Delta Variant Spurs Masking Order This Weekend, Vaccine Pop-ups Cover The County, and More Discussed During COVID Press Conference

The Humboldt County Joint Information Center hosted a virtual news conference on August 4 to provide an update on the county’s COVID-19 response, including vaccination efforts, and answer questions from local media. The Humboldt County COVID-19 Joint Information Center hosted a virtual news conference to provide an update on the county’s pandemic response, including vaccination efforts, and answer questions from local media. Panelists included Chief Executive of St. Joseph Health, Humboldt County Dr. Roberta Luskin-Hawk, Public Health Director Sofia Pereira and County Health Officer Dr. Ian Hoffman.

For this type of press conference, the Joint Information Center (JIC) moderates the question and answer exchange in a zoom meeting, where local media presents questions and follow-ups to local officials who give their responses in real time.  The resulting video, called a Virtual Press Conference, is then posted to the county’s COVID-19 YouTube channel at the end of the day. 

Here are some of the main points covered in the August 4 Virtual Press Conference, with a summary of answers from the participants. 

El video del 4 de Agosto de preguntas y respuestas de medios, que muestra subtítulos disponibles en español, usando las opciones del menú de YouTube y seleccionando ‘auto-subtítulos’ y luego seleccionando un idioma.

Meriah Miracle: Good afternoon and thank you for joining us for the August 4th COVID-19 virtual news conference. My name is Meriah Miracle, I’m a public information officer working in the COVID-19 Joint Information Center (JIC). Today’s panelists include County Health Officer Dr.  Ian Hoffman, Chief Executive for St. Joseph Health in Humboldt County, Dr. Roberta Luskin-Hawk, and Humboldt County Public Health Director Sofia Pereira.

25 secs in:

Meriah Miracle: I’ll start with a brief update from the Joint Information Center before we hear from our panelists. A total of 5,269 Humboldt County residents have tested positive for COVID-19 as of yesterday, and later today the JIC will report 82 new positive cases, breaking the single-day record that was just set last Friday, July 30th.

More than 630 new positives were recorded in July. That’s the third highest number of cases recorded in a single month topped only by the winter surge in December and January. Since the most recent news conference on July 21, the county has reported 18 additional code-related hospitalizations and in that time the county has recorded one death of a local person in their 30s. Health officials continue to urge all eligible residents to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Anyone with questions about vaccination, testing, or safety measures, can reach out to the community information line at 707-441-5000. 

We answer questions in English and Spanish, Monday through Friday from 8am to 5pm now we’ll hear from our panelists and let’s start with Humboldt County Health Officer Dr. Ian Hoffman.

1 min 30 secs: 

Dr. Hoffman:  Thank you Meriah, and a big thanks to Dr. Luskin-Hawk for being here today. Really happy to have her perspective in this next phase of what’s going on in Humboldt County. 

So I want to just start off today by saying that the Delta variant of the coronavirus is here in Humboldt County and it’s widely circulating, and it’s very different. It is not the same as the previous versions of the coronavirus that we’ve seen throughout the course of the pandemic and I think you know you can really see that now in our case numbers as they’re growing rapidly. You know, a few weeks ago our case count was well under ten per hundred thousand, now pushing up into the high teens per hundred thousand. We’ve seen a dramatic increase in hospitalizations over the course of the last week, as Meriah mentioned, and you know Dr. Luskin-Hawk will get into the details, but we are now at the highest level of hospitalizations we’ve seen yet in throughout the entire pandemic. 

So it is with all of that in mind the changes rapid changes in this pandemic that we’ve seen the swings that we, you know, do not take lightly measures that are stronger but it is, they are necessary going forward, and so with that in mind we are announcing today a return to universal masking for Humboldt County.  I will be putting in a Health Order in the coming days that will go into effect at 12:01 AM on Saturday, August 7th. So this will be in effect for all people vaccinated and unvaccinated in all public settings, indoor and including outdoor crowded public settings and public events. 

We strongly encourage people to mask around others who are not in your household, because this is spreading so quickly and you know and it’s unfortunate to be at this point where we have to go backwards in these recommendations, but we really want to do this because we have to, to protect the critical infrastructure of our fragile hospital system in Humboldt County, and we want to continue to see businesses remain open. 

We certainly don’t want to return to any lockdown situations and we have to have kids in school this fall. It is an absolute priority for the health and safety of our community to have kids in school, so it’s with all of that in mind that we’re doing this. And it is something that we will continue to monitor in the coming weeks and months as we hopefully see case counts come down and hospitalizations coming down as well as vaccination rates going up. And I’m gonna leave on that note, with vaccination being the key to ending this pandemic. We need to get our vaccination rates up in order to get out of this, so we’re going to continue to offer vaccinations through Humboldt County Public Health, continue to expand opportunities for people to get vaccinations, and continue to answer questions as they come up about the vaccines that are safe. They’re effective, and they’re highly effective against the Delta variant and keeping you out of the hospital and keeping you from getting seriously ill and keeping you from dying from this very serious new threat to our community with the Delta variant. 

