While some elected officials continue to question the time when the state suspended its home order, California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly said at a news conference on Tuesday that he believes he has been suspended “in the right moment”.
“This was not a request to stay in a regional home based solely on community transmission rates, it was really focused on what we would see in hospitals in a few weeks,” explained Ghaly.
The state suspended its regional home stay request for all five regions on Monday, as health officials now expect the intensive care unit’s bed capacity to reach the 15% limit in four weeks.
As health officials look at a four-week projection, Ghaly said he previously mentioned that the order to stay at home can be lifted when hospitals still have a high census of coronavirus patients.
“We know that today’s cases become hospital cases in about two weeks, ICU cases three to four weeks later, so we really want to determine what the impact of our current case numbers is, our current transmission rates, our positivity of current testing on where we’re going to be in hospitals, ”said Ghaly. “We have to wait about four weeks.”
What the numbers show: The state continues to show a downward trend in cases, deaths and hospitalizations.
California reported 17,028 new cases of the virus on Tuesday and 409 additional deaths, both well below the 14-day average of 28,993 cases and 501 deaths.
The 14-day test’s positivity rate also dropped to 9%, down 33% since the state reported its highest percentage earlier this month, according to Ghaly.
In the past two weeks, hospitalizations have decreased by more than 20%.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of when the first two cases of the virus were reported to the California Department of Public Health, one case in Los Angeles County and one in Orange County. In one year, more than 37,500 Californians lost their lives due to the virus, which Ghaly called an “immeasurable loss”.
To date, California has a total of 3,153,186 cases of coronavirus and 37,527 deaths.
note: These figures were released by the California Department of Public Health and may not correspond exactly in real time to the CNN database obtained from Johns Hopkins University and the Covid Tracking Project.