MORGANTOWN — “Mon County is exceptional. Our citizens are above the others, and we’re going to prove it.”
And with that, Monongalia County Commission President Tom Bloom issued a challenge.
“I want to challenge the citizens of Monongalia County, that to the end of this month, wear a mask inside buildings. Just wear it,” he said, adding, “The second thing is we challenge to go up 10% in getting vaccinated and boosted. At the end of January we can show what we’ve done.”
Bloom’s remarks came following a particularly bleak COVID-19 update from Mon County Health Officer Dr. Lee Smith, who explained that while vaccines and booster shots do offer varying degrees of protection against the virus, “I think the take-home message has to be continue to mask, continue to watch your distance, continue to limit your exposure as much as possible.”
The double-vaccinated and boosted are not immune to the virus, Smith said, nor are those who have survived the illness.
“It looks like at this point in time that the virus mutates in such a direction that when it represents itself to the individual, having had the vaccine, having had the booster, having had COVID a couple times, there’s limited protection,” he said, adding that health factors like obesity, heart disease and hypertension remain critically important to patient outcomes.
The dismissal of omicron as a mild, but highly transmissible variant was also addressed.
Smith said he can’t quantify the impact of having 30% of the county’s workforce quarantined at home — nor can he ensure the outcomes of those who become infected.
“It’s going to take everybody in the community to pull as one to see the least amount of damage from this. If you have 100,000 cases or a million cases, it’s not going to be a happy ending for everybody. So we can’t just discount that, ‘Well, I heard it was going to be [mild]’ ” he said, noting “We’ll be studying this for the next 100 years, like we studied the Spanish Flu that was 100 years ago.”
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