John Abplanalp, of Lewis County Public Health, talks about pandemic stages during a public meeting at O'Blarney's in Centralia.
Last week, Lewis County Public Health and Social Services Deputy Director John Abplanalp mentioned in a press release the limited testing in the county and confirmed that due to the low volume, trends haven’t started to develop.
Lewis County Manager Erik Martin confirmed the county’s total of confirmed COVID-19 cases had climbed to 12 as of 4 p.m. on Wednesday and he added a possible 13th case could be confirmed in the near future.
The number still stood at 12 Sunday at noon.
The Washington Department of Health had the total number of tests administered in Lewis County at 406, meaning three percent of all tests have come back positive.
“We know that only a small number of people are getting tested,” Abplanalp said at Thursday’s meeting. “There are definitely more undiagnosed cases in the county.”
On Wednesday, Abplanalp said in a news release that it’s too early to tell whether infections are peaking, increasing or reducing just yet.
“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 Sen. John Braun, R-Centralia, 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 Wednesday.
On Thursday, Abplanalp said there have been no deaths related to COVID-19 in the county. He mentioned “about 40 percent” of the people diagnosed have required hospitalization.
“In my opinion, I think we need to make sure we’re following state guidelines and actually federal guidelines and doing everything we can to protect our workers and staff,” Commissioner Gary Stamper said during the meeting.
