[ad_1]
Marin County is past its fourth wave of COVID-19 cases, but public health officials are already looking at Halloween and a cooler fall with some trepidation.
“We are seeing a significant decrease in COVID-19 activity in our community,” Marin County deputy public health officer Dr. Lisa Santora told supervisors Tuesday morning.
Santora said Marin was the first county in the state to fall into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “moderate” category, based on its rate of coronavirus cases.
As of September 10, Marin had a rate of 9.8 cases per 100,000 population per day. Marin follows CDC recommendations for mitigation strategies, which vary depending on the level of transmission in communities.
Santora said Marin will attend a meeting of the Association of Bay Area Health Officials this week to discuss adopting consistent thresholds to adjust mitigation strategies such as the interior masking mandate of the county.
Santora warned that case rates in Marin had risen again since Labor Day. She said it wouldn’t take many new infections to push Marin back into the CDC’s “substantial” transmission category. On Tuesday afternoon, the CDC’s COVID Data Tracker showed Marin had already fallen back into the substantial category.
Santora said, “We are preparing for a fifth post-Halloween wave. The story repeats itself. We saw an increased risk of transmitting COVID last year as temperatures cooled and people moved inside and started partying. We hope it will be a much smaller and shorter fifth wave. “
Santora said Marin quelled its fourth wave faster than other counties in the state because of its high vaccination rate.
Currently, just over 90% of Marin residents aged 12 and over are fully immunized, and 97% of Marin residents have received at least one dose of the vaccine. The 39,793 residents of Marin who are not vaccinated include residents 11 years of age and under who have not received a vaccination clearance.
Santora said approvals for pediatric vaccinations are not expected until the end of October, but she said public health, with help from the Marin County Office of Education and the Marin Medical Reserve Corps, will be ready to launch pediatric vaccination clinics from October 28. She said vaccination teams will visit school campuses. The goal will be to vaccinate 75% of eligible young people during the first month.
“It’s a critical population,” Santora said. “It is one of our largest reservoirs of unvaccinated individuals.
Santora said the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in Marin has increased, and those hospitalized are younger than Marin residents sent to hospital before vaccines were available, but 90% of Marin’s hospitalizations have involved unvaccinated people. Marin’s case rate among its unvaccinated residents alone is about 28 cases per 100,000 population per day.
“The hardest part of my day,” Santora said, “is looking at who’s in the hospital and seeing that the majority of those hospitalizations would have been prevented by vaccination.”
Santora said the department was seeing a steady decrease in immunity among vaccinated cases and breakthroughs.
“We also need to prepare for new variations,” she said. “It may influence the peak of this fifth wave.”
The deputy public health officer said plans to give boosters, except to people at increased risk of complications, are on hold while the CDC and other federal health agencies assess the scientific evidence for their effectiveness.
Santora said health care providers in Marin should provide reminders to their eligible patients. She said if and when recalls are allowed based on age, Marin Public Health will support the health system by offering clinics.
As they have been doing for weeks, a group of vaccine critics have complained about COVID-19 mitigation efforts and vaccine policy. Janine Pera said she went to a conference from a Santa Rosa nurse who said she was looking for patients with multiple injuries from the vaccine.
Santora said, “I strongly encourage everyone to get their information from trusted resources, peer-reviewed publications, and data meta-analyzes. This is how we look at the data. I know a lot of people read blogs available on social media.
[ad_2]
Source link