As Santa Barbara County recovers from its third and highest-yet peak in COVID-19 cases, health officials say the region still has a long journey ahead to reach the next tier in the state’s reopening system.
“Our COVID metrics, indeed, have significantly decreased since peaking mid-January. We’re seeing about a 60.5 [percent] reduction in our case rate, and we’re seeing about a 38 percent reduction in our testing positivity,” Public Health Director Dr. Van Do-Reynoso said at a Feb. 5 press conference.
But, she continued, “in order for us to reach the red tier, our case rate needs to decrease by an additional 80 percent, and our testing positivity needs to decrease by an additional 20 percent.”
Getting the community into the red tier is an essential step toward reopening schools. According to the Blueprint for a Safer Economy webpage, public kindergarten through 12th grade schools can reopen for in-person instruction once their county is in the red tier for at least five days, and once a school posts its COVID-19 Safety Plan on its website homepage.
“Simply put, we need to have fewer than 32 new cases a day to reach to the red tier, and right now we’re averaging 157 new cases per day,” Do-Reynoso said. “We still have a lot of work to do.”
In the meantime, the county is helping schools prepare their COVID-19 Safety Plans so they can reopen as soon as it’s allowed under state guidelines.
“We are reviewing the safety plans and offering suggestions for improvement, and awaiting corrections. Some of these schools are very, very close to having a top notch school safety plan ready to go,” Do-Reynoso said.
She announced later that the Santa Barbara Unified School District and the Buellton Unified School District had their safety plans approved by the public health team.
Another looming question is when educators will be able to receive the COVID-19 vaccine in Santa Barbara County. The county plans to prioritize education and child care workers, as well as food and agriculture employees and emergency services personnel, in the next phase of vaccine rollout. Community members who are 65 or older will also be eligible for the vaccine in this next phase. But Public Health Officer Dr. Henning Ansorg said that the county is still struggling to vaccinate residents in the first phase—health care workers and people 75 or older who want to be vaccinated.
At the press conference, Ansorg said Santa Barbara County has about 36,000 residents over the age of 75 and about 26,000 health care workers. He added that while 75 percent of the elderly want to accept the vaccine at this point, only about 50 percent of the health care workers countywide do. At Cottage Hospital, about 80 percent of workers accepted the vaccine, Ansorg said, whereas that number sits around 30 percent at skilled nursing facilities.
“That brings the number of vaccines needed to cover this initial phase to roughly 80,000, because remember, two shots are needed for every person,” Ansorg said. “Given the fact that the Public Health Department has been receiving about 6,000 vaccine doses per week for the whole county, it is obvious that it could easily take 12 weeks or longer to complete this task.”
Although, Ansorg said, “the vaccine supply to the Public Health Department is slowly increasing.” The next phase—individuals 65 and older and some essential workers, like teachers—will likely require even more doses than the first phase, Ansorg said.
“We are estimating that we require anywhere from 70,000 to 100,000 vaccine doses just to cover these groups, depending on how many of these actually want to be vaccinated,” he said. “I’m sure you can imagine that it is very challenging to plan and schedule for vaccinations if the amount of available vaccine is determined only week by week. It’s also difficult when we’re not in a position to schedule vaccinations ahead of time, because we do not know how much vaccine we will actually receive next week.”
When enough doses do become available, Ansorg confirmed that the county plans to open up eligibility to the 65-and-up age group, teachers, farmworkers, and emergency services personnel concurrently.
“We are thinking even if there is only a 60 percent acceptance of the vaccine that we would need about 100,000 doses,” Ansorg said. “So we anticipate a lot of people in this particular group. We are hoping that we are getting more vaccines and that it doesn’t take even longer than this first phase that we’re just about to finish.”
This article appears in Feb 11-18, 2021.