New variants of the Covid-19 virus are causing another increase in cases that is not expected to peak until early next month, Mendocino County Public Health Officer Dr. Andy Coren reported in his latest update to county residents.
“We’re clearly seeing a wave, but this is not like it was in the prior surges, and that’s a good thing,” said Coren on June 17, describing the “current Covid wave of increasing cases and hospitalizations (as) due to this highly contagious BA.2.12.1,” which is a subvariant of the Omicron variant.
Based on the experiences of other countries and the city of New York with this subvariant, Coren said “it looks like the surge in cases (in California) is slowly forming a shoulder, just as it did in New York about a month ago.
“At the same time, California is experiencing even less hospitalizations than New York had,” he continued, explaining that, however, even more variants are now adding to the mix: BA.4 and BA.5.
“They are expecting the BA.5 to be even more contagious than the BA.4, and the projection now is that we’ll probably see a peak in cases in early July, and a peak in hospitalizations in late July, with a long, slow tapering off of cases thereafter, because the BA.4 and BA.5 have shown no increases in their virulence,” he said.
In Mendocino County, Coren said the rate of cases “increased by a factor of 10 – 1,000 percent – in the past 10 weeks,” which moved the county “into the red, or high-transmission, zone for the (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)”
As for hospitalizations, Coren said the rate in Mendocino County doubled earlier this month with “nine county residents hospitalized” due to Covid, but as of his report Friday, that number had dropped to three. And because of that drop, he said the CDC recently moved the county out of the high-risk category and into the “medium-risk.”
As for outbreaks, Coren said Friday there were four outbreaks in the county, all of which he described as being in “congregate care areas.” He added that three of of the outbreaks had been “closed” as of his report.
He also reported Friday that about a week after school graduations, most of which were held outdoors, there “hadn’t been a rush of new cases from school-age people.”
