A new glimpse into WA’s earliest COVID deaths — and why we may never have a complete record

On the Saturday afternoon of Feb. 29, 2020, reporters joined local and state health officials, packing into a room for a news conference in downtown Seattle. Details were shared about what appeared to be the first COVID-19 death in the nation just the day before.

It was a man in his 50s and a patient at EvergreenHealth hospital in Kirkland. He had underlying health conditions — and no recent travel history.

“What we’re seeing is the tip of the iceberg,” Dr. Francis Riedo, EvergreenHealth’s medical director of infectious disease, said at the time.

But we now know the King County man wasn’t the first in Washington — or in the nation — to die of COVID after all.

In a recent review of the state’s earliest COVID deaths, the state Department of Health has confirmed at least four other Washingtonians died from COVID complications before or on Feb. 28, 2020. Three were from long-term care facility Life Care Center of Kirkland, the site of the first known coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., while DOH now believes the first person to die in the state was actually a Snohomish County woman in her 30s.

Bob Anderson, the chief of mortality statistics at a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a recent interview that it has not been uncommon for authorities to have missed some of the country’s early COVID deaths.