Well, we did it. California is officially in first place in a race that nobody wants to win. As of Saturday, the state has the highest number of new cases of COVID per capita in the U.S.:
Last week, the state reported the fourth highest number of daily COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents over a seven-day period, but California jumped to the top spot when the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its tracker. cases per capita on Saturday.
According to Saturday’s CDC update, California has reported an average of 100.5 daily cases of COVID-19 per 100,000 residents in the past seven days, which puts it comfortably ahead of Tennessee’s second place, which saw an average 89.6 daily cases per 100,000 residents in the same period.
California’s daily per capita number of cases is actually below last week’s 109.3 mark, which is likely due to reporting delays caused by the Christmas holiday.
The winter wave in California is almost twice that of the spring / summer season based on the number of people hospitalized.
On Monday, more than 19,750 patients were hospitalized with confirmed cases of the virus in California, including 4,228 treated in intensive care units. Both totals are now officially more than double the peak seen during the summer peak, when about 7,200 were hospitalized with 2,050 in intensive care.
The availability of beds in the ICU is still at 0% in Southern California and the Central Valley. Authorities have not yet said that the three-week block will be extended, but that is certainly the case. At a news conference today, Governor Newsom said the decision would be announced tomorrow. The structure to end the block is the same to enter, that is, the ICU capacity of 15%. So at the moment, the entire southern half of the state is nowhere near that. What we don’t know is how long the block will be extended.
All of this raises an issue that Politico highlighted last week. Why is this happening? California took this virus seriously from the start. It was the first state to close in the spring and had a standstill in the most seriously affected areas for most of this month. But so far it seems that these measures have not really worked.
The turnaround has baffled health leaders and experts. They may point to a number of reasons that have contributed to California’s surge in recent weeks. But it is difficult to pinpoint a single factor – and equally difficult to find a silver bullet …
In Los Angeles, officials said all the time that people met very often. They blamed the celebrations and post-season screening parties when the Dodgers and Lakers won the championships this fall.
Some blamed the strict rules themselves, saying that the confined Californians couldn’t take it anymore and decided that they need to live their lives. Others said that congregational environments remain a major concern in a state of housing restriction, especially in low-income communities where residents live in tight quarters and must continue to work in person to survive …
Assembly member Jordan Cunningham (R-Templeton) argued that the state’s attempt to “end types of human interaction without seeing if this is effective” was creating a kind of reaction – “getting people into high-risk activities”, like meeting at home, than places like restaurants.
There is some data to support this idea that people are resisting blockages. Cell phone data earlier this month appears to support the idea that Californians in the San Francisco Bay Area are simply not following the rules as strictly as they did in the spring:
Data company Unacast, a company that collects cell phone location data from millions of phones for private companies, created the “Social Distancing Scoreboard” that shows which counties in California and beyond are looking at compliance to make people stay at home. Each county and state is rated on a scale from A to F based on three criteria: change in average mobility based on distance traveled, change in non-essential visits and difference in meeting density …
… Data taken on December 17 – almost two weeks after five Bay Area counties early adopted the state’s home order – shows that only one county is receiving an “A” grade.
If I had to point out one factor that could convince people not to take it so seriously this time around, it would be the hypocrisy of Democratic leaders who preached social distance and then were caught up in fancy dinners in closed rooms. Both Governor Newsom and San Francisco Mayor London Breed were caught doing this and I think it suggests to most people that they can fake things in the same way, instead of being strict about it. Hypocrisy is what made California the epicenter of the winter wave.