Meriah Miracle:  Dr. Luskin-Hawk?

5 mins 50 secs in: 

Dr. Luskin-Hawk: Thanks for having me here today. I think most of you know that Providence in Humboldt includes St Joseph Hospital in Eureka, and Redwood Memorial in Fortuna, and while Redwood sees a few patients, really the bulk of our work around COVID treatment has been at St Joseph because of our intensive care unit capacity, intensivists, infectious disease doc and some other things that we have available. We also obviously have Mad River in our community  to take care of some of our patients, but as we look at the impact of this pandemic right now we’ve seen a rapid increase in the number of inpatients.  When we looked at January of 2021 which was one of our highest periods, we had 16 people in the hospital, in the last couple days we peaked at 23 – we’re at about 19 today – a number of our ICU beds have patients with COVID who are seriously ill, and obviously anyone who’s in the hospital is ill.

In addition, the medical group and other primary care providers in our community are taking care of patients who are having some milder disease. I am fully supportive of this new mass mandate because as I look at all the signs, the case rates the what we know about the Delta virus, the Delta variant virus, that it spreads so much more effectively than the original virus. we we know that this is taking off at a very rapid rate some of it is already, you know, there’s a lot that’s already out there and that our job now is to take care of the people who who are impacted by it, but I think it’s incumbent upon every member of the community and hospitals and public health to intervene in any way we can. 

The mask mandate is an important tool. We know that over the winter months Humboldt County used masks effectively to have an impact on this virus, and so I applaud this order and fully support it. In addition, I can’t underscore enough the importance of people who are not yet vaccinated getting vaccinated. We know without a doubt that over 99 of people dying of COVID are unvaccinated, that is a consistent finding, and so as my nurses in my ICU who are exhausted, and you know, they’re so sad to see people who they’re caring for – as you heard one as young as in their 30s dying of this infection – who are unvaccinated and where they know that this could have been prevented. It’s just having an emotional toll as well as the physical toll of a lot of people to care for. I think we just all have to be sensitive to the fact that unless we pull together and get vaccinated and take extra precautions that when our hospitals get impacted it not only impacts our our caregivers we want to stay and care for us in Humboldt, but it also impacts just you know the the ability for us to more easily care for someone who has other illnesses, like a heart attack or something else.

The reason we want vaccinated people to wear masks, too, is that if you can get a secondary infection you can spread it to someone and so we are asking just everyone to not assume that there’s anything that’s special about them, but to wear a mask, to distance appropriately, to use the precautions that were outlined our healthcare infrastructure. Everyone is ready to do whatever it takes, but it is not possible to do it without the partnership of our community. 

Meriah Miracle Thank you, Doctor.  Director Pereira?

10 mins in:

Pereira:  Yes, good afternoon everyone. I just wanted to give a brief update on our vaccination effort. I think those of you that have been following it have known that we have been going to all parts of the county to make sure that we are reducing barriers making it as accessible as possible to get vaccinated, and we have been seeing success with that. We are seeing people show up to these clinics. You know, like we’ve talked about before you know, gone are the days where you have a thousand people getting vaccinated in a single day, but with this effort we are seeing with every location that we are going to, people are showing up whether it’s five people, seven people, or 40 people at a Crabs game. We had 35 people you know vaccinated yesterday in King Salmon, Fields Landing area yesterday, which we were very pleased to see.  So those are the types of numbers we’re seeing and we were really pleased to see that people are still showing up to get their first dose to get vaccinated and so we’re going to continue on with this effort and continue to provide these opportunities. I’m really grateful for partners in the community that are really encouraging vaccination and providing incentives. 

You know, this Friday we’re going to be at Six Rivers Brewery during the lunch hour, and then going to ACE Hardware also in McKinleyville, and they’re providing gift cards as well. I just really appreciate these types of partnerships. To Dr. Luskin-Hawk’s point, right? This is, this is really a community effort. So seeing community organizations, our local business community really rising up and supporting this effort to get vaccinated, to keep our community safe, is just so appreciated. And then also just want to know for our veterans and our community our vaccination team will be at the North Coast Stand Down this weekend, so we just really want to encourage our folks that are veterans that want to get access to a variety of services and also get a vaccine, our mobile team will be out there as well. We are going to be at a lot of different places in the month of August and so please go to MyTurn, that is a great way to see all the different clinics that we are going to be at.

I think folks can see the urgency of the need to get vaccinated. If you haven’t done so already and we are doing everything we can to provide as many opportunities to make it as convenient as possible for you to get your vaccine. 

Meriah Miracle:  Now we’ll take questions from reporters, and we’ll start with Thaddeus Greenson from the North Coast Journal. 

