First COVID-19 Press Conference of 2022 Covers Testing Shortage, COVID Stats, Omicron, Genomic Sequencing and More

The Humboldt County Joint Information Center hosted the first COVID-19 virtual press conference of 2022 on January 5th, providing an update on the arrival of Omicron to the North Coast as well as the county’s pandemic response, and vaccination efforts. Panelists– Humboldt County Department of Health & Human Services Assistant Director Michele Stephens and County Health Officer Dr. Ian Hoffman–were available to answer questions from local media,

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 we provide a summary of the questions asked by local reporters at the January 5th Virtual Press Conference, with the answers given by each of the participants.  

El video del 5 de enero de preguntas y respuestas de medios con el Dr. Ian Hoffman, que muestra subtítulos disponibles en español, usando las opciones del menú de YouTube y seleccionando ‘auto-subtítulos’ y luego seleccionando un idioma.

JIC: Good afternoon and thank you for joining us for the January 5th COVID-19 virtual news conference. My name is Christine Messinger, and I’m a Public Information Officer here at the COVID-19 Joint Information Center. Today we’re joined by Humboldt County Department Of Health And Human Services Assistant Director Michelle Stevens and County Health Officer Dr Ian Hoffman. Assistant Director Stevens, can you provide us with an update?

30 secs in:

Stephens: Sure. Good afternoon, everyone. Hi there, Happy New Year. So, in the first two days of this week, the JIC call center staff has answered 316 calls. 58,650 calls have been answered since the call center opened in the beginning of the pandemic, and at its height, the JIC had dozens of staff that were working in the in the Joint Information Center, and we’re now down to a handful, all of whom have other jobs within DHHS that they’re responsible for, and this is our first news conference of the year. We plan to host news conferences every week going… every other week going forward, but we’ll continue the daily reporting, except on days that the county is closed. Thanks.

JIC: Thank you. And Dr. Hoffman, can you please provide us with an update?

1 min 15 secs in:

Dr. Hoffman: Sure. Thanks, Michelle for being here, it feels like old times. Thanks everyone for coming today. Yeah, I’ll start off with the Omicron update. I think that it’s safe to say based on the recent genomics sequencing from a few weeks ago, that Omicron is here and it’s circulating in our community, and we are really starting to see the beginnings of the Omicron surge in Humboldt County. 

We want to offer a message of caution and hope in this upcoming surge. I think that the caution is really, let’s all get prepared. We have the tools necessary. We’ve had them all along, and they’re the same tools for Omicron as they are for every other surge we’ve been through in this  pandemic. so, vaccination, testing, trying to avoid large gatherings, being in places that are well ventilated, increasing ventilation, and the use of isolation in quarantine – which we’re going to talk about a little bit more, as well. 

So, you know, what we’re seeing in other places, and we’re starting to see here, are really the hallmarks of the Omicron surge, which is starting to see really sharp increases in cases over the last week, a small bump in hospitalizations, and extreme staffing shortages. And that’s really I think where the focus for a lot of places has been, is that because this is spreading so dramatically, and so quickly through communities it makes it hard for everywhere to stay open. so not just hospitals and healthcare clinics, but schools and businesses and government, so the more we can take caution with all those tools – masking, trying to avoid gatherings and getting vaccinated – we’re going to blunt this surge and hopefully have less impact as far as the impact of this on the hospitals. I think again it’s mostly going to be the staffing, and that’s based on what we’ve seen in other places. We’re seeing less severe hospitalizations. 

The hospitalizations are certainly up in many, many places, and they are seeing increases in the number of beds taken up by COVID infections, but they don’t seem to be as severe and much less ICU patients with COVID. Not to say that they don’t exist, but there certainly seem to be quite a bit less than than previously with the other variants. So we’re hopeful that the severity of this will continue that way for Humboldt County, but we do need to prepare for impacts to the hospital, and impacts to businesses and impacts to schools and government offices. So, as far as some of the ways we’re preparing here at Public Health for that, we’re increasing testing. so we’re trying to get more testing in the county. We’ve increased the Optum capacity this past week, we’re looking to increase it more in the coming weeks. Those requests are into the state. We’ve pushed out 15,000 over-the-counter tests throughout different partners – mostly through our school systems to test kids as they come back to school this week. And we will continue to try to increase testing to the best of our ability. 

