Fresno City Councilmember Mike Karbassi is tested for Covid-19 in this May 2020 file photo.

The Fresno County Department of Public Health held a briefing on Friday regarding COVID-19 cases in Fresno County, mask mandates and the direction the virus seems to be heading.

Currently, there have been 223,594 total COVID-19 cases in Fresno County since the onset of the pandemic, with Interim Health Officer Rais Vohra adding that the county still sees hundreds of new cases each day.

According to Vohra, of those cases, 2,544 have resulted in fatality.

“Just because the [infection] numbers are decreasing doesn’t mean that they’re quite normal yet, and we need to respect that,” Vohra said. “[The pandemic] hopefully will come to a close in a way that we can all celebrate, but we still need to wait for those numbers to tell us that it’s the time.”

Currently, 413 people are hospitalized with COVID-19, and according to Vohra, a majority — if not all — of those are of the Omicron variant.

In Fresno County, 58% of residents have been fully vaccinated, according to Fresno County Health Division Manager Joe Prado. 

During the past two weeks, testing sites have seen limited activity as well, with testing rates dropping from 51% to 38%, meaning only 38% see maximum utilization.

The state reduces the capacity of testing sites once the rates drop below 50%.

Recently, however, turnaround times on test results have improved during the last several weeks. “Over 80% are being done within a 24-hour period, and upper mid-90s within a 48-hour period,” Prado said.

February also marks the one-year anniversary of the county’s hosting of mobile clinics.

“When we started in 2020, we knew that we had something very serious going on in our community and it was spreading,” said Ivonne Del Torosian, vice president of community health and well being at Saint Agnes Medical Center.

Del Torosian emphasized the importance of the ability to travel to rural areas in order to vaccinate those communities.

“We were working with families who were primarily immigrants — some of them documented, some of them not documented,” she said, emphasizing the importance of health care for those communities.

“We went out to the rural clinics; we partnered with community based organizations to outreach to the people and make sure they had a trusted voice,” she said.

Del Torosian explained that for those communities, isolation was not realistic based mainly on employment.

Working through multiple community-based outreach programs, the mobile vaccination clinics have been able to vaccinate nearly 40,000 people, ranging from children to their oldest vaccine recipient — a 104-year-old woman who got the shot in Calwa.

It was emphasized, however, that despite the relaxing of the mask mandates, the mandates still remain in effect for those choosing to not receive the vaccine.

“Use a mask if you’re not vaccinated,” Vohra said. “People need to understand that the mask mandate being lifted Tuesday really does not apply if you’re not vaccinated. We know that the unvaccinated ones are really the vectors for a lot of the disease.”