love Elementary (12) – Hollywood Hills Elementary (3) – Inglemoor High School (3) – Innovation Lab High School (2) – Kenmore Elementary (3) – Kenmore Middle School (31) – Maywood Hills Elementary (6) – North Creek High School (15**) – Ruby Bridges Elementary (4) – Shelton View Elementary (14**) – Skyview Middle School (67) – Sunrise Elementary (18) – Timbercrest Middle School (21) – Westhill Elementary (6) – Woodin Elementary (4) – Woodinville High School (18)
Under Investigation
Local Districts Scorecard – * indicates positive cases only ** indicates 5 or more confirmed positive cases
The Lake Washington School District updated its tracking dashboard providing a better degree of insight on the number of confirmed COVID cases among students and faculty, mirroring the information provided by the Bellevue School District.
Although there are a significant number of impacted schools in the LWSD, there have not been any community transmission outbreaks within the district. The number of impacted schools in BSD declined overnight, and we were able to get more data on quarantines.
The more concerning trend is in the Northshore School District where 3 schools now have 5 or more reported confirmed COVID cases. Bothell High School has 7 confirmed cases between students and faculty, and another 21 in quarantine. Shelton View Elementary has 5 confirmed cases among students and another 9 in quarantine. North Creek High School has 7 confirmed cases among students, and 8 more in quarantine.
Three states have exited the CDC ‘high’ COVID transmission category – Vermont, the most vaccinated state, Connect, the second most vaccinated state, and California, the 16th most vaccinated state.
The Pentagon announced guidance on the vaccination mandate that was established in August for active-duty military. Service members have three months to become fully vaccinated for face discharge from the force. The Marines released a soldier last week for refusing to wear a mask, issuing a general discharge under honorable conditions.
In what could be called ironic, Russian President Vladamir Putin is self-isolating after he was exposed to COVID. Putin who is vaccinated has faced accusations from European and North American nations of backing the spread of COVID misinformation to undermine trust in democratic governments.
Alaska
Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage Alaska, the largest hospital in the state, was forced to move to crisis standards of care on Tuesday. The hospital published a two-page letter explaining why they had to restrict care and start making black tag triage decisions.
“At this time, we feel we have an ethical obligation to be transparent with our community and share with the public the distressing reality of what is happening inside the walls of our hospital. The state’s COVID-19 Dashboard isn’t equipped or designed to demonstrate the intricacies of providing medical care during this unprecedented time. More than 30% of the adult patients hospitalized at Providence have tested positive for COVID-19.
Our caregivers are doing their best, just as they have been for the past 18 months of this pandemic. We believe that the Providence administration has acted in good faith throughout the pandemic, following the guidance of local and national experts to create policies and procedures that protect patients and caregivers.
While we are doing our utmost, we are no longer able to provide the standard of care to each and every patient who needs our help. The acuity and number of patients now exceeds our resources and our ability to staff beds with skilled caregivers, like nurses and respiratory therapists. We have been forced within our hospital to implement crisis standards of care.
What does this mean? In short, we are faced with a situation in which we must prioritize scarce resources and treatments to those patients who have the potential to benefit most. We have been required to develop and enact policies and procedures to ration medical care and treatments, including dialysis and specialized ventilatory support.”
Doctor Kristen Solana Walkinshaw, Chief of Staff indicated that this decision could have a dramatic impact on healthcare across Alaska.
“Nurses here are not leaving because of the vaccine mandates. They’re leaving because they’re overwhelmed by the emotional toll it’s taking,” Gonsette, the Providence hospitalist, said in an interview Tuesday. “Part of it, we all feel it, is because we are not heard. The public either wants to bury their head in the sand or maybe some of them really don’t know what’s going on. Those are the ones we’re trying to reach.”
Colorado
We have avoided reporting on right-wing radio or TV personalities who have become infected or have died from COVID, but Bob Enyart was a special kind of awful. Enyart, a provocateur who gleefully mocked the deaths of AIDS victims, had encouraged his listeners not to get any of the three available COVID-19 vaccines because he claimed they had been tested on “cells of aborted babies.” (Though coronavirus vaccines do not contain fetal cells, Johnson & Johnson used a historic fetal cell line to produce and manufacture its vaccine; Pfizer and Moderna used a fetal cell line in a very early phase to confirm efficacy prior to production.) He also successfully sued the state of Colorado over COVID-related restrictions on church attendance.
Enyart’s wife is still hospitalized with COVID.
Editor’s Note: It is ironic that Mr. Enyart would die after exaggerating the danger AIDS presented to the general population while minimizing the impact of the second pandemic in his lifetime.
Idaho
The situation in Idaho is going from worse to catastrophic. In a media briefing today Idaho Health and Welfare Director Dave Jeppesen reported “Hospitalizations in Southwest, Central and South Central health districts, which includes the Treasure Valley and the Magic Valley, are reaching a critical point,” Jeppesen said. “Without a change in direction, crisis standards of care are imminent for all three of those health districts.”
Any permitted event or activity held in a city-owned building must require masks indoors, require masks outdoors if six feet of physical distance can not be maintained, and submit a plan to the city for approval, and requiring “COVID-19 Protocol Ambassadors” on-site. In addition, the mayor said, all events over 250 people must require proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID test.
Event organizers will be tasked with supplying masks to those who do not have them.
“We do believe that here in Fargo, we’re probably about two to three weeks away from peaking in terms of COVID cases. But we’re already at capacity and have been for a few weeks now due to our overall non-COVID census being very high,” said Dr. Doug Griffin, vice president and chief medical officer at Sanford Health in Fargo.
Griffin said most of their COVID patients are local or coming from western North Dakota, where vaccination rates remain low. Griffin said the hospital is turning away patients who need critical care, some from as far away as southern Minnesota.
“If I could put on a statewide mandate, if the health department could do it, we’d do it,” he said during a Tuesday press conference. “The legislature has made it very clear that if we put a mandate on for kids in schools to wear a mask, they would take it off.”
DeWine’s comments were a shift from the Republican governor’s previous position, which had been that there isn’t an “appetite” for such mandates. DeWine has instead emphasized personal responsibility and sharing information with Ohioans.
“The good news is that we did peak,” said Peter Graven with Oregon Health and Science University. “The bad news is, the model is showing that it could take until the end of October or even November until we really get down to the levels that we had prior to the surge.”