I do want to say, though, that many, many jurisdictions who are living through this right now – even with all the preparations – have not had enough testing. So testing is likely to be limited even with all these preparations because of the size of the surge, and the speed with which this variant spreads. So the most you can do now to try to prepare for increasing your testing would be beneficial. 

The last thing I’ll say is masking is certainly, has always been important throughout this entire pandemic, and continues to be extremely important. We are encouraging [people] to consider increasing your mask usage, and increase your mask quality.  And some of that is also covered in the new isolation and quarantine orders that have come from CDC and CDPH. So if you’re unvaccinated in this surge, you certainly are at higher risk. There are many things you can do to reduce that risk, like wearing a mask, avoiding crowds and gatherings trying to choose outdoor activities whenever possible or increasing ventilation, and certainly getting vaccinated would still help, and vaccination is still the best tool that we have against Omicron, as it is against all the other variants. 

The last thing I wanted to let everyone know about is that we will be releasing new isolation and quarantine orders today to line up with all of the changing orders that are coming down from the federal agencies and through CDPH. This new order will allow us to essentially implement any of those changes immediately in the future so there’s less lag time between when changes happen at the agencies where they make these and Humboldt County. So we should be having that come out within the next few hours, and I look forward to answering questions, and any discussion today. Thank you.

JIC: Thank you. Now we’ll take some questions from reporters. Kim Wear?

7 mins 45 secs in:

North Coast Journal: Dr. Hoffman, you’ve been discussing ways to try and get an idea of monitoring for Omicron, and you’re hoping to have that done this week, to get a better idea, can you talk a little bit about how the county can do that, how Public Health can do that?

Dr. Hoffman: Sure. Yeah, so we’ve been looking for ways since Omicron was first identified, how could we identify it here in the county as quickly as possible. So, tests come in from all sorts of different places. they’re coming to us here at the county, they’re going to the state lab, going to see a branch lab that CDPH… [FEED INTERRUPTED] …testing going on in many places at home and clinics and hospitals, so there’s a lot of testing going in all the places. so we don’t get everything. The sequencing that came in earlier this week, that came in earlier this week from two weeks ago, was run through a local pharmacy and they’ve been partnering with federal sequencing partners to try to get more sequencing of those tests that come through pharmacies. So that’s how we got alerted to the first Omicron sequencing. Our local lab had been doing sequencing, but we have not – that’s been on hold for almost two months due to staffing issues, and just the inability to keep up that platform. So we haven’t had that local capacity.

What we’re trying to get is a test that will find the hallmarks of Omicron – it’s called the “s-gene dropout.”  So, a few previous versions of the previous variants of COVID-19 also had these hallmarks, but we haven’t seen it for quite a while. So we know now when we see that, that it’s highly likely that that’s Omicron, so it’s not a whole genome sequencing, but it’s looking for kind of the thumbprint of Omicron. so we’re hopeful that sometime before the end of the week we can run that on some samples and get a sense of what the proportion is.

We assume if they have that s-gene dropout of their Omicron, if they don’t, they’re probably Delta, because we just haven’t seen anything else for quite a while. So that’s what we’re looking to do. It’s those, again hampered by staffing, the materials that we needed to run that we’re in short supply because the whole world is scrambling to get that test up and running at the same time, so we’ll see. When we have that data, we’ll report it out to you. I also suspect we will continue to get more genomic sequencing in from other partners from both the federal partnership with the pharmacies and some from the state lab and then eventually when our staffing’s back up we will be able to run whole genome sequencing here locally again.

JIC: Kim, do you have a follow-up? 

NCJ: Oh no, that’s good, thank you. 

JIC: Thank you. Ryan, do you have a question?

