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| Photo courtesy of the National Institutes of Health
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Orange County’s COVID-19 hospitalizations remained relatively flat compared with last week, according to data released Thursday by the Orange County Health Care Agency.
There were 164 patients hospitalized with the virus on Feb. 8, and that number increased to 170 as of Wednesday. The number of patients in intensive care rose from 19 to 26 in the same time period.
The agency logged 15 more fatalities, increasing the death toll to 7,908. Eleven of those fatalities occurred last month, boosting January’s death toll to 95.
Three of the fatalities occurred in December, raising its death toll to 147.
December is the first month with triple-digit deaths since the summer wave of infections. On two of the dates that month, 10 people died, marking the first time there were days of double-digit deaths since last February.
Of those hospitalized in the county, 62.6% are unvaccinated or partly vaccinated. The ICU patients are 63.2% partly vaccinated or unvaccinated.
The number of residents fully vaccinated increased from 2,367,020 to 2,367,539. The number of residents who have received at least one dose is 226,167. The number of booster shots administered increased from 1,447,774 to 1,449,113.
The number of children up to 4 years old who have received at least one dose inched up from 18,534 to just 18,643 with 11,780 fully vaccinated. Just 6.3% of the county’s population in the age group is fully vaccinated.
For 5- to 11-year-old children, 97,487 are fully vaccinated, about 36.8% of the age group. In the 12-to-17 age group, 69.6% are fully vaccinated.
The test positivity rate went from 6.1% to 6.5% and decreased from 7.1% to 6.8% in the health equity quartile, which measures the communities hardest hit by the pandemic.
The positivity rate for those fully vaccinated with a booster, which was 4.4 on Jan. 22, increased to 4.6 on Jan. 29. For those vaccinated with no booster, the rate went from 4.1 to 3.9. For those not vaccinated the rate went from 8.2 to 7.6.
The daily case rate per 100,000 went from 5.2 to 5.5 on a seven-day average with a seven-day lag, and from 4.9 to 5.5 in the adjusted daily case rate per 100,000 on a seven-day average with a seven-day lag.
The county logged 1,426 new cases of COVID-19, hiking the cumulative to 709,877.
The OCHCA reports COVID-19 data every Thursday.