With recent testing difficulties and delays in contact tracing, parents around Utah are saying they aren’t getting notified of their kids’ classroom exposures until it’s almost too late to do anything about it. Quarantine periods generally are backdated to begin 10 days after the exposure or a student began having symptoms, but families may not know to start quarantine until days later.
Misinformation
We have a two for one tonight for misinformation. Part one – Nicki Minaj.
My cousin in Trinidad won’t get the vaccine cuz his friend got it & became impotent. His testicles became swollen. His friend was weeks away from getting married, now the girl called off the wedding. So just pray on it & make sure you’re comfortable with ur decision, not bullied
There is no scientific evidence, nor one single VAERS entry prior to September 13, 2021, stating that the COVID vaccine causes swelling in a man’s testicles. There is no scientific evidence to back up the claim that the COVID vaccine causes infertility in men or women (there is evidence that COVID infections cause stillbirths and premature births).
However, there is a condition that can cause swelling of the testicles, infertility, and a mate wanting to call off a wedding. That’s called gonorrhea. This type of misinformation is called a false causality fallacy where the “link between premises and conclusion depends on some imagined causal connection that probably does not exist.”
That would be correct.
First, it was hydroxychloroquine, and more than a year after former President Donald Trump stopped advocating it as a possible treatment, people are still taking it.
Then it was Chlorine dioxide, a chemical bleach that has been previously advertised as a junk science cure for autism.
Next came ivermectin – and we’ve beat that dead horse into the ground.
Then it was glyphosate, a herbicide.
Now it’s Betadine, the iodine-based antibacterial antiseptic. Yes, Betadine, and apparently people are drinking it and gargling with it, despite it being toxic when ingested. Additionally, long-term consumption of excess iodine can damage the thyroid.
“Betadine® Antiseptic First Aid products have not been approved to treat coronavirus. Betadine® Antiseptic First Aid products should only be used to help prevent infection in minor cuts, scrapes and burns.”
Knowledge is the best tool to fight against fear. A wise person chooses to be informed so they can make sound decisions. To join the fight against COVID misinformation, you can share this update through your social media platform of choice.
[KING COUNTY, Wash.] – (MTN) The number of hospitalized COVID patients dropped slightly over the weekend, while the number of critically ill patients on ventilators increased. New King County and statewide vaccination data show the gap between the most vaccinated and least vaccinated counties grew wider. A new IHME forecast indicates Washington may have hit the peak but forecasts a long fall ahead.
Two more schools in the Lake Washington School District reported COVID cases, while the number of quarantined students at Kamiakin Middle School rose to 140.
The Washington State Hospital Association stated hospitals were operating in “contingency care” as staffing, transportation, and some critical equipment remain in tight supply. 911 dispatchers in Seattle were diverting ambulance calls for part of the day on Saturday, as local emergency departments were flooded with a surge of patients.
A ferry was delayed by a man who refused to wear a mask, and on Friday, ferries heading to the San Juan Islands were canceled due to a sick out.
Complaints have emerged at the Spokane County Fair and the Washington State Fair due to people not wearing masks indoors and lax enforcement.
Almost 90 Washington state employees have filed a lawsuit in Walla Walla trying to block the governor’s vaccination mandate. A woman was cited for trespass in Vancouver for refusing to wear a mask and refusing to leave a private business.
The gap between the highest vaccinated counties versus the least widened more over the weekend. In the South Central Hospital Region, which includes Benton, Franklin, Klickitat, Walla Walla, and Yakima counties, new cases are 886.1 per 100K people. In comparison, the Central Hospital Region, which represents King County, had a rate of 318.6.
Percent of Total Population Fully Vaccinated
Average 14-Day New Case Rate (unadjusted)
50.00% or above (12 counties)
530.8 (up)
40.00% to 49.99% (18 counties)
764.5 (up)
27.30% to 39.99% (19 counties)
848.6 (up)
14-Day New COVID Cases per 100K average by Vaccination Rate, Not Adjusted for Population
Through September 12, Washington’s statewide 14-day rolling average was 526.1 COVID cases per 100K, which is slightly up from Friday but still within the 500 to 535 range the state has bounced between for weeks. Asotin (1,007.1 per 100K), Clallam (1,057.7 per 100K), Douglas (1,024.0 per 100K), Franklin (1,182.0 per 100K), Grant (1,036.7 per 100K) Lincoln (1194.6 per 100K), Okanogan (1,013.2 per 100K), and Stevens (1,191.2 per 100K) reported an extreme number of new cases. Counties in the 800.0 to 999.9 per 100K range include Adams, Benton, Chelan, Columbia, Cowlitz, Grays Harbor, Lewis, Pend Oreille, and Yakima. Garfield County dropped to 764.0
The Washington State Department of Health reports a data backlog for test positivity, with the published number 14 days old. According to Johns Hopkins University Medicine, the positivity rate for the last 30 days is 13.40%, and over the previous 7 days, 13.81%. These numbers indicate the state is under testing. Further, there has been little change in the positivity rate for almost a month.
The 7-day case rate by age was up in every age group except 35 to 49-year-olds. Hospitalizations were flat or slightly down over the weekend, and that decrease is mirrored in the patient reports from the Washington State Hospital Association.
Age Group
7-Day Case Rate
7-Day Hospitalization Rate
Ages 0-11
31.8 (up)
0.1
Ages 12-19
25.0 (up)
0.1 (down)
Ages 20-34
57.4 (up)
1.3
Ages 35-49
49.5 (down)
2.6
Ages 50-64
37.0 (up)
3.7
Ages 65-79
18.1 (up)
3.5 (down)
Ages 80+
5.4 (up)
1.7
7-day case rate and 7-day hospitalization rate is per 100K within the age group – the target for 7-day case rate is <25.0, but there are other factors such as vaccination rates within the age groups, how many total tests within the 7-day period, and the positivity rate within each age group
The USA Today COVID Tracker reported 68 deaths on Friday. Numbers from over the weekend typically include multiple days of data and should not be used to read a trend.
Seattle Fire Department diverted 911 calls for ambulances on Saturday
For part of the day on Saturday, calls to Seattle 911 for ambulances were being diverted, with only the most serious calls being responded to. Critical calls were still covered, while others, which would normally get an EMS response, were told they would need to transport themselves.
