What a difference a month makes. Today, we are detecting 13 new cases of COVID-19 per 100,000 residents each day, down from almost 200 cases a day at the beginning of February. Two dozen people are hospitalized for COVID, down from more than 100 a month ago.
The decline in cases, however, obscures an important detail about the nature of the pandemic: people who are unvaccinated continue to fare far worse than people who are vaccinated. How much worse? Those who are unvaccinated are more than twice as likely to get COVID-19, 15 times more likely to be hospitalized for the virus, and nearly 11 times more likely to die from it.
It is the reason why the county and its health care partners have worked together to deliver more than 1 million doses of vaccine to Sonoma County residents over the last 14 months, a milestone reached in February. As a result, more than 80 percent of eligible Sonoma County residents are now fully vaccinated and 64 percent are boosted, giving Sonoma County the 10th highest vaccination rate in California. It is an achievement that has made our community safer by slowing transmission and keeping people out of the hospital.
As a result, Sonoma County on Feb. 10 lifted a temporary 30-day ban on large gatherings that it put in place to prevent superspreader events during the omicron surge. The county also has aligned with state actions to ease masking requirements in public indoor settings. This week, the California Department of Public Health strongly recommended that all people continue to wear masks indoors in public, but lifted an order that made masks mandatory in many places for unvaccinated people.
After March 11, the state will no longer require masks in schools and child care facilities, though they will be strongly recommended. Masks will still be required for everyone in high transmission settings like public transit, health care settings, long-term care facilities, emergency shelters, correctional facilities and homeless shelters. Sonoma County plans to align with the updated state rules, said Dr. Sundari Mase, the county’s public health officer.
“We are in a much better place than we have been,” Mase told the Board of Supervisors in an update on March 1. “Things are going the right direction.”
Watch a video of the March 1 COVID-19 update:
|