12 mins 45 secs: 

NCJ: Thanks very much, Meriah. So, Dr. Hoffman I’m curious what modeling, local modeling indicates the effect of the mask mandate might be on disease transmission and case counts locally?

Dr Hoffman:  Thanks, that is a really great question. You know, modeling is such an important part of what we do, and it also is, you know, rarely proves to turn out exactly the way we expected it to so you know I think there’s a lot of different things you have to put into a model and one of them is how much is the community going to participate in in an intervention. And so we’ve put a lot into this. I’ll tell you that the leadership of Humboldt County has broad support for this new mask mandate, and I think you know you’re gonna see that coming out in the coming days and that hopefully will get the message out that this is serious. 

This is real. So, if adopted well, I think that you know this could be very beneficial and could reduce case rates. You know I think if people followed it through then it could reduce it by more than 50 percent, I mean if you look at what we saw over the winter months, we know that the mask is an effective tool, and it was one that was being used widely then. I think if we, you know if we look at realistic modeling, it could potentially decrease it by more like 25% or 15% somewhere in there, but every little bit counts at this point, honestly. 

You know we’re talking about hospital capacity here, so by reducing you know 20% or 15%  we’re talking about several extra beds in the hospital which is going to alleviate the strain as we potentially haven’t even seen the peak yet of this surge of cases, in terms of hospitalization.

So it’s really up to the community on how effective this tool is, but we hope everyone follows it and that will determine how effective it is as a tool.

15 mins 15 secs in:

NCJ:  Excellent thank you, and then just a quick follow-up, which you already touched on a little bit, but as you’ve said repeatedly, you know people are tired, this is everybody’s tired of COVID. This has been a long slog, so what is the kind of messaging strategy on part of public health and the JIC in the county, to just kind of convey the importance of this mask mandate at this moment in time?

Hoffman:  Yeah, you know this is not something that any of us are taking lightly. We’re doing this to protect our community. We’re doing it to keep everything open, keep businesses open, keep the schools open, and we’re doing it to protect the health care facilities in our community that are fragile that could easily be overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases and not be able to take care of all the other things like Dr. Luskin-Hawk mentioned. So I think all of that is the message that we’re putting out there, with this order. 

Meriah Miracle: Isabella Vanderheiden, from the Times-Standard.

16 mins 20 secs in:

T-S:  Hi, thank you. Although case counts are an alarming rate both locally and across the country there are reports that vaccination rates are also going up across the country, and what would this panel attribute that shift to, and are we seeing a similar trend locally?

Pereira: That’s a great question.  You know, we’re definitely tracking the numbers closely to see if there’s a trend over time, with an increase definitely in the past couple weeks. 

Anecdotally we have been seeing an increased interest in getting vaccinated, and I think understandably the Delta variant really has been a game-changer for our community. I mean the impact that it has had so rapidly I think has been a call to action for many folks. 

Dr. Hoffman: Yeah and all that you know, we were actually asked by the state recently, because we had one of the best increases in the state over the last couple weeks for first doses, ‘what were you doing’ and you know, we said we’re doing the same thing we’ve been doing. we’re going out to places that we think a lot of people will be available, and would want to get a shot. We’re partnering with community partners, businesses, community organizations, healthcare organizations, and we think that’s now paying off. And that we had that infrastructure in place and there is definitely more worry among the community with Delta here.

Meriah Miracle: Thanks, Isabella.  Hank Sims, from the Lost Coast Outpost.  

18 mins in:

LoCO: Well we’ve been told about lots of delays and waits at the new testing site at the new OptumServe testing site at the Wharfinger building, and given that the surge is hitting us again is it possible to ramp up testing again? Is it, and is that something that you’re looking at doing and how?

Dr. Hoffman: Yeah, well we are. I’d say in the last seven to ten days we’ve seen historic levels of testing after seeing about six to eight weeks of historic lows of testing. So, we’re trying our fastest and best to make testing available at our local lab here has hit new highs several times in the last few days. In the last week, you know we have a mobile testing team that has, you know, again been slightly dormant and they’re starting to ramp up and do a lot more testing around the county in the next couple of days given response testing. We’re working with a lot of employers to try to roll out the state program which allows any organization, business, church, anyone really to enroll in the state program to get rapid tests or send test PCR tests to the state self-collected. It doesn’t have to be through a healthcare provider so these are these are all ways that testing can become more available in the community, and we get reports on the Optum usage weekly, so I haven’t seen that this week’s usage, so I’ll be curious to see if there’s that much of an increase. It was down to around 10% of capacity being used across the county for Optum, so that means 90% of the appointments throughout the month of July had not been used for for OptumServ so we, you know, if we need to we will ramp up more though in response to this current surge.