Hospitals may decide to divert ambulances from going to their emergency room when they get overwhelmed with patients or are expecting a surge from incidents such as a mass casualty event. On Saturday, multiple emergency departments were beyond capacity in Seattle, which created a ripple effect impacting emergency departments both east and north of the city. On Saturday evening, one area hospital had over 80 patients in the emergency department and another 22 waiting for hospital beds.
The number of people coming into emergency departments wasn’t just due to COVID. There was an influx of medical emergencies such as cardiac arrests and several significant auto accidents. Additionally, the Washington State Hospital Association reported this morning there is a shortage of ambulances for ground transit.
Calls to 911 for EMS and fire services were above average on Saturday but nowhere near the record set on June 28, when the department responded to 555 calls for aid.
Latest IHME forecast projects Washington state has hit the peak
On Friday, the IHME updated its forecast models, which projected that Washington state has hit the peak for the current wave. The projected number of fatalities through December 1 declined slightly also, to 8,784. Part of the decline is due to the Washington vaccination mandate for state employees and the statewide order for mask wear. The model projects that if mask wear compliance was 100%, we could save 600 lives.
The model also projects that the state will only see a gradual decline in cases and will settle to half of the current volume of new cases, patients, and fatalities. The Washington State Hospital Association expressed today that slashing the number of hospitalized COVID patients from 22% to 11% as a new normal would be unsustainable for the healthcare system.
Vancouver police cite woman for trespass over refusal to wear mask
The incident apparently happened on September 8 but blew up on social media over the weekend after a story was run in the Post Millenial. A woman with her children at Chuck’s Produce and Street Market on Southeast Mill Plain Blvd. refused to wear or mask or leave the store when directed by staff. She continued to shop and was told police would be called.
When Vancouver police arrived, she continued to refuse the leave the store and went to checkout. While she continued to defy store management and the police, she was cited for trespassing.
Not 2 miles from my home in Vancouver, WA you find: Police writing tickets to citizens for grocery shopping at Chuck's on Millplain without a face mask. Someone tell me what's brought us to this (Hat tip to retired cop who sent it to me) pic.twitter.com/sS14i5Otts
Woman issued a trespass citation for refusing to leave a store in Vancouver, Washington, on September 8
Kitsap ferry delayed by man who refused to wear a mask
On Saturday, the 7:40 PM sailing of the Kitsap ferry from Fauntleroy was delayed for over an hour by a man who refused to wear a mask. According to Washington State Ferry employees, the man was asked to put a mask on during the crossing and refused. He then became “aggressive” toward the crew and appeared to be inebriated. He was issued a 60-day no-trespass order from the Washington State Ferries property. We also hope he didn’t drive off in a vehicle.
Weekend sick-out impacts ferry service to the San Juan Islands
After weeks of threats, a sickout impacted ferry service to the San Juan Islands on Friday evening. Two ferry runs out of Anacortes to Friday Harbor, the 4:45 PM and the 8:20 PM, along with the additional stops at Lopez, Shaw, and Orcas, were canceled due to a lack of Coast Guard certified personnel. Additionally, the #3 Samish was running behind schedule for the afternoon and early evening.
The Washington Federation of State Employees, which includes Washington State Ferries employees, ratified their agreement over mandated COVID vaccination with the state of Washington on Thursday. Over 80% of members voting in favor of the compromise agreement.
Spokane County Fair organizers respond after photos emerge of maskless guests and vendors
Photos emerged over the weekend of non-existent mask wear at the Spokane County Fair. According to KREM, Kevin Humphrey, a regular guest at the fair, talked to officials about the lack of masks and was told that masks were only checked at the entrance but were not being enforced.
In response to the photos, Spokane Interstate Fair Director Erin Gurtel wrote, “The Spokane Fair and Expo Center staff is communicating with all vendors in writing daily, along with verbal announcements over the Fairgrounds sound system multiple times a day. All of the vendors have been made aware of the requirement to wear masks indoors and starting tomorrow, September 13th, we will require this indoors and outdoors.”
The fair has also created numerous signs to post all over the grounds to communicate the new requirement of outdoor masks, Gurtel said. The fair’s team is also doing its best to communicate the requirement and make sure it is “being adhered to,” she added.
People complaining about lack of masks at the Washington State Fair
In Puyallup, where up to one million people are expected to visit the Washington State Fair through September 26, complaints are growing about maskless vendors and guests. Numerous pictures and videos emerged of groups of people both indoors and out.
89 state employees sue over Washington state employee vaccine mandate
A group of state employees from the Washington State Patrol, Washington State Ferries, and Washington State Department of Corrections filed a lawsuit in Walla Walla against the looming vaccine requirement.
According to a report in Northwest News, Nathan Arnold, the lawyer who filed the lawsuit, wrote, “The penalties for not taking affirmative action to comply with the Governor’s Mandate are overly severe, punitive, and unconscionable.” He also called the penalty of termination “arbitrary and capricious,” especially for employees who can work from home or have natural immunity from having previously contracted COVID-19.
The lead plaintiffs are William and Sherra Cleary. Mr. Cleary was listed as a King County firefighter and Ms. Cleary as a healthcare worker who is also pregnant. The plaintiffs are looking for the court to declare the vaccine mandate unconstitutional.
The Tri-Cities Herald reported Troopers Travis Brawdy and Brittany Crosby with the Washington State Patrol and Michele Vasquez, an employee of the Washington state Department of Revenue, were also listed as plaintiffs.
The Biden Administrator’s order for federal employees and contractors to get vaccinated also impacts 11,000 workers at Hanford.
Travel Advisories
We recommend avoiding all travel to Yakima, Klickitat, Benton, Franklin, and Walla Walla counties, along with the state of Idaho. Hospital resources in these regions are so constrained that you may receive inadequate care if you experience a medical emergency.
Thank you
Thank you to our new subscribers and those of you who have made one-time contributions. On behalf of the entire team, thank you for helping us keep the lights on!
The report, in which two senior Food and Drug Administration officials were contributors along with the World Health Organization, came as another study indicated the FDA approved Pfizer vaccine and the emergency authorized Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines remain highly effective against hospitalization and death.
“The ability of vaccines that present the antigens of earlier phases of the pandemic (rather than variant-specific antigens) to elicit humoral immune responses against currently circulating variants6,7 indicates that these variants have not yet evolved to the point at which they are likely to escape the memory immune responses induced by those vaccines.”
King County, Washington is reporting over 85% of age eligible residents are vaccinated with at least one dose. The highest rates of positivity are in areas with low vaccination rates statewide. The FDA has provided full approval of the Pfizer vaccine for anyone 16 and over.
