Health Officials Consider Adding Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated Data and Real Time Hospitalizations to Humboldt County COVID Dashboard

[Stock image from Can Stock Photo]

According to the CA State COVID-19 hospitalization dashboard, ICU capacity is not stressed, but there are eight patients hospitalized in Humboldt County with COVID-19 as of June 8th. This ICU capacity information is no longer provided directly via Humboldt’s COVID-19 dashboard, but may soon be reinstated.

While Humboldt County Public Health officials continue to urge residents to get the protection of a vaccination, a sizable portion – still upwards of 50% of the community – have not gotten the jab.  Humboldt County’s Public Health Officer Dr. Ian Hoffman has said several times that unvaccinated people are the only ones being hospitalized with COVID-19 locally,

According to County Public Health Officer Dr. Ian Hoffman at this week’s Virtual Press Conference on June 9th, “None of our local ones” (referring to breakthrough cases) “have been hospitalized or died.”  As the doctor pointed out, this is good news in comparison to other areas in the state which have counted vaccinated individuals as some of those hospitalized.   Last week, Dr. Hoffman noted that the county had tallied about 40 cases of COVID-19 in vaccinated people locally, none of whom required hospital care.  

On Wednesday June 9, the Redheaded Blackbelt asked public health officials at the COVID-19 Virtual Press Conference if there was any plan to add more hospitalization data to the dashboard and learned that the topic has been taken into consideration.  Humboldt County Public Health Director Michele Stephens and Public Health Officer Dr. Hoffman both confirmed that the public’s interest in real-time data on hospitalizations, and particularly of vaccinated people being hospitalized, is being addressed.

With the hospitalization numbers no longer updated daily, local data presented to the public has been limited to weekly statistical updates on the dashboard.  While this gives an idea of general trends, a daily update would allow community members to know in real time how many locals were hospitalized in the previous 24 hours, and potentially if they were vaccinated or not. 

Public Health Director Michele Stephens acknowledged the request being brought up at the County Board of Supervisors meeting earlier in the week, saying, “with Supervisor Wilson‘s request to have that- I don’t think we anticipated the connection between how many people are vaccinated and the reporting that we’re doing on breakthrough cases.”  

Mike Wilson, 3rd District Supervisor asks about hospitalization data at the June 8th County Board of Supervisors meeting.

Director Stephens explained that the health department is looking into ways to present more data, more effectively. She said,

And so we were having conversations internally around – in addition to showing the cumulative totals every week- updating the dashboard every week for cumulative totals for hospitalizations- that we could start doing daily reporting in the daily case count news release so that we could show how many hospitalizations are happening from COVID again, because of the curiosity and the conversations that we’re having around people that were vaccinated becoming hospitalized, versus people who are unvaccinated becoming hospitalized, and the difference there and how it really drives the point home of that vaccination works and that vaccination is going to protect you far more than being unvaccinated or acquiring COVID-19 and having natural immunity.”

In Napa County, health officials noted this week that one person who was fully vaccinated with the Moderna jab was hospitalized and then died after contracting a variant of concern.  This is the first recorded death of a vaccinated individual in that county.  When asked about this incident, Dr. Hoffman reiterated that only 0.03% of fully vaccinated people even get a breakthrough case, and that while a vaccination does not guarantee perfect health, it does substantially diminish the chances of contracting the virus.  

Giving a big boost to local lab efforts to track variants of the virus, Hoffman also announced that the County Health Department would be developing the ability to do genetic sequencing of some COVID-19 samples.  This means Humboldt can soon detect locally which strains of the virus are circulating, and potentially learn more about them, since a big concern of the Public Health Department is monitoring the variants of concern that have been found circulating in the area. 

Dr. Hoffman explained that identifying various strains of the virus would be helpful in understanding how it may interfere with society.  “Definitely the P1 is circulating widely in our community,” he said. “These variants of concern and variants of interest could have the ability to change the way the virus acts.  It might change the way that it interacts with medications that we use, it might be more transmissible, more highly contagious.  Some of them, we are monitoring for potential that it could escape through the vaccine response more easily.”     

