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Good morning. I am in place to cover this morning’s Special Meeting of the City Council of Oklahoma City with the Oklahoma City-County Health Department. Today will be an informational meeting about COVID-19. There will be no voting during today’s meeting.
The meeting is now starting. If this meeting is disconnected for thirty minutes, the meeting will be continued at 1pm.
I’m comforted by the roll call from OCCHD and how many Doctors there are. An air of expertise is encouraging.
The mayor explains that the OCCDH is an independent organization, and does not answer to the city or county.
“This is not just a meeting to talk about a mask ordinance.”
Now we’ll hear from Chairman Raskov of the Department.
He thanks the Council for calling this meeting.
Raskob has slides.
First he gives a timeline of the disease and it’s impact in OK.
Cases in OK County have increased 84% in the last 14 days. Yowza.
Canadian County’s increase is 105%!
Now he talks about transmission. He has a handy graphic.
Mostly this illness is contracted through aerosol respiratory droplets. (Hence the mask helping.)
He says that the first four days after infection one shows no symptoms, but is highly infectious.
That kind of infection accounts for 48-62% of total infection transmission.
Most hospitalized patients are over 50yo.
We don’t know what this disease will do to a person over the long run. We only have several months of data.
He says this is much more serious than Flu.
He talks now about testing. (He points out that a test is just a snapshot at a single point in time.)
He says the presence of antibodies and immunity to future infection is unknown currently.
He speaks to hospitalizations. There are 208 in ICU as of July 14. Compared with 80 or so in May.
I got that wrong. 80 hospitalizations in general in May. We have nearly 500 hospitalizations now.
He now closes his presentation with a slide about mitigating the impact of the illness.
He says a year to 18 months at least for a vaccine.
He says to achieve herd immunity we’d have to vaccinate 60-70% of Oklahomans. Currently about 3% of Oklahomans have been infected already.
The single most important thing we can do is wear masks, says Raskob.
He says that the mask also protects the wearer.
He really drives home the issue of wearing a mask.
Now we hear from Dr. McGoff of the Department for a brief presentation.
Trends for OKC show a 1.5% case fatality ratio. Statewide that is 1.9% and nationwide 3.9%.
Our healthcare facilities were never over run, and we can owe that low mortality rate to that.
In County as of 6/30 we had 100 hospitalizations and now we have over 180.
We are currently at 15% capacity for ICU beds in County. Mc Goff says there is a difference between “staffed beds” and “available beds.”
Our local hospitals are challenged to keep ICU beds staffed. Lots of nurses have gone to Dallas to work for higher wages during this spike in illnesses.
He says we will see more deaths.
He shows a slide of activity trends showing where new cases have come from. 24% from restaurants. 13% from faith based activities.
They’re testing on average 200 people a day M-F at the fairgrounds. Lots of testing going on, that’s good to see.
*were testing
The Department has given out 50,000 masks to the general public.
McGoff has recommendations.
