When COVID-19 vaccines became widely available earlier this year, Cincinnatians largely rushed to get theirs.
But with a vaccination plateau and the coronavirus becoming even more transmissible in recent weeks, Southwest Ohio isn’t quite out of the woods.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Hamilton County now has a “substantial” risk for coronavirus — a change from earlier this summer when the CDC said the county’s risk was low or moderate. As of Monday morning, Hamilton’s surrounding counties in Ohio — Butler, Clermont and Warren — also are listed as substantial. Hamilton County has a rate of 66.42 coronavirus cases per 100,000 individuals, the CDC says, which is much higher than its rate in late spring when most public health measures were dropped.
A little further to the east and to the north, Adams, Clinton, Greene, Highland and Montgomery counties are faring a bit worse. They’re listed as “high risk,” the highest level the CDC provides.
The Kentucky counties near Cincinnati aren’t doing well, either. Boone County is listed as high risk, while the risk in Kenton and Campbell counties is labeled as substantial.
As CityBeat has previously reported, the majority of counties throughout the rest of Kentucky are high risk.
The CDC uses local, state and national data to designate coronavirus hotspots. Earlier during the pandemic, the Ohio Department of Health also had a county-by-county map of risk levels throughout the state (Hamilton County had frequently been at extremely high risk) but discontinued its map earlier this year.
The Delta variant of the coronavirus has been responsible for the sharp uptick in cases, hospitalizations and deaths, and scientists warn that this strain is much more dangerous than the original virus. People infected with Delta carry 1,000 times more of the virus, which makes it easier to transmit among others when speaking, singing, sneezing or breathing hard, particularly within indoor areas. Health experts say that Delta is more than twice as easy to transmit than the original virus.
Unvaccinated individuals are at the highest risk for severe infection and substantial health issues, experts say. Because of the easier shareability, people who have received a Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson (J&J) COVID-19 vaccine also are becoming infected, but their symptoms and rates are less severe.
On July 27, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky held a briefing to address the Delta variant and to recommend that individuals — even those who are vaccinated — return to routine masking, particularly indoors, in regions with great risk of transmission (which includes Greater Cinncinnati), and in areas with low vaccination rates. Walensky said that universal masking can help protect individuals who are not yet eligible for vaccines, such as children under age 12 and people who have compromised immune systems.
Walensky said that more people need to get a COVID-19 vaccine, as the virus could mutate further and become even more infectious. She added that the country’s overall low vaccination rates enabled the Delta variant in the first place.
“This could have been avoided with higher vaccination coverage in this country,” she said.
In May, the CDC had advised that vaccinated individuals no longer needed to mask up but unvaccinated individuals should continue to wear masks, practice physical distancing and consider vaccination. New data has changed that.
“We’re not changing the science,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, told CNN last week. “The virus changed, and the science evolved with the changing virus.”
Greater Cincinnati hospitals are considering mandating COVID-19 vaccines for staff, WXIX recently reported.
The CDC’s Walensky also called for universal masking for all students and employees in K-12 schools. Cincinnati Children’s immediately shared a statement supporting that directive.
“Cincinnati Children’s recommends that all children returning to in-person school wear masks, regardless of vaccination status. Many children are not yet eligible to be vaccinated against COVID-19, and others should mask because no vaccine is 100% effective at preventing infection,” the statement said. “In addition, teachers and staff should continue to wear masks, regardless of vaccination status.”
During a media briefing on July 29 — two days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) resumed recommending mask wearing — Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear strongly pushed universal masking for Kentucky’s schools that are returning to in-person activities in August. The governor noted that the Delta variant was quickly moving throughout the state, and masks and vaccinations were essential to stopping it from doing further harm.
“This Delta variant is aggressively spreading across this country, and places that haven’t taken steps are seeing results that we should know by now — widespread outbreaks, clusters, large amounts of quarantines,” Beshear said. “We don’t have to have that happen. We have a very simple equation: vaccinations, plus (when we need to) mask wearing equals we can do everything that we want in our Commonwealth and our economy.”
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine told CNN on Aug. 2 that he will not consider statewide mask mandates or other public health protections again, despite the state’s sharp rise in coronavirus cases. Last week, WEWS-TV in Cleveland reported that Ohio’s COVID-19 cases had increased by more than 1,000 for several days in a row.
Jerome Adams, the previous U.S. Surgeon General appointed by former President Donald Trump, recently said that it was “premature” to ease mask restrictions in late May and early June, as Kentucky, Ohio and many other states had done. The CDC had recommended that fully vaccinated individuals no longer needed to wear masks for their own protection or the protection of others, but many leaders of many local governments — including DeWine, used that to walk back all mask mandates, eliminating a preventative measure while vaccination rates continued to decrease.
Find COVID-19 vaccines in Ohio and Kentucky.
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This article appears in Jul 21 – Aug 4, 2021.