Database update breaks on creation of `held` column in `registration_state`

I'm updating to 1.6 from 1.0-beta3.

Using Drush to make the update, my site crashes with PDO errors relating to the creation of the `held` column in the `registration_state` table. This seems consistent to other issues reported in #2468549: broke my drush? Column not found 'base.default_state' in 'field list' and #2123401: Update 7.x-1.x-dev to 7.x-1.2 breaks database. Is it possible to update this module without either completely uninstalling or running queries directly on the database?