Yes, it's the same as always. Currently there are 3 patrollers and 20 non-patroller local moderators. (I saw someone say elsewhere that all mods have jurisdiction over newbies, but this isn't true.) At some points in the past there have been more patrollers, but that's not necessarily indicative of a shortage.

I understand there was a newbie jail that only allowed newbies to post in the "Begginers & Help" section until they had made 5 posts and stayed logged in or browsed the forum for some specified amount of time. This might help reduce newbie spamming spree when reinstalled(or given a little tweak).
link to the post by hilariousandco : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=879237.msg9707641#msg9707641

Limiting newbie participation is very harmful for a community. Newbie jail will never return: I consider the newbie-jail period to have been extremely damaging to the forum. When barriers to participation are too high, then the best people often just won't go to the trouble of joining, and the people who are willing to jump through the hoops are often people who aren't good for the community: people with nothing better to do, scammers, get-rick-quickers, etc. Having a permanent newbie jail policy would improve things a lot in the short-term, but would end up being a fatal poison to the community.

The low signal-to-noise is a real issue which seriously annoys me and is often on my mind. But as you mention, fixing it non-destructively is difficult.