Pereira:  One thing I just want to add as well, is that you know we’re working with OptumServ. You know we have public health doing testing. We just also want to remind folks that we have pharmacies here locally where you can get tested. There are a variety of places to get tested, and one thing I also just want to note is that I don’t know if Dr. Luskin-Hawk wants to speak to this, but if folks are interested in getting tested just to reduce the strain on our healthcare system and our hospitals please use these other resources like Optumserv or our local pharmacy to get your testing especially if you’re asymptomatic and you’re not showing illness, severe illness of some kind.

21 mins 10 secs in:

Dr. Luskin-Hawk:  Yeah, just to follow up on and Sofia’s comment, it is very helpful to the hospital when people who really just want to test and don’t feel well, but don’t need an emergency department visit or a hospital stay use these other locations, leaving our capacity to address the needs most rapidly for the people who are sickest within virus and other things. So yeah, thanks Sofia. 

Meriah Miracle:  Michael Patterson from North Coast News.

22 mins in:

NCN: Yes, thank you. So a question for Dr. Hoffman. So, last month Governor Newsom implemented a new restriction requiring, you know, state employees and you know health care workers to be vaccinated to continue working. I just wanted to kind of see you know what your stance is on those kinds of requirements, and if public health is perhaps drafting you know plans to ask county and local governments to implement similar kinds of restrictions?

Dr Hoffman: Yeah, great great question. So the State Health Officer order that came out a couple weeks ago addresses healthcare entities and some congregate living facilities like jails and homeless shelters and requires in those those places of operation, for the employer to determine which staff are vaccinated or unvaccinated, and in the unvaccinated, implement testing programs and and and then superior masking levels for those who are unvaccinated. Surgical type masks like we’re wearing today, and Dr. Luskin-Hawk might want to talk a little bit more about this because it does impact her facility as well, so as far as county government goes you know public health falls into this as well, because we have a clinic.

We’re working with the county to implement this in multiple divisions within the county that fall under that. 

What Governor Newsom did was take that state order and applied it to other things that the state order didn’t apply to, so of all offices of state government. So it’s not requiring vaccination, it’s just, it’s putting those higher levels of protection on the for the unvaccinated. So currently we are in the process of implementing that in county government and where it is required there are a lot of conversations going on across the state and there are places that are considering those sorts of things.

I know healthcare entities who are considering mandates for vaccination, and you know, we know that that will increase the vaccination rate dramatically if you know, point to several entities across the country that have implemented vaccine mandates and got their vaccination rates well above 90% and you know locally, we have very dramatically different vaccination rates among certain healthcare entities. Some as high as the high 80s and pushing 90 percent, and some much lower closer to like 50% more like the rates in the county. So I think all these tools are necessary. 

Yes, they’re necessary to both encourage vaccination and get us to a place of higher vaccination rates, and also for those who aren’t vaccinated to be able to monitor them and make sure that they’re not spreading COVID in the workplace.

25 mins in:

NCN: And kind of one quick follow-up related to restrictions, you know back in June, you know we were talking about loosening these restrictions as kind of being this turn in the pandemic, and kind of you know good idea that we can handle it, I mean looking back on this now, I mean obviously hindsight’s 20-20 but I mean does this loosening of restrictions kind of seem like a mistake in hindsight now?

Dr. Hoffman: I’ll go back to what I said in the beginning, which is Delta is very different. This is not the same virus. It’s almost like we’re dealing with a whole new pandemic, here. You’re talking about contagiousness as high as double what it was previously, you know approaching chickenpox level, but much more lethal and there’s only a few other things you know that are much more contagious in this, including measles. So it’s really been a game changer should we look back and say we shouldn’t have done it, yeah like you said hindsight’s 20-20. I think those of us who really got to see family and friends and enjoy life for a little bit you know I think it was important and I think we might see more of this going forward. You know, we might have this ebb and flow go on for a while. We just don’t know what’s coming next with this virus and so I think we have to be prepared to respond to it, but we have the tools now, and we’ve been through it so hopefully it’ll be easier each time. 

26 mins 30 secs in:

Dr. Luskin-Hawk:  I think it’s worth you know, in a follow-up to Ian’s comments, it’s worth noting that the longer a large group of people is unvaccinated this virus will continue to mutate and we know that delta can cause a lot of havoc, but it we also were at risk that with a lot with a large segment of a population unvaccinated that the mutations will continue, that’s just the nature of viral infections. And so again, just another really important reason to have that broad, broad  immunity in our community.  It makes a substantial difference.

Meriah Miracle:  Redwood News?

27 mins 20 secs in:

RN:  Hello, so I talked to Julie Benbow last week from the Humboldt County Convention and Visitors Bureau and she told me tourism is doing really great right now in Humboldt County, and she’s really concerned. So I really just wanted to talk to you about that, and how are you monitoring that?