COVID vaccines are free for anyone over 12 years old, and no appointment is necessary at most locations. Lyft and Hopelink provide free transportation, and KinderCare, the Learning Care Group, and the YMCA offer free childcare during vaccination appointments or recuperation.
According to the DoH COVID Dashboard, 23.2% of all acute care patients hospitalized in Washington have COVID. A hospital system caring for this many COVID-positive patients in acute care is considered to be under “severe stress.” ICUs are at 90.9% of capacity statewide, with 35.0% of ICU patients fighting COVID. All of these numbers are up from over the weekend.
The new hospital admission rate for COVID patients was 162 per day on September 11. This is a decrease from last week and is an indicator that the state may be at its peak. The Department of Health reported there were 1,742 COVID patients statewide on September 12 and 275 on ventilators. That is down from the 283 reported on Saturday. Weekend numbers typically get adjusted upward on Tuesday as additional data is processed.
EvergreenHealth reported there are 39 COVID patients in Kirkland and none in Monroe.
The Washington State Hospital Association held its weekly press conference, telling reporters that hospitals are operating under “contingency care” statewide. From walk-in clinics to trauma centers, medical facilities continue to struggle with the crush of regular and COVID patients.
We are in a crisis, but we are not in crisis standards of care,” said Washington State Hospital Association (WSHA) Executive Vice President Taya Briley.
Briley also reported that 95% of hospitalized COVID patients statewide are unvaccinated, saying, “We are far, far above our peak from last year.”
Dr. Christopher Baliga with Virginia Mason Franciscan Health in Seattle added, “The hospitals are struggling.”
“Everyone who works in healthcare, it does feel like everybody has gone back to normal. It is scary, frustrating, and disheartening for people not to understand what is going on. We have stretched almost as far as we can go.”
“With the last surge in the fall, our hospitals were empty. That’s not true anymore. All of those patients are there…and they are sicker. This is non-COVID. YOu now have a hospital that is essentially full having to manage an influx of COVID patients.”
When asked about what additional resources would be available to improve the situation, Briley reported there were few options left. The state was already enlisting the help of unpaid volunteers. The WSHA had already reached out for National Guard resources, but the critical staff and equipment have already been deployed to other states to support their COVID surges, along with aiding in hurricane, flooding, and climate disasters. Federal resources are also stretched thin.
The press conference closed with an appeal to get vaccinated, wear a mask, and avoid risky behavior that could cause a general injury.
– Benjamin Franklin Elementary (?) – Juanita Elementary (1) – Juanita High School (37) – Peter Kirk Elementary (2) – Robert Frost Elementary (9) – Thoreau Elementary (4)
– Kamiakin Middle School (140) – Mark Twain Elementary
Northshore
YELLOW
– Arrowhead Elementary (1) – Bothell High School (19) – Canyon Creek Elementary (9) – Canyon Park Middle School (4) – Cottage Lake Elementary (4) – Crystal Springs Elementary (4) – East Ridge Elementary (2) – Fernwood Elementary (2) – Frank Love Elementary (11) – Hollywood Hills Elementary (1) – Inglemoor High School (2) – Kenmore Elementary (1) – Kenmore Middle School (7) – Maywood Hills Elementary (2) – North Creek High School (6) – Ruby Bridges Elementary (1) – Secondary Academy for Success (1) – Shelton View Elementary (7) – Skyview Middle School (10) – Sunrise Elementary (4) – Timbercrest Middle School (9) – Westhill Elementary (5) – Woodin Elementary (1) – Woodinville High School (7) – Woodmore Elementary (9)
None
Local Districts Scorecard
In the Lake Washington School District, new quarantines were announced at Ben Franklin and Robert Frost, while the number of quarantined students at Kamiakin Middle School grew to 140, 24% of the student body. Several classrooms are now fully virtual, moving the school over into the closure column.
It is important to note that quarantined does not indicate widespread infection. To date, none of the area schools we are following have reported a significant outbreak of COVID cases that has been transmitted in school or at school activities.
Kirkland-Bellevue-Woodinville
King County Public Health updated the vaccination rates by zip code, with the numbers improving throughout the region. The northern half of Kirkland continues to lag behind the rest of the local area.
King County COVID vaccination rates – at least one dose – by zip code as of September 13, 2021
Zip Code
Percent vaccinated, at least one dose, 12 and older
98155
92.7%
98028
89.2%
98011
88.7%
98034
86.0%
98033
92.6%
98072
91.6%
98052
>95.0%
98004
>95.0%
98039
94.3%
98005
>95.0%
98007
89.9%
Vaccination rates for those 12 and older by zip code – at least one dose
National Round-Up
Johns Hopkins University Cumulitaive Case Tracker does not reflect nationwide data on Monday due to the way states report their information.
Irresponsible headline of the day – 57% of hospitalized COVID patients are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms
The Atlantic is grabbing headlines with a story out this afternoon, Our Most Reliable Pandemic Number is Losing Meaning. There is a lot that is problematic with this story and the interpretation of a study released today. The study, The COVID-19 Hospitalization Metric in the Pre- and Post-vaccination Eras as a Measure of Pandemic Severity: A Retrospective, Nationwide Cohort Study, is a pre-print non-reviewed study. The study includes a list of prestigious and respected doctors from the Veteran’s Administration and Tufts University.
For those who only read headlines (and the coming misinformation memes), there are many things to consider that the story in The Atlantic did not.
COVID patients, even when asymptomatic or mildly sick, require additional safety protocols for hospital staff. This takes up time, equipment, and personal protection equipment. This would be the same protocols for patients with other infectious diseases such as a measles outbreak. The critical difference is the scale of the number of COVID positive patients coming into hospitals.
The report only analyzed patients in the Veteran’s Administration, which is heavily male, and does not include pediatric patients. The VA demographics are not representative of the United States population.
The report study period ended in June, before the surge in Delta cases.
The study did not control for patients who required oxygen therapy before being admitted to a VA hospital, a condtion that is more common among veterans than the general population.
The VA has a policy of testing all patients for COVID regardless of what they come into the hospital for. That is not reflective of all hospitals in the United States.
Not all severe cases of COVID are admitted to a VA hospital, and those cases aren’t included in the data.
