Update on Pierce County COVID-19 community level

UW President Ana Mari Cauce and Provost Mark Richards recently sent messages to all UW staff and instructors and all UW students announcing spring quarter plans and updates to UW’s masking policy.

Among many important factors in UW’s decisions around COVID-19 planning, a couple stand out in particular for UW Tacoma. First, our campus leadership and university leadership agree that, if at all possible, we should stay unified as a tri-campus institution in our policies and planning.

Second, UW bases its planning on data from federal, state and county agencies. Recently, the U.S. CDC introduced a new set of metrics to track the community level of COVID-19 in each county in the U.S. The CDC works in partnership with the state Department of Health and with the health departments of each county in our region. The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department identified a discrepancy in the data CDC was using to characterize Pierce County’s COVID-19 community level.

The outcome is that TPCHD recently announced that, using the accurate data, Pierce County is now at the medium level of community spread for each of the three measures the CDC uses: 7-day case rate, 7-day COVID hospitalization admission rate and 7-day average COVID hospital bed utilization rate.

You can read more about TPCHD’s work to clarify Pierce County’s true community level here. And we urge you to review the resources available across the UW and here on the Tacoma campus as we continue our transition back to mostly in-person learning and work.

Thank you for all that you have been doing to keep UW Tacoma strong for the last two years. We look forward to seeing you on campus in spring quarter!