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This summer is starting to look like last summer, at least when it comes to the coronavirus.
The county’s latest COVID-19 follow-up report lists 521 new cases of the coronavirus on Tuesday. That’s 136 more than the 385 new cases reported a year ago, on July 20, 2020.
After several weeks of fewer than 100 new cases per day, San Diego County spent a week recording more than 400 new cases per day, according to the latest update from the county health department, with the case rate local unadjusted to 7.6 per 100,000, enough to return the region to the most restrictive purple level had the state reopening system not been withdrawn by mid-June.
After many weeks where less than 1% of coronavirus tests came back positive, that ratio has consistently exceeded 6% over the past week, pushing the 14-day moving average positivity rate to 5.1%.
While nowhere near as affected as they were during the vacation wave six months ago, hospitals are starting to feel the change at the bedside. There were 200 confirmed and suspected cases of COVID-19 in local hospitals on Tuesday, nearly double the 116 listed in last Wednesday’s now weekly report.
The number of people with illness severe enough to require admission to intensive care also nearly doubled in one week, from 27 to 52.
This is where the case of vaccination is most visible. Despite a higher total of new cases on July 20 compared to a year ago, the total number of hospitalizations that day a year ago was 499, including 172 in intensive care beds.
But there are plenty of signs elsewhere that it could get worse.
Hospitals in some communities in Mississippi, where vaccination rates are much lower than those in San Diego County, are reporting full units. As the more transmissible Delta variant spreads, communities with a greater proportion of their populations fully vaccinated report smaller increases.
Strangely, Delta hasn’t grown as quickly as the total number of cases in the latest San Diego update, from 108 to 122 after two straight weeks of doubling every seven days.
County public health officials were unavailable for comment on the situation on Wednesday evening. They noted previously that, because it takes two to three weeks to perform the genetic analysis that can determine the variants, today’s numbers offer insight into the activity of the variants that occurred there. has almost a month.
In an email Wednesday night, Dr Hai Shao, an infectious disease specialist at Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center, said he was concerned about the significant drop in vaccination rates just across the US border. Mexican. Some reports he has seen, Shao said, point to a rate of 17% in Mexico as a whole, which is not a good situation because Delta comes up with considerably higher transmissibility.
“A perfect storm could be brewing across the border as we speak,” Shao said. “If my prediction is true, it will affect the dynamics of the surge in Southern California, particularly in the communities of South Bay.”
Local hospitals are already reporting a noticeable increase in their caseload, even without a Delta explosion spilling out across the border.
Dr Jess Mandel, director of pulmonary intensive care and sleep medicine at UC San Diego Health, said he has had his share of patients who have ended up with very severe cases of COVID-19 after having declined vaccination.
Although he has said he doesn’t lecture his patients of their own choosing – they’re usually in such bad shape by the time they meet him that wiggling a finger is unnecessary – he wants us to understand better. that the COVID-19 game has changed.
The faster transmissibility of the Delta variant first detected in India means that the lull in activity seen in late spring is over.
“People have to understand that the rules of the game have changed a bit,” Mandel said. “A month ago, someone might not get the vaccine and say there isn’t a lot of COVID around.
“There is COVID in the world now, and it really puts you and the people you come in contact with at risk by not getting vaccinated. “
Today, Mandel said, the ages of patients have changed significantly. Major vaccination campaigns in nursing homes, he said, have clearly reduced the number of older people who end up with serious illness.
“It’s a victory, but we still see very, very sick middle-aged, early and unvaccinated people with very serious illness,” Mandel said.
As of Wednesday, the county health department began providing a regular breakdown of new cases by vaccination status since January 1. Since then, according to the report, there have been 1,657 positive tests in total among those who are fully vaccinated against 110,485 among those who were not vaccinated or received only one injection.
The unvaccinated, according to the report, were hospitalized at a rate four times that of the vaccinated, at 4.8% and 1.2% respectively. Five of the fully vaccinated died for a mortality rate of 0.3 percent compared to 1,217 among the unvaccinated or partially vaccinated, for a mortality rate of 1.1 percent.
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