J&J vaccine arrives in county

First shipment Monday, Public Health Officer reports

The first shipment of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine arrived in Mendocino County on Monday, Public Health Officer Dr. Andy Coren told the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors Tuesday.

“We have not yet set up any specific vaccine clinics for this product, but we are strongly considering its use for more transient populations, such as the homeless, and hard-to-reach individuals such as the home-bound,” Coren said.

Meanwhile, the number of new cases in Mendocino County is continuing to decrease, with Coren reporting Tuesday that the average daily case rate is 3.72, “which is one third of what it was two weeks ago, and the positivity rate is 2.7, which is half of what it was two weeks ago.”

However, he also expressed concern that the improving numbers would encourage people to relax prematurely.

“I fear that many people will see those very low numbers for a couple of weeks and think, ‘OK, this epidemic is over,'” Coren said. “And then we’ll begin to have outbreaks again, and bounce back into more restrictive tiers. Plus, we’re not out of the woods in terms of the possibility of variants breaking through the natural vaccine immunity.” He urged people to continue to wear masks, wash their hands and avoid gatherings, including in work lunchrooms.

“We continue to be in the Purple Tier at this point, however (Tuesday) we did get our metrics back from the state that show us to be in an improved tier, actually it showed Orange Tier, but we’ll need one more week of those metrics in the Red or Orange tier to be formally put in the Red tier status,” Coren said.

Also Tuesday, Coren said there were no current outbreaks for him to report on, as the virus currently is spreading “predominantly by community spread and household (contact), but there’s a lot of missing information here because the testing is significantly decreased.

“And that worries me, because we could open too soon, and not know enough about what’s happening on our county, which would expose us to more outbreaks as people feel overconfident,” Coren continued. “So we do need to encourage more testing.”

The samples from testing in Mendocino County are now being sent to a lab in Solano County, and Coren said he was “in discussion with them now to arrange for formal, whole genome sequencing to detect for emerging (Covid-19) variants, so they can run it. But they don’t have their testing facility set up for that yet,” Coren said. “In the meantime, the state is conducting such testing, but they are thousands behind, so that is why I wanted to set something up for our county.”