By RICHARD SKOLNIKLos Alamos
Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a series of COVID-19 Updates by Richard Skolnik that appear bi-weekly in the Los Alamos Daily Post. These are meant to keep the community informed on the status of the pandemic, critical new findings on the pandemic, and what this information suggests for our community’s response to COVID-19. These updates complement the data that Eli Ben-Naim prepares for the Post. Unless otherwise noted, data is from the New York Times and the New Mexico Department of Health.
Pandemic Data and Trends – For the Week Ending Oct. 18, 2021
In the US, cases declined by 20%, hospitalizations by 19%, and deaths by 11% over the last two weeks. The daily average of new cases in the US over the last week was about 83,000, with a daily average rate of 25 cases per 100,000. Cases are declining in the South but rising in a number of states.
Over the last two weeks, the daily average of news cases rose in New Mexico by 39%. Hospitalizations declined by 3% but deaths rose by 24%. The daily average number of cases over the last week was 956, with a rate of 46 per 100,000. Almost 72% of all New Mexicans over age 18 have been fully vaccinated.
Los Alamos had a daily average over the last week of about 8 cases and a rate of 43 per 100,000 population. This is the highest rate of new cases in Los Alamos since the pandemic began in early 2020 and was an increase of 123% over the last two weeks. The age distribution of new cases (thanks to Eli Ben-Naim) is shown in the graphic below. Almost 90% of the adults over 18 in Los Alamos have been fully vaccinated.
Important Pandemic Information
New Mexico hospitals are now operating under Crisis Standards of Care, a framework for rationing care.
New Mexico is providing Pfizer boosters to eligible people.
It appears that the FDA Advisory group will recommend boosters for certain people who got Moderna and all people who got J&J. It looks like they will also recommend approval of “mixing and matching” of vaccines. Additional approvals by CDC are still required before implementation.
The FDA will consider on October 26 a request from Pfizer for emergency use authorization of vaccines for ages 5-11.
Cases among children in the states that report continued to decline. Over 5,000 children in the US have suffered multi-system inflammatory syndrome.
If you are unvaccinated in NM, your risk of being infected, hospitalized, and dying is 4.8 times, 7.2 times, and 10.7 times greater than if you are vaccinated.
All active-duty staff at LANL are now fully vaccinated or on the path to full vaccination.
What Do We Need to Do in Los Alamos?
The pandemic is not behind us. Rather, our rate of new cases is the highest it has been since the pandemic began. Moreover, our young children will remain unvaccinated for some time and at risk of infection and of bringing infections to others. Until boosted, many of our adults also have waning immunity to the virus.
We need as a community to do what we can to get rates of new infections back down to the low level that they were at for some time. Getting there will require continued and consistent implementation of our school and community mitigation efforts.
It will also require, among other things:
- Explicit efforts by community leaders to bring us together in this effort. This is a normal part of such efforts everywhere in the world but has been almost absent in Los Alamos.
- Urgently improving our understanding of the outbreak, on which we have largely been “flying blind.” LAPS has done extensive contact tracing. However, LAPS deals with only a share of our total cases. It appears that no one at the state or the county level has made an effort to examine the recent outbreak, draw conclusions about spread, help us refine our approach to mitigation, and speak clearly to the community about what is going on and what needs to be done about it. The community’s lack of knowledge of the outbreak fuels rumors about how the virus is spreading, rather than a common and evidence-based understanding of what we face.
- Being very careful about community events, lest they become opportunities for viral spread. We have greatly increased the number of such events lately, despite the fact that our case counts have been increasing.
- Rigorously engaging in quarantine and isolation when you are asked to do so. Quarantine and isolation are not “fun.” However, the failure to engage in them properly, even by a small number of people or families, can lead to infections, hospitalization, deaths, school closings, rationing of hospital care, and continued blows to the local economy.
Editor’s Note: Richard Skolnik is the former regional director for health for South Asia at the World Bank. He was the director of an AIDS treatment program for Harvard and taught Global Health at the George Washington University and Yale. He is the author of Global Health 101 and the instructor for Yale/Coursera’s Essentials of Global Health. Skolnik has written this article in his personal capacity.