When Jefferson County marked its second year of dealing with the
Kelley Vollmar
COVID-19 pandemic on Wednesday, March 23, life was beginning to look brighter, with new coronavirus cases decreasing sharply and many residents foregoing masks and returning to more normal routines.
However, it was only a couple of months ago the county was seeing a record number of coronavirus cases and deaths.
The first three COVID-19 cases in Jefferson County were reported March 23, 2020. As of Monday, March 21, a total of 52,988 cases had been reported in the county since the start of the pandemic, the Jefferson County Health Department reported.
In the second year of the pandemic, from March 23, 2021, to Sunday, March 20, a total of 32,326 cases had been reported, according to the Health Department.
In addition, the county has seen a total of 528 people die because of COVID-19. Of those total deaths, 288 occurred during the second year, the Health Department reported.
Also in the second year many countians got vaccinated, which helped slow the spread of the virus, Health Department officials said.
“We saw the implementation of a vaccine which is probably the gold standard of our prevention strategies, and that was a bit of a game changer because we did see that number (of vaccinated people) go up pretty quickly (once they became widely available), and we did see a reduction of cases prior to variants coming into play,” said Brianne Zwiener, public communications officer for the Health Department.
Sara Wilton, epidemiologist for the Health Department, said there is no way to predict the future of COVID-19 with only two years of data.
“Each year has been so different that we can’t necessarily predict what’s going to happen or when there’s going to be another surge or another variant of concern that’s going to pop up,” Wilton said. “In my personal opinion, I would say that instead of worrying about what’s going to happen, we really just need to protect ourselves with the best way that we know possible, which is the vaccine.”
Record-breaking year
Wilton said many people believe the pandemic is over, but she noted that not long ago the county was seeing a record number of new coronavirus cases.
From Jan. 9 to Jan. 15, the county had 3,313 new cases, the largest number in one week, the Health Department reported.
“We’ve already had in 2022 about 13,500 cases, and that’s almost as many as we had in the entire year of 2020,” she said on March 8. “We had 176 deaths in 2020 and we have already had 101 (reported) in 2022.”
Health Department Director Kelley Vollmar said she was not surprised to see those record-breaking numbers of cases in the second year because of the reluctance among some to follow other recommendations to mitigate the spread of the virus.
“I think we anticipated that more pressure was going to be put on us to start to either roll back or to limit the mitigation measures,” she said. “There comes a certain psychological point where I think people just want to get back to their normal lives and get back to where they were. We saw that over the course of the two years and that definitely impacted our efforts to do our (prevention) steps.”
Vaccine
While COVID-19 vaccines first became available late in 2020, most countians who received them were vaccinated in 2021.
As of March 16, just slightly more than 50 percent of countians had received two vaccines, and about 20 percent had received two vaccines and a booster, the Health Department reported.
“I don’t see that number increasing by a large amount,” Zwiener said
Vollmar agreed.
“We’re over a year of the vaccine at this point, and I think we kind of all are operating under the motto that everybody who wants to get it has gotten it,” she said. “The further away that we get from a surge or the further away that we get from a new variant of a virus, the less intensity in terms of people feeling like they need to get this right now.”
Vollmar wishes more people would get vaccinated, though.
Melissa Parmeley, clinical services manager, said the Health Department is not doing large-scale clinics anymore, but they are working to get the vaccine to homebound people and holding smaller clinics to give boosters.
Variants
The second year of the pandemic included the widely spread variants, Delta and Omicron.
Vollmar said she expects to see more variants. “Viruses utilize their hosts to mutate, and so as long as people continue to get sick, there’s going to be that opportunity for something to mutate and to be able to change,” she said.
Jeana Vidacak, public health preparedness supervisor, said she believes more variants will spread, but she hopes we don’t have any more large surges.
“I am very hopeful that we are going to maintain what we are now and see cases here and there,” she said. “I think that we still are planning for there to be more surges.”
Cases of the latest variant, Omicron BA.2, are on the rise in parts of Asia and Europe, and the variant has made its way to the U.S. as well, leading some health experts to predict that we’ll see another uptick in new COVID-19 cases.
Parmeley said no matter what variant comes the Health Department is ready.
“Regardless of the cases and the levels or the surges, we’re going to continue to provide the services we’re going to be able to and provide COVID testing if needed,” she said.
Misinformation
Health Department officials said they feel like they had to deal with more COVID-19 misinformation in year two of the pandemic.
“My strategy is when I have provided that information and that education, I’m not going to continue in an argument or you know, a 17-comment thread stream,” Zwiener said.
She said she has worked to make correct information easy and accessible.
“I’ve kind of taken a ‘you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink (mindset),’” she said. “I just make sure I bring them to the water, the water is clean, they have lots of options and there are lemon slices.”
Vollmar said the Health Department also has worked to give the same correct information from different health officials.
“Our population has reached the point where they feel educated about it, they feel like they know what they need to do,” she said.
whether that’s getting vaccinated, whether that’s masking, whether that’s not doing anything because they believe they’ve got a healthy immunity,” she said.
