Keeping in line with the state, the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to end its local COVID-19 state of emergency, doing away with bureaucratic bypasses officials said were vital in defending residents against the worst of the virus.
“While today’s vote ends the emergency phase of the pandemic, it does not end the county’s continued and focused effort to combat COVID-19,” board President Dave Pine said. “The county will continue to work closely with community- and faith-based organizations to educate residents about residual risks, vaccination recommendations and programs to buffer economic impacts.”
Tuesday’s decision to end the county’s emergency order sunsets a policy enacted in early March 2020. Little was known about COVID-19 then, county officials noted Tuesday, and the move was meant to enable county officials to more quickly respond to the respiratory illness.
Out of an abundance of caution, officials used the emergency order to greatly limit business operations as cases grew. Indoor dining became prohibited and entertainment venues, gyms and schools were shuttered.
The order also enabled governing bodies to transition to online platforms, expanding public access to meetings. As the order ends, County Attorney John Nibbelin noted that elected officials will have to meet in person but virtual access to meetings can remain. County Executive Officer Mike Callagy said staff are workshopping ways to continue allowing online participation with the goal of expanding access to all of the county’s dozens of committees and commissions.
Supervisor David Canepa lauded county staff and top officials for their work over the past three years establishing mass vaccination and testing sites, supplying protective equipment to hospitals and providing guidance on public health issues and enforcement, while also noting traces of COVID-19 will likely remain in communities.
“I don’t know if we’ll ever be out of COVID per se but I’m very pleased with what our health department has done,” Canepa said. “I’m just extraordinarily grateful for our 5,800 employees. We’re over it in terms of what we do today; but, COVID will continue to be in our community.”
About 94% of residents have received at least one vaccine dose since first becoming available in January of 2021. Meanwhile, only 33% have received the bivalent booster, a shot engineered to better combat the omicron variant and its subvariants that was made available last September.
Officials have lauded vaccines as a key tool for staving off serious illness and hospitalization. Still, officials have warned the public that the virus remains present and has continued to spread, according to data from wastewater samples.
To date, more than 184,000 cases of COVID-19 have been detected over the past three years, according to the county’s COVID-19 dashboard. The state’s COVID-19 data indicates that about 750 residents have died with 69 county residents continuing to contract the virus per day. County data shows about 30 residents with COVID-19 being treated in hospitals as of last Thursday.
The county plans to retire its case data dashboard on March 23 given that at-home testing has become more prominent. Results from those tests are not typically reported and, as a result, case and testing data “do not provide meaningful intelligence the way they did previously,” according to County Health.
County Health Officer Scott Morrow, in his rescinding of a health order issued in May 2020, encouraged the public to continue following guidance from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and its subagency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency, the California Department of Public Health and California Department of Social Services.
“This global event was rough on everyone, and while we didn’t come out of it unscathed, we did better than many other communities,” Morrow said in a press release. “This is thanks to you, the community, for your insightful, wise, and ‘caring for your neighbor’ cooperation. And while this is not yet over, hopefully, this will be a once-in-many-generations event.”
Visit the County Health website at smchealth.org/coronavirus to learn more about COVID-19 vaccine opportunities and other local updates. Visit the state’s COVID-19 website at covid19.ca.gov/ for data and more information.
(4) comments
This announcement is anticlimactic. As LittleFoot said, many folks have already gone back to their lives and if they haven’t bothered to get multiple jabs, they won’t. And why would they? Studies that have shown that the more “booster” shots you have, the higher your incidence of contracting COVID.
To add insult to injury, the experimental COVID jab has resulted in increased excess mortality rates, especially for millennials aged 25-44. And every day there are more and more reports of young athletes in the primes of their lives dropping, some fatally, due to heart conditions likely caused by the jab. Let’s not forget parents who have subjected their kids to be lab rats; kids who may contract side effects affecting the rest of their lives. Another anticipated effect… poor kids who lost up to a year or more of their education due to non-scientific COVID policies.
History will show that mistakes made by government “officials” dealing with COVID via mandatory experimental jabs and non-scientific masking theatre will have consequences for a generation. The CDC has lost its credibility and we have to wonder whether they’ll return to making policy based on science, rather than emotion. Remember, your body, your choice; your kid’s body, still your choice. Research the effects of COVID shots before making a choice to be a lab rat, or not. As more time goes on, evidence is showing the choice to not be jabbed, or submit to further jabs, will likely be the right choice.
As an aside, don’t worry, Westy. With excess mortality rates due to COVID jabs, you’re likely to get your wish of cutting our population levels (although not from COVID infections, but from excess deaths due to COVID jabs). And that’s without counting folks moving out of the state due to CA taxation and regulation incompetence. BTW, was there ever a number of COVID deaths associated with Newsom for allowing COVID-infected individuals to return to their nursing homes to infect and kill other residents?
Normal people have gone back to their lives and left the fear at home a long time ago - the fact that unelected bureaucrats can make sweeping and "mandatory" policies that can effectively control and derail our entire lives/livelihoods is very very problematic moving forward. We must never accept this level of arbitrary control ever again.
Yeah, we had such good opportunity to cut our population levels and eliminate more of those immune-compromised and older people who are weighing down the system and we completely blew it. We only managed to off a little over 100,000 in California, we could have done 10x that if we'd really put our minds to it and eliminated those pesky restrictions.
Those vaccines were straight up poison and have killed countless children and young people in the prime of their lives. What of them?
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