SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) – State home orders will remain in effect in the Bay Area until at least Jan. 8, with the potential to expand based on projections of the intensive care unit’s capacity, state health officials said Saturday.
Home state control is triggered when the average intensive care capacity of a region falls below 15%. The current capacity of the UI in the Bay Area is 5.1%, according to the California Department of Public Health.
The San Joaquin Valley region, Southern California and larger Sacramento regions remain under house arrest orders because their four-week ICU capacity projections do not meet the ability to get out of order, the department said.
Available capacity in the Sacramento region is 6.9 percent, while the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California regions have dropped to 0 percent, according to the department.
The health department said Saturday that California has 2,345,909 confirmed cases so far, although the numbers may not be a real day-to-day change, as test results may be delayed. On Friday, there were 53,341 newly registered confirmed cases and the 7-day positivity rate is 14 percent, while the 14-day positivity rate is 12.6 percent, the department said.
There were 33,391,442 tests performed in California, an increase of 333,131 in the previous 24-hour reporting period.
As the number of cases continues to grow in California, so will the total number of people who will have serious results. There have been 26,357 deaths from COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic.
As of Wednesday, a total of 335,983 doses of vaccine had been administered statewide. As of Monday, a total of 1,762,900 doses of vaccine have been distributed to local health departments and health care systems that have facilities in several counties.
SIGNS Hope
With December dominated by declining ICU capacity and signs of an increase in holiday coronavirus, it was easy to miss the good news: a post-Thanksgiving increase eventually ran out of steam.
“So we’ve seen a slight decrease in the growth rate in our cases,” said Dr. Sara Cody, Santa Clara County Health Officer, just before Christmas.
“It will take a week or so for everything to work out,” said UCSF epidemiologist George Rutherford. “I think just before Christmas we were starting to see a dive, which was good and we saw it through several signs.”
Whether or not this positive trend has continued is not difficult to say at this time. Holidays and weekends reduced testing and delayed reporting.
“I think things are going in the right direction,” says Rutherford. “The question is whether these trends have been affected by the New Year. We won’t know until we know. “
However, Southern California is a different story – 20,000 new cases in Los Angeles on Friday, with a test positivity rate of over 21 percent.
“You know, there’s one interesting thing that’s moving, which is this British variety that’s been found in San Diego in several cases,” Rutherford explained. “The current question is whether these could be differences in the strain that causes more disease in Southern California. I think it is an extremely easy explanation, based on 5 cases, out of 20,000 … but it is something that needs to be analyzed ”.
Back in the Bay Area, the improvement in numbers would be just that: an improvement from the beginning of December. Real progress would still be far away.
“At some point we will be able to get out because a lot of people have been vaccinated,” Rutherford said. “I think we have to be in the game for a few more months until we get the vaccines firmly in place.”
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