The report concludes, “Consideration should be given to updating the definition of COVID-19 hospitalizations to improve differentiation between hospitalization caused by COVID-19 and those associated with detection of SARS-CoV-2 through the addition of straightforward and objective measures of disease severity.”
After reaching a peak of 2,890 COVID-19 inpatients on Sept. 1, the state’s hospitals are starting to see a steady fall in the number of coronavirus patients.
As of Monday, hospitals were down to 2,474 patients being treated for the virus, according to the latest data from the Alabama Department of Public Health. It’s not clear to what extent the drop in hospitalizations is due to deaths or discharges.
By Monday, the state health department reported 210 COVID-19 patients in Alaska hospitals — the most ever. Thirty-three of them were on ventilators.
Health care officials have also cautioned that the true number of hospitalizations is likely even higher because the state’s data doesn’t include some long-term coronavirus patients, reported the Anchorage Daily News.
Hospitals in Anchorage had no remaining ICU beds on Monday.
Police have confirmed they are investigating a report of a hate crime and battery that occurred in the city last week, but they declined to disclose further details.
The Wells Fargo employee asked the man to wear a mask, and he responded aggressively. When he offered a mask to the customer, he started rummaging through the file cabinets and drawers of the bank, forcing employees to threaten to call the police.
The man then threatened the employee, calling him a racial slur and finishing with, “I better not catch you outside.”
When the bank closed at 5:30, the man was waiting for the banker and assaulted him in the parking lot. The employee fought back, and as a coworker called the police, the attacker fled. He was chased for a block, and as police arrived, scrambled over a fence.
“It’s crazy,” he added. “The guy went home, he plotted, he laid in wait, he ambushed me. And he called me a ‘sp–.’ I’m thinking, ‘Gosh, you know, he completely escalated on his own. He didn’t like the idea of having to wear a mask.’”
Speaking in Alachua County, DeSantis said government agencies in violation could potentially face millions of dollars in penalties.
“We are gonna stand for the men and women who are serving us. We are gonna protect Florida jobs,” DeSantis said. “We are not gonna let people be fired because of a vaccine mandate.”
Cases started climbing in late June and finally topped out toward the end of August. At that point, the state averaged more than 9,200 new cases a day. The average dropped by almost a thousand a week later.
Georgia never surpassed January’s surge that topped out at an average of nearly 11,000 new cases a day, but the state did almost double the peak from July 2020 of less than 4,700.
Health experts questioned whether traveling and get-togethers over the Labor Day weekend would keep cases climbing. The holiday still falls well within the two-week preliminary data window, so the state is still counting tests from that time.
Idaho’s 2,713 new cases, which included the weekend, brought the state’s seven-day moving average for new daily cases to 1,400. Hospitalizations hit a record high on Friday, with 626 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 statewide.
The Panhandle and North Central Health Districts in Idaho continue to operate using “crisis standards of care.” We strongly recommend not to travel to Idaho during this time of medical crisis. Any health emergency requiring hospitalization could result in you receiving inadequate care.
Illinois
We reported last week about Veronica Wolski. A well-known figure in the Chicago area for her sign waves over an expressway, last week it was widely reported that she was in the hospital with COVID.
Veronica Wolski in a Chicago area Staples refusing to wear a face mask, and on BIPAP therapy at a Chicago area hospital
Wolski died on Sunday night to the outrage of the QAnon community, disgraced lawyer Lin Wood, and former national security advisory Michael Flynn. According to her supporters, she had requested to be treated with ivermectin, and the hospital has refused.
A harassment campaign led by Wood and Flynn flooded the hospital with phone calls and e-mails.
Disgraced lawyer Lin Wood’s statement on the death of Veronica Wolski
Wolski was a passionate supporter of Bernie Sanders starting in 2014, campaigning vigorously for the Vermont Senator. When Sanders failed to get the nomination from the Democratic Party, she became despondent and starting following the QAnon conspiracy.
North Carolina
The Union County Public School Board voted Monday morning to end COVID-19 contact tracing and quarantining for non-positive students and staff.
That means students can go to school even if they have come in close contact with someone who is COVID-positive. The only people who have to stay home are those who have tested positive or have symptoms.
The School Board released a statement after the decision was made.
“At the Sept. 13 Special Called meeting, the Union County Board of Education voted effective immediately, to halt all staff responsibilities regarding contact tracing and quarantining for students and staff, except as required by law. The statutory authority of managing contact tracing and quarantining is that of Union County Public Health.
“As required by law, school nurses, administrators and school staff will continue to address positive, presumptive or confirmed cases of COVID-19. All students and staff who do not have a positive COVID-19 test or symptoms, should return to school or work immediately.
“If students or employees have the following symptoms: fever or chills, sore throat, cough, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, fatigue, muscle or body aches, new loss of taste or smell, sore throat, congestion or runny nose, nausea, diarrhea and vomiting, headache, they should stay home, stay away from others and call their health care provider.
“Students and employees who have been isolated due to a positive case or COVID-19 symptoms, should not report to school or work until they have completed 10 days of isolation, symptoms have improved and fever free for 24 hours without fever-reducing medication.
“Face coverings are still optional for students and staff in Union County Public Schools.”
“The hospital is full,” said Rex Director of Emergency Services Kim Boyder. “We are like 90% or greater capacity in the hospital. So that means we also get backed up in the ER. So that means we need additional space for not only the volume but some of the boarding.”
Although COVID-19 related hospitalizations have declined since Friday, 93% of Oregon’s hospital beds for adults are full, and there are just 62 adult intensive care unit beds available in the state.
Between Friday and Sunday, health officials say there were 32 deaths due to COVID-19. To date, the state’s death toll since the start of the pandemic is 3,446.
Oregon is in the midst of its worst COVID-19 surge since the start of the pandemic — which health officials say is fueled by unvaccinated people and the highly transmissible delta variant.
Knowledge is the best tool to fight against fear. A wise person chooses to be informed so they can make sound decisions. To join the fight against COVID misinformation, you can share this update through your social media platform of choice.
[KING COUNTY, Wash.] – (MTN) Hospitals in Eastern Washington continue to struggle with more officials warning they are running out of staff and resources. Counties with higher vaccination rates have fewer new COVID cases, while counties with low vaccination rates run out of options.
There were more COVID cases in all three school districts we are monitoring, including Peter Kirk Elementary and an expansion of quarantined students at Juanita High School and Kamiakin Middle School.
