Spokane County has set another one-day record for confirmed Covid cases. The health district reports 146 cases and two more deaths. That makes 14 deaths and 34 new hospitalizations of Spokane County residents over the last week.
Health Officer Bob Lutz doesn’t expect things to change anytime soon.
“Based upon the modeling that we’ve been following at the state level from the Institute of Disease Modeling, that has said that when you see an increased case count, as we have seen, you will ultimately see more hospitalizations and, therefore, more deaths associated with it. It’s just very consistent with what we have predicted to happen and, unfortunately, I don’t think this is the peak. I think we will continue to see a rise over the next couple of weeks," Lutz said.
Also on Friday, Panhandle Health District officials announced they’ve found community transmission of the virus in Shoshone and Boundary counties. Spokeswoman Katherine Hoyer says that means contact tracers can’t trace all of the cases there back to specific people who also have the virus.
“We seem to be having a high concentration of community transmission in Kootenai County, but Bonner, Boundary, Benewah and Shoshone, all of them, are showing community transmission at this time," Hoyer said.
That’s showing up in the individual county counts, including more than 1,500 in Kootenai County; about half of those are still considered active.
Boundary and Shoshone counties, the two latest to be put into the community transmission category, have far fewer cases, but a high percentage still active. Sixty-five cases in Shoshone County and 50 still active. Thirty-four cases in Boundary County, 27 active.
To contrast, Benewah County has 41 cases overall, but only nine active.