Marin County has passed its fourth wave of COVID-19 cases, but public health officials are already looking forward to Halloween and cooler weather in the fall with a bit of fear.
“We are seeing significant declines in COVID-19 activity in our community,” Dr. Lisa Santora, Marin County’s deputy director of public health, said Tuesday morning.
Santora said Marin was the first county in the state to move to the “moderate” category of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to its coronavirus case rate.
As of Sept. 10, Marin had a rate of 9.8 cases per 100,000 residents per day. Marin follows CDC recommendations on mitigation strategies, which vary depending on the level of community transmission.
Santora said Marin will attend a meeting this week of the Bay Health Officers Association to discuss the adoption of consistent thresholds to adjust mitigation strategies, such as the county’s internal masking mandate.
Santora warned that case rates in Marin had risen again since Labor Day. He said not many new infections would be needed to push Marin into the “substantial” transmission category of the CDC. On Tuesday afternoon, CDC’s COVID data tracking showed Marin had already returned to the substantial category.
Santora said: “We are preparing for a fifth wave after Halloween. History does repeat itself. Last year we saw an increased risk of COVID transmission as temperatures cooled and people moved inside and started celebrating. We hope it will be a much smaller and shorter fifth wave. “
Santora said Marin suffered its fourth wave faster than other counties in the state due to its high vaccination rate.
Currently, just over 90% of Marin residents aged 12 and over are fully vaccinated and 97% of residents in the same category have received at least one dose of vaccine. The 39,793 residents of Marí who remain unvaccinated include residents under the age of 11 who have not received permission to be vaccinated.
Santora said no approvals for pediatric vaccines are expected before the end of October, but said public health, with the assistance of the Marin County Education Office and the Medical Reserve Corps of Marin, will be ready to launch pediatric vaccination clinics on October 28th. He said vaccination teams will visit school campuses. The aim will be to vaccinate 75% of eligible young people during the first month.
“This is a critical population,” Santora said. “It’s one of our largest reservoirs of unvaccinated individuals.”
Santora said the number of people hospitalized because of COVID-19 in Marin has increased and that people hospitalized are younger than Marin residents sent to the hospital before vaccines were available, but 90% of Marin’s hospitalizations have involved unvaccinated people. The Marin case rate among its unvaccinated residents is about 28 cases per 100,000 residents per day.
“The hardest part of my day,” Santora said, “is looking at who’s in the hospital and seeing that most of those hospitalizations would have been prevented by vaccination.”
Santora said the department is seeing declining immunity between vaccinated and advanced cases steadily.
“We also need to be prepared for new variants,” he said. “This may influence the peak of this fifth wave.”
The deputy public health deputy said plans to administer booster shots, except for people at higher risk for complications, are on hold while the CDC and other federal health agencies evaluate scientific evidence of their effectiveness.
Santora said health care providers should provide boosters to their eligible patients. He said that if and when age-based reinforcements are allowed, Marin’s public health will support the health care system by offering clinics.
As they have done for weeks, a group of critics with vaccines complained about COVID-19 mitigation efforts and vaccine policy. Janine Pera said she went to a talk by a Santa Rosa nurse who said she was looking for patients with a large number of vaccine injuries.
Santora said: “I encourage everyone to get their information from reliable resources, peer-reviewed literature and data meta-analysis. That’s how we consider the data. I know a lot of people read blogs available on social media.”