San Francisco extended his stay request indefinitely just before the new year, citing a worrying increase in the number of hospitalizations in the bay area. On Sunday, the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) revealed that the current capacity of the Bay Area ICU is now 8.4% – but, according to regional health officials, at least the post-Action increase of Thanks it seems to be losing strength.
According to a press release published today by the CDPH, the Bay Area must “remain under the [current stay-at-home order] until at least January 8th “and could be extended involuntarily well after that date, if the ICU capacity projections turn out to be bad. (Spoiler alert: they probably will … because they are already very bad.) From now on, the only region in the state that is not under mandatory stay at home is Northern California, which has a 35.5% ICU capacity. In comparison, the Greater Sacramento region has 10.3% – while Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley are at 0.0%.
But the truce may be coming while some health officials in the bay area, as the Thanksgiving holiday record COVID-19 balloon begins to wilt.
“[…] we saw some easing in the rate of increase in our cases, ”said Santa Clara County Health Officer, Dr. Sara Cody, just before Christmas, according to KPIX. Although positive, UCSF epidemiologist George Rutherford added to the news that it is not very clear how long this “slowdown” in COVID-19 infections will last. Rutherford said that we may not know in a week or more. And that assuming “there [hasn’t] went [any] damage caused “by Christmas vacation trips New Year’s Eve meetings with members outside the immediate circle of people.
With the vaccine implantation going slower and awkwardly than expected, social detachment and the use of masks will exist as norms in 2021 for quite some time. Rutherford, too, notes that we will be able to “get rid” of the pandemic – or at least those massive outbreaks of COVID-19 – once a sizable portion of the population is vaccinated. (Many epidemiologists believe that successful vaccination between 50% to 90% of a population will produce collective immunity; the percentage, however, is directly linked to the R of any individual pathogen.)
California currently has 2,391,261 confirmed cases of COVID-19 to date, an increase of more than 391,000 cases since California became the country’s first state last week to pass the two million confirmed cases of the new disease respiratory.
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