County is expected to move into orange tier

Lake County is expected to move into the less restrictive orange tier next week, Public Health Officer Dr. Gary Pace told the Board of Supervisors at its meeting Tuesday.

With California hitting its four million mark for vaccine doses administered in the state’s lowest income areas, the thresholds for the tiers are being lowered. Counties will be able to move into less restrictive tiers with a higher case rate than what was previously required.

Counties are required to meet the threshold for two consecutive weeks in order to move into a less restrictive tier. Lake County has met that criteria and is targeted to meet it again this week.

“Big picture, (we) do see some promising news after the last month or so, being fairly stable in terms of new cases in the county,” said Sarah Marikos, Lake County epidemiologist.

In order to move to and stay in the orange tier, which allows greater indoor capacity at restaurants and other places, the county will need to maintain a maximum of 27 cases each week. The red tier requires a maximum of 45 weekly cases and the yellow tier requires a maximum of nine weekly cases. The state has its lowest testing positivity rate since the beginning of the pandemic.

So far, about 35% of Lake County residents over age 16 have been vaccinated, including 11,612 people — 22.2% of the population — who are fully vaccinated and 6,479 people — 12.4% of the population — who have received one dose.

Among Lake County residents ages 75 and over, 66% have received at least one dose, and 61% of people ages 65 to 74 have received at least one dose. Among people ages 55 to 64, 33% of them have had at least one dose, as well as 30% of people ages 45 to 54. A total of 21% of people ages 35 to 44 have had one dose, as have 19% of people ages 20 to 34, according to county data.

“What we’re seeing over the last two weeks is decreased demand,” Pace said. “We have a good supply now. We’re actually starting to get vaccine supplies that we can’t use as fast as we need to

now. This is the first time this has happened… This is not where we want to be.”

Pace said the county was trying to expand eligibility as much as possible. As of April 15, anyone age 16 and older will be eligible to receive a vaccine in California.

The public health officer said it was crucial to get as many vaccines into arms as quickly as possible as people were growing apathetic about taking precautions and restrictions were lessening, while variants were on the move. While it is possible to contract one of the variants once vaccinated, the risk is greatly reduced, Pace said.

Two cases of the faster spreading and more deadly coronavirus variant first identified in the UK have been identified so far in Lake County, Pace said. Pace said the county just found out about those cases, stemming back to February, a few days ago.

Pace said Dr. Evan Bloom would be taking over his duties for the next couple of weeks while Pace went on vacation. Pace will be vacating his role as the county’s public health officer at the end of the month.