Samantha Rodriguez outside of her home in Penn Hills. (Photo by Clare Sheedy/PublicSource)
COVID case counts are down, but so is testing and vaccination. Fading resistance spurs fear — among the immunocompromised and Allegheny County health officials.
by Matt Petras, PublicSource
A few years before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Samantha Rodriguez’s ankylosing spondylitis, a spine-related form of arthritis, worsened to the point of giving her regular bouts of chronic pain, brain fog and fatigue. This put the 29-year-old Penn Hills resident in a group of immunocompromised people who are at particular risk of developing severe symptoms from COVID-19.
As COVID-19 began to spread around the world, Rodriguez immediately became educated – she not only had skin in the game, but also a background in healthcare research. She stayed careful, and years later, after most people have moved on from many COVID-19 precautions, still does.
When she visits her parents, one of whom has an autoimmune lung condition, they typically take multiple rapid PCR tests leading up to the gathering and mask even if it’s negative. At this point, she’s most concerned about getting long COVID, a chronic condition.
“I already have a disability that makes functioning sometimes very difficult, and I don’t want to exacerbate that,” Rodriguez said.
She gets every vaccination shot she can – the initial two doses that most people got, two of the initial booster shots and two of the more recent bivalent booster, designed to combat newer strains of the virus.
However, despite recommendations from both local and federal health officials, only around one in five people in Allegheny County, and even fewer in the United States as a whole, have received bivalent booster shots.
“Honestly, it stresses me out because it’s not gone,” Rodriguez said. “And the more that we pretend like it’s not here, the worse, eventually, reinfections will be, and every new infection is a higher chance of developing long COVID or ending up in the hospital or suddenly having a stroke.”
The federal government ended the emergency declaration for COVID-19 in May. Allegheny County followed suit, ending both the vaccination requirement and the COVID leave policy for county employees and cutting back on regular reports to the public about the state of the virus.
“Following the ending of the Federal Health Emergency on May 11, it is time for Allegheny County to do the same,” County Executive Rich Fitzgerald said in a May press release. “While we still encourage people to protect themselves against COVID, the lifting of the emergency by the federal governments suggests to us to be consistent.”
The most recent data from the Allegheny County Health Department [ACHD], which goes to May 19, shows very low levels of infection but also very low levels of testing. The week of May 14 saw 23 confirmed infections and 10 confirmed reinfections reported, but only 185 residents were tested. The week prior had 121 people confirmed to be infected, 33 confirmed to be reinfected and 2,156 people tested.
Data updated June 23 shows 20.9% of county residents have gotten at least one bivalent booster shot. This is higher than the U.S. population as a whole, 17% of which has received a bivalent booster shot, according to data posted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on May 11. Allegheny County has a disproportionately large senior population, the age cohort most likely to get COVID-19 vaccinations.
Experts and vulnerable residents warn that the virus still warrants caution.
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