Well, I did. California is officially in first place in a race that no one wants to win. As of Saturday, the state has the largest number of new cases of COVID per capita in the United States:
Last week, the state reported the fourth-highest daily number of COVID-19 cases per 100,000 population over a seven-day period, but California came in first when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and they updated the case per inhabitant 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, placing it comfortably ahead of Tennessee, second, with an average of 89.6 cases. daily to 100,000 residents in the same period of time.
The daily number of cases per capita in California is actually down from 109.3 last week, which is probably due to reported delays caused by the Christmas holidays.
California’s winter growth is about twice as bad as we had in the spring / summer, based on the number of people hospitalized.
As of Monday, more than 19,750 patients have been 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 observed during the summer growth, when about 7,200 were hospitalized, with 2,050 in intensive care.
The availability of ICU beds is still at 0% in Southern California and Central Valley. Officials have not yet said the three-week blockade will be extended, but that is certainly the case. At a news conference, Governor Newsom said the decision would be announced tomorrow. The blocking end frame is the same as for its introduction, ie the ICU capacity of 15%. So at this point, the entire southern half of the state is nowhere near anything. What we don’t know is how long the blockade will be extended.
All this raises a question that Politico highlighted last week. Why is this happening? California has taken this virus seriously from the beginning. It was the first state to close in the spring and had a halt in the worst-hit areas for most of this month. But so far it seems that these measures have not really worked.
The revolution confused leaders and health experts. They can indicate any number of reasons that have contributed to California’s growth over the past few weeks. But it’s hard to identify a single factor – and just as hard to find a silver bullet …
In Los Angeles, officials have always said that people gather too often. They blamed the holidays and post-season viewing parties when the Dodgers and Lakers won championships this fall.
Some themselves blamed the strict rules, saying co-opted Californians couldn’t take it anymore and decided they had to live their lives. Others said that congregation environments remain a severe concern in a housing-constrained state, especially in low-income communities, where residents live in cramped spaces and must continue to work personally to survive …
Assembly member Jordan Cunningham (R-Templeton) argued that the state’s attempt to “shut down the types of human interaction without seeing if it was effective” created a kind of reaction – “leading people to a higher-risk activity.” , such as gathering in the house, than places like restaurants.
There are some data that support this idea that people are pushing back against blockages. Data on cell phones earlier this month seemed to support the idea that Bayonne Californians are not following the rules as strictly as in the spring:
Data company Unacast, a company that collects cell phone location data from millions of phones for private companies, has created a “Social Distancing Scoreboard” that shows which California counties and not only are in line with what determines people to stay home. Each county and state is classified on a scale from A to F based on three criteria: the change of average mobility based on the distance traveled, the change of non-essential visits and the difference in meeting density …
… Data from December 17 – almost two weeks after five Bay Area counties adopted their home state early – show that only one county receives an “A” rating.
If I had to point out one factor that might persuade people not to take this as seriously this time, it would be the hypocrisy of Democratic leaders who preached social distance and then were caught at elegant tables in closed rooms. Both Governor Newsom and San Francisco Mayor London Breed have been caught doing this, and I think it suggests to most people that they can cheat things in a similar way, instead of being strict. Hypocrisy is what made California the epicenter of winter growth.