Spokane public health officials reported 53 new coronavirus cases on Friday. It’s the sixth day out of the last seven that the case count was 75 or fewer. And it was less than a third of Thursday’s record of 170 new cases.
Health Officer Bob Lutz says the Thursday count appears to be an outlier in the recent trend. He says the reason appears to be related to tests taken of residents at one of the long-term care homes.
“One of the facilities sends its laboratories to an out-of-state laboratory and that out-of-state laboratory all of a sudden, it’s in California, and they were reporting results to the public health agency in that county, that then sent it to us and so a significant delay, but that represented a lot of cases from that one facility" that were all counted at once, Lutz said.
The health district also reported one more death, meaning fatalities have been reported 13 of the last 14 days.