Dr. Hoffman:  You know, I think that we’re at a difficult spot.  We want to continue to encourage businesses to stay open. We don’t want to return to anything like we had before, and I don’t think it looks necessary right now so we’re taking one step, which is a mask mandate to try to get control of this. As far as I know, every county in the state is open for business and tourism is going on in all those places so we’re you know we’re just taking the steps again to protect our county like many other counties have 20 over 20 now with this mass mandate and hope that we don’t have to go backwards any more than that.

Meriah Miracle:  Lauren Schmidt from KMUD News?

28 mins 30 secs in:

KMUD:  Thank you so much. Dr. Hoffman, do you know how many of the recent positives have been breakthrough cases, and do you happen to know the efficacy rate of the vaccines against the highly contagious Delta variant?

Dr. Hoffman:  Yeah, so we’ve been trying to get a handle on some of this data. It’s- we’ve got a lot of data coming at us rapidly. Obviously with this large increase in cases we’re doing our best to keep up with those numbers. Here’s what I can tell you. 

What I know for sure right now, since the beginning of the pandemic about 5 of our total cases in Humboldt County have been breakthrough cases, so it is still a very small number overall. As we get more and more vaccination, we expect that number to go up, I mean you look at a place like Marin County that has upwards of 80% vaccination rate and they have a high percentage of their cases are breakthrough cases because those are the people who are in the community. 

So you know, if there’s very few unvaccinated people, there’s just not going to be as many percentage-wise aren’t going to be as many of the total cases, so we know breakthrough cases are going to happen. They’ve been expected, and we know that in July about a quarter of our cases locally were breakthrough cases. Now, the vast majority of those overwhelmingly were mild to asymptomatic, and a very small handful of hospitalizations. 

You know again, we’re trying to get all the data together so we can present it, but it’s a very small number, you know very similar to the nationwide data you know probably on the order of 95% or more of the hospitalizations that are happening across the country are in the unvaccinated, so, and no deaths whatsoever in the fully vaccinated group in Humboldt County, and very very few nationally. So when we talk about the vaccination, the vaccine or all three are very effective. 

I think what we have, they’re very effective against severe disease, hospitalization and death. They had been very effective against even mild disease, against the previous versions and I think that’s where we’ve seen some slight decrease in effectiveness. And now this, you know what we can verify is that it can spread among the fully vaccinated, but that doesn’t mean that the vaccines aren’t working. It just means that the virus is working harder, and that means we have to work harder, too.

 Dr. Luskin-Hawk, if you want to add anything to that? …Highly trained infectious disease Doctor who has a lot more experience than me?

31 mins 45 secs in:

Dr. Luskin-Hawk:  Yeah I think you did a really excellent job at explaining it. It’s, you know, we’re gonna see some breakthrough cases and I think that the responsibility for people who are vaccinated is to try to avoid getting a mild case, or even an asymptomatic case and spreading it to someone. Some patients have had flu-like symptoms but as Ian said, hospitalization is quite rare and we are not seeing deaths but they all but they all work for the important thing which is they keep you alive. 

Meriah Miracle: Thanks, Lauren.  Ryan Hutson, from the Redheaded Blackbelt.

32 mins 30 secs in:

RHBB: Hello. Yes, I have a few questions. I want to start by asking Roberta if you can tell us both within and apart from the ICU, of those cases, how many of them are among vaccinated individuals? 

Dr. Lukin-Hawk: It’s a good question. I don’t, we don’t track it that way on a daily basis, so there’s some deeper information that then gets shared with public health and the denominator is – the numbers are so small that any percentages probably wouldn’t be helpful – which is part of why I don’t know on a daily basis. I’m sorry I can’t help you there. Right, but I have no reason to think that our trends would be different. In fact because we see the bulk of the hospitalizations in the county. 

What Dr. Hoffman is referencing probably is mostly our data with a little bit of data from Mad River and from Redwood. 

33 mins 35 secs in:

RHBB:  Okay, thank you for that, and regarding hospital staff, I am curious if you can give us an idea of you know percentage-wise how many staff within the local system here are unvaccinated?

Dr. Luskin-Hawk:  Yeah it’s interesting, you know vaccination rates in general even in the country are very high among physicians. They are much more reflective of community preferences among even nurses, and other health care health care workers. 

So currently, I think we’re seeing a rate that’s… it’s not what I’d like it to be, yet it’s you know somewhere about 50% for two shots, and above 75% for at least that first shot. But we’re putting more in place to make sure, we’re now getting reporting of when they’ve had it in the community because we didn’t have access for that and the state’s put in some clarity. It’s been helpful for us to work with our caregivers to make sure they fully understand what’s available, that we understand if they’re declining, why they’re declining. 

And then I’m setting up ongoing testing for people who choose to remain unvaccinated, that being said, that when they’re working in the hospital setting we mandate universal masking always, and so we what we are not seeing is our caregivers, when/if they’re, if they get exposed to the community, because they’re community members, we’re not seeing them bringing in and giving it to patients. That’s not something that we’re seeing, but we believe for their own health and to set good examples they absolutely should be vaccinated.

