COVID-19 case rates still high
Though COVID-19 case rates appear to be dropping somewhat statewide, the case rate in Mendocino County remains stubbornly high, about twice that of neighboring Sonoma County, a Ukiah emergency room doctor reported this week.
“We keep adding about 20 new COVID cases per day in our rather small county, which is a pretty high rate,” said Dr. Drew Colfax, an emergency room physician who practices at Adventist Health Ukiah Valley, speaking Tuesday with Alicia Bales on KZYX&Z for the latest installment of their now twice-a-month Local Coronavirus Update. “And we are exceptionally high when compared to the surrounding counties, and have been for a number of weeks now. I’ve been sort of disappointed to see our numbers not fall in any significant or meaningful way.”
In the last two weeks, Colfax said “we’ve added approximately 250 new, documented cases of COVID. Our hospital rate, which is the metric that most people are concerned about, remains manageable, but not negligible.”
Colfax described Mendocino County’s COVID case rate as twice that of the rate in Sonoma County, and three to four times that of the Bay Area counties.
When asked what Mendocino County might be doing differently than other neighboring counties, Colfax said he did not have a good answer, but “I think that the cases that continue to come up are primarily amongst the unvaccinated, though not exclusively, and there are still large pockets of this county that just don’t have very high vaccine rates, and (the virus) just keeps spreading amongst those individuals, combined with the increased socialization.
“People who are showing up in the ER with symptoms are, by and large, unvaccinated,” said Colfax, describing the age range of those patients as “usually middle aged, or even younger. We have a pretty high vaccine uptake amongst the 65-plus crowd, but the people who are getting sick and symptomatic are the people in their 30s and
40s who tell me on their second, or third, or fourth visit, that they just didn’t think that this was going to affect them in any significant way.”
When asked if another wave of COVID was coming this winter, Colfax said “the waves are going to get smaller, but (locally) we do not have enough immunity to forestall them. What we look like in early January won’t be as bad as last January, but I think it’s going to be considerably worse than it is right now. I hope I’m wrong, but there are still more than enough (unvaccinated) people to get sick and present for medical attention.”
On Monday, Mendocino County Public Health officials reported that 43 new cases of COVID-19 had been reported among local residents for a total of 8,101. As of Monday afternoon, seven people were hospitalized with the virus, three of whom needed the Intensive Care Unit.