Signal Shift: Flagler Health Department Ends Covid Testing As Cases Fade; Deaths Increase by 15 in 2 Weeks

But cases have been fading rapidly, diminishing by half for the past four weeks. The omicron surge peaked at nearly 1,500 confirmed cases in Flagler in the week ending Jan. 14. The total fell to just under 1,200 two weeks later, then decreases accelerated: 708, then 408, then 204, and now down to 110 in the week ending last Friday, the lowest weekly total since the week of Dec. 17. Residents were simply not showing up to get tested anymore, at least not in numbers that justified keeping the operation going.

In Flagler County schools, cases have fallen to a trace: a total of three cases among staffers in the week from Feb. 14 to Feb. 22, and 16 cases among students.

The Health Department also just received enormous amounts of rapid testing kits, which will be made available to anyone who asks for them at the department’s headquarters at 208 Dr. Carter Boulevard in Bunnell.

The department continues to provide vaccines, though those numbers continue to be anemic: just 50 were administered last week, 51 the week before. As of today, 63 percent of Flagler County’s population has been fully vaccinated, including 88 percent of its population 65 and over, but only 29 percent have been boosted.

The Flagler Health Department’s vaccine clinic is open on Mondays between 3:30 and 6 p.m.. Both Pfizer and Moderna vaccines will be available. Appointments are encouraged and can be scheduled by calling 386-437-7350 ext. 0. Covid testing is still offered in Flagler County through corporate and independent pharmacies, and urgent care centers. Home test kits can be picked up at the health department or purchased through local retailers and online.




The end of operations at the airport–or at the department itself–signal the Health Department’s shift back to what it is calling “normal,” pre-pandemic operations, exactly two years after mobilizing for the first covid surge–what, in retrospect, would be a minor outbreak compared with what was to follow.

The omicron surge that began in the middle of December proved to be the sharpest in numbers, but milder in consequences: hospitals never exceeded capacity, as they had during the delta surge over the past summer, and proportionately, omicron had less severe effects on those infected. But since it infected so many more people, hospitalizations still rose, nearing about 40 on any given day at AdventHealth Palm Coast, for example, and the death tally continued–and continues–to grow: Florida this week or next will reach 70,000 deaths attributed to Covid.

In the last two weeks alone, the number of people who have died due to Covid in Flagler County has risen by 15, for a total of 311, according to the New York Times’s database. A fifth of the county’s population–22,000–have been infected since the beginning of the pandemic. In Florida, the death tally increased by a staggering 888 just in the past week, to a total of 69,790, yet the reaction has been muted, as if Covid deaths are themselves psychologically endemic: a new normal of its own. The nation is approaching 1 million deaths from the disease (the current tally is 973,119, according to Woorldometer), by far the largest number of deaths for any country in the world, though proportionate to its population, the United States has the 18th-highest rate of Covid deaths. Brazil is second, with 649,000. Worldwide, 6 million people have died from the disease to date.

“As a community, we’ve worked hard to mitigate the spread of Covid for almost two years,” Bob Snyder, the Flagler Health Department’s administrator, said. “We are grateful for support and cooperation we’ve received and look forward to returning our focus to core public health initiatives. As we move into the endemic phase, we encourage people to keep health safety precautions like handwashing, vaccinations and boosters in mind.”

“I am happy to finally report that COVID cases and hospitalizations have decreased significantly across the U.S. since the Omicron peak,” Ruth Ann Crystal, a California physician who has tracked the disease and issued a newsletter about it, wrote on Feb. 25, in a message circulated by Dr. Stephen Bickel, the medical director at the Flagler Health Department. “We are in a much better place than a few weeks ago. Today, the CDC announced that mask use is optional in the 70% of U.S. counties where the COVID hospitalization and case rates have decreased to low or medium risk. […] Across the U.S., people will still need to wear masks on public transit, in airports and airplanes and in hospitals for now.”




There are still significant challenges, from the way the disease is still targeting people with immunodeficiencies to the vulnerability of people without a vaccine to the debilitating, dispiriting effects of long Covid on, potentially, anyone who has been exposed. “When people have Long COVID, despite normal appearing scans, they can have a reduced ability to extract oxygen from the lungs, small fiber neuropathy that affects the autonomic nervous system and cognitive issues related to microglia immune cells in the brain,” Crystal wrote.

So one remaining question in Flagler is: what will Jeff Nay do now that he no longer has the airport vaccine and testing location where to peddle his disinformation? Nay is a retiree who has his own YouTube channel on vintage computers. He was caught on video purposefully coughing on people attending an Aug. 17 Flagler County School Board meeting, where he was protesting mask mandates. He’d been a fixture on the sidewalk on the approach to the airport location, brandishing a prop syringe and claiming that vaccines were the problem, not the solution. America’s million deaths may, if robbed of a voice, suggest otherwise.