There’s a new county behind Los Angeles with the second-most confirmed cases of COVID-19 in California, and as soon as this week, the state could overtake the nation’s initial epicenter in total number of cases.
The state added 11,834 positive tests to its count Monday, according to data compiled by this news organization, increasing its overall case count to 396,501. With another 60 deaths from the virus Monday, the state is averaging 96 fatalities and 9,108 new cases per day over the past week, both near record highs.
Locally, as of press time Tuesday, Lake County’s health department reported 156 overall cases with 28 of them still active and three currently hospitalized.
In his weekly COVID-19 update to the Board of Supervisors Tuesday, Health Officer Dr. Gary Pace said the county found itself in the same situation it did last week, with new cases coming in but not seeing a sharp escalation like surrounding counties.
Pace added neighboring Mendocino County was seeing a surge with a recent outbreak in one of the nursing facilities while Sanoma County also had multiple deaths in one of their nursing facilities and seeing 40 to 50 new cases a day with almost 1,000 active cases to date.
In terms of the variance data in Lake County, Pace said the county is doing pretty well. “We are still kind of near the border of where if we cross over we would get put on the watchlist but we’re still maintaining underneath it, it seems to be going OK at this point, as long as our staff and the staffs of different places around when a case is identified are able to keep working with these situations and containing the outbreak, I think we’ll continue to do OK.”
Pace noted county departments and volunteers are helping with traffic control at the various testing sites throughout the county. Pace also addressed problems with the supply chain for testing statewide which he said may end up being a problem in Lake County as well.
“What’s happening is the testing infrastructure is a little bit stressed at this point, they are having trouble keeping up with the demand, but locally we are doing all right at this point.”
Also addressing the housing variance and the homeless, Pace said the request for proposal for the homeless sheltering was closed with the county receiving one bid. “We are waiting to see how that works out. There’s a possibility that may be able to continue,” he said adding that contact tracing is going reasonably well with new volunteers allowing the county to keep up with testing demand. Pace said Remdesivir, which is used to treat COVID-19 is in limited supply, being allocated around the region but it is not allocated to Lake County due to the low number of cases.
California’s case count on Monday stood about 15,000 shy of New York, which reported the majority of its 415,000-plus cases in March and April. It’s now almost August, and the pandemic has swept into the southern and western parts of the country. While California adds more than 9,000 new cases per day, New York has squashed transmission down to about 725 per day.
California’s 63,758 new cases over the past week trails only Texas and Florida, but on a per-capita basis, the virus is more widespread in a rash of smaller states: Florida, Louisiana, Arizona, Alabama, Nevada, South Carolina, Texas, Mississippi, Idaho, Georgia, Tennessee and Arkansas all have reported more cases per capita in the past week than California (161 per 100,000 residents); only two of those states and five total have conducted more tests per capita than California in the past week (2,170 per 100,000 residents).
Even as California catches up to New York in cases, its deaths lag far behind.
At its peak, New York was reporting about the same number of cases as California is now — just below 10,000 per day (but with much less testing — about 20,000 per day, compared to 120,000 per day now in California). At the same time, nearly 1,000 New Yorkers were dying from the virus each day. On California’s deadliest day, there were 151 reported deaths from the virus. As a result, the 7,760 deaths in California rank well behind New York (32,000) and also trail New Jersey (15,000) and Massachusetts (8,500).
Similar to cases, only Texas and Florida have reported the more fatalities from the virus in the past week, but nine states have higher per-capita death rates: Arizona, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Nevada and New Jersey.
The largest growth continues to come out of Southern California — even more so in the counties next to Los Angeles.
A spike in Orange County last week sent the seven-day average there north of 1,000 cases per day; it has since fallen back to about 675 per day — about the level it was at two weeks ago. Orange County overtook Riverside over the weekend while the latter failed to report new test results. After Monday, when both counties reported, Orange County’s case count stood at 29,986 — three more than Riverside County.
The last time there was a county other than Los Angeles with more cases than Riverside County came May 24, when San Diego had 6,701 cases to Riverside’s 6,464.
As recently as July 2, Orange County had fewer cases than LA, Riverside and San Diego counties. But since then, its growth has outpaced every other hard-hit Southern California county. Its total case count has grown by 99%, compared to 83% in San Bernardino, 60% in Riverside and San Diego, 47% in Los Angeles and 26% in Imperial County.
North of Los Angeles, Kern County hasn’t seen the long-lasting rise as some of its neighboring counties but has seen a dramatic spike in cases in the past three days. It added another 787 cases on Monday, which would have nearly quadrupled the daily record prior to this week, if not for another 1,214 cases the previous two days. Just in the past three days, Kern County has reported 21.7% of the 9,234 total cases it has reported since the pandemic began.
The Bay Area, home to about 8 million people, compared to 3.2 million in Orange County and 900,000 in Kern County, reported one of its highest single-day totals of the pandemic: 1,174 new cases Monday — the fourth time the region has reported more than 1,000 cases in a day. Another nine Bay Area residents succumbed to the virus Monday, keeping the seven-day average near its late-April level of more than 7 per day.
Hospitalizations in the Bay Area and across California hit record highs on Sunday, the most recent day for which data was available. Bay Area hospitals added a net of 15 patients to increase the total here to 705 — 40% more than two weeks ago — while the total number of patients statewide climbed to 6,921, a 22% increase in two weeks.
Alameda County leads the region in hospitalizations (159), as well as total cases, followed closely by Santa Clara County (157) but neither cracked the top 10 in hospitalizations statewide. Los Angeles (2,218), Orange (666), San Bernardino (613), Riverside (507), San Diego (390), Fresno (2269), Kern (248), San Joaquin (210), Stanislaus (209) and Sacramento (204) all had more patients hospitalized Sunday than any county in the Bay Area.
After a brief dip Friday and Saturday, the number of patients receiving treatment in intensive care units was back at a record high Sunday: 2,157 confirmed or suspected to have the virus. There were eight counties in the state with less than 20% of their ICU beds available: San Benito, where ICUs were 100% full, Napa (94.7%), Madera (90.2%), Yolo (88.2%), Sacramento (85.3%), Imperial (84.6%), Merced (84.2%) and Placer (81.4%).
As California neared 400,000 total cases, the country was closing in on 4 million. It has reported at least 60,000 new cases on all but one of the past 10 days, while the nationwide death toll crossed 140,000 on Monday, more than any other country.