The Washington Federation of State Employees overwhelmingly approved a compromise agreement with Washington in support of the Governor’s vaccine mandate.
The Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer ignored a court order barring protests within one mile of Vancouver, Washington schools. The same organizers of the ongoing Vancouver protests have an event scheduled in Woodinville on September 25.
New data from the CDC shows that Moderna is the vaccine winner against the Delta variant and provides a hint on why the Johnson and Johnson vaccine has all but disappeared.
Reactions to announcements made by the Biden Administration yesterday are following partisan lines to the surprise of no one.
Finally, you probably heard about a study that indicated that 85% of men who take ivermectin become infertile. A study that we haven’t mentioned until right now. We cover that one in our misinformation section.
Although COVID cases remain on a plateau statewide, counties with lower vaccination rates have more new cases per capita.
Percent of Total Population Fully Vaccinated
Average 14-Day New Case Rate (unadjusted)
50.00% or above (12 counties)
517.8
40.00% to 49.99% (17 counties)
697.2
27.30% to 39.99% (10 counties)
828.5
14-Day New COVID Cases per 100K average by Vaccination Rate, Not Adjusted for Population
In the South Central Hospital Region, which includes Benton, Franklin, Klickitat, Walla Walla, and Yakima counties, new cases are 844.9 per 100K people.
Through September 9, Washington’s statewide 14-day rolling average was 508.0 COVID cases per 100K. Clallam (1,008.2 per 100K), Columbia (1,075.3 per 100K), Franklin (1297.0.0 per 100K), Lincoln (1049.5 per 100K, Okanogan (1,001.6 per 100K), and Stevens (1,060.5 per 100K) reported an extreme number of new cases. Counties in the 800.0 to 999.9 per 100K range include Asotin, Benton, Chelan, Cowlitz, Douglas, Grant, Lewis, Pend Oreille, and Yakima. Garfield County dropped to 764.0
King County is at 301.1 cases per 100K, statistically unchanged from yesterday.
The Washington State Department of Health reports a data backlog for test positivity, with the published number 14 days old. According to Johns Hopkins University Medicine, the positivity rate for the last 30 days is 13.73%, and over the previous 7 days, 13.84%. These numbers indicate the state is under testing, and testing locations are becoming overwhelmed in the hardest-hit counties. The rate of hospitalization was flat to down across all age groups.
Age Group
7-Day Case Rate
7-Day Hospitalization Rate
Ages 0-11
28.3 (up)
0.1
Ages 12-19
22.0
0.2
Ages 20-34
50.4 (down)
1.2 (down)
Ages 35-49
45.2
2.8
Ages 50-64
33.2
3.8 (down)
Ages 65-79
16.6
3.8 (down)
Ages 80+
5.1 (down)
1.6
7-day case rate and 7-day hospitalization rate is per 100K within the age group – the target for 7-day case rate is <25.0, but there are other factors such as vaccination rates within the age groups, how many total tests within the 7-day period, and the positivity rate within each age group
The agreement provides an additional leave day, a retirement option, vaccine access and education on work time, and a fair, equitable, and consistent process for employees seeking a medical or religious exemption.
“Our union was able to achieve what we set out for—a victory for public health and due process,” said WFSE President and Psychiatric Social Worker Mike Yestramski.
State employees have until this Sunday to get their first dose and comply with the October 18 deadline to be totally vaccinated. Although the Johnson & Johnson vaccine could be received as late as October 4 to meet the deadline, the supply of the single-dose vaccine is low.
Patriot Prayer, Proud Boys, and activists ignore protest injuction in Vancouver
Multiple groups protested at Skyview High School in Vancouver in defiance of a court order restricting protests within one mile of any school in the city. Skyview High School parents received an e-mail informing them of the multiple protests planned. The school district added security and was “coordinating with the Clark County Sheriff’s Office.”
E-mail message sent to Skyview High School parents warning of new protests by anti-vaccination and anti-government groups
Members of Patriot Front, the Proud Boys – including Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, and the Washougal Moms protested on school grounds and across the street. Police did not intervene to enforce the court order. The group then left to protest at the home of Clark County district judge Suzan Clark’s home. Social media posts and a website listed the judge’s address publicly, and on Telegram, there were calls to come armed to her home. Protesters arrived at the published address this afternoon to find that it wasn’t the residence of Judge Clark.
The Group Wake Up Washington calling for a protest at a District Judge’s home to protest a court order
The group that organized the planned protest at the judge’s home also organizes anti-vaccination protests across Washington state, including upcoming area protests in Seattle, Marysville, and Woodinville. The Seattle Truth Network, in coordination with Wake Up Washington, is planning an anti-vaccination event on September 25 at Rooster’s Bakery and Cafe in Woodinville.
Palmer Davis of La Center is behind the announcement to protest at the judge’s house yesterday. Davis ran for a city council seat in La Center last month, receiving 4.68% of the vote in a 4 candidate field.
The anti-vaccination and the anti-government movements are intersectional, with Open Schools USA, Wake Up Washington, and Washougal Mom’s have embraced support from right-wing organizations. In a study released on August 27, the Proud Boys were among the top three factions in the country that brandished firearms at protests, and Patriot Prayer was among the top ten. The same study found that 25% of the events that the Proud Boys showed up at descended into violence.
Travel Advisories
We recommend avoiding all travel to Yakima, Klickitat, Benton, Franklin, and Walla Walla counties, along with the state of Idaho. Hospital resources in these regions are so constrained that you may receive inadequate care if you experience a medical emergency.
Thank you
Thank you to our new subscribers and those of you who have made one-time contributions. On behalf of the entire team, thank you for helping us keep the lights on!
The research data was collected from 187 hospitals and 221 emergency departments and urgent care clinics. The nine states utilized were selected because the Delta variant accounted for at least 50% of the laboratory-confirmed COVID cases at the start of the study period. Researchers examined confirmed COVID cases among 32,867 adults 18 and over, and vaccination status was confirmed using electronic records and immunization registries. For the study, a person was considered fully vaccinated 14 days after they received their final dose.
The median age of an infected person was 43 years old, and the median age for an individual hospitalized was 65. The study did not take into account factors such as weight, race, community COVID restrictions or mandates, or comorbidities.
The study found that the Moderna vaccine was the most effective against the Delta variant, followed by Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. For the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, some of the data is concerning.
