A nurse sits on standby at the entrance to Providence Centralia Hospital's emergency entrance with a non contact thermometer in hand Tuesday morning in Centralia
Lewis County Manager Erik Martin confirmed the county’s total of confirmed COVID-19 cases has climbed to 12 as of 4 p.m. on Wednesday. He added a possible 13th case could be confirmed by as early as this evening.
The Washington State Department of Health is experiencing technical difficulties with its data and has yet to update numbers from its most recent report on March 28.
In a release on Tuesday, Lewis County Public Health and Social Services Deputy Director John Abplanalp mentioned the limited testing in the county and confirmed that due to the low volume, trends haven’t started to develop.
According to the release, less than 500 county residents have been administered a test.
“More people are being tested and test results are being reported back to us, but it’s still too early to discern meaningful trends,” Abplanalp said in a release. “Having so few tests done really hinders our efforts to predict where we are as a county. Are we increasing, decreasing, or holding steady? We just don’t know yet.”
Commissioner Edna Fund said in Wednesday’s BOCC/COVID-19 meeting that Senator John Braun was hoping the county could provide further updates on the status of confirmed cases.
“He said it would be nice to know the stages of their recovery and if they’re being isolated at home or at hospitals,” Fund said during the meeting. “I think we have been providing ages, but from his review, we could provide some of that data if it is available to us and it would be helpful to him also.”
She continued by saying the updates would be formatted as a general overview of all cases to maintain the privacy of the individual patients.
Martin said he would discuss the possibility of providing the updates with Abplanalp and Lewis County Health Officer Dr. Rachel Wood.
“We’ll try to get some feedback on that question tomorrow,” Martin said during the meeting.