We just recognize that right now they still have a personal choice.

35 mins 40 secs in:

RHBB:  Okay, thank you, and if I could sneak in a follow-up on that as well, do you anticipate sort of following suit with Governor Newsom’s plan to to require vaccination at any point for hospital care workers?

Dr. Luskin-Hawk:  Yeah, I think over the next- even the next week, you’ll see more definition around you knowing our policy to make sure that we’re aligned with any state mandates and the best kind of public health recommendations. So you will definitely see that among our caregivers. The other thing I didn’t mention which is related but unrelated, is that for anyone who’s hospitalized for another reason or comes to our ER for another reason we’re also offering vaccines in that setting. So trying to reach out more broadly.

Meriah Miracle:  Thank you, Ryan. All right we’ll start back with the North Coast Journal. Any additional questions, Thad?

36 mins 40 secs in:

NCJ:  Yeah, thank you. I think this should be for Dr. Luskin-Hawk. I’m curious, back kind of when we were initial surge planning there was a lot of talk about workforce readiness and making sure you know that there weren’t just enough beds, but enough trained professionals to care for Humboldt County if there were a true surge in illness. I’m curious, Dr. Luskin-Hawk, if you can give an update on the current staffing levels and then also what’s being done to bring more staff in line should they be needed?

Dr. Luskin-Hawk:  Yeah, that’s a good question Thaddeus. What’s interesting, what we’re facing in Humboldt County across the state and across the nation is an extraordinary workforce shortage right now. So that back in January there were traveler nurses available and and people from agencies you know from agencies and local nurses, and we were ensuring that we had people what’s happened is we kind of turned that corner of about 18 months into the pandemic, is that we look back and about a hundred thousand nurses had retired from nursing across the country that we talked to the staffing agency we used to pull in temporary nurses from other areas of the country they don’t have the number of nurses that they have requests for so we now are working with with multiple agencies so we have had a very high number of positions posted for regular hire in addition to that we’ve reached out really over the last several months not not only just recently for traveler positions. We’ve filled some gaps with those when we’ve looked to see we still need more, and we’ve reached out to additional agencies more recently,

We also always hire graduate nurses often from College of The Redwoods. We just, when we hire them they need a minimum of three months of training, so we hired we just recently had 28 new nurses that we hired who were trained, and now are off their training period and we are in the midst of hiring about another 35 to 40 nurses again to to be trained for positions so it’s kind of an is a multi-pronged approach. We’re being aggressive about making attractive offers to people. I will say that one of the challenges for our traveling nurses has been housing in Humboldt. We’ve had some people who have agreed to come and then found getting housing so challenging that they’ve backed out of contracts. So now we’ve partnered with some realtors and others to try to help them get housing, because they’re finding it hard on their own. 

So it’s a long way of saying that we want more staff than we have, and but we’re working with the staff that we have to take care of patients so recently this week we’ve started canceling some elective surgeries in order to preserve staff beds for patients with covid it’s not ideal for the patient who has been waiting for a surgery.  I understand that, but it’s for the safety of the community during this surge, but that speaks to what Dr. Huffman was saying that we can all have a more robust health system if we tamp this down and allow our caregivers to do the full spectrum of care.

Meriah Miracle:  Thank you, Thad. Isabella, any additional questions?

40 mins 15 secs in: 

T-S:  Yes. Dr. Anthony Fauci noted the possibility of yet another variant emerging as case counts skyrocket and the possibility that such a variant could challenge the efficacy of our vaccine. I realize this is somewhat speculative, but can Dr. Hoffman speaks to this point?

Dr. Hoffman:  Well, I think if you look at the Delta variant and how it took this sort of giant leap even from the alpha variant which we saw the effect of in our community the last surgeum yeah we’re worried we’re worried that this could turn into something even stronger and bigger, and certainly something that could get around the vaccine efficiency would would be, could potentially be much more devastating even than the Delta variant. So the faster we all get vaccinated the less likely that is to happen, to Dr. Luskin-Hawk’s point, every chance that the virus gets to mutate by infecting another person, it will potentially mutate so time is of the essence and we you know want to encourage everyone to get vaccinated and make it we’re trying to make it as easy as possible.

Meriah Miracle: Hank, any additional questions?

42 mins in:

LoCO:  Yeah real quick, and perhaps this is mostly for Dr. Luskin-Hawk, but I just want to say that you know the it seems like the way that to fight misinformation or vaccine hesitancy or vaccine skepticism, like a really powerful way is to share concrete stories, and I wonder, I know that you’re limited in what you could say but it would be I think it would be really helpful if you could share what you can, what more you can, about the case of the person in their 30s who who passed this week – you know, the course of that person’s illness, whether they were they presented with comorbidities, just as much like detail as is possible for you to share about the course of that person’s illness would be helpful, so perhaps, I don’t know if you can do that?

