Grays Harbor Public Health reported 72 new cases of COVID-19 Tuesday.

Including Friday’s report of 57 new cases, there have been 244 new COVID-19 cases in the county between 11:59 p.m. Thursday and 11:59 p.m. Monday. The county’s total case count stands at 1,298, still with 17 deaths.

Public health continues to report that the elevated numbers over the past several days are “due to an outbreak situation,” and that the county incident management team is “working closely with those involved.”

The county does not release outbreak information to the public unless it’s believed the public has been exposed. But meantime, more than 200 COVID-19 cases at Stafford Creek Correctional Facility have been reported in the last week, although public health officials haven’t commented on that.

The number of cases among males has surpassed those among females by a wide margin after being about even throughout the pandemic, 694-565, with 24 listed as “unknown” gender.

Numbers Tuesday showed 333 active contact investigations in the county, and 282 active cases under isolation or quarantine.

The number of cases attributed to November has now more than doubled the case count in October, 444-213. There have been 18 cases attributed to the month of December, and public health lists 64 cases as having an unknown month of origin.

A rise in the number of cases attributed to unknown race has risen sharply to 245. Cases among those in the white ethnicity are at 625, and Hispanics 317.

More than half the cases are reported in people age 20-59. There have been 220 cases reported in the 60-79-year range, and 194 in the 1-19 range.

According to data provided by public health, the number of cases with known sources of transmission and the number of those without a known source are about even over the week of Nov 22-28: 41 known and 38 unknown.

State Department of Health data updated Sunday shows 21,076 total tests performed in Grays Harbor County, and 74 hospitalizations for the pandemic. The rate of newly diagnosed cases over the previous two weeks per 100,000 population stood at 218.4 Sunday; the statewide rate was 436.1 The average daily testing rate per 100,000 over a week was 112.3, with the percent of positive tests over a week at 14.2%. Statewide, those numbers are 211 and 14% respectively.