11 mins 40 secs in:

Redheaded Blackbelt: Yes, thank you. So, a question from one of our readers recently expressed some frustration that the county dashboard does not reflect current COVID-19 hospitalizations, and I know we’ve mentioned this, and gone over this in the past but not, not since the beginning of the winter or so, I think. So, and I realized that providing that number is possibly, you know, somewhat at the discretion of the hospital administrators, and that it would also include people who tested positive at arrival, not necessarily that they came for COVID care but then tested anyway just as a matter of procedure there…  So, while that information can be found at the state website on the dashboard there, locals want to see it provided at their fingertips, here at our local dashboard. So in regard to improving the public’s awareness about that hospital capacity – and because it’s also related to the masking, dropping the masking order – would it be reconsidered to add that onto the dashboard, Dr. Hoffman, and if you could speak to that concern and why, or why not, the hospitalization rates currently are not reflected on the dashboard?

Screenshot from remote press conference.

Dr. Hoffman: Thanks, Ryan. Yeah I’ll, so a little on the history of that. When we decided to take that off the dashboard, we were in a much different place. It was the end of really, the Alpha surge, it seemed like we were on the precipice of this going away and it didn’t seem as relevant anymore, so we did take it down. We have continued to use it internally, and those are numbers that get shared internally every day. They also live on other dashboards, so if you go to the CDC data tracker, that number is also on there, it’s also on the CDPH dashboard for COVID, when you search under Humboldt County, and those are updated daily on both of those websites, and that would be the number that we would put on our website. I think, you know, again, for staffing reasons and and all sorts of other reasons it’s been really difficult to get changes to the dashboard up and running quickly, so we’ve kind of let it stand that those live in other places. Whether or not they could be added again, it’s certainly a discussion that’s ongoing, and we are looking at revamping the entire dashboard as we’ve talked about and still working on finalizing that to make sure that it has all the necessary pieces before it goes live, so it, the data’s out there. It’s on other dashboards, and I can’t say for sure it will be on the new dashboard or not, but it does live in many places.

I’ll just take that opportunity to point out a difference though, like you mentioned, between those numbers that are reported from say CDC and CDPH’s dashboard, and what we report on a daily basis is hospitalizations so our daily hospitalization report and the daily case count are only Humboldt County residents, who we are following as Public Health, who are hospitalized. And  that number is different than the number of people who are in the hospital with COVID because some of those patients who are in the hospital are not Humboldt County residents, some of our patients we are following are hospitalized in other counties because they were transferred out, so they don’t match up. The differences we are not reporting. We’re only reporting people who are COVID positive and in the hospital for a reason related to COVID, not that they’re there incidentally for something else. As far as the other numbers, those are all encompassing anyone who’s in a bed, in a hospital, who’s COVID positive. The majority of them are there for COVID reasons, but there are some that are not. But they still take up resources, and so we have to follow them closely as Public Health, because they’re using a bed that is in isolation, …the staffing there has to be using isolation procedures including a lot of PPE, and it’s extra work for everyone to take care of those patients in the hospital, even when they’re not there for COVID. 

JIC: You have a follow-up, Ryan?

16 mins 35 secs in: 

RHBB:  Yes. I would like to do a clarifying follow-up, there. So, currently I’m looking at the Hospitalization Dashboard here, and it’s showing that in Humboldt County… [FEED INTERRUPTED] …So, looking at the dashboard right now – in hospitalizations, it says 16 positive patients, 4 positive in the ICU, and six available ICU beds.  Are those all people who checked in because of COVID, then?

Dr. Hoffman:  Yeah, so that’s the, those are the numbers that would include people who are both in the hospital for COVID-19, so they’re COVID positive, they have COVID pneumonia or some other COVID complication, and they’re hospitalized with that. But, it will also include some of those people who are in a bed – in an isolation bed – with whatever else,  their gallbladder problem or their kidney problem, but they’re not sick with COVID, they still have to be in isolation because they’re a COVID patient.  They still take up a COVID isolation bed, and they still use PPE, and higher staffing ratios, because of that COVID. So, the proportion of that changes day to day. Most of those patients are COVID positive, with a COVID related problem. What we’re seeing in Omicron is that that number goes up, and both of those are going to probably go up, because more and more people in the hospital will be positive who are just there for other reasons, and that’s what we saw in some of these surges.

