It has been nearly a month since Orange County celebrated the post-pandemic reopening of its economy on June 15. While health officials are touting COVID-19 vaccination milestones, experts say remaining cautious is the best strategy. 

On Wednesday, June 30, the Orange County Health Agency reported that 70% of O.C. residents 18 and older have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Yet, despite the optimism surrounding reopening, county health officials say there is still reason to exercise caution regarding COVID-19 – even as the county reaches vaccination milestones.

Simultaneously, the county’s health agency has announced that it will no longer report daily COVID-19 case totals, and is shifting to a weekly report. The report, according to HCA, will be published every Tuesday, by 5:00 p.m.

With this shift in reporting, local health experts, like UC Irvine Epidemiologist Andrew Noymer, say that continuing the daily COVID-19 cases counts might actually help – especially considering the county is fully reopened.

“I’ve looked at those numbers everyday since they started publishing them – for the last 400 days in a row without fail,” Noymer said in an interview with Irvine Weekly. “They announced this [weekly COVID-19 reports] sometime ago, it went under the radar, and it was in the fine print, but now they’ve finally started doing it.”

Noymer added that he thinks sooner or later the county will need to go back to daily COVID-19 case counts.

“We’re in a lenient period in the summer, the seasonality of the virus is becoming apparent, and a lot of the U.S. population has been vaccinated — not enough, but a lot,” Noymer explained. “But, that doesn’t mean the pandemic is over. If there’s one thing that’s consistent messaging is that it’s not over yet.”

Noymer emphasized that he was not shocked, nor appalled at HCA’s decision to shift to weekly reports, but said the data would be welcome from a social standpoint, just to see “what’re the COVID numbers doing these days?”

Looking outside of Orange County, Noymer pointed to Los Angeles, where a face mask recommendation is still in place.

“[Dr.] Barbara Ferrer has gotten a lot of attention lately for recommending masks — even indoors, even for vaccinated people,” he said. “Yet, Orange County sees fit to reduce the frequency of COVID reporting, from seven times weekly, to five times a week — to weekly.”

On Thursday, July 8, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported 515 new COVID-19 cases with 8 new COVID-19 related deaths.

As of July 7, LADPH reported 1,253,536 cumulative COVID-19 cases, including 24,514 deaths.

In HCA’s last daily update, on Tuesday, July 6, O.C. recorded 331 new COVID-19 cases between July 3 and July 6.

In Orange County the recent July 4 weekend marked the first official holiday weekend residents were able to celebrate without COVID-19 restrictions in place.

Yet, while the county is set to decrease the frequency at which it will report COVID-19 statistics, Dr. Clayton Chau continued to emphasize the importance of vaccination as the main defense against COVID-19.

“Since the reopening of our state on June 15, with many people no longer wearing masks or physically distancing, we’ve seen a slight increase in our seven-day positivity rate from 0.9% to 1.1% in the lowest HPI quartile areas. Of most interest is the fact that over 90% of new positive cases were among people who are not fully vaccinated,” Chau said in a Wednesday, June 30 statement. “In fact, over 95% of persons hospitalized with COVID-19 had not been fully vaccinated. We know the vaccines work. We are continuing to offer them to our community and encourage everyone who are not vaccinated to do so.”

As of July 6, there were a total of 73 patients being treated for COVID-19 in O.C. hospitals, with 11 in the intensive care unit.

Since June, the county’s ICU has yet to see a total lower than six, while the number of patients hospitalized for COVID-19 reached a low of 40 on June 26.

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