COVID-19 activity surges in San Diego County and is likely to continue to rise

This summer is starting to look like last summer, at least where the coronavirus is involved.

The county’s latest COVID-19 follow-up report lists 521 new coronavirus cases on Tuesday. This is 138 more than the 385 new cases reported on July 20, 2020, a year ago.

According to the latest update from the County Health Department, San Diego County recorded less than 100 new cases per day for weeks and then more than 400 new cases per week. If the state reopening system is not abolished in mid-June, it will return the area to the most restrictive purple layer.

A few weeks after less than 1% of coronavirus tests returned positive, the percentage consistently exceeded 6% in the past week, pushing the 14-day moving average positive rate to 5.1%.

It wasn’t as bad as the surge of vacations six months ago, but hospitals are starting to feel the change at the bedside. There were 200 confirmed and suspected COVID-19 cases at a local hospital on Tuesday, almost double the 116 cases mentioned in this week’s report last Wednesday.

The number of illnesses that were so serious that they required hospitalization in the intensive care unit almost doubled in a week, jumping from 27 to 52.

This is where vaccination cases are most prominent. The total number of new cases on July 20 increased compared to a year ago, but a year ago the total number of hospitalizations that day was 499, 172 in the intensive care unit.

But there are many other signs that it can get worse.

Hospitals in some communities in Mississippi, where vaccination rates are much lower than in San Diego County, report complete units. As the more contagious delta mutants spread, communities where the majority of the population is fully vaccinated are reporting smaller epidemics.

Curiously, Delta didn’t grow as fast as the sum of the overall cases in San Diego’s latest update, doubling every seven days for two consecutive weeks and then jumping from 108 to 122.

County public health officials were unable to comment on the situation on Wednesday night. They previously said that today’s numbers give a glimpse of mutant activity that occurred almost a month ago, as it takes a couple of weeks to perform a genetic analysis that can determine the mutant.

In an email Wednesday evening, Dr. Hai Xiao, an infectious disease specialist at the Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center, said he was concerned that vaccination rates would drop significantly across the US-Mexico border. According to Xiao, some reports he saw show that Mexico as a whole is 17%, which is not a favorable situation as Delta arrives with significantly higher transmission rates.

“As we are talking about, the worst possible situation can occur across national borders,” says Shao. “If my predictions are true, it will affect the dynamics of the surge in Southern California, especially in the South Bay community.”

Local hospital doctors have already reported a significant increase in their workload, even if the Delta explosion has not spilled across national borders.

Dr. Jess Mandel, director of pulmonary emergency and sleep medicine at the University of California, San Diego, said a high proportion of patients ended up with very severe COVID-19 cases after refusing vaccination.

He told the patient he wouldn’t lecture on their choices — they were generally ill enough by the time they met him and it was pointless to shake their fingers — he said the COVID-19 game I want to understand more about what has changed.

The faster transmissibility of the delta variant, which was first detected in India, means that the calm of activity experienced in late spring has ended.

“People need to understand that the rules of the game have changed a bit,” Mandel said. “A month ago, someone might say that they weren’t vaccinated and there aren’t many COVIDs around.

“Currently, we have a COVID, which really puts ourselves and the people you come in contact with at risk by not being vaccinated.”

Today, Mandel said the age of patients has changed significantly. An important vaccination campaign in nursing homes has clearly reduced the number of older people who end up with severe illness, he said.

“It’s a victory, but we still see middle-aged, early-aged, very sick people who are very seriously ill and unvaccinated,” Mandel said.

From Wednesday, the county health department Regular breakdown Since then, the report has reported a total of 1,657 positive tests for fully vaccinated individuals, compared to 110,485 for unvaccinated or only one vaccinations. Indicates that there was an inspection of.

According to the report, unvaccinated people were hospitalized four times as often as vaccinated, at 4.8% and 1.2%, respectively. Five of the fully vaccinated people died with a mortality rate of 0.3%, while those who were unvaccinated or partially vaccinated had a mortality rate of 1.1%.