The usual bullshit from the county I live in.
BREAKING NEWS FROM THE CARMEL PINE CONE
January 23, 2021, 5:28 p.m.
ICU, CASE NUMBERS LOOKING BETTER, BUT VACCINE SITUATION WORSENS
There was a healthy dose of good news for Monterey County today, at least as far as the numbers of new coronavirus cases and the state’s scorecard for ICU availability are concerned. But prospects for expanded vaccine availability have gotten murkier, even as media reports say California has sunk to dead last among the 50 states for usage of vaccine supplies.
This afternoon’s Monterey County health department update of
coronavirus infections among county residents shows a total of 1,867 new cases over the last seven days — more than one-third fewer than the 3,024 cases the week before, and fewer than half as many as the 4,043 cases for the week ending Jan. 9. In fact, this week’s total was the lowest for any seven-day period in Monterey County since mid-December. It also lowered the county’s 7-day average of new cases per 100,000 residents to 58.3, which is the lowest it’s been since Dec. 17.
This week’s 1,867 cases were distributed as follows: 1,230 in Salinas and the Salinas Valley and 389 in the Monterey Peninsula, including 177 in Seaside, 88 in Marina, 55 in Monterey, 39 in Pacific Grove, 11 in Big Sur, nine in Carmel area (92923), 4 in Carmel Valley and three in Carmel-by-the-Sea. The total in Pebble Beach declined by one during the week, and 4 cases were from an unspecified area.
Even that good news was surpassed by the
announcement this morning from the California Department of Public Health that
ICU availability in the Greater Bay Area Region, of which Monterey County is a part, had jumped to 23.4 percent — well above the 15 percent threshold for the region to be freed from the shutdown order that went into effect here Dec. 13. When (or if) that means the order will be lifted remains to be seen, though the Greater Sacramento Region had the order lifted last week for its 11 counties, based on improving projections for ICU capacity even though its ICU availability has not reached the 15 percent threshold.
The
latest numbers for hospitalizations at Community Hospital are in line with the CDPH’s optimistic regional assessment. CHOMP said today it has 31 coronavirus-positive inpatients, including six in the hospital’s ICU — a significant improvement after weeks of the hospital being at or above capacity.
But all that is tempered by a report this morning that California now ranks last in the United States when it comes to
usage of the state’s allocation of coronavirus vaccine doses. Just 37.3 percent of the state’s vaccines have actually been injected into someone’s arm, a
story at sfgate.com says — worse than any other state.
What percent of Monterey County’s vaccines have been administered? We have no idea, because the county health department has never reported any such figure. We also have no idea how many doses have been allocated here.
The latest number we have for the county is 31,525 doses — and that’s a number given last Wednesday during a media briefing by health officer Dr. Ed Moreno, even as he provided no update on the prospects for the county to increase that number to a point where it would achieve parity based on population, much less get large numbers of county residents vaccinated.
But the situation is far worse than that. On the county health department’s
official web page where the public is supposed to get information about the county’s vaccination program, the total number of doses in the county is said to be 24,150 — a number which hasn’t changed in two weeks and
evidently has nothing to do with reality. While the public waits anxiously for news about when and where the various demographic groups in Monterey County can expect to get their inoculations, the utter failure to keep this web page current is the worst example yet — and there have been many — of the health department’s indifference to the needs of the public is it supposed to serve.
For the latest official information on local vaccination availability (such as it is), click
here. The CDPH vaccination page is
here. The CDC's nationwide vaccine page can be found
here. To review the CDC-recommended tiers for vaccination priority, click
here. CHOMP has a very useful page with detailed information about vaccines, which you can find
here.
To see the latest county health department data on the local coronavirus epidemic, click
here. For the most up-to-date info from the CDPH, click
here. And below, you can also find our latest charts and tables about the status of the epidemic in Monterey County, including cases by zip code.