Key messages
- Black History Month ends, but our work continues.
- Looking back on 5 years of COVID-19 in Pierce County.
Updates
We remember Black History is more than a month
Black History is American History. It’s also the history of public health.
- The Health Department works daily to improve the lives of all people in Pierce County.
- Black, Indigenous and other communities of color often have lower life expectancy, poorer birth outcomes and higher rates of chronic disease than white residents.
- We work hard to improve health outcomes for all our residents.
- Programs like Black Infant Health help ensure all communities grow and thrive.
Learn more about our Black Infant Health program and how we are helping communities grow and flourish in our recent Your Reliable Source blog.
5 years ago, COVID-19 came to Pierce County
COVID-19 arrived in Pierce County 5 years ago. Since then, we’ve lost 1,789 people through 2024 to the disease.
- We confirmed the first case in Pierce County on March 6, 2020.
- The vaccine arrived in December 2020, with the first public vaccine clinic later that month.
- Washington state’s emergency proclamation ended on Oct. 31, 2022.
- Since that first case, we:
- Delivered more than 750,000 test kits.
- Investigated more than 2,000 outbreaks.
- Administered more than 1.8 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.
We’ll look at 5 years of COVID-19 in Pierce County in this week’s Tacoma Pierce County Board of Health meeting.
Read and share our reliable information
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