The Washington State Department of Health is concerned about a rise in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations being seen across the state due to the spread of the delta variant.<\/p>\n
Over the past four days, an average of 1,500 new cases have been reported each day, according to an Aug. 3 state Department of Health news release. Hospital occupancy is at the highest levels seen to date in 2021 due to increased COVID-19 transmission, patient demand and hospital staffing challenges.<\/p>\n
Testing: Percent positivity is climbing rapidly to 5.5%, up from a low of 2% a month ago.<\/p>\n
Hospitalizations: More than 600 people are hospitalized with COVID-19, an increase of more than 20% from last week.<\/p>\n
The highly contagious delta variant, which is a more transmissible strain of the virus, is the dominant strain in Washington making up roughly 76% of sequenced cases. While no vaccines are 100% effective, it is proven COVID-19 vaccines provide strong protection against variants, prevent severe illness and hospitalization and lower your risk of death.<\/p>\n
More than 94% of all cases, deaths and hospitalizations in Washingtonians 12 years of age and older can be attributed to people who have not been fully vaccinated.<\/p>\n
“Higher vaccination rates across the state are needed to protect our communities,” said state Secretary of Health Dr. Umair A. Shah. “If there was ever a time to get vaccinated, it is now in the race against this variant.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
State Department of Health officials urge vaccination immediately to combat the spread <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":51053,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,24],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-51052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home2","category-northwest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51052"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51052"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51052\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51052"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=51052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}