Kings County COVID numbers continue to stabilize
Dec. 1—Numbers for COVID-19 seem to be going down for Kings County, according to the latest reports.
Data posted by the Kings County Department of Public Health on their website show there were 1,661 open cases of COVID-19 reported as of Wednesday. The number is one case less than previously reported. Meanwhile, there were 39 cases that have been closed.
Last week, Kings County Assistant Health Director Darcy Pickens discussed the numbers surrounding hospitalizations at Adventist Health Hanford at the Kings County Board of Supervisors weekly meeting. When last reported, the hospital had 28 patients in med-surg and four in the intensive care unit. Of these, 21 were Kings County Residents. It's a significant drop from last week, when 40 patients were in med-surg, while ICU occupancy was down by half from last week's eight. Numbers have been trending downward slowly but steadily.
It is not clear, however, how the recent omicron variant will play into Kings County's situation. On Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control announced that the California and San Francisco Departments of Public Health had reported the first case of the omicron variant in a patient who arrived on Nov. 22 after traveling in South Africa.
"Genomic sequencing was conducted at the University of California, San Francisco and the sequence was confirmed at CDC as being consistent with the Omicron variant," the CDC announced. "This will be the first confirmed case of COVID-19 caused by the Omicron variant detected in the United States."
The patient is self-isolating.
