Category: Healthy Update

The state Department of Health (DOH) reported 2,392 new coronavirus cases and 53 new deaths on Tuesday.

The update brings the state’s totals to 670,207 cases and 7,860 deaths, meaning that 1.2{fe463f59fb70c5c01486843be1d66c13e664ed3ae921464fa884afebcc0ffe6c} of people diagnosed in Washington have died, according to the DOH. The data is as of 11:59 p.m. Monday. Tallies may be higher earlier in the week because new state data isn’t reported on weekends.

In addition, 37,238 people have been hospitalized in the state due to the virus — 109 new hospitalizations. In King County, the state’s most populous, state health officials have confirmed a total of 153,740 COVID-19 diagnoses and 1,889 deaths.

Since vaccinations began in mid-December, the state and health care providers have administered 9,154,939 doses and 58.3{fe463f59fb70c5c01486843be1d66c13e664ed3ae921464fa884afebcc0ffe6c} of Washingtonians have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to vaccination data, which the state updates on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Providers are currently giving an average of about 15,583 vaccine shots per day.

The DOH says its daily case reports may also include duplicate test results, results assigned to the wrong county, results that are reported for today but are actually from a previous day, occasional false positive tests and other data discrepancies. Because of this, the previous day’s total number of cases plus the number of new daily cases does not add up to the new day’s total number of cases. State health officials recommend reviewing the dashboard’s epidemiologic curves tab for the most accurate representation of the state’s COVID-19 spread.

Rapid at-home COVID-19 testing is about to become much more widely available in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration said, following authorization of a mass-produced testing kit.

Competing at-home tests have been on the market for months, but Acon Laboratories’ test, authorized by the agency Monday, “is expected to double rapid at-home testing capacity in the U.S. over the next several weeks,” Dr. Jeffrey E. Shuren, director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in a statement.

“By year’s end, the manufacturer plans to produce more than 100 million tests per month, and this number will rise to 200 million per month by February 2022,” he said.

Like tests already available from Abbott, Quidel, Becton Dickinson and other makers, Acon’s test is made to detect antigens, proteins from the coronavirus, on a nasal swab, and produces results in 15 minutes.

Read the full story here.

South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham was only midway through his sentence when the crowd began shouting over him.

“If you haven’t had the vaccine you ought to think about getting it because if you’re my age — “

“No!” attendees at a Republican event held Saturday responded as others booed. Graham was speaking at a country club in Summerville, S.C., about 25 miles outside of Charleston.

Bowing his head and holding up a hand, the 66-year-old — who got his coronavirus vaccine in December — responded to the crowd, telling them, “I didn’t tell you to get it. You ought to think about it.”

Read the full story here.

Ellume, an Australian company that makes a widely available at-home coronavirus test, has recalled nearly 200,000 test kits because of concerns about a higher-than-expected rate of false positives. That represents about 5.6{fe463f59fb70c5c01486843be1d66c13e664ed3ae921464fa884afebcc0ffe6c} of the approximately 3.5 million test kits Ellume has shipped to the United States.

The company, which detected the problem in mid-September, traced the issue to variations in the quality of one of the raw materials used in the test kit, Dr. Sean Parsons, Ellume’s CEO, said. He declined to specify the material in question, citing a desire not to publicly disclose precisely how the test kits work.

Approximately 427,000 test kits, including some provided to the U.S. Department of Defense, were affected by the problem, Parsons said. Roughly half have already been used, he said, yielding about 42,000 positive results. As many as one-quarter of those positives may have been inaccurate, Parsons said, although he stressed that it would be difficult to determine exactly how many.

Read the story here.

A King County woman in her late 30s has become the first person in Washington state to die from a rare blood-clotting syndrome after receiving the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, local health officials confirmed Tuesday morning.

The woman received her shot on Aug. 26. She died less than two weeks later on Sept. 7, according to a statement from Public Health — Seattle & King County.

Public health officials said the syndrome was a “very rare” complication of the vaccine. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has counted three other similar deaths nationally.

“We at Public Health are saddened by this loss and offer condolences to the woman’s family and loved ones,” the Tuesday statement said.

The woman’s cause of death was thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), a condition researchers have said is a rare but “potentially serious adverse event in people who received the J&J vaccine,” the statement said.

Her diagnosis was confirmed by the CDC’s clinical immunization safety assessment project, according to the public health department.

Read the story here.