Data Snapshot
UW Medicine Hospitals:
King County: The county reported 50 new positive cases and 3 new deaths on June 2.
Washington: The state reported 21,977 cases and 1,124 deaths as of May 31. A total of 365,272 people have been tested and 5.1% of those tests have been positive.
United States: The CDC reports 1,802,470 cases and 105,157 deaths as of June 2.
Global: WHO reports 6,194,533 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 376,320 deaths as of June 2.
*Numbers update frequently, please follow links for most up-to-date numbers.
Need to Know
Inslee issues Safe Start proclamation for county approach to re-opening
Gov. Jay Inslee today issued his Safe Start proclamation as the Stay Home, Stay Healthy order is set to expire tonight at 11:59 p.m. The governor announced Safe Start — Washington’s Phased Reopening plan on Friday during a press conference where he detailed the county-by-county approach.
#FitForTheFrontLine is a national fitness challenge created by Mount Sinai Health System to show appreciation for front line workers. Fitness activities can range from dedicating a walk around the block, cycling for 60 minutes, or doing a 30-minute meditation. Just use #FitForTheFrontLine on social to show your support.
Community Donation Drop-off Site Closing
In recent weeks, we have seen a natural slowdown in the number of community members using our drop-off site and to ensure the responsible use of staff time and resources, we decided to close the site as of June 1. UW Medicine Advancement is still actively seeking large-scale donations of certain PPE items, which currently includes surgical masks (though the need will likely change over time). For smaller in-kind donations, we are encouraging community members to consider giving to local organizations that can benefit greatly from smaller quantities of PPE. We have the systems in place to reopen the community donation site quickly, should the need arise. In the meantime, we invite you to learn more on our in-kind donation webpage.
UW Medicine Work-Related Travel Restrictions Extended Through June 30
UW Medicine leadership has decided to extend the current work-related travel restrictions for all employees through June 30, 2020. This includes all travel for conferences and meetings related to professional membership societies/associations and meetings or gatherings related to grants.
UW Medicine in the News
The Seattle Times: 250,000 people now follow this Fred Hutch scientist on Twitter. We talk to this leading voice of the coronavirus pandemic
Featuring: Trevor Bedford, PhD, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and affiliate assistant professor, Genome Sciences
“Bedford’s Twitter feed, which now has nearly 250,000 followers, has become a must-read for infectious disease experts and armchair epidemiologists. Health officials turn to the computational biologist and his colleagues for insight and analysis. When genetic sequencing of the first two cases in Washington state suggested the virus had been spreading silently through the community for six weeks and was poised for exponential growth, Bedford sounded the alarm Feb. 29 — via a long Twitter thread spelling out his reasoning — and helped galvanize the public health response. The quick action is generally credited with preventing the kind of runaway epidemic that devastated New York.”
The Daily: UW Medicine launches virtual assistance tool to provide 24/7 support for COVID-19 screening
Featuring: Carrie Priebe, Enterprise Access & Innovation; Kelly Resco-Summers, chief nursing and informatics officer DNP, RN; John Lynch, MD, Allergy & Infectious Diseases
“To provide faster access to COVID-19 information, UW Medicine has launched a virtual assistance tool to screen symptoms of potential patients and guide them to appropriate care. The virtual assistance was developed using Amazon Web Services and serves as a robot who can ask people a series of questions including symptoms, chronic disease conditions, and recent working history. Based on the response, the robot provides initial medical evaluation and guidance to the next step of medical care.”
Cancer Today: Cancer Care Moves Forward Amid COVID-19
Featuring: Mary-Elizabeth Percival, MD, Hematology
“Research into how the coronavirus affects cancer patients who get it is ongoing, but data so far indicate that risk of severe COVID-19 cases is elevated in at least some people who have been diagnosed with cancer. In order to reduce risk to patients and staff, cancer centers have tried to minimize the amount of time cancer patients spend hospitalized or in the clinic.”
My Northwest: UW Medicine Virology: We may never know who had first COVID-19 case in WA
Featuring: Keith Jerome, MD, PhD, Laboratory Medicine
‘“I don’t think we’re ever going to know the exact person who was the first one,’ UW Medicine Virology head Dr. Keith Jerome told KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross. That’s largely driven by a lack of proper surveillance early on in the pandemic, which has left state health officials without the necessary data and infrastructure to be able to trace the virus’ early presence in Washington. ‘This goes back to the issues in public health and surveillance, and I think we’ve under-invested in that,’ Dr. Jerome noted.”
Research Update
The Journal of Infectious Diseases: New Vaccine Design and Delivery Technologies
Featuring: Daniel Ellis and Neil P. King, PhD, UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design
“In this perspective, we discuss emerging approaches to vaccine design and engineering based on recent insights into immunology, structural biology, computational biology, and immunoengineering. We anticipate that these cutting-edge, interdisciplinary approaches will lead to breakthrough vaccine concepts for ever-evolving and (re)emerging influenza viruses, with important ramifications for global public health.”
Clinical Infectious Diseases: Low Prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 Among Pregnant and Postpartum Patients With Universal Screening in Seattle, Washington
Featuring: UW Medicine Post‐Acute Care (PAC) Network
“We found a low prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 (2.7% [5/188]) among pregnant and postpartum patients after initiating universal testing. Prevalence among symptomatic patients (22.2% [4/18]) was similar to initial targeted screening approaches (19.1% [8/42]). Among 170 asymptomatic patients, two were positive or inconclusive, respectively; repeat testing at 24 hours was negative.”
Journal of Medical Virology: The Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Complicated by Pulmonary Embolism and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome
Featuring: Guang-Shing Cheng, MD, Pulmonary Critical Care and Sleep Medicine; Sudhakar Pipavath, MD, Radiology
“Acute respiratory distress syndrome [ARDS] and coagulopathy played an important role in morbidity and mortality of severe COVID-19 patients. A higher frequency of PE [pulmonary embolism] than expected in COVID-19 patients was recently reported. The presenting symptoms for PE were untypical including dyspnea, which is one of the major symptoms in severe COVID-19, especially in those patients with ARDS. We reported two COVID-19 cases with coexisting complications of PE and ARDS, aiming to consolidate the emerging knowledge of this global health emergency and raise the awareness that the hypoxemia or severe dyspnea in COVID-19 may be related to PE and not necessarily always due to the parenchymal disease.”
