The new, more contagious strain of COVID-19 originating from the United Kingdom has surfaced in Cobb County.
As cases of the virus have surged around Cobb, officials with the Cobb & Douglas Public Health Department held a virtual town hall meeting Tuesday to update the community on its efforts to vaccinate qualified individuals against COVID-19.
Dr. Janet Memark, district health director of Cobb & Douglas Public Health Department, said including antigen and PCR tests, the county’s two-week case number is about 1,000 per 100,000 people. That’s a rate 10 times higher than what’s considered high community spread.
Cobb also has one of the highest number of hospitalizations in the state and very few critical care beds at its hospitals, the doctor said. Georgia Department of Public Health numbers show, as of Wednesday, Cobb has reported 637 deaths and 2,519 hospitalizations. It ranks fourth in hospitalizations behind Gwinnett, Fulton and DeKalb, and is second to Fulton in deaths, the state’s website indicates.
Memark said the department has also been told by healthcare officials that the new strain first reported in the U.K. has been discovered in Cobb County. While the variant doesn’t appear to be more deadly, it is more contagious, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said.
Referring to the recent surge of the UK strain in California’s Los Angeles County, Memark said, “If this takes over our county like L.A. County, we are going to be in just really the most dire of situations.”
A little more than 7,700 doses of the vaccines have been given throughout Cobb and Douglas counties since it began vaccinating frontline healthcare workers, public safety employees, residents and staff of long-term care facilities and people age 65 and older earlier this month, Memark said. That number includes doses of the vaccine it has given from its inventory to partners to help vaccinate people such as healthcare workers and educators who are 65 and older, department spokeswoman Valerie Crow told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The health department on an average day provides about 700 vaccines at Jim Miller Park in Marietta and between 200 and 300 at the Douglas County Public Health Center. However, there’s just not enough doses of the vaccine to go around to vaccinate everyone who qualifies under the current rollout plan, Memark said.
A little more than 1 million vaccines have been shipped to Georgia and about 535,920 have been administered, according to the Georgia Department of Public Health. There are 1,761 providers throughout the state who are authorized to give the vaccines to the public, but Memark said some have not received the doses. She said the federal government has been slow to release vaccines to the states, but hopes that will soon change.
“It’s simply a supply versus demand issue,” she said.
The increased demand also led to the health department’s website crashing during the early days of the vaccination campaign. Memark said the website was put together “at the last minute” since they were expecting the state to have a registration system in place. To help manage the load, the department each Friday at 5 p.m. will open the registration website for appointments for just the following week due to the uncertainty of the vaccine supply.
Memark said the department hopes to transfer its registration website to a new server that can handle the increased web traffic. She also said they are looking to staff a call center to help with the number of inquiries coming to health department offices related to the vaccine. Another outreach effort would be to use mobile vaccination units.
Nancy Nydam, spokeswoman with Georgia Department of Public Health, told the AJC that the department hopes to launch a statewide scheduling website in the next few weeks. It hasn’t done so already because similar sites in other states had problems handling the heavy traffic.
Other places offering the vaccine, such as CVS, Publix, Kroger, Walgreens, can help ease the burden on the health department. Lisa Crossman, deputy director of the department, said residents can check with their local health care providers and pharmacies to see if they offer the vaccines. Residents can visit the state Department of Public Health’s website to find vaccine providers.
“We want to get these shots in arms,” she said. “It’s kind of our mission in life right now to get these shots in arms.”
AJC reporters Brad Schrade and Johnny Edwards contributed to this report.
