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COURTESY PHOTOS COVID-19 tests were distributed by the city of Goleta on Saturday at West Wind Drive-in.
The city of Goleta gave away over 10,000 at-home COVID-19 test kits Saturday at the West Wind Drive-in theater. The tests were supplied by the Santa Barbara County Public Health Department.
The distribution was on a first come, first served basis with a limit of six per household. The city of Goleta expressed gratitude to the West Wind Drive-In for providing space for the event, and to the Foodbank of Santa Barbara County for assisting with logistics.
“Overall things went really smoothly, it was a really long rush for three hours straight. We were planning on going until 3:30 but ran out just before 1 p.m. The city would like to give a special thanks to the volunteers, who came out and spent their Saturday helping the community,” Michael Baris, emergency services coordinator for the city of Goleta, told the News-Press.
Free at-home test kits can also be ordered online at https://covidtests.gov/.
A few weeks ago the News-Press reported that Santa Barbara County had the ranked 34th in the state for the highest number of COVID-19 cases. The county is now 18th in the state.
On Feb. 4 (the latest numbers available), the county had 447 new COVID cases, with 3,155 still infectious county wide, while deaths stood at 619. These numbers are significantly lower than Jan. 21, when the county reported 1,421 new cases with 6,325 still infectious, and 585 deaths. On Jan. 7, the county reported 1,137 new cases with 5,280 still infectious and 571 death. The county has 32.7% fewer deaths and 12.5% fewer cases per 100,000 residents than the state of California as a whole, according to KRON4.
The vaccination rates in Santa Barbara County stand at 70.8% for the eligible five-and-over population, with 66.6% of the entire county (all ages). Santa Barbara County’s vaccination rate is 3% lower than the state’s. Out of the county population, 299,599 are fully vaccinated according to KRON4.
Officials praised the volunteers who turned out to distribute the COVID-19 tests.According to data from Johns Hopkins University, the nation has had over 16 million new COVID cases in the last 28 day, and deaths totaled 62,445. National totals stand at over 76 million covid cases and 902,298 deaths. The death toll for California reached over 80,000 Friday, reported the AP, citing data from John Hopkins.
“We can start to lean forward and take a little bit more risk and try to at least make sure that students in schools have some semblance of normalcy for this spring term. A lot of kids haven’t really known a normal school day for two years now,” Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and current Pfizer board member told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. However, Dr. Gottlieb added, “We are tragically still in this fight.”
According to the Bloomberg Virus Tracker cases top 394.3 million and deaths top 5.7 million, worldwide. According to the vaccine tracker, more than 10.2 billion shots have been administered worldwide.
email: kzehnder@newspress.com
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