Now we’ve also seen the number of COVID pneumonias go up in these cases, but they have tended to not be as severe as previously, so they’re less likely to be in the ICU. As far as those 4 ICU patients, I could go back and look. I haven’t looked today, but my guess would be most of those are COVID positive ICU patients who are there for a COVID reason. It’s not impossible that someone could be in the ICU with other things, and be COVID positive, but most of those ICU patients tend to be there because of a COVID related issue.

RHBB: Perfect, thank you.

JIC: Christinna, do you have a question?

19 mins in:

CB: Yes. So, with so many rapid COVID tests recently going out to the schools, is there a proper way, especially for those that tested positive, to dispose of these tests?

Dr. Hoffman: Oh, great question, Christinna. So a negative test does not need to be disposed of in… any special way. A positive test is considered to be infectious. I think there are, there are instructions in the boxes on how to dispose of those. I think really just trying to make sure that they don’t get handled by other people in the family,pack, sealing them up well, and then following those instructions on the box would be the best way.

And then some of those also came with reporting mechanisms, either through the i-health app, if you got it from a non-school source, but if you’re getting it from…a Humboldt County Office of Education or from a school, we’re encouraging you to use the CDPH reporting mechanism that was created so that people could report those, and they would go in to be visible to the schools then, and to Public Health, so that we could track those, and make sure that your positive test result got…counted, and for lots of different reasons, if you need proof of positive tests in the future.

CB:  So those that test positive, would you guys go pick them up? Or you just kind of put them in a bag and throw it out?

Dr. Hoffman: No, we have no mechanism to do that. So, please just follow the instructions in the box. I mean, there are millions and millions of these test kits across the country and yeah, there’s no specific way other than the recommended manufacturer’s way of disposing of them.

CB: Okay, thank you.

JIC: Isabella, do you have a question?

21 mins in:

Times-Standard: Yes, I do. At the end of 2020 the county saw 22 deaths and 1,764 confirmed cases. At the end of 2021 the county jumped to 122 deaths with 10,952 cases and 2022 has started off with nearly 600 cases so far, and as of yesterday one death. Is this year going to continue this deadly trend, and with DHHS down about 30 percent of its staff, what tactics are planned to help turn around, to help 22 turn out different than last year?

Dr. Hoffman: I mean, I can speak to some of those figures, and maybe Michelle can talk to the DHHS component. Yeah, we’re hopeful that we’re going to break that trend. I mean, I think that we’ve been talking about decoupling the case…count from the hospitalization and death count and I think that’s what Omicron might do, is really change that dynamic where you see a big surge in hospitalizations and deaths after a big surge in cases.

So the proportionality is important though, because the surge is so big in Omicron that you still see a fairly significant surge in hospitalizations I think really the biggest change though has been that we haven’t seen that huge shift towards a lot of deaths with it, so people, again, people are not as sick. They’re still getting hospitalized, if they get hospitalized, they tend not to go to the ICU as much. And so yeah, hopefully that will change. I think it’s a good time to point out though, that  we still haven’t talked about Delta yet today. Delta is still here and, you know, we don’t have any evidence to suggest that Omicron is absolutely taken over. So we should all be operating on the assumption, until we have stronger evidence that Omicron is [not] the predominant variant in our county, that Delta is still a predominant variant.

So, again we’re hoping to get some of that data in the next couple of days and share that with the community, and give us some reassurance that Delta has maybe been edged out. But as of yet we’re still seeing hospitalizations, quite a few of them – and that number Ryan just quoted, 16 is up from the last few days – it had been down under 10 for about a week or two. So, we are seeing, it’s hard to say if it’s a trend or just a little bump right now.

