COVID booster shots drive demand for Fresno County vaccinations. What are the reasons?
More than 114,000 Fresno County residents have received booster doses of COVID-19 vaccines – an indication, health officials say, that people are concerned about ensuring protection for themselves and relatives for large holiday family gatherings this winter.
More than 60% of all of the coronavirus shots administered in the county since Nov. 1 have been third doses or boosters for people who were already fully vaccinated, but for whom months had passed since their previous doses of the Pfizer, Moderna or Janssen/Johnson & Johnson vaccines, according to data from the state Department of Public Health.
Over the past two weeks, an average of more than 3,200 shots per day have been given by doctors, clinics and pharmacies across Fresno County. More than 1,950 of that daily average has been for boosters.
And just this week, as news spread about the emergence of the new Omicron variant of coronavirus, the daily average for total doses lurched upward to almost 4,400 shots per day, of which an average of almost 2,600 doses were boosters.
Joe Prado, interim assistant director of the Fresno County Department of Public Health, said Friday that vaccine providers’ conversations with people indicate that “the overwhelming part of people (receiving boosters) want to be protected for the holidays.”
“They’re seeing cases not really going down, and they want to be together with their family and feel safe about it,” he added. “Everybody’s planning on a big family get-together … and they’re thinking about their elders, or some of them are younger parents with younger children who aren’t eligible yet to be vaccinated. They want to make sure they’re protecting their children as much as possible.”
Dr. Rais Vohra, interim health officer for Fresno County, said that the uncertainty over whether the new Omicron variant, of which two cases have been reported in California after it was initially detected in countries in southern Africa, could be a factor, as well. Little is known so far about whether it is more contagious, or may cause more severe illness, than the Delta variant that is already in wide circulation in California and the U.S.
“Certainly the news about this new variant has gotten everybody’s attention, and perhaps appropriately so,” Vohra said Friday. “So if that’s triggering people to get boosters or vaccines, that’s certainly a good development because we are really a little bit behind the rest of the state in terms of getting everybody vaccinated that we need to.”
Preparing for Omicron variant
As of Friday, the only two confirmed cases of the Omicron variant in California have surfaced in San Francisco and in Los Angeles County, and Vohra said there’s been no indication that the heavily mutated strain of coronavirus has made its way into Fresno County or the central San Joaquin Valley.
“I think it’s important for us to know about, but really contextualize in the larger picture, right now we don’t have any cases. It’s very possible that in the future that may change,” Vohra said. “What we need to not lose sight of is the fact that the Delta variant is still very dominant here in Fresno County. All of these new cases that we’re describing right now and all of these folks that are getting hospitalized right now are … because of the Delta variant.”
“Even though there’s a lot that’s unknown about this new variant, let’s not forget what we do know and have worked very hard to establish, which is that we know a lot about the Delta variant that we’re dealing with right now, and that the vaccines work really well against the Delta variant” to prevent infection and prevent serious illness from the virus, Vohra added.
Regardless of which COVID-19 variant is circulating in the population, Vorha said the same precautions that have been preached by health officials since the earliest months of the pandemic in spring of 2020 remain important. Those include hand washing and hygiene, wearing face masks, social distancing, avoiding crowds in close contact, and staying home if sick to prevent possibly infecting others, as well as getting vaccinated against the virus.
“We need to be realistic; sooner or later a laboratory from the state is going to contact me or one of our medical community to say the whole-genome sequencing shows a case of the Omicron variant” in Fresno County, Vohra said. “Sooner or later that is going to happen, and we need to prepare for that eventuality.”
In terms of treating the patient and moving forward with a response to the variant, “it probably won’t change too much because this is still COVID,” he added. “We know what it can do, more or less. … Some people may have a worse course than others. We certainly hope that it’s mild.” So far, Vohra said the cases that have been described elsewhere show that “none of those have required hospitalization.”
“We hope the treatments we have will work, but that’s a real unknown,” he said. “This variant has so many mutations, especially in parts of the virus that are targets for our therapies” including vaccines and other treatments.
“But nonetheless, we will deal with that as it comes,” Vohra said.
Fresno County stats
Through Friday, laboratory testing has confirmed almost 145,000 COVID-19 cases in Fresno County since the first infections were discovered in early March 2020. Of those, the virus was cited as the cause of death for 2,270 patients.
To date, 57.3% of Fresno County residents who are eligible to receive coronavirus vaccine shots – everyone ages 5 and older – are fully vaccinated, meaning they’ve had two doses of the two-shot Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, or a single shot of the Janssen/Johnson & Johnson one-dose vaccine.
Still, out of Fresno County’s overall population of 1.03 million, more than 419,000 people have yet to receive even a single dose of vaccine.
