Southwest Health System’s COVID-19 team discussed how the hospital has fared since summer with virus hospitalizations, ICU cases and staff cases among vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
Marc Meyer, director of pharmacy services and infection control, Alan Laird, lab director and Maddie Wright, infection prevention and quality data analyst, presented information via Facebook Live Jan. 12.
The hospital has hosted two Facebook Live informational sessions this month amid the fast-spreading, though seemingly less severe, omicron variant now dominating COVID-19 cases.
In the first, held Jan. 5, Meyer expressed cautious hope that the new variant would lead to fewer hospitalizations but warned it would incite breakthrough cases.
In that session, Southwest Health System anticipated a protection rate of about 36% for people who have had a vaccination but no booster, and a 70-75% protection rate for people who have received booster shots.
Montezuma County has had 269 new cases of COVID-19 in the past week, according to Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment data published Tuesday.
Since the start of the pandemic, 19 Montezuma County residents have died because of COVID-19, and 59 have died with the virus in their system, according to CDPHE.
The county’s one-week positivity rate is 21.4%, according to CDPHE data.
As of Jan. 11, Southwest Health System had transferred 82 patients to other hospitals for high levels of care since Nov. 15, and 15 of the cases were COVID-related.
Of the people hospitalized with COVID-19 in Southwest Health System since June 2021, 72 patients were unvaccinated, 14 were vaccinated,and two were vaccinated and boosted.
Of patients in the intensive care unit since June 2021, 32 were unvaccinated and two were vaccinated. No vaccinated and boosted patients required ICU treatment.
Of COVID-19 infections among the 550 Southwest Health staff since June 2021, 29 staff were unvaccinated, 30 were vaccinated, and 12 were vaccinated and boosted.
This equates to a 12% positivity rate among staff since last summer, Wright said, of which 83% were unboosted or unvaccinated.
“We don’t have a high boosted rate at the moment,” she said. “I like to think that’s going to be changing here shortly with numbers coming out.”
None of the positive cases among staff were traced back to in-house outbreaks, she clarified.
In Colorado, fully vaccinated individuals are two times less likely to become infected with COVID-19, 11.8 times less likely to be hospitalized and 12.9 times less likely to die from the virus compared with unvaccinated individuals, according to CDPHE.
