UPDATE: Washington Governor Jay Inslee has required businesses statewide to require their employees and customers to wear face coverings.
The Spokane Regional Health District reported 70 new Covid cases today [Thursday]. It’s the third day in the last four that that figure has been 70 or more.
Health Officer Bob Lutz says people younger than 40 continue to account for a large number of the cases. “I looked at the median age of the last 100 cases. It was 31. That’s a significant drop. A couple of weeks ago we were reporting that the median age was 54. We’ve dropped a decade-and-a-half in less than a couple of weeks. It’s all over the place. We truly have community spread. We truly have an outbreak that is not being contained at this point," Lutz said at a media briefing on Wednesday.
And there are worries that the numbers will get worse after the Fourth of July weekend, unless "if I get 80%, 90% of people wearing face coverings, we can bend the curve. But people need to do the work," he said.
The Institute for Disease Modeling, out of Bellevue, released a report today [Thursday] confirming the demographic shift in people who contract the virus. It says people younger than 35 represented 22-percent of Washington’s cases between January and March, but 46-percent in May and June.