Stephens: I would just add that the incident command system or ICS system that we use, as well as the same system law enforcement uses in an emergency response in an emergency preparedness field. It allows for expansion and contraction of increasing staffing and decreasing staffing. So when the pandemic first started, we had a Public Health Department Operations Center that was really just staffed by Public Health staff. We started the Joint Information Center and then as the pandemic got bigger and the response was we needed a larger response, the Emergency Operations Center, the EOC started through the sheriff’s office and it was a joint effort. We had staff pulled from all kinds of different departments, and from other fire departments, and law enforcement. So if that were needed again, we have the ability to scale up if needed, and the Emergency Operations Center could be reactivated again with the Sheriff’s Office.  So that’s what we’ve been doing. So right now, we’re back to a DHHS Department Operations Center with not just Public Health staff, but also other DHHS branch staff. So that’s what we would do. We also called on the state for resources, other counties, if they were in the situation they might also call on the state for other staffing resources, too.

So it wouldn’t just necessarily be DHHS, we’d probably have to start the Emergency Operation Center again and partner more closely with the Sheriff’s Office, and other folks around staffing.

25 mins 45 secs in:

T-S:  Great, thank you. And I guess I would just follow that with, as Dr. Hoffman said, bearing in mind that Delta is still indeed here and Omicron is now here, what is the advice that you would advise folks to heed with all this different information, new information coming up from the CDC,  obviously an ensemble of misinformation all over Facebook and wherever else, I guess, what are just kind of some core points that you’d really want to get across to the community to try and ensure everyone’s safety during this time?

Dr. Hoffman: This great question is about, I think, the message remains the same – wear a mask, keep your distance, avoid gatherings if possible, get vaccinated, get boosted, and let’s get through the next month or two of this and and hope that it has less impact on…our schools, our businesses, our hospitals, and the health of our  community.

Stephens:  I would also add if you’re feeling even remotely sick, stay home, right?  I think that’s the, that’s also number one thing if testing is an option for folks, and available, then they should be getting tested as well. 

If it’s not, then I think people should err on the side of caution and stay home if they have even allergy-like symptoms, right?  And I think that would be… it’s the same stuff that we’ve been doing right, it’s the same messages that we’ve been doing even when we were sheltering in place. so, we’re not sheltering in place, but we should all use those same non-pharmaceutical interventions.

JIC: Thank you. Austin, do you have a question? 

27 mins 15 secs in:

North Coast News: I do, yes, thank you so much. So I kind of want to touch on schools. Yesterday, because city schools issued a statement saying after the holiday their schools have seen an increase in students and staff testing positive for COVID-19. So my question is twofold. First off, do you have any specific figures on how many positive cases we’re seeing in schools and then second, should parents be worried about sending their kids in-person?

Dr. Hoffman:  Thanks, Austin. I don’t have any specific numbers that I can share with you, but I will say that just as we’ve seen in the wider community in the last few days in the schools we have seen large increases in the number of positive cases so that’s to be expected to a certain degree after the holidays again this has a little bit of the thumbprint of Omicron on it so we’re looking into that  but just I think it’s it’s going to continue and we will likely see even more cases over the coming weeks due to the nature of how this new variant spreads throughout the community.

As far as being safe in the schools, I do. I think that it’s still the safest place for kids to be. Everyone’s masked. They’ve worked on ventilation. Many of the schools are doing testing  and certainly we know the disruptions that virtual learning took on kids over the last couple of years so we’re not recommending going to virtual classrooms. It might be a necessity for some districts or some schools because of staffing issues. I think that’s really again going back to what the hallmark of this surge has been in many other places is that staffing becomes very difficult with so many people out sick at once so the more we can do to try to slow that down avoiding gatherings, wearing our mask, getting vaccinated–it’s going to blunt this surge and…have less impact on institutions like our schools. 

29 mins 30 secs in:

NCN: Great, thank you I have one real quick follow-up and you’ve kind of already touched on it but I understand that Humboldt County Public Health has recommended postponing or moving to a virtual platform for non-essential events, and I know you’ve already talked about how at this point in time you don’t recommend returning to virtual learning considering the toll, but at some point further down the line, do you see the potential for possibly returning to virtual learning?