Vaccine
Effectiveness Against Delta Variant
Effectiveness Against Hospitalization
Johnson & Johnson
65%
60%
Moderna
92%
95%
Pfizer
77%
80%
All Vaccinated Individuals
82%
86%
CDC Study on vaccination effectiveness against the Delta variant – September 10, 2021
The study does have several limitations. Overall vaccine effectiveness and how much immunity declines over time have not been fully evaluated, and the time between being completely vaccinated before testing positive was not considered. The study did not account for partial vaccinations, with data included in the unvaccinated group. Lastly, although the study uses a significant population sample, the findings are likely too narrow to apply to the entire United States.
The federal government stopped the distribution of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in June of this year, and doses are very hard to find. This report provides some insight into why the one-dose vaccine has fallen out of favor.
King County, Washington is reporting over 84% of age eligible residents are vaccinated with at least one dose. The highest rates of positivity are in areas with low vaccination rates statewide. The FDA has provided full approval of the Pfizer vaccine for anyone 16 and over.
COVID vaccines are free for anyone over 12 years old, and no appointment is necessary at most locations. Lyft and Hopelink provide free transportation, and KinderCare, the Learning Care Group, and the YMCA offer free childcare during vaccination appointments or recuperation.
According to the DoH COVID Dashboard, 22.4% of all acute care patients hospitalized in Washington have COVID. A hospital system caring for this many COVID-positive patients in acute care is considered to be under “severe stress.” ICUs are at 89.6% of capacity statewide, with 34.1% of ICU patients fighting COVID, a small increase compared to yesterday.
The new hospital admission rate for COVID patients is 176 per day on September 7. The Department of Health reported there were 1,755 COVID patients statewide and 261 on ventilators.
Yesterday, we reported that at least one hospital in Yakima was having to ration care and warned they were close to crisis standards of care. In Colville, Mount Carmel Hospital is full, and more than half of the patients have COVID.
“Stevens County today has 14. When you think about only having 25 beds or less in critical access,” Peg Currie, the chief operating officer at Providence Healthcare, explained. “Imagine what the emergency rooms are like, the waiting lists are like, to try to get into a higher level of acute care.”
Officials in Spokane County held a press conference today, reporting a record number of COVID and total patients in the hospital.
As of Friday morning, 150 patients with COVID-19 are hospitalized at Sacred Heart and Holy Family Hospital in Spokane, and 95% are unvaccinated, Providence COO Peg Currie said during the press conference.
“It’s not a record that we wanted to break, but we have broken that,” Currie said. “Many of these [patients] are in our ICUs, and everybody that is in the Sacred Heart and Holy Family ICU now on a ventilator is not vaccinated.”
The age group that Providence is seeing the most in its hospitals is 40 to 50 years old, Currie said, which is much younger than previously hospitalized patients.
– Kamiakin Middle School (94) – Juanita Elementary (1) – Juanita High School (37) – Peter Kirk Elementary (2) – Thoreau Elementary (4)
– Mark Twain Elementary – 2nd-grade class (multiple confirmed cases)
Northshore
YELLOW
– Arrowhead Elementary (1) – Bothell High School (18) – Canyon Creek Elementary (10) – Canyon Park Middle School (4) – Crystal Springs Elementary (5) – East Ridge Elementary (2) – Fernwood Elementary (2) – Frank Love Elementary (9) – Hollywood Hills Elementary (1) – Inglemoor High School (1) – Kenmore Elementary (1) – Kenmore Middle School (10) – Maywood Hills Elementary (2) – North Creek High School (11) – Ruby Bridges Elementary (2) – Shelton View Elementary (6) – Skyview Middle School (11) – Sunrise Elementary (1) – Timbercrest Middle School (6) – Westhill Elementary (5) – Woodin Elementary (1) – Woodinville High School (6) – Woodmore Elementary (9)
None
Local Districts Scorecard
The number of students moving to quarantine expanded at Juanita High School and Kamiakin Middle School in the Lake Washington School District. Parents were notified that 29 at Juanita High and 13 at Kamiakin had close contact with a positive COVID case. Additionally, parents at Peter Kirk Elementary were notified that 2 students had been put into quarantine due to a COVID exposure.
Multiple school districts throughout Western Washington are reporting COVID cases, including Shoreline and Edmonds.
Yesterday’s announcement by the Biden Administration’s mandating the COVID vaccine for most federal employees and contractors, and requesting OSHA to implement a program that mandates vaccination or weekly COVID screening at companies with 100 or more employees, is being met with fierce resistance along partisan lines.
The governors of Arizona, Indiana, Georgia, Montana, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas vowed to fight the looming OSHA rules in court. During a visit with first lady Jill Biden to a middle school in Washington D.C., the president was asked his message to Republicans who decry the vaccine mandates as federal overreach and plan to challenge them in court.
“Have at it,” Biden said. “We’re playing for real here. This isn’t a game.”
Nome’s hospital doesn’t even have any COVID-19 patients, but it still faces “a COVID problem,” as Dr. Tim Lemaire, a family practitioner and member of the Norton Sound Health Corp. incident command team, put it. “We don’t have COVID here, but we can’t get our regular patients … care because of COVID everywhere else.”
Trying to move patients with heart attacks, strokes, or injuries from four-wheeler accidents, Norton Sound Regional Hospital sometimes has to call three or four facilities to find an open bed, at least once moving a patient all the way to Seattle to get them into an ICU.
State officials say rural hospitals throughout the state are suddenly facing unheard-of medical situations because they’re holding patients they’ve never had to before.
Brian Ritchie, the state’s health emergency response operations manager, helped a rural hospital find oxygen supplies after COVID-positive patients on high-flow therapy ran through existing cylinders faster than expected.
The district hasn’t experienced a single outbreak during the first month of instruction. Officials define an outbreak as “three or more cases in non-related households in which the source of infection occurred at the school, and not another setting.”
The San Francisco health department also emphasized that vaccinations “are our best defense to protect children,” noting most pediatric cases of COVID-19 in the city came from unvaccinated adults in a household getting the virus and spreading it to unvaccinated children.
“The difference between this wave and all past waves is that Coloradans have returned to their normal lives,” Bookman said. “Those who have been vaccinated have been given the opportunity to go out and live their lives. What comes with that is additional cases of trauma, additional heart attacks, additional strokes – we have seen people who have delayed receiving care over the course of the pandemic because they were afraid to go to their doctor. And this is all coming together with the increase in COVID hospitalizations at this point to really stress our health care system.”
