SPOKANE COUNTY, Wash. — The Delta variant of COVID-19 is causing a new surge of cases and hospitalizations across America, including in Spokane County, leading to widespread concern from elected leaders and public health experts.
But just how bad is this wave? How do the metrics compare to past waves of the pandemic? The data shows: it's not the worst wave Spokane County has had, but it's close to it and getting closer.
Cases
The first metric people typically go to to analyze COVID-19 is, naturally, case counts.
According to the Washington State Department of Health (DOH) dashboard, there have only been two waves where COVID-19 cases peaked higher than the current Delta wave.
Numbers are higher now than during summer of 2020 and nearly as high as during late spring of 2021, both times during which restrictions were quite severe.
Numbers are currently not as high as during the wave that began in late fall of 2020 into early 2021.
Hospitalizations
Still, most leaders in policy and public health say the more important metric is hospitalizations. That is, after all, the number that tells you how sick people are getting.
Furthermore, even though vaccinated people can be infected with Delta, they virtually never get hospitalized from it. That means hospitalizations can tell us to what extent COVID-19 remains a truly dangerous pandemic.
Here, the news doesn't get much better. Hospitalizations are higher than during the first COVID wave in April 2020 and about on par with the late-summer 2020 wave.
They still haven't quite reached the extent of the winter 2020 or spring 2021 waves. However, they are quickly approaching those figures.
Deaths
If there's any good news, it's about the number of COVID-19 deaths in Spokane County. Over the course of the pandemic, they have steadily declined.
Deaths spiked at the start of the pandemic, then again in late summer 2020 and hit their highest levels during the winter wave.
However, they declined in 2021 steadily and remained relatively low even during the April 2021 wave. That's remained true during delta; deaths in Spokane County, while unfortunately still extant, are fairly low.
Forecasts
The numbers for hospitalizations have been particularly concerning to elected leaders. Governor Jay Inslee cited them in his decision to mandate vaccinations for health care workers, among other employees.
Forecasts from data modelers suggest they could get worse.
The University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) has been modeling COVID-19 data from the start of the pandemic. One of their most important models deals with forecasted hospital resource use; in other words, how many beds need to be taken up by coronavirus patients.
Hospital resource use has remained quite high in Washington throughout the pandemic, spiking largest in April 2020, winter 2020 and May 2021.
With the current rate of the rapidly-spreading Delta variant, IHME forecasts that by the end of the year, hospitals could become the most crowded they've been in this state during the entire pandemic.
Of course, these models are just predictions and estimates, and the conditions of the pandemic change rapidly.
