Sonoma County on Monday reported three new deaths due to COVID-19, another dark indicator of the damage the delta variant is wreaking throughout the region and the country.
According to county records, as of Sunday, 70 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 in Sonoma County, the highest amount on any one day since the winter's deadly wave of cases.
Health officials told the Santa Rosa Press Democrat that all three people who died were unvaccinated and suffered from underlying health conditions. They included a woman between age 50 and 64 who died July 28; a woman over 75 who died July 31; and a man 50 to 64 who died August 1.
"We are unfortunately seeing more hospitalizations due to COVID now than at any time last summer, largely because of the highly contagious delta variant," Dr. Sundari Mase, Sonoma County's health officer, told the paper.
The transmission rate in Sonoma County is now 20.2 cases per 100,000 residents, almost 10 times what it was in early July, the paper said.
"These are preventable tragedies" Dr. Mase said. "In almost every case, the hospitalized individual is unvaccinated."
About one-third of Californians still aren't vaccinated and many of those have said they don't intend to be in the future.
Jonas Kaplan, Associate Professor of Research in Psychology at USC's Brain and Creativity Institute, told KCBS Radio that his research suggests that many people are refusing to receive the vaccine because they are heavily influenced by misinformation.
"It's basically a misinformation pandemic right now," he said. "It spreads very easily, it spreads through our social networks… which is one of the main ways we get our information nowadays."
"We think that this is something that's become politicized. You're tied to people's political identity for a signal of who you are and who you associate with and that makes it very difficult to change," Kaplan added.
Sonoma County's pandemic death toll is now up to 337 people.
