In a nation ravaged by a feared winter wave of the coronavirus, California has emerged as the emblem of the pandemic’s devastation.
The state had some of the worst results: crowded morgues, overloaded hospitals, scarce oxygen.
But that is starting to change slowly – especially in northern California.
Still, it is far from clear that the state is fully recovering. Officials hope that measures to stay at home and changes in behavior may, over time, double the curve. The latest restrictions took effect in late November, but holiday meetings, shopping and travel are believed to have fueled the new peak in coronavirus cases.
The post-natal surge is a major concern for public health officials, who worry about what other infections will do to hospitals already flooded with patients.
The hope is that in February there will be some relief, as the number of cases begins to stabilize.
This is where we are in the coronavirus crisis and where we can go:
National perspective
Of the 50 states, 49 are in an outbreak or recovering from one, said Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist at the University of California at San Francisco. Hawaii is the only state that did not immediately enter or exit an outbreak.
“Cases are everywhere,” said Rutherford, “with many in the southwest – in Arizona, in southern California; a little in New Mexico and southern Nevada – but also in the mid-south ”.
Arizona and Rhode Island surpassed California in rates of coronavirus cases with the country’s worst rates in the past 14 days. According to a Times analysis, Arizona overtook California on January 2 with a worse rate of coronavirus cases per capita.
In recent weeks, hospitals in Phoenix have started refusing some ambulance patients from emergency rooms, according to the Arizona Republic.
There are now 16 states with worse COVID-19 mortality rates per capita in the last 14 days than California. The death toll in Arizona and Kansas in the past two weeks is at least 50% higher than in California.
Positive signs
There are some signs of improvement in California.
The number of coronavirus positive patients hospitalized across the state has reached a level of just under 22,000, and new admissions for COVID-19 have also declined – from about 3,500 a day last week to between 2,500 and 2,600, according to Dr. Mark Ghaly, Secretary of Health and Human Services from California.
The increase in the rate of hospitalizations for COVID-19 has slowed, and Ghaly said this was “a very encouraging sign, but we are not yet out of danger”.
“We know that there is still a lot of COVID in our communities, that people can easily transmit.”
In other developments:
- The state raised your order to stay home to Greater Sacramento. The move will allow counties to reopen beauty salons and barber shops in a limited capacity and allow other businesses, including restaurants, to resume some outside operations.
- Some parts of northern California have seen infection rates slow.
Negative signs
As Governor Gavin Newsom said on Tuesday: “California remains at its most intense peak to date.”
The state posted high single-day counts on Tuesday for coronavirus cases and deaths, with both numbers well above the daily average.
A diary research conducted by The Times found 53,260 cases of coronavirus – the sixth highest count in a single day – and 678 deaths reported on Tuesday. The death toll was the second highest on any pandemic day, eclipsed only by Friday’s count, when 685 deaths were recorded.
Tuesday marked the first time that California recorded an average of more than 500 COVID-19 deaths per day during a weekly period. A Times analysis found that the state now averages 520 deaths a day – roughly the equivalent of a Californian dying every three minutes.
Southern California is still being attacked by the coronavirus. The postnatal increase has worsened, but it is not yet clear how hard it will hit hospitals, which are already at critical levels.
Although the number of COVID-19 patients hospitalized across the county has recently stabilized at just 8,000, the sustained increase has forced some county hospitals to create beds in aisles and gift shops and keeping some patients waiting in ambulances for up to 17 hours before the space in the emergency room is opened.
Any new spike in infections, authorities warn, will set off a wave resulting from new patients requiring professional care – creating a unsustainable tension in hospitals and intensive care units already overloaded.
Besides that:
- Los Angeles County is fast approaching 1 million confirmed cases of coronavirus, a milestone that means that 1 in 10 angelenos was infected at some point during the pandemic.
- As of Tuesday, 14,134 new cases of coronavirus were reported in LA County. This led the county to an average of more than 15,000 new cases of coronavirus a day last week, one of the worst daily averages and a warning sign for a potential future increase in hospitalizations. The authorities predicted that an average of 15,000 cases per day would likely be the precursor to an even worse increase in hospitalizations.
- Over 2,300 people across the county have died of COVID-19 since New Year’s Day, and LA County has averaged about 231 deaths from illness daily in the past week, a higher rate than at any time during the pandemic. On Tuesday, 318 deaths were reported in LA County, drawing the highest single-day death count recorded on Friday.