MORGANTOWN — For almost as long as there’s been COVID-19 in the United States, there’s been COVID fatigue, brought on by a heavy dose of life-altering precautionary measures and overwhelming, nonstop, ever-changing news.
But just as the virus itself has spun off a number of variants, COVID fatigue appears to have developed into full-on apathy for many.
“We’re all tired of it. We’re all tired of wearing masks. We’re all tired of doing all these things,” County Health Officer Lee Smith said Wednesday during a COVID briefing before the Monongalia County Commission. “It’s become noise in the background and people don’t pay any attention to it.”
But now is really not the time for that, Smith said.
While Monongalia County is among the best in the state in percentage of population vaccinated at around 40%, it’s not close to the 60% or 70% the experts say is needed to develop herd immunity.
And the rate at which vaccines are being administered has leveled off dramatically since mid-April.
“There now is more supply than demand. We have more vaccines than arms to put them in,” Smith said, explaining that the situation has evolved from one in which every dose was obsessively accounted for to new vials being opened to administer a single shot.
As the lines for vaccination disappear, the county’s infection numbers are starting to tick up again for the first time since a 213-day run in the red that stretched from November into March.
This is in no small part thanks to viral variants.
Monongalia County is a hotspot for the more infectious California variant of the virus, with 76% (162 of 213) of the state’s identified cases located here. Monongalia County also has more than a quarter of the state’s U.K. variant cases, with 127 of 471. That variant is both more infectious and more lethal.
Smith said Monongalia County’s numbers compare favorably to the rest of the state in nearly every measurable standard.
But everything remains fluid.
“The message is this is not the time to lower your guard. There are variants out there. People are not vaccinating to the level that we think we have herd immunity,” he said. “It’s easy to get the disease. We just want to get more people vaccinated.”
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