As Berrien County rapidly approaches 70,000 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine administered, the County’s Health Department says the number of coronavirus cases, virus transmission, and hospitalizations are “fairly steadily increasing,” and the age of those infected is getting younger and even reaching into children under the age of 18. 
Berrien County Health Department Officer Nicki Britten and Spectrum Health Lakeland President Dr. Loren Hamel provided trend reports today in a Facebook Live update on the Spectrum site to update the community.
Britten says, “Right now we are in the midst of a continued increase in the number of cases and the amount of transmission that is happening in our community, with about 48 new cases per day on average, and that has been fairly steadily increasing for about the last three weeks or so.” Additionally, she says, “Our percent positivity in the county is around 10-percent, whereas back around a month ago we were sitting around 5-percent or even below 5-percent and that was a very comfortable place to be, 10-percent not quite so much.”
Britten says that the situation is not unique to Berrien County, as the entire state of Michigan continues to see increasing cases, moreso than many other states in the country, and points out that the state has been tabbed as one of the “hot spots” in the country. However, she notes, “Our rise in cases here in Berrien County hasn’t been quite as dramatic as some other communities in Michigan, but we’re definitely watching carefully, and note that there are other communities that are seeing this increase pretty rapidly.”
While a lot of younger people have often felt considerable more invincible during the pandemic, Britten says the age being impacted here continues to drop, reporting, “We do know that a larger proportion of our more recent cases, as compared to last fall, are amongst younger adults and even children under the age of 18.” She adds, “We have seen a lot more cases among school aged children, particularly middle-school and high-school, and so we’re watching that trend.”
Britten admits that it can be difficult to compare age trends and breakdowns right now as compared to last fall “because the vaccine definitely makes a difference in how this all plays out.” Further explaining, she says, “It’s possible what we’re really seeing is the absence of hundreds and hundreds of cases amongst older adults that are now very well protected. As they’re getting the vaccine we’re seeing those percentages increase.”
Also changing the playing field a bit is the introduction of the variant strains cropping up. Britten says, “There have been close to 20 with 12 confirmed cases of the B-1-1-7 variant, which is also known as the U.K. variant, and there have been some other cases associated with those confirmed cases that are considered suspect. We do know that this variant is more contagious and more likely to spread between people.”
That doesn’t necessarily make the variant more deadly, as Britten explains, “There is no overwhelming evidence that it necessarily causes more severe illness, or that it is more likely to lead to hospitalization or death, but would be more infectious which means that more people are likely to become infected, and as more people are infected we do see more hospitalizations and deaths.” Summarizing that topic, she says, “So, it’s possible that the variants are playing a bit of a role and we do know that once variants are present in a community, it does fairly quickly become the predominant strain, not the only one, but it becomes more common, so there’s a lot of factors here that we’re continuing to watch and again it’s hard to make some comparisons as to where we’ve been, because the vaccine definitely changes the landscape as well as the susceptibility of our population and there’s more that we continue to learn as we watch trends develop and watch other communities.”
Looking at the hospitalization rates, Dr. Loren Hamel is most alarmed at the opposite side of the state. He tells us, “We saw over the course of the last couple of weeks that we’ve gone from no hospital admissions, which was just a breath of fresh air to have, with no admissions to the hospital at least for a few days, up to 27 or a little lower than that today, so we have seen a significant increase. We’ve been watching with a great deal of interest what other hospitals in Michigan have been experiencing and on the east side of the state they’ve gone from pretty good shape to a really troublesome picture very quickly.” Explaining that concern, Dr. Hamel says, “Our friends at Belmont Hospital have 400 COVID patients in the hospital, and just a week or two ago that was half that number. It can explode in terms of in-patient cases quite rapidly.”
Hamel, too, addressed the drop in age range of those being admitted, saying, “In the Spectrum Health System, we’re seeing a younger cohort being admitted. We have, within our facilities overall at Spectrum Health, admitted children. We have folks under 30 years of age on ventilators in the ICU. We have more in their 40’s and 50’s than we had before, with the average age of our individuals that have been admitted running at about 10-years younger than it was just a few weeks ago and that certainly is related to vaccine successes in our older individuals, and as Nicki said, we would be in so much worse shape right now if we had not been so diligent in immunizing some of the oldest folks in our population, we could be just inundated right now.”
Dr. Hamel suggests, too, “That is just a reminder that when enough people get infected, somebody’s going to end up in the hospital, and somebody’s going to end up in the ICU on a ventilator, and somebody’s going to die, and that is occurring in a younger group of people than we were seeing just a month or two ago, so it’s reason to be concerned, it’s reason to be very diligent in social distancing, masking up, and hand hygiene.”
Related to the ever increasing number of folks in Berrien County clamoring for the vaccine, Dr. Hamel says, “God Bless you all that have taken the vaccine. Thank you so very much. The life you save might be your own, but it also could be your neighbor’s. I think it’s the responsible thing to do, and across the world now we have given more than half a billion doses of the vaccine.”
For those still on the fence regarding vaccinations, Hamel says, “We know just about everything there is to know about side effects. Never in human history have we gotten so much vaccine data so quickly. Never in human history have we known the benefits and risks of both a disease and the way to prevent it so quickly. Now a year may seem long to you, but in the past we would have to go decades and decades to get this much data. It is much safer to get the vaccine than it is to take the risk of getting the disease.”
Britten and Hamel report that thousands of doses of the vaccine are being administered locally every week with some 66,000 shots administered to 41,000 unique individuals which represents a third of the population of Berrien County over the age of 16 with at least one dose, and 70-percent of the local population aged 65 and older now vaccinated.
Britten says that with the increased quantities of vaccine flowing to the county, it’s actually getting harder to fill the open appointments as rapidly as in the past, and Dr. Hamel telling people “Now is the time. Get your vaccine. Everyone should get in line as the vast majority of the backlog has now been eliminated. Sign up, schedule an appointment, and get your vaccine.”
