California officials painted a cautiously hopeful picture of the pandemic on Monday, the day after reporting the smallest number of cases in a single day in more than two months and when the state prepared to open its largest mass vaccination site in Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara County on Tuesday.
But even with COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths have dropped dramatically in the past month and vaccination numbers have continued to improve, California’s prospects continue to be hampered by uncertain vaccine delivery and the growing spread of new coronavirus variants that lead to another outbreak.
On Sunday, California reported nearly 8,000 new cases of COVID-19 – a drop of 50,000 on January 8 and the first time the state dropped to less than 10,000 cases in the day since before Thanksgiving. The positive test rate dropped from 14% to 5% last month. Hospitalizations dropped by almost a third. In the bay area, the number of patients hospitalized with the virus dropped to less than 1,200 on Sunday, for the first time in two months.
“This is encouraging news, in fact,” Governor Gavin Newsom said at a news conference at the state’s first mass vaccination site, which opened a month ago at Petco Park in San Diego. “Vaccines, however, cannot move fast enough.”
With the worst outbreak of the pandemic receding, Newsom said he would soon announce plans to reopen schools safely, which would include prioritizing teachers for vaccination. Educators are already at a level allowed by the state to be vaccinated, but most counties do not yet have enough vaccine stock to offer them.
In the bay area, unions representing San Francisco Unified School District officials announced a provisional agreement with the district on Sunday to reopen the city’s public schools. This agreement may depend on the vaccination of teachers, depending on the spread of the virus in the community.
Most of California, including all counties in the Bay Area, is still undergoing widespread transmission, meaning they are attributed to the state’s purple layer for reopening. Updated data on the status of county levels is expected by Tuesday.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned states on Monday not to relax restrictions too quickly, with transmission rates still dangerously high. The United States overcame 27 million cumulative cases on Monday.
The country reported more than 460,000 COVID-19 deaths on Monday. In California, more than 44,000 people died of COVID-19, including 4,565 deaths in the bay area. Although the number of daily deaths is also decreasing, the Bay Area recorded 109 deaths on Friday, the second most lethal day in the pandemic.
Walensky’s warning comes as California continues to report new cases of more communicable variants. The state identified 153 cases of the UK’s highly transmissible variant, Newsom said. Scientists have also identified 1,203 cases of two variants that originated in California; it is not yet known whether these variants are more infectious. The state has yet to find any cases of variants from Brazil or South Africa.
Health officials in California and San Francisco said they believe the current vaccines are effective against variants found in the state. But with the new variants spreading quickly – the UK one is expected to be dominant in southern California in a few weeks – public health officials said there was an urgent need to speed up vaccinations.
On February 15, the state will formalize its partnership with two nonprofit health organizations, Blue Shield and Kaiser, to accelerate the distribution of vaccines, Newsom said. California has administered 4.65 million vaccines so far and distributed three times more doses on Sunday than in the previous month, he said. But the state is still receiving just over 1 million doses a week from the federal government.
“We need to see this increase,” said Newsom.
Part of sending more doses is building more infrastructure. The state’s largest public vaccine center, due to open on Tuesday at the San Francisco 49ers’ Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, will have an initial capacity of 5,000 doses per day, which could increase to 15,000.
The state’s vaccine-level system is currently prioritizing healthcare professionals, residents over 65, farmers, educators, and first responders, but it still doesn’t have enough doses to give to all those eligible. Newsom said on Monday that it wants to prioritize people with disabilities and high-risk medical conditions.
The state has allocated more than $ 6.6 billion for the reopening of schools and will also include testing, social distance and ventilation, Newsom said.
“It is my desire that our schools are opened safely as soon as possible, especially for our young children, especially children with special needs, adopted children, homeless youth, children who do not have access to devices,” he said. “I am confident that we can do this safely.”
Newsom said that fear and trust are the biggest obstacles to overcome in order to reopen schools. In January, there were 87 cases of coronavirus from schools in the state, Newsom said. Marin County officials said on Monday they had identified 10 cases of suspected school transmission in 17,000 students in the nearly six months since partial face-to-face teaching resumed.
While the state is dying to reopen schools, the internal services were given the green light by a Supreme Court decision this weekend. The California Department of Public Health issued temporary guidelines allowing in-house services with 25% capacity for counties in the purple layer.
Santa Clara County initially maintained the local health order by banning all internal meetings, including religious services. But on Monday, the county revised its order to allow resumption of domestic services at 20% capacity. The county said in a statement that it still “strongly discourages” indoor meetings of any kind. The order does not allow singing or singing during internal services.
Calvary Chapel, a San Jose church involved in a legal battle after defying health orders and holding internal services, posted a live video on its Facebook page on Sunday that showed a band leading the worship and a pastor preaching on stage without masks. Church officials were not available for comment on Monday.
In San Francisco, Sts. The Church of Peter and Paul is closed until February 13 after three of the five priests who live there contracted the virus, said the spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of San Francisco, Jan Potts. The individual parish decided not to reopen face-to-face services because it did not have the resources to manage them, she said.
“The archbishop wants to make it very clear that it is preferable to celebrate masses outdoors,” said Potts. “It is the safest thing to do, and that is what science shows.”
Aidin Vaziri, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, contributed to this report.
Mallory Moench is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @mallorymoench