Pam Marino here, thinking about the “s” word uttered today during a Monterey County press briefing call. As in, we are now in a new Covid-19 surge, according to local infectious disease doctors.
“I don’t think there’s any question we are currently experiencing a surge,” Allen Radner, chief medical officer at Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital, said in a written statement issued after the briefing. “The only question is the severity of the surge.”
After experiencing only one or even zero patients in May and June all four hospitals are now seeing an increase in patients very ill with Covid. There are seven at SVMHS today, three in ICU and one on a ventilator. Natividad has seven, Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula has five with one in ICU. The state hospitalization dashboard shows three at Mee Memorial Hospital in King City.
There are two factors driving this surge: the highly infectious delta variant and people who either can’t or won’t get vaccinated.
“A month ago we met and we talked about a handful of delta cases in the county,” said Mahendra Poudel, an infectious disease expert with SVMH, referring to a press briefing on June 23. “It didn’t take very long for this variant to take over the virus.”
Nearly all the patients who are coming into the hospitals seriously ill are unvaccinated, making it a “pandemic of unvaccinated people,” Poudel said. (A small percentage of vaccinated people are getting Covid; at Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula 5 percent of Covid patients were fully vaccinated, said Martha Blum, infectious disease expert there, but they’re far less ill than the unvaccinated patients.)
Yet it’s not strictly a case of people refusing to be vaccinated. Craig Walls, chief medical officer at Natividad, said they’re finding patients who couldn’t get vaccinated due to access issues like transportation and language barriers. “We have to redouble our efforts,” he said of the push to vaccinate residents beyond the current 73-percent county vaccination rate.
And then there have been cases of “folks showing up very sick asking for the vaccine and it’s too late,” Walls said. “We don’t vaccinate people who are acutely ill with Covid-19.”
Once those patients recover, if they recover, doctors are urging them to be vaccinated after the two-week isolation period is over, Blum said. Not enough is known about how strong their immunity is once infected. “Right now the strongest and most effective tool to protect our community from Covid-19 is through vaccination,” she said.
Another marker of a surge reported today: The county’s alternative housing program, which gives homeless and others who live in crowded conditions a place to isolate after they test positive, has jumped from one guest to 22 in just two weeks, according to Deb McAlahney who has been coordinating the program for the last 16 months.
McAlahney and her staff assist their isolated guests—some stay in what’s been dubbed Operation Oasis, a collection of 10 trailers at San Lorenzo Park in King City, some in hotel rooms—in any way they can. Nurses monitor how the guests are doing and urge them to go to the hospital if necessary. McAlahney has seen how Covid cases progress, either better or worse, and this time with delta it’s different.
“It’s pretty gnarly, in layman's terms,” she said of watching recent guests get worse. “It’s a bit scary to see it unfold in front of us.”
During the press briefing the California Department of Public Health announced its recommendation that everyone wear masks indoors in public settings, even if fully vaccinated, another sign that officials are nervous about the latest surge in cases due to delta.
The doctors on the call repeated their plea: Get fully vaccinated. It not only protects the one vaccinated, it protects loved ones and the community at large. “Otherwise,” Poudel said, “the delta variant will find you.”
Vaccines are plentiful and free. Go to montereycountyvaccines.com to find out where to get one.