Recently have Yakima Health District officials started to see significant numbers of people wearing masks. | Pixabay
Recently have Yakima Health District officials started to see significant numbers of people wearing masks. | Pixabay
A warning more than two weeks ago from Gov. Jay Inslee doesn't seem to have made a difference in Yakima County as it continues to record high numbers of COVID-19 cases.
Washington’s governor specifically called out Yakima County, where the coronavirus infection rate remains stuck at the highest rate in the state.
“I just want to level with the people in Yakima because they are my former neighbors and I care a lot about them,” Inslee said, the Yakima Herald-Republic reported. “We are only going to stop this from getting into the broader neighborhoods of Yakima if we all sort of get behind this wagon and push."
More people in the county wear masks now, Yakima Health District spokeswoman Lilian Bravo told the Yakima Herald-Republic.
But the county still recorded 116 new coronavirus cases and another death on June 15. That brought the total deaths attributed to the coronavirus to 111 since mid-March, with 5,727 total cases in the county, the Yakima Health District told the Yakima Herald-Republic.
The county has yet to reach the peak in confirmed cases, which continue to rise. Yakima has the highest transmission rates across the state using the metric named R-naught, Scott Lindquist, state epidemiologist of communicable diseases, told the Yakima Herald-Republic.
“The R-naught value, or any other number of case rates, are so much higher in Yakima than other parts of the state that I think if anyone in the state really needs to concentrate on social distancing, mask wearing, hand washing, the disinfection, all the care to reopening, it is clearly Yakima County,” he told the Yakima Herald-Republic.
Local communities have to act to lower the transmission rate and prevent the spread of the virus, he told the news agency.
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