By Pepper Fisher
PORT ANGELES – At Friday morning’s weekly Covid briefing, County Health Officer Dr. Allison Berry Unthank began with the numbers. Clallam County lists a total of 658 cases. We have high but improving numbers in cases per 100K at 149, no current hospitalizations, and a percentage of positivity in the last 2 weeks of 4.4%.
Dr. Unthank said a large spike of 17 cases posted Wednesday was actually not a spike at all, but a 3-day backup at the lab that caused the number of cases over several days to be posted all at once. She said she is pleased to report that our county did not see a significant surge following Thanksgiving.
Dr. Unthank said that vaccine shots began today at Olympic Medical Center for those in the 1A group, starting with frontline healthcare workers. Others in that group are first responders and residents/staff at 3 local long term care facilities. All of the other long term care facilities will be served by a federal government program.
“Some of our assisted living facilities didn’t quite have the infrastructure support they needed to do that program and so we will be vaccinating them with our staff. And so that will be starting next week.”
She says the 1A group is 4 times larger than the number of vaccines we have, so frontline healthcare workers will go first.
The Dr. addressed yesterday’s announcement from Gov. Inslee that Washington state would be receiving 40% fewer doses in the coming weeks than was originally promised.
“We don’t yet know why that is. I would anticipate it’s likely a logistics issue. You know, it’s very complex to move that much vaccine, especially with the specifications of the Pfizer vaccine. But I am hopeful that with Moderna coming on at about the same time that that will fill that gap and help vaccinate more members of the 1A group for us. So we are likely going to be using the Moderna vaccine to vaccinate parts of our 1A group, and I think with those two at the same time, it should balance out.”
Dr. Unthank says agrees with the latest messaging from the state Department of Health about reopening schools based on the latest data that shows very little spread of the virus in school settings, and she thinks we will see our larger districts reopening in-class learning after the winter break. Smaller districts have remained open all along.