Dr. Luskin-Hawk: Yeah, thanks Hank. I mean, I think as you know highly restricted due to things like HIPAA, but by the same token, I think that if people – what people do need to understand is that you know, a patient in their 30s who sought medical care, got high quality intensive care unit care, in a unit with critical care nurses and board certified intensivists, a whole team of people working together with experience and dealing with this virus after a prolonged hospitalization – which means it wasn’t that he waited too long. He came in to seek care, who had, according to what I’m told, and I’ve never seen this man’s medical record, but according to the ICU nurses who are quite distraught, he had none of, no unusual underlying diseases, no immunodeficiency, nothing else… and despite their best, best efforts, died. And I think that story, while you know, no further details would be available, is really compelling that the sense that people have gotten, that if I’m young enough, if I’m healthy enough, this virus is not going to touch me, is really important. 

And I think in addition to that if you look at the the weekly data on on the humble health alert you know there were also about four deaths and and people in their 50s you know, and so I know people who you know, people who didn’t want to take a vaccine but left, you know, left children behind… and you know, who passed away and they were they were parents. And so the toll of this is real, and I do think we have to connect to the community and the readers. It’s almost, people have gotten numb with the numbers and they feel like this refers to some other and it’s not. It’s real people. 

It could be your neighbor, and I think if you’re, you know, if you’re a parent or you care about your health in any way, that a death in someone who is unvaccinated in my mind is needless, and it also it’s a tragedy for that person, it’s a tragedy for the people who love them, but also as I try to support my caregivers and healthcare team it has a devastating effect because it’s emotionally draining and they feel like it didn’t have to happen. And so we need to care for them so that they can take care of all of you, and stay in health care. You know, people retire when it gets just too overwhelming, so that’s my long story, that’s about as much as I can tell you. But I hope it’s enough for you to connect to the fact that this is hitting people who don’t have anything special wrong with them, and it’s hurting them and it’s killing some of them.

Dr. Hoffman: Yeah and if I can add to that, you know exactly what Dr. Luskin-Hawk is saying, we are seeing this happening in younger and younger folks.  The deaths in the 50 year olds look multiple hospitalizations 40 year olds and we review all of these cases at public health as well and I tell you that exactly what we’re seeing in Humboldt County is exactly what we’ve seen across the country, which is that yes, some of these people have pre-existing conditions, but not all of them, and many of them do not.  

They are people just like yourself, just like your neighbors, who are considered to be in good health. This virus can take anyone, and being vaccinated is your absolute best chance. The death of the young gentleman this past week has also taken a very hard toll on our public health staff here who worked very hard to try to protect everyone. This is a really tough time for all of us in healthcare. We really feel for the staff in the hospital and our staff here who are working so hard to try to stop this part of this disease. 

Dr. Luskin-Hawk:  Yeah, there’s some data that suggests that Delta variant is two and a half more times likely to cause hospitalization than than some of the original strains right so it is it’s not only more contagious it’s more aggressive, and so seeing deaths in young people is part of of the constellation that we’re seeing.

Meriah Miracle: Michael from North Coast News, any additional questions?

47 mins 30 secs in:

NCN: Yes, one quick question that I think would be best for Sofia Pereira. The, I know the case investigations, the way Humboldt is doing case investigations now is changing because of this reduction in state staff, so I was just kind of curious of how many people are currently working on case investigations, and you know,what what now is considered a vulnerable population you know with the delta variant being so transmissible and dangerous? 

Pereira: Thank you actually if it’s all right, Dr. Hoffman, just given the recent things with the prioritization of our case investigations I’d like to turn it over to you.

Dr. Hoffman: Sure, yeah thanks, Sofia. Jeez, you know exact numbers on the staff, I can’t give you but it’s been a dramatic reduction. I’d say you know at least 30% to 40% reduction in the staff in the investigations. We had a tremendous number of staff from the state throughout the winter surge months and even up until as late as June. They started reducing them and then just slowly have been reducing it more throughout the last six weeks, so we’re doing everything we can to build internal capacity to continue as much investigation as we can with as small of a group of people as we can. 

