Tuolumne County adds 2 more unvaccinated COVID deaths

Tuolumne County added two more deaths attributed to COVID-19 on Friday — a woman in her 60s and a man in his 70s who were both reportedly unvaccinated, the county Public Health Department said.

The county also added 10 new cases of COVID-19, all of which were unvaccinated people.

There were 79 active cases in the county on Friday, including five people who were hospitalized for COVID-19. Four of the five hospitalized patients were unvaccinated, according to the department.

The county’s daily case rate increased Friday to 20.9 per 100,000 residents averaged over the previous two weeks, up from 19.8 per 100,000 on Thursday.

New cases in the county on Friday were identified as one woman and one man between 18 and 29; two women and one man in their 30s; one woman in her 40s; two women and one man in their 50s; and one man in his 70s.

There had been 7,989 total confirmed cases in the county as of Friday, which includes 1,621 that were infections among inmates at Sierra Conservation Center state prison in Jamestown.

The coronavirus death toll for Tuolumne County reached 148 on Friday, 75 of which were reported since Aug. 1.

Seven of the 75 county residents who have died since Aug. 1 were fully vaccinated.

Dr. Eric Sergienko, the interim county health officer for Tuolumne County, said on Friday that most of the county’s deaths since Aug. 1 were due to the delta variant and could have been avoided through vaccination.

Sergienko hopes residents and visitors understand the new omicron variant could cause another wave of cases and another surge in hospitalizations and deaths.

“When you see that number of cases happening so rapidly as we did with delta, you’ve got doctors, nurses, technicians taking care of more than they should be, and that leads to mortality that could have been avoided,” Sergienko said in a press briefing. “That’s my concern with omicron. If we have that kind of explosive growth that we’re seeing in South Africa, our system will get strained again, and then people will get sub-optimal care. And it’s not just people who have COVID, it’s people who have heart attacks and car crashes.”

Calaveras County added 18 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday, though its public health division does not publicly disclose vaccination status of new cases or deaths. The death toll in Calaveras

County was at 91 as of Friday.