||| BY MINOR LILE, ORCASONIAN REPORTER |||

At today’s Board of Health meeting, Public Health Officer Dr Frank James shared his perspective on the current status of the pandemic in San Juan County and asked that his remarks be shared with the entire community.

Here is what Dr. James had to say:

“Hello everyone. I just want to make a few comments and I want to make a request of everybody that’s listening.

“The next month is the crux of the whole pandemic. This is it. This is going to be the most serious time. We have a patient hospitalized right now who is high risk. It’s a time when deaths could occur. This is going to be when most people that we have that are going to get the disease are going to get the disease, in the next month or so, the next four to six weeks.

“This is the time when we have to take extraordinary measures to protect ourselves.

“We went 10 weeks with no cases in our county and what I can tell you is that that means there was no disease in our county at all. But in the past 2 weeks that has blown up. There are many cases and many more possible cases in our county now and we now have some people that are extremely ill. At the same time the capacity of our hospitals is shrinking.

“If we’re going to end up in a situation where we have a surge of cases this is it.

“The fundamentals have not changed. 40% of people who have this disease have no symptoms at all. They don’t know they have it. Others who contract the disease actually have no symptoms for the first 48 hours that they are infectious. This is not a disease we can detect by symptoms, people feel just fine.

“With a fairly large spread in our community already, we are heading into the most risky time of the entire year. It’s a time when people gather at home, they have close contacts, they’re indoors, they don’t wear masks for sustained periods of time. That’s a formula for transmission of this disease. We know that friends, neighbors and relatives are the most likely people we will get this from and spread it to. And the most likely location for this transmission is in your home.

“If I could beg you, I would beg you. I do beg you, please share this message with your family, with your friends, with your colleagues. They have to know that this is the time when we have to take those responsibilities seriously. If we do that, if we wear our masks, if we distance, if we don’t travel, we’re going to do as well as we’ve done already.

“And we’ve had an outstanding success. There are hundreds of (thousands) of deaths in America. We’ve had none. That’s an achievement of our entire community, by doing the right thing.

“I certainly know of people who are going to travel for Thanksgiving. Either travelling or having guests in your home is not the right thing to do. We need to make sure that this is a social norm. I don’t have a lot of patience with people talking about shaming. It’s just a fact. This is not the time to engage in those activities. The people that have made those plans need to cancel them.

“And it’s not just about yourself, it’s the entire community. We have an extremely high risk community. We already have this disease out in it. We have community spread for the first time. It is a dangerous situation. It can grow exponentially because no-one knows they have it when they spread the disease. With exponential growth we can expect this to double or quadruple the number of cases we have and the number of people being quarantined. We do not have the staff to do that. Our hospitals do not have the staff to manage to manage that number of cases. We have to behave differently and we have to do it now.

“I appreciate all of our community’s support and our willingness to do the right thing up to this point. This is the crux. This is when it matters.

“Around the corner there’s so much good news. New treatments have been released and the vaccines are promising to be highly effective and very safe. The first two vaccines, I’ve looked at some of the data. There’s 95% efficacy, even in elders. For mildly ill and severely ill people they work. They are just around the corner. We’ll see the first vaccines in December. We’ll see a lot distributed in January, February, March, and by April we’ll have enough so that anyone who wants a vaccine can get it.

“But until then, and certainly for now, it is time to double down on our commitment to limit the spread of this disease.”


 

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