Grant County has outsized COVID-19 positive test rate, but a low number of deaths

GRANT COUNTY — Grant County has the seventh-highest rate of positive COVID-19 tests of any Washington county, a metric which health officials have previously stated is an indicator of how widespread the coronavirus was in an area.

According to the state Department of Health, 11.6 percent of all COVID-19 tests conducted in Grant County had come back positive as of Wednesday, more than double the statewide average of 5.7 percent. The only counties with higher positive test rates are Douglas, Adams, Okanogan, Benton, Yakima and Franklin counties, which have seen rates ranging from 14.4 to 25.1 percent.

And despite being the 13th most populated county in the state, Grant County is ninth among the state’s 39 counties for the most cases, with 1,223 cases as of Thursday. It has also had an outsized rate of confirmed cases per capita. Clark County, by comparison, has had the eighth most cases, with 1,756 as of Thursday — only around 30 percent more cases, despite having over five times the population of Grant County.

In some ways, however, Grant County has been spared some of the damage caused to other counties.

The state has recorded 12 deaths for Grant County, of which 10 have been confirmed by the local health district, one is pending review of the death certificate and one was listed in error, health district administrator Theresa Adkinson said in a recent interview. Only around 1 percent of Grant County residents who have tested positive for the coronavirus have later died due to the virus — one of the lowest rates in the state.

By comparison, King County, the most populous county in the state, has lost around 4.3 percent of residents who tested positive for COVID-19. Barring a few outliers whose numbers are skewed by particularly low numbers of confirmed cases, Kittitas County has seen the highest death rate, at 5.2 percent, having seen more deaths than Grant County despite reporting 75 percent fewer cases overall.