Immunization card with name and birth date redacted. [Photo by Ryan Hutson]

Dr. Hoffman said, “I think with time, I’m sure we will see something like that here. It’s going to happen everywhere, just like the flu happens everywhere every year.” 

Hoffman went on to explain that people are still suffering from the virus locally, calling attention to the proportionately high number of illnesses. “The numbers are overwhelmingly in support of vaccination as a tool and a method to avoid hospitalization and death.” 

He continued, “If you look at our 4300 cases, you know 190+ have been hospitalized and we’re at 46 today, have died. Those numbers are really staggering for that small number of cases.  You know, imagine if we had as many cases as we had vaccinated people, that number would be overwhelming.”

Echoing the concerns of his constituents who want to know more about these breakthrough cases, 3rd District Supervisor and Vice-Chair Mike Wilson inquired about the county’s hospitalization data during this week’s Board of Supervisors meeting.  Wilson asked if the County Health Department would consider providing a more accurate reflection of current stats to the public.  Specifically, Wilson requested that the local hospitalizations be shown on the COVID-19 dashboard as a real time, current tally, as opposed to the way it is structured now, showing data which is cumulative, and is only updated weekly.  

Supervisor Wilson explained that members of the public have indicated a desire for more information, and for more timely data about local hospitalizations of COVID-positive cases to be made available.  Both Dr. Hoffman and Public Health Director Michele Stephens acknowledged the concern Wilson discussed regarding the general public’s misconceptions pertaining to COVID-19 post-vaccination “breakthrough” cases and the ongoing hospitalization of unvaccinated individuals.  

Wilson said in the meeting, “I think it would be helpful that we have, in a current timeframe, how many people are being hospitalized. Because being hospitalized as we all know it’s terrible. No one likes it, anyone who has been hospitalized does not want to do it again, and anybody who’s dealt with people, family and friends who have been hospitalized, they do not want that to happen to them again. And I think it’s that we’re not relating to, that is still happening.” 

 Humboldt’s COVID-19 dashboard shows a running total of hospitalized community members by age group, updated once per week.

Emphasizing that additional information regarding current, real-time hospitalizations of non-vaccinated individuals is being asked for by members of his constituency, he stated, “Now, because we’re in a phase where it is preventable – people are dying or going to the hospital either as a failure of us as a government institution not to deliver the vaccine to people, or, is a failure of individuals to receive the vaccines.”  

Last December, as local COVID-19 cases began to increase following the Thanksgiving holiday, hospitalization data, including rates of local ICU capacity were added to the local dashboard as a public information barometer gaging the local hospital’s capacity to cope with the COVID-19 winter surge.   With the numbers posted to the dashboard regularly, and updated to reflect current conditions of the local healthcare system, it was immediately apparent to curious constituents how stressed the local hospital capacity was, and how many people were being cared for in ICU.  As soon as the surge subsided, and the local hospital system no longer appeared in jeopardy of being overwhelmed, the hospitalization rates and ICU capacity data was removed from the local COVID-19 Dashboard.  

Humboldt’s vaccination rate at about 48% among the eligible population of 12 and up is slightly less than the statewide percentage.  

As the dashboard is currently configured, a bit of math is required on the part of anyone who would like to discern how many people are hospitalized on any given day in the county.  An earlier version of the dashboard was sparsely outfitted in comparison to other county dashboards, but was greatly expanded and improved late in 2020 to include demographic data, as well as zip code data.  Advocates for public access to information like Supervisor Mike Wilson anticipate seeing more information presented in coming weeks which would enlighten the community about hospitalizations post-vaccination.   

Confirming that the desire for more stats has been considered by local officials, Dr. Hoffman said, “We are going to look internally at the case rates of the unvaccinated population as we have a smaller pool of people who are unvaccinated.  But we’re still having fairly high case rates and almost all of it is in the unvaccinated.” 

Dr. Hoffman was hopeful that additional data could be released to the public either through the daily case count announcements or via the COVID-19 dashboard.  He explained, “I do think that once we can get that case count per hundred thousand for the vaccinated population versus the unvaccinated population, that could be a helpful tool that we might be able to update every once in a while to give people a sense of what’s going on out there in the community.”