|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Santa Clara County is outpacing the state in uptake of the omicron-specific COVID-19 booster vaccine across all eligible age groups, the county’s top health official said this week.
Roughly one-third of county residents ages 65 and up have received the updated booster compared to just 24.3% of residents statewide in the same age group.
As of Oct. 26, 18.4% of county residents ages 50-64, 10.8% of those ages 18-40 and 7.4% of those ages 12-17 have also received the updated booster.
Countywide, nearly 16% of eligible residents have received the booster compared to roughly 11% statewide, according to county Health Officer and Public Health Director Dr. Sara Cody.
“While our numbers are certainly lower than we’d like, we are doing better than the state as a whole,” Cody said during Tuesday’s meeting of the county’s Board of Supervisors.
The booster vaccine, which is available to everyone ages 5 and up, protects against the original COVID-19 strain as well as the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants of the omicron variant.
Cody noted that data from the county’s main sewershed in San Jose, which covers more than 75% of the county, has shown that COVID-19 transmission levels remain higher than they may seem by just observing the number of reported cases.
“We don’t know what’s just around the corner, but we think that the grandchildren of omicron are probably around the corner,” she said. “These are the children of BA.5. There’s a few variants that are emerging now, we’ve detected a handful in our county, but they’ve not yet taken off.”
In addition to encouraging residents to get vaccinated and take steps to reduce virus transmission like staying home when sick, Cody said there are also ongoing efforts to better understand long COVID and how to measure how widespread it is going forward.
“One of the things that worries me most about how we still have a lot of COVID circulating is I worry that the pandemic is going to have a very long tail, because there are a lot of people in our community who have long COVID,” Cody said.
“While we don’t have a robust surveillance system here in Santa Clara County, we’re getting better and better information from colleagues in other jurisdictions to be able to apply that and understand the burden here,” she said.
Just an observation,
With 300 variants spreading worldwide, do you think we can vaccinate or treat our way out of Covid?
I have been saying it over and over again, the fact that Covid removed 4,000,000 workers from the U.S. is causing a permanent labor shortage.
Resulting in wage inflation, which forced price inflation.
Which forces the FED to raise interest rates, which is forcing a lot of business leveraged to have to pay off debt, they cannot afford to pay the interest. Or worse if they are overleveraged, they are OUT OF BUSINESS.
Same goes with the people, they are being FORCED to pay off debt, and not consider taking any more on.
There goes the housing market, the Auto market, the stock market, and a lot of discretionary purchases. 2023 is going to be a VERY bad year.
And banks are going to be in REAL trouble because without any NEW loans, and values dropping on older loans, they are stuck with TOXIC ASSETS again. But NO BAIL OUT this time, because they did not FIX THEIR OWN PROBLEMS before.
The Stock market IS GOING TO FEEL IT THE WORST, SO MANY BUSINESSES TOOK OUT LANS TO BUY BACK STOCK, TO STABILIZE THEIR STOCK PRICES. But the prices are still going down. if stocks were used as collateral for loans, those loan will be pulled, and the stocks will be on a fire sale, like housing and stocks during 2006-2009.
Time to finally get all bubbles fixed, and to NEVER let them happen again.