Health & Medicine · The Record
CDC's provisional table lists 13 Candida auris cases in Washington and no screening figure
The 13 cited in local coverage is the clinical column of CDC's weekly notifiable-disease table. In the two 2026 weeks where a Washington screening row appears in the record, that column returns a flag instead of a number, while the national screening total stands at 3,325.
FOX 13 Seattle reported on August 8, 2026 that federal data shows 13 cases of the fungus Candida auris in Washington this year. The station wrote: "According to a data report from the CDC that tracks weekly cases of notifiable diseases in the U.S., there are 13 cases in Washington state as of 2026."
The number is in the record. What the coverage does not say is which of two columns it comes from.
The record
The source is CDC's NNDSS Weekly Data, resource x9gk-5huc on data.cdc.gov. At MMWR week 30 of 2026, the Washington row labeled "Candida auris, clinical" carries a cumulative year-to-date value of 13.0, against 8.0 at the same point in 2025. The dataset's own metadata defines that field as "Cumulative YTD Current MMWR Year". The column labeled "Previous 52 week Max" shows 2.0 for that row.
The same dataset publishes Candida auris under a second, separate label: "Candida auris, screening". At week 30, Washington's screening row carries no numeric value in the fields that would hold this year's and last year's cumulative totals. Both return a flag character rather than a figure.
What that flag means is not settled by the record in front of this piece. The dataset metadata on file lists the column names only - "m3 | Cumulative YTD Current MMWR Year" and its siblings - and carries no legend explaining the flag character. So this article cannot tell you from the snapshot whether the flag encodes a reported zero or a submission that was never made. That distinction matters, and it is the first thing a reader should want CDC or the state to clarify.
What is on the record is narrower and still worth stating: where other reporting areas return a screening number, Washington's row returns none.
One more limit on the record, which the framing of a "column" can hide. The query that pulled Washington's 2026 Candida rows in reverse week order, capped at eight rows, came back with six: clinical rows for weeks 30, 29, 28 and 27, and screening rows for weeks 30 and 28 only. Nothing was cut off by the cap. Weeks 29 and 27 return no Washington screening row at all in that result. A further query recorded in the same snapshot, searching the dataset's 2022 to 2026 span for any Washington screening row carrying a value, is logged as returning "EMPTY ARRAY."
The scale of the column nobody quoted
Nationally at the same week, the screening label is not a rounding error. Cumulative year-to-date screening detections stand at 3,325.0 for 2026, against 3,724.0 for 2025. The clinical label stands at 3,544.0, against 4,262.0. In other words, the category Washington's table leaves without a number is, nationally, almost as large as the category the 13 comes from.
Among individual states returned with a screening figure at week 30, Texas shows 741.0, Michigan 559.0, Illinois 420.0, Nevada 167.0, Arizona 151.0 and North Dakota 4.0. The largest non-national figure in that result set is not a state at all but a regional aggregate: East North Central, at 1,423.0.
What the two labels actually measure is not defined in any document in this record. FOX 13 Seattle reported that patients can carry C. auris on their skin without symptoms, a state providers call colonization, and that CDC says providers can screen for colonization by collecting and testing skin swabs. That is the station's description of screening in general, not a definition of the NNDSS case categories, and this piece has no source that defines them.
Provisional means provisional
CDC describes the table's contents as "provisional cases". Washington's own numbers show what that means in practice. The cumulative year-to-date clinical value for Washington reads 7.0 at week 27, 8.0 at week 28, then 13.0 at weeks 29 and 30. A cumulative total that moves by five between two consecutive weekly publications is consistent with newly reported illness, with revision of earlier weeks, or with both. The snapshot does not distinguish between those, and no figure here should be read as final.
The same caution applies to comparisons across sources. The Washington State Department of Health reported an increase in locally acquired cases in 2024, and a Snohomish County Health Department advisory dated July 5, 2024 recorded 14 locally acquired cases identified from January through May of that year. That is more, in five months, than the 13 provisional clinical cases NNDSS shows for the first seven months of 2026 - but the two counts are not the same measure, and lining them up as a trend would be an error.
What the state says about risk
Both state and county health authorities are on the record that this is not a general-population hazard. A Washington State Department of Health health update dated July 30, 2024 states: "C. auris is not a risk to the general public, nor to most hospitalized patients." Claire Brostrom-Smith, Healthcare Associated Infections Program Manager at Public Health - Seattle & King County, is quoted on the county's public health blog: "Most healthy people do not need to worry about C. auris infections."
The department's notifiable-conditions page is blunter about the people who are at risk. It states that about 30 to 60 percent of patients with an invasive C. auris infection die, and adds in the same sentence that most fatal cases have other serious illnesses that may cause or contribute to death. Read plainly: this is a hazard concentrated in already very sick patients in healthcare facilities, which is also how FOX 13 Seattle characterized it.
The department also states that C. auris was first reported in Washington in 2023 and, since January 2024, has been detected in patients in several healthcare facilities and counties. Its reporting rules require providers and laboratories to notify the local health jurisdiction within 24 hours.
Screening, where it stopped
Public Health - Seattle & King County has published that Kindred Hospital - First Hill Seattle left the voluntary Partners for Patient Safety Program, and that "As of August 2025, Kindred is no longer proactively screening patients for C. auris at the time of their admission to the facility." The same county post records that a case was reported at that hospital on January 10, 2024, that screening of other patients found two more positives on January 22 and a fourth linked case on January 26, and that this was the first known C. auris outbreak in the state.
Leaving a voluntary program is lawful, the county disclosed it itself, and nothing in this record ties that decision to any patient harm. The July 2024 state health update, for its part, listed admission screening with contact precautions until a negative result among its recommendations.
Analysis
Two things in this record point the same way, and one link between them is inference rather than documented fact.
The documented part: Washington's clinical count is running above last year, 13.0 against 8.0, while the Pacific region is running below it, 900.0 against 978.0, and the national total is down, 3,544.0 against 4,262.0. California, which dominates the Pacific figure at 887.0, is also down. Washington is moving against its region on very small numbers, and small numbers move for uninteresting reasons; this is a signal to watch, not a finding.
The inference: it is tempting to connect a hospital ending proactive admission screening to a screening column that returns no number. No source in this record states that NNDSS's screening counts are fed by hospital admission screening, so that connection is a hypothesis this piece cannot confirm. It is, however, the obvious question to put to the agencies that hold the answer, alongside the flag question above.
Nothing here supports a claim that any agency or facility concealed cases. The narrower and checkable observation is that a category worth 3,325 detections nationally is, in Washington's rows, not a number.
FOX 13 Seattle noted a related gap on the state side, reporting that "Health officials have not disclosed which specific cities, counties or care facilities in Washington state account for the 13 reported cases."
Right of reply
Daily Pol did not approach CDC, the Washington State Department of Health, or Public Health - Seattle & King County with questions before publication. No request for comment was made, so no response is outstanding. Any of them is welcome to answer the two questions above: what the flag in the screening row encodes, and how screening results in Washington reach, or fail to reach, the national table.
A prediction you can check
By December 31, 2026, the most recent 2026 weekly table in CDC's NNDSS dataset (resource x9gk-5huc) will still show no numeric cumulative year-to-date value in Washington's "Candida auris, screening" row. Rerun the query and see.