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Amid new signs that the pandemic is slowing, the district’s health department confirmed that 43 infections related to the mu-coronavirus variant had been detected in the region as of April.
San Diego County released its most positive coronavirus report in weeks on Wednesday, reporting four days in a row with a total of new cases below 1,000 and a total of 519 on Monday, the lowest number in a day reported since July.
Hospital admissions related to COVID are also on a downward trend, hitting 609 in all local hospitals on Tuesday, after peaking at 695 on September 1.
California’s latest estimate of the county’s effective transmission rate now drops it below 1 and is 0.89 for San Diego County. Numbers below 1 indicate that each new case generates fewer than one additional case on average, meaning the pandemic is on a declining path.
Brett McClain, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Sharp HealthCare, said on Wednesday that those numbers have recently resulted in a lower number of tests that came back positive over the past week as the number approved with COVID-19 fell slightly .
“It looked a little promising last week,” said McClain. “I feel a little more encouragement than I have for some time.”
Dr. Seema Shah, medical director of the county’s epidemiology and immunization division, said the current pattern of numbers signals a change in the local status of the pandemic.
“Yes, we are currently plateauing, but the three-day weekend may very well have changed that,” said Shah.
Whether Labor Day weekend causes another surge in cases, followed by an inevitable surge in hospital admissions and deaths, depends on how much immunity was in the community when the parties were taking place.
It’s easy to see how many are protected by vaccines. More than 2.1 million people across the county are fully vaccinated, according to the county’s latest report, representing about 63 percent of the population, including about 500,000 children under 12 who are not yet approved for the vaccination.
As of Wednesday’s weekly update, 2.4 million residents of the district had received at least one dose of vaccine, out of the 2.8 million residents 12 and over who are eligible. This means that over the weekend around 290,000 residents of the district were partially protected, with around 380,000 eligible but not yet vaccinated.
Surviving a coronavirus infection naturally leaves protective antibodies in the blood that continue to help fight the virus for an unknown number of months after recovery.
Since many have mild or no symptoms after infection, it is impossible to know exactly how large the group of people with natural antibodies is, although the county’s records show there were around 56,000 residents from July 1 to September 7 Tested Positive How many of them weren’t vaccinated wasn’t available Wednesday night, but the county’s latest report estimates that about 80 percent of the new cases confirmed since Aug. 9 have occurred in unvaccinated residents.
With hundreds of thousands of children and adults still unvaccinated and unlikely to have natural immunity, now is not the time to celebrate good news in weekly numbers, Shah said.
“To continue this trend, people need to mask when they congregate, get vaccinated and get tested when they have symptoms,” said Shah. “We’ve been through this before, where we can plateau briefly and then rise again when people drop their guards.”
As Delta has shown, coronavirus is a constantly evolving threat, hence the recent concern about the mu variant.
Experts agree that at this moment of improvement in the number of cases, a new variant is always of great importance, but the one denoted by the 12th letter of the Greek alphabet will probably not be the new delta.
Scripps Research immunologist and molecular biologist Kristian Andersen said Wednesday that the variant, which has been scientifically named B.1.162 since it was first discovered in Colombia earlier this year, is less transmissible than the delta variant, which is the world’s summer surge caused. Genetic analysis done by Andersen’s lab and others shows that the variant that the World Health Organization named Mu in early September has simply not been able to outperform Delta since it first appeared in the spring.
“Not only do I think it’s competitive with Delta, I think Delta has beaten it pretty fairly and fairly,” said Andersen, noting that two of the local mu infections were snow leopards, which were positive for coronavirus infections in late July were tested at the San Diego Zoo.
While the virus remains “watched”, the researcher said in an email that the next threat is more likely to come from an already known attacker.
“I think the next line of real interest will almost certainly be an underline from Delta,” said Andersen.
Some may wonder if Mu has actually been showing up in lab reports since April, why he was never included in the county’s now weekly reports on coronavirus variants.
Shah said the report only includes those variants officially identified as of concern or of concern by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So far, the CDC has not followed the WHO’s lead in classifying mu as a variant of concern or concern.
“We don’t usually report a particular variant until the CDC says, ‘Hey, this is something we’re worried about,'” said Shah.
And that applies to the vast majority of the variations found in coronavirus samples collected so far. In San Diego County alone, Andersen’s lab and several others have documented 224 different lines of virus, although only a handful of evidence has shown them to become major public health concerns. The number of genetically unique types exceeds 1,600 worldwide.
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