74.7% of Pasadenans Fully Vaccinated Against COVID-19, But Presence of New Variants in U.S. Causes Concern

Just under three-quarters of Pasadena’s population over 12 had been vaccinated against COVID-19 as the state on Tuesday lifted longstanding pandemic restrictions, officials said.

In addition to the 74.7% of eligible city residents who have been fully vaccinated, 85.2% of the population has received at least one dose of two-dose regimens, according to Pasadena Public Health Department data.

A single new COVID-19 infection and no new deaths were reported by Pasadena health officials.

The city’s pandemic totals stood at 11,315 cases of COVID-19 and 249 fatalities, records show. The city’s average number of daily infections over the prior week dipped slightly to 2.1.

Officials at Huntington Hospital reported treating six COVID-19 patients as of Tuesday, with three of them being cared for in intensive care units.

With increasingly aggressive strains of COVID-19 emerging regularly, the importance of vaccination is increasing, Huntington Hospital Infectious Disease expert Dr. Kimberly Shriner said.

One of particular concern is the so-called “Delta,” or B.1.617.2, variant, first detected in India. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention labeled it Tuesday as a “variant of concern.”

“That is not only even more infectious than the UK variant, the Alpha B.117, but it’s also nastier. When it infects you, it seems to turn off your ability to fight the infection. So people get very sick, very fast,” Shriner said.

“If you are unvaccinated, you are at very high risk with that virus,” Shriner said. The risk posed by the Delta variant was believed to be more than twice that of the original COVID-19 strain.

Shriner said she was not aware of any infections involving the strain in Pasadena, although more genomic testing is needed. It was believed that about 5% of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. involved the Delta variant.

Pasadena Director of Public Health and Health Officer Dr. Ying-Ying Goh said Tuesday the “most important thing we can do now is to keep getting more people vaccinated.”

“Some initial evidence supports the likelihood that current vaccines provide some protection against the Delta variant,” Goh said.

Data published Monday by Public Health England indicated the existing vaccines are effective against the Delta strain.

“The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is 96% effective against hospitalisation after two doses,” the agency said in a written statement. That’s “comparable with vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation from the Alpha [B.117] variant.”

“Further work remains underway to establish the level of protection against mortality from the Delta variant. However, as with other variants, this is expected to be high,” the statement added.

“Public Health England has previously published analysis showing that one dose is 17% less effective at preventing symptomatic illness from the Delta variant, compared to Alpha [B.117], but there is only a small difference after two doses,” the PHE statement said.

With a vaccination rate among the highest in the state, Pasadena is on particularly good footing, Shriner said.

“That’s when you have a low level of circulating virus, regardless of what the variant may be, and it’s less likely to be here,” she said. “But that being said, in areas of the country that are poorly vaccinated for whatever reason, the virus is going to circulate there and those folks are in grave danger.”

It’s important to stamp out the pandemic as quickly as possible with widespread vaccination before COVID-19 ends up mutating into a form that does not respond to the vaccines.

“There’s a selective pressure on the virus to find a mutation that can evade the vaccines. And that’s a very, very big concern for all of us,” Shriner said. “We don’t want to start this over again. I think all of us are really sick of it and exhausted from it.”

County health officials reported Tuesday that 56% of the county’s eligible residents were fully vaccinated.

An additional 210 new COVID-19 infections and six deaths were also reported, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. In all, the county had recorded 1,246,619 cases of the virus and 24,416 deaths.

Two hundred and eighteen patients remained hospitalized with the virus county-wide, authorities said. Twenty percent of them were being treated in ICUs.

L.A. County Director of Public Health Barbara Ferrer remarked on how much the situation has changed in recent months.

“At the peak of the pandemic, we were losing 277 residents a day,” she said. “More than 15,000 new cases were diagnosed each day.”

“After 16 months of enormous upheaval and loss, we can now move forward with a genuine sense of hope. We can and should feel joy while recognizing and honoring the immense collective effort that brought us to the point where we can fully reopen,” Ferrer said.

“We remain committed to protecting your health and to closing gaps in health outcomes associated with COVID-19. Case counts and transmission are low because of our shared efforts to implement a layered approach to preventing transmission,” she added. “As we reopen, we are mindful that for those not yet vaccinated, protection is highly dependent on our continued actions to take care of each other.”

L.A. County’s infection rate was the lowest of any major metropolitan area of similar size in the nation, county officials said.

The California Department of Public Health announced 628 new infections and 10 deaths on Tuesday, raising the state totals to 3,697,927 COVID-19 cases and 62,515 deaths.

The state’s average positivity rate over the prior week was recorded at 0.7%, according to CDPH data.

As of Tuesday, L.A. County accounted for 34% of California’s COVID-19 infections and 39% of the state’s deaths.