SPOKANE, Wash. — Every Friday, the Washington Department of Health releases a report assessing whether each of the state's regions is ready to move to the next phase of reopening. A region must meet four of four metrics to advance and so far no region has met all four metrics in any of the three reports.
Per these reports, things are not improving in Eastern Washington. In fact, they seem to, in some respects, be getting worse. That doesn't seem to mesh well with the daily updates from the Spokane Regional Health District, which show recent declines in case numbers and hospitalizations.
There are several reasons why the state data appears to tell a different story than what we're seeing locally.
For one, the state analyzes by region, not by county. Spokane County is included with eight other counties in the East region. SRHD data only reflects Spokane County figures.
Secondly, SRHD doesn't report the same metrics the state does. Namely, positivity rate. That's the percentage of COVID-19 tests that come back positive, and it's the one metric Eastern Washington has consistently performed poorly in.
Third, the data in the state reports just aren't as recent.
"It takes some time before it gets reported to us," said the state's epidemiologist and acting health officer, Dr. Scott Lindquist. "Either the clinician doesn't call us with the result or it doesn't get put into the electronic lab reporting."
Lindquist says the DOH won't publish the rate unless the data analysts are confident at least 90 percent of tests have been properly reported.
"We can't calculate a positivity rate on partial data," he said.
As a result, right now when reports are released on Fridays, the numbers are nearly three weeks old.
Eastern Washington's first report showed a positivity rate of 17 percent. The second week it stayed flat at 17 percent. And in the third week it went up to 21 percent.
Given that we need to get down to 10 percent to move to phase two, it feels like we're nowhere close and going backwards. But it's worth noting almost all of that data is from December; it's possible what we're looking at there is a holiday spike. With the current reporting methods, we won't really know for sure until more like late February.
That's not just frustrating for the people reading the reports. The people compiling them don't like it either.
"None of us are happy that the delay... that it takes that long for everyone to get their I's dotted and their T's crossed," Lindquist said.
In fact, that's why DOH staff are currently considering a process where you basically just find one lab in each region and use that lab's data as a sample.
"Can you use a system that is more representative of the positivity, that is in real time?" Lindquist said. "And that is where the team is going right now... As we're speaking, they're working on it."
In the meantime, that 10% figure seems distant but Lindquist says even that is far from the end goal here.
"We were very generous in setting the rate at 10%. That is a massively high rate," he said.
Lindquist also added that even though the reopening is based solely on four hard metrics, the overall public health response must take a more holistic view of the data and examine factors such as trends over time.