California added just over 12,000 new cases of Covid-19 on Tuesday, the lowest daily case count in a state affected by a dramatic increase in the holiday since Thanksgiving, according to department data. state health care.
“We haven’t seen a number like this in a while,” Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly told a news conference. Just two weeks ago, the state reported an average daily count of about 40,000 new cases.
But while state health officials are seeing signs of optimism after the darkest months of the pandemic, they are renewing calls to avoid meetings before the Super Bowl and Lunar New Year, warning that this could lead to another deadly virus outbreak that claimed the lives of more than 41,000 Californians.
Looking to the future: Hospitalizations are expected to drop by more than half over the next month, Ghaly said. In the past two weeks, there has been a 29% reduction in hospitalizations with more than 14,000 patients receiving treatment. About 3,800 of these people are in intensive care units.
These projections led to the suspension of regional requests for stay at home across the state. The ICU’s capacity projections were the driving force behind these restrictions, and the entire state is now expected to be well above the 15% limit set by the state. In completely new projections, Southern California, which has been the most affected region in the state, is expected to have the largest ICU capacity in the state by next month.
But more than 1,000 instances of Covid-19 variants have been detected in California to date – two different versions of the West Coast variants along with the UK variant.
“The variants create another wildcard,” said Ghaly, adding that the new strains are a cause for genuine concern that are being closely watched as the state continues to actively sequence mutations and develop the capacity to do more.
“If you give Covid an inch, it will take a mile,” he warned.