Colorado’s hospitals report that 81% of those hospitalized in the state are unvaccinated, and 85% of recent COVID deaths were unvaccinated, said Herlihy.
DeSantis’ press secretary Christina Pushaw tweeted: “(First) District Court of Appeals just granted the State of Florida’s request to reinstate the stay — meaning, the rule requiring ALL Florida school districts to protect parents’ rights to make choices about masking kids is BACK in effect!”
Yesterday, a Brevard County School Board meeting was far more subdued than the August 30 meeting that made national headlines. While things were quieter outside, a crowd of over 20 people gathered to burn masks. A counter-protestor with a megaphone, a Firehouse Subs helmet, and a fire extinguisher lectured them about fire safety and threatened to put out any fire they lit.
Megan Alexandra Blankebhiller of Jacksonville, Florida, arrived in a hospital emergency room on August 13. As she waited to be seen, she shot a short Tik Tok video, where the screams of another person could be heard in the background. The screams were coming from a person who had lost a loved one in another area of the emergency department.
Blankenbiller, who was 31 and unvaccinated, was admitted to the hospital with COVID. She made a series of videos appealing for her followers to get vaccinated from her bed as her condition declined.
“I shouldn’t have waited,” she said in the video, which has been viewed nearly 900,000 times. “If you are even 70% sure that you want the vaccine, go get it. Don’t wait. Go get it because hopefully, if you get it, you won’t end up in the hospital like me.”
By August 20, Blankenbiller was in critical condition and on a ventilator, and she died shortly thereafter. Blankenbiller’s sister, Cristina Blankenbiller, told WebMD in an interview that their family had agreed to get vaccinated, including Alexandra, shortly before she became ill.
Idaho
The Panhandle and North Central Health Districts in Idaho continue to operate using “crisis standards of care.” We strongly recommend not to travel to Idaho during this time of medical crisis. Any health emergency requiring hospitalization could result in you receiving inadequate care.
Illinois
Veronica Wolski was well known in the Chicago area for producing videos and harassing retail employees and people wearing masks. In one video, she walked through a Staples, wearing a “Lone Ranger” style mask, telling the manager who asked her to wear a mask that she has one on and has a medical condition that exempts her.
Veronica Wolski in a Chicago area Staples refusing to wear a face mask, and on BIPAP therapy at a Chicago area hospital
Wolski is hospitalized with COVID at Ressurection Medical Center in Norwood Park, Illinois. According to her supporters, she has requested to be treated with ivermectin, and the hospital has refused. Wolski was known in QAnon circles. Her situation has drawn the attention of disgraced attorney Lin Wood and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn (have we mentioned lately how the anti-vaccination and the anti-government movements are intersectional).
“At AMITA Health, our first priority is the health and safety of our patients. Our physicians and clinicians follow the full guidance of the FDA and the CDC in the treatment of COVID-19. And while AMITA Health Resurrection Medical Center has received hundreds of phone calls and emails associated with one patient’s care, we have simply and respectfully noted the concerns shared.”
The largest peer-reviewed study on the effectiveness of ivermectin in treating COVID so far indicated that the anti-parasitic provided no benefit compared to a placebo. For hospitalized patients, it made them sicker.
Hospitalizations peaked at 1,178 COVID-19 cases on Sept. 1, and critical care resources remain under extreme strain, with roughly half of all intensive care units in the state filled with COVID-19 patients who are largely unvaccinated.
“It looks like we are seeing the flattening of cases that we had hoped for,” said Peter Graven, Ph.D., lead data scientist in OHSU’s Business Intelligence unit. “However, we are still projecting it will be a very long time before hospitalization levels return to more manageable levels.
Tennessee
Tennessee High schooler Grady Knox’s passionate plea for the health of himself and others was mocked earlier this week at a Rutherford County Board of Education meeting, a scene that has drawn national attention.
Knox was ridiculed, even laughed at, Tuesday evening by some in the school board meeting audience when he said his grandmother died of COVID-19 after being exposed to a person without a mask.
Knox’s grandmother lived at Adams Place retirement community in Murfreesboro before she died of COVID-19.
One of the persons who heckled Knox was quickly identified as Erika Casher, a nurse who had spoken at other school board meetings. It was reported today that Casher was terminated from her position with Cigna.
Texas
Karra Harwood of Baycliff, Texas, is mourning the death of her 4-year old daughter, Kali Cook, who died of COVID. Harwood, who is unvaccinated, had become sick and was confirmed to have on Monday. After her diagnosis, she isolated herself from her family.
Later that evening, Kali’s grandmother noticed she was sick, and at 2 a.m. found that she had a fever. At 7 a.m., she was found dead in her bed. An autopsy confirmed that Kali also had COVID.
“She was so funny and sassy,” said Karra Harwood, Kali’s mother. “She wasn’t your average little girl. She’d rather play with worms and frogs than wear bows. She was just so pretty and full of life.”
Harwood said she didn’t want people to think of her daughter as an anonymous statistic through sobs Thursday. She wanted people to know who her daughter was.
“I would rather her be a name than just a little girl,” she said. “She was beautiful.”
“I was one of the people that was anti. I was against it,” she said. “Now, I wish I never was.”
Misinformation
A lot of schadenfreude has been spilled in the news on social media after a 2011 study on the Effects of Ivermectin therapy on the sperm functions of Nigerian onchocerciasis patients reemerged. The study found that 85% of men who took ivermectin to treat onchocerciasis (river blindness) suffered from low sperm count and poor sperm quality, rendering them infertile.
The story was widely published, and tonight, many media outlets are retracting the story. We never highlighted this piece of news, and we’re labeling the claim as misinformation.
The problems with the study are numerous. First, it only involved 37 men, which is a very small sample size. Researchers wanted to include more people in the study, but many were disqualified because they already had low sperm count and/or low sperm quality.
The men took ivermectin for 11 months to treat active river blindness, which is longer than almost anyone taking human or animal formulations of ivermectin as a preventative or treatment for COVID (no, it doesn’t do either).
The study found that 85% of the men they observed over the 11 months had poor sperm quality and/or count, rendering them infertile. The study didn’t account for other potential factors, which may have been very likely given so many test subjects were rejected before the study was done because they were already functionally infertile.
Misinformation cuts both ways, and you should always consider your own personal biases when consuming information and deciding what is fact and fiction.
Journalists, activists, and researchers defending the First Amendment
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