Orange County’s COVID-19 hospitalizations ticked up Wednesday as the county also logged eight more fatalities, most of which occurred this month.
The number of hospitalized patients increased from 288 Tuesday to 291, with the number of intensive care unit patients increasing from 72 to 82, according to the Orange County Health Care Agency.
The county has 23.7% of its ICU beds available and 66% of its ventilators. Despite Wednesday’s slight increase, the county has seen its number of COVID patients gradually declining in the last couple months.
“Hospital numbers are down significantly compared to a week ago,” Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist and UC Irvine professor of population health and disease prevention, told City News Service on Tuesday after weekly averages were released. “Things are moving in the right direction. All of Southern California, not just Orange County, is looking good. Things are getting better.”
The county’s weekly case rate per 100,000 residents improved from 11.3 to 9.7, while the positivity rate fell from 3.7% to 3.4%. The county’s Health Equity Quartile positivity rate — which measures progress in low-income communities — dropped from 4.2% to 3.8%.
The county also logged another 305 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday and eight additional deaths, raising the cumulative totals to 297,237 cases and 5,426 fatalities since the pandemic began.
Of the deaths logged Wednesday, five occurred in September and the other three were in July.
The death toll for September is 67 and 156 for August.
That marks a stark contrast with the rest of the summer. The death toll for July increased to 25, 19 for June, 23 for May, 46 for April, 199 for March, 615 for February, 1,580 for January — the deadliest month of the pandemic — and 976 for December, the next deadliest.
Dr. Clayton Chau, chief health officer and the director of the OCHCA, said the county by now “should be over 70% of eligible individuals,” who have received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine. He said the vaccination rate among seniors is about 90%.
Dr. Regina Chinsio-Kwong, deputy county health officer, said Friday that 94% of the people who died in August were unvaccinated.
Without vaccines the death toll from this summer’s surge, which was fueled by the more contagious Delta variant, would have been higher, Chinsio-Kwong said.
“We could have been losing more people to Delta if we didn’t have the vaccination rates we have,” Chinsio-Kwong said.
Eight of the people who died from COVID complications in August were vaccinated and at least 65 years old, Chinsio-Kwong said. Seven were older than 75 and one who was between 65 and 74 was in a skilled nursing facility, she added.
All Orange County residents who died from COVID complications in September were not fully vaccinated, Chinsio-Kwong said. One had received one of two doses of the Moderna vaccine and the others did not receive any doses, she added.
Orange County Board of Supervisors Chairman Andrew Do and Supervisor Katrina Foley got into a heated discussion during Tuesday’s board meeting, with Foley questioning Chau in an extension of their recent feud over protocol.
Do said he felt Foley was expanding discussion on unrelated topics as the board was set to vote on a relatively routine agenda item. Foley argued that since the agenda item covered a grant for outreach on vaccination, it was appropriate to question Chau on where the county was in terms of vaccination levels.
“We have to have some kind of order,” Do snapped at Foley.
“You’re disrupting the order,” Foley angrily shot back.
When Do scolded her for interrupting him, she said, “You’re interrupting me. You interrupted my question.”
Do replied, “You may have this desire to turn every meeting into a circus,” which prompted Foley to shoot back, “You turned it into a circus … because you don’t like my questions for some unknown reason.”
Do replied, “Every question leads to something else with you … Now we’re going into a COVID update.”
Foley said, “I would think you of all people would care about COVID,” referring to the fully vaccinated Do’s breakthrough infection.
That drew a rebuke from Supervisor Don Wagner.
“I understand the heat of rhetoric,” Wagner said. But, he said, no matter anyone’s health status on the board, “All of us care about COVID, and to suggest you have to have it for it to matter to us is truly an unfortunate rhetorical flourish in the heat of argument and I object to it.”