Dr. Hoffman: Here’s what I say about the use of virtual venues – when it’s important to be in person, we still recommend it to be in person. So there are activities that you can’t do virtually. Health care – we can’t, some of it we can, but a lot of it we can’t.  Industry, manufacturing, construction, these are not virtual options. So we have to be in-person, and I think what we’ve learned is that in-school instruction is one of those. so it is a last resort to move to virtual learning when it’s necessary, because of other factors… [FEED INTERRUPTED] …that, I think it is not something we have evidence for and we think that it’s, we know that it’s safe based on the data, and all of the things that we’ve done to take precautions. Most people are getting COVID outside of schools, outside of their workplaces, going to gatherings, not wearing a mask, being unvaccinated. so that’s where the primary spread is. It’s very small in those institutions because they’re taking so many precautions.

Stephens: I just wanted to draw a parallel to other essential services like providing behavioral health services, right, we saw the impact of virtual on the community that experiences mental illness or other other emotional…It’s been stressful, it’s been really hard, and we’ve seen increases in suicide and other other concerns and so we know that providing in-person services for behavioral health, especially and other …services is really critical.

I would say that we also saw that for a lot of kids doing virtual learning was really, really difficult. and so like Dr. Hoffman said, it should be, it should be a last resort. and we weren’t seeing we haven’t been seeing as many cases in schools as we have in other sectors which is pretty phenomenal really. The schools really do have it dialed when it comes to using those npis and the testing that they have as an option for parents with for their kids and catching cases that way and getting kids in isolation and quarantine has been really effective so we strongly encourage to continue that. 

JIC: Lauren, do you have a question? 

32 mins 40 secs in:

KMUD News: The follow-up on Issabella Vanderheiden’s question. You know, it’s been reported that the Omicron variant is highly contagious, even more so than the Delta, yet it results in less severe outcomes of the disease. So, Dr Huffman, do you think the Omicron variant could be like a silver lining in helping to end the pandemic?

Dr. Hoffman:  It’s a great question. I think all of us are hopeful and would love to see that silver lining come true, but you never know what the silver lining is until you’re on the other side. so I think what we know right now, based on everyone else’s experience so far, and we do get a little bit of benefit being Humboldt, of having some foreshadowing because we tend to have these surges come here a little later than other places. So we do know that it looks to be less severe. There tends to be less ICU admissions. so less need for ventilation and less, you know, severe outcomes. And certainly so far, less death. Because of the sheer volume there has been an increase in many places in hospitalizations of more moderate disease so people with pneumonia who need hospitalization but not yet needing a ventilator, so I think that’s a cautionary for sure.

And then whether or not this could be sort of the end of the pandemic? With a lot of people getting immunity, natural immunity plus boosting the immunity, the vaccination immunity that’s out there, I think while there’s some hope again, there,I think it’s reasonable to also take some caution. That we have tried, we’ve seen that, and we’ve tried to make predictions in the past and failed. so I think that no one has a crystal ball, and we should all be prepared that there could be another variant out there, but we’ll get through this one and it it certainly seems like–from a death, an ICU, hospitalization, ventilation perspective–it’s going to be much better. The real concern in this surge is…staffing across the board in all sectors.

Stephens: I think the take away…I think, what we’ve said is that Omicron is kind of the good news, bad news variant, really. Right, I think that’s what Dr. Hoffman’s describing.

JIC: Sorry, Lauren, thank you – we can’t understand you. Do you want to try again, or do you want to type it in the chat, and I can read the question?

KMUD News: Can you hear me now? 

JIC: Yes, yes. 

35 mins 45 secs in:

KMUD News: Okay, quick follow-up so I believe January 15th was the date set to reconsider lifting the indoor mask mandate. I’m guessing that’s not the case but can you just share a quick update?

Dr. Hoffman: Yeah we’re still watching things, certainly from all the metrics that we set – the three metrics, the case count, the hospitalizations, and the vaccination rates –  we haven’t met any of those, so… but we’ll still look at it on January 15th and let the public know.  Also, that’s the date that CDPH has set for evaluating their statewide mask mandate, and so we’ll also be watching to see what the state does.

KMUD News: Thank you.

JIC: Thank you guys, all for coming. Thanks to our panelists and to our media representatives for joining us today. We’ll send you links as soon as the recording is ready and have a great day, Happy New Years, everyone.