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CORONAVIRUS

COVID-19

Case backlog inflates Spokane County COVID-19 numbers

Becky Doughty, director of Health Services with Spokane Public Schools, prepares doses of the Pfizer vaccine for students during a vaccination clinic held by Spokane Public Schools on May 14 at North Central High School in Spokane. (Tyler Tjomsland/The Spokesman-Review)
By Arielle Dreher arielled@spokesman.com(509) 459-5467

While Spokane County has yet to see COVID-19 go away, in the past week, some of the higher daily case counts include COVID-19 cases from earlier this year.

Starting on May 21, the Spokane Regional Health District began including backlogged virus cases from Department of Health data in its daily case counts.

Some of these cases date back to December.

So while the health district confirmed 222 new cases on Thursday, at least half of them are from earlier this year.

On Wednesday and Thursday of this week, the district confirmed 491 new cases, but of those, only 151 were really new in the last two days.

Since Friday, the district has confirmed 592 backlogged cases.

A look at the numbers:

The Spokane Regional Health District confirmed five additional deaths on Thursday.

There have been 639 deaths due to COVID-19 in Spokane County residents.

There are 76 patients hospitalized with the virus in Spokane hospitals.

The Panhandle Health District confirmed 36 new cases on Thursday and no additional deaths.

There are 30 Panhandle residents hospitalized with the virus.

Arielle Dreher's reporting for The Spokesman-Review is primarily funded by the Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund, with additional support from Report for America and members of the Spokane community. These stories can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper’s managing editor.