The 2020 decline kicked off the exit on Thursday, with the county health department announcing an additional 62 deaths from COVID-19, a new single-day record coming in on New Year’s Eve.
And there was an extra reason for concern. The county’s public health laboratory, working with local researchers, confirmed three more cases of the UK coronavirus strain on Thursday, bringing the total to four, including the initial case involving a 30-year-old man announced on Wednesday .
Officials said none of the four were related and had no contact before the test was positive.
The three additional cases confirmed on Thursday were all men. Investigators in the case interviewed two of the three who reported not having recently traveled abroad. Two of the three new cases were in their 40s and the third in their 50s. The third case for which travel information was not available had not yet been interviewed.
They live in La Mesa, Otay Mesa, Mission Beach and the Rancho Bernardo-Carmel mountain area.
The county public health laboratory was still waiting for the results of the genetic tests to confirm whether a close contact with the first subject of the United Kingdom strain, who was supposedly showing symptoms of coronavirus infection, also has the United Kingdom strain.
Dr. Eric McDonald, medical director of the county’s epidemiology department, said on Thursday evening that the subject, a woman also in her 30s who is the spouse of Wednesday’s case in the United Kingdom, was admitted to hospital after a positive coronavirus test. Genetic tests carried out by Scripps Research will be needed to confirm that the UK strain was involved, but that seems very likely at this point.
“I would be shocked if he did not return with the entire genome sequencing that confirms it,” said McDonald.
He said the three additional UK cases confirmed through genetic testing on Thursday were tested between 20 and 22 December. Helix, a local company that the county hires for testing, examined its records after the first case appeared and found the results to have the revealing “fall” signature that marked Wednesday’s case.
Having cases from different parts of the county that were not known, he said, shows that this strain, which is thought to spread more easily than other variants, has been with us for some time.
“This has not just spread to many different parts of the county among people who have not met in the past two weeks,” said McDonald. “The dispersion of these cases geographically indicates that he has probably been in the county for longer.”
With 99 deaths announced in just the past two days, December is by far the deadliest month in the pandemic. According to county records, 488 deaths were recorded in December, more than double the previous monthly record of 197 recorded in July.
The most recent deaths announced on Thursday range from 45 to 100 years old, with three in their 40s. As always, the deaths announced on a given day did not all occur on the eve of the announcement. It can take days or weeks for death certificates and causes of death to be finalized before being reported to the public.
Taking the latter group into account, records show that a total of 28 deaths occurred on December 22, drawing 18 December for the deadliest day of the pandemic.
McDonald said he analyzed each death certificate before the county released new figures. Seeing so many in December, he said, was particularly distressing.
“Each of these is a person and has a family,” said McDonald. “What this means is that more and more families in San Diego are facing the fact that this is a real and deadly pandemic.”
Deaths are what epidemiologists call a “delay indicator”, usually occurring weeks or months after infections set in. As such, an increase in deaths does not, by itself, say everything about how a pathogen like the new coronavirus is spreading in a community. The number of new positive cases arriving daily provides a more immediate sense of the current rate of infection.
The final COVID-19 report for 2020 lists 3,083 new cases, again jumping the 3,000 mark after three consecutive days below that mark. The result may signal the arrival of a new wave of cases linked to Christmas celebrations, since the average incubation period for the virus – the amount of time the body spends before symptoms usually start to appear – is around 6 days, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Pressure continues to rise in local hospitals, with 1,580 patients with COVID-19 in beds across the county on Wednesday. COVID-positive patients occupied 35 percent of the total 4,504 beds in use. Intensive care admissions remained stable at 621, with 386 diagnosed with COVID-19 and 235 without.