So part of that is yes you know I think the public’s really aware of what it means now to get a diagnosis, to be on isolation for 10 days if you’re positive, to quarantine if you are exposed to that person who’s positive for ten – at least ten days – and to notify your contacts.  I think you know, that’s really what our investigations team does ninety percent of the time for these low-risk folks who are either asymptomatic or mild symptoms, many of them being followed by their doctors. Doctors might be giving them these quarantine and isolation orders as well, so it’s a community-wide effort. So what we’re focusing on as public health are the areas where there is the absolute highest risk for spread for widespread so places where it could rapidly spread to you know dozens, or even you know 20, 30, 50 people at a time, so those are settings like the skilled nursing facilities, long-term care facilities that we have that house a lot of vulnerable older patients, but it also extends to things like the schools where there’s a lot of unvaccinated children, things like summer camps and daycares and as well as larger businesses that they have a lot of people working close together where people can’t always take the distancing measures that might you know somewhere in an office setting can, so those are some of the ways that we’re prioritizing this going forward.  And we’ve been doing that the whole time, it’s just that each time we have to you know, cut back on staff, we have to narrow our focus a little bit more and ask more of the public for their own follow-up from from when they get the diagnosis or get a positive test we do still attempt to contact every single positive person  at least three times and… But we’re finding more and more that people just aren’t answering the phone calls, or they hang up on us. And so our staff can’t keep reaching out over the course of 10 days to all of those people, so we make those three attempts and then if there’s not a callback, if there’s not you know an answer, then we have to move on.

Meriah Miracle:  We have just a few more minutes here.  Lauren from KMUD do you have an additional question?

51 mins 30 secs in:

KMUD: Yeah really quickly, Dr.  Hoffman, if this surge continues to worsen is there a potential for another shelter in place order?

Dr. Hoffman: I’ll be honest, I don’t think anyone’s talking about that right now, so we just hope everyone wears their masks, get vaccinated. Go get tested if you don’t feel well, stay home if you know you’re exposed to someone. If we all follow those guidelines we will not see that kind of surge, so, you know I’ll  just say that I think even with Delta being so transmissible, we still have fairly high vaccination rates.  You know we have just a little bit under the mean in California, which is a little bit over the mean for the U.S, so we do have that layer of protection that hopefully we would never have to go back that way, but none of us wanted to be here with masking either and here we are now with nearly half the state under a masking order again.

Meriah Miracle: Thank you very much, thank you lauren.  Ryan, do you have a quick question to ask? 

52 mins 45 secs in:

RHBB:  Yes real quickly, I was just hoping that Roberta could clarify, she said earlier that 19 people are currently hospitalized in Humboldt with the covid – I’m  wondering, of those 19, if that’s current, how many of those are in the ICU?

Dr. Luskin-Hawk:  Sure. Fair question.  Four of them are in the ICU, as of this morning.

53 mins 10 secs in:

RHBB: Okay. Thank you for that, and then a quick quick one, can you talk to us about the difference in the symptoms of the Delta variant, as opposed to the original strain, and is that being seen in children?

Dr. Luskin-Hawk: Yeah, I’d like maybe Dr.  Hoffman can speak to that, too.

Dr. Hoffman: Sure, yeah you know, I think anecdotally there’s been some discussion about potentially different symptoms, and kids you know more GI symptoms, more headaches.  I don’t think we have enough data right now locally to say anything, but I, you know, ithink we know that this virus can cause a lot of different symptoms. 

So traditionally you know cold symptoms, runny nose, coughs, sinus type things, aches, fevers – but we do know it can cause diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal pain, headache… So really at this point if you have any symptoms, check in with your doctor. Ask them if you should get a test or if you don’t have a doctor, definitely you know, call for advice or go get tested somewhere. I think that’s really the key point, and if you know you are exposed, stay home. Monitor for symptoms and get latest after about five to seven days after that exposure. So those are the things that are going to keep us safe, and keep us out of trouble. 

Dr. Luskin-Hawk:  One more comment- you know, in Humboldt we have such issues with access to primary care, so when we say ‘see your doctor’ sometimes that seems like a daunting thing, but certainly many organizations have virtual visits and some other options to get further information. If you, I know if you go to our, the providence.org website, there’s a chat box that can talk about symptoms, there’s access to virtual visits, I think that you know, open door has virtual visits sometimes the Providence Medical Group does it and it kind of lets you know when you should get tested, or if you test positive but you’re concerned you’re still not feeling well there are things you can do other than going in the emergency room and I would encourage again that the emergency room be for the most sick patients but those are some resources for patients who still have concerns but aren’t sick like they can get a little pulse oximeter to to monitor their oxygen and have check-ins with a healthcare professional and be cared for you know, kind of recover safely at home if there’s someone who has relatively mild disease.

Meriah Miracle: Thank you Dr. Hoffman. Thank you Dr. Luskin-Hawk, and thank you Director Pereira for joining us today. Thanks to all of our media representatives as well.

Community members with questions or concerns are encouraged to call 441-5000 for additional information. 

For updates on vaccination distribution in California, go to cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/COVID-19/COVID-19Vaccine.aspx.

Local information is also available online at humboldtgov.org or during business hours by contacting [email protected] 

Local COVID-19 vaccine information: humboldtgov.org/vaccineinfo,

Humboldt County COVID-19 Data Dashboard: humboldtgov.org/dashboard,

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Humboldt Health Alert: humboldtgov.org/HumboldtHealthAlert