Coronavirus updates: California reports 13,000 cases in one day, a new all-time high
California’s ongoing and severe surge reached new heights on Friday, when the state recorded its highest daily case total for the entire pandemic.
The addition of 13,005 lab-confirmed infections brought the state total to more than 1.07 million, the California Department of Public Health said in a morning update.
That breaks the previous high of 12,807 set July 21. Friday’s total came from a pool of about 50,000 more diagnostic tests than the summer record.
Hospitalization figures continue to grow substantially, with the statewide patient total for the disease passing 4,750 for the first time since Aug. 20.
More than eight months into the crisis and with coronavirus activity erupting throughout the state, the vast majority of California starting this weekend will be in the tightest set of restrictions imposed since spring.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office on Thursday announced a one-month, 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew for all counties in the state health department’s purple tier.
The announcement came three days after the state sent more than two dozen counties back to that most stringent tier, which now encompasses 94% of California’s 40 million residents, due to rapidly accelerating COVID-19 numbers.
The curfew restricts non-essential gatherings and business operations. It will mainly impact outdoor restaurant dining and a few entertainment-centered businesses that do significant business late at night. You can still pick up takeout or get drive-thru food after 10 p.m. and grocery stores will be allowed to stay open. You can still run essential errands like walking your dog or going to the pharmacy.
Newsom in a statement referred to the new measure as a “limited stay-at-home order,” and it is currently set to expire the morning of Dec. 21.
California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly says this week’s major changes to restrictions — Monday’s mass tier demotions and the curfew — are necessary emergency actions as COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations accelerate.
California’s infection growth curve has been extremely steep. The rolling two-week average, now above 8,650, was a little over 3,100 one month ago and about 4,500 just two weeks ago. In just the past week, the state has added more than 70,000 cases — over 10,000 a day.
Test positivity, as a rolling two-week average, has gone from 3.2% at the start of November to 5.2% as of Friday, reflecting that the surge is fueled by a true increase in spread and not simply a product of increased testing. The World Health Organization has for months recommended regions do not proceed with economic reopening until the rate of tests returning positive is below 5%. California stayed below that mark for nearly all of September and October.
The number of virus patients currently hospitalized statewide has jumped to 4,755, a net increase of more than 2,200 patients since Nov. 1. The total in intensive care has spiked from 700 to nearly 1,250 this month. Just over 1,900 ICU beds were available as of Thursday.
The hospitalization surge has been very widespread: Nearly two dozen counties that combine for the lion’s share of California’s patients have each had their total increase more than 40% since the start of this month, The Bee recently calculated.
Likewise, new cases are up across the board, in essentially all of California’s well-populated areas.
“Activities you normally do are higher risk today than they were a month ago,” because more people are infected statewide, Ghaly said in a Thursday news conference. “This (curfew) is going to help us stop the surge faster and avoid more severe restrictions.”
The U.S. as a whole is amid its worst surge yet in the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University and other compilers of nationwide COVID-19 data, with activity on the rise in almost every state.
Curfew has been criticized. Will it be enforced?
Several local government leaders in Northern California, especially in rural parts of the state, have lambasted the curfew order as unnecessary and overreaching. Some suggest there isn’t evidence to support it will be effective. Others say it will confuse people.
Assemblyman James Gallagher, R-Yuba City, who has been a vocal opponent of the stay-at-home order for months, in a Thursday statement slammed the curfew as “arbitrary” and claimed it won’t be effective.
“This virus does not suddenly come out at night, and there is little evidence that shifting businesses’ operating hours has any impact ... A curfew undermines the public’s faith that the guidelines are science-driven,” he wrote.
Sacramento County health chief Dr. Peter Beilenson also expressed a bit of skepticism, saying Thanksgiving and the winter holidays are of primary concern, but “very few” of those types of celebrations go later than 10 p.m.
Placer County Board of Supervisors Chair Bonnie Gore called the curfew a “civil liberties issue” and said residents “are aware of the risk and should be trusted to conduct themselves with discretion.”
Earlier this week, though, Placer County health director and interim health officer Dr. Rob Oldham acknowledged in a Board of Supervisors meeting that the region’s surge is “escalating much faster” than anticipated. Placer’s health office recently reported that 20% of people with confirmed COVID-19 cases interviewed in October said they had attended a large in-person gathering, which Oldham said was the highest rate of any month in the pandemic.
Ghaly says the goal of the curfew is to reduce nighttime gatherings, which are mostly not essential. For a couple of weeks, Ghaly and local health leaders, including in the Sacramento region, have attributed the infection surge to private in-home gatherings in which friends and family members don’t adhere to social distancing and face covering guidelines.
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“Letting our guard down could put thousands of lives in danger and cripple our health care system,” Dr. Erica Pan, the state’s acting public health officer, said in a written statement accompanying Thursday’s announcement from Newsom’s office.
Many local law enforcement bodies in the Sacramento area also said Thursday that they would not be enforcing compliance of the curfew, opting to continue an education-based approach.
Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones and others said those calling dispatch about curfew violations will be rerouted to 311 so that callers can reach the county health office instead. The Sacramento Police Department and Placer and El Dorado sheriff’s offices put out similar statements.
Those agencies had essentially the same response when Newsom’s office announced a statewide mask mandate in June.
Hospitals filling fast, especially in rural California
Hospitals across the state have seen coronavirus patient totals surge rapidly in recent weeks and, with infections still also on a sharp incline, are bracing for even worse.
Adventist Health/Rideout, the only general acute care hospital in the Yuba-Sutter area, has had its virus patient total soar from three on Nov. 10 all the way to 24 on Thursday.
Rural parts of the state are of high concern not only because hospital space is limited, but because the nearest alternative sites for some can be hours away. From Siskiyou County near the Oregon border to the Tahoe side of El Dorado County to Mono County in the Eastern Sierra range, hospitals with small capacities in the first place are seeing those limited beds filled with spiking numbers of COVID-19 patients.
California’s hospitals aren’t hurting as much for supplies, like personal protective equipment, as they were earlier in the pandemic. But staff shortages are becoming particularly concerning because of how widespread California’s current surge is.
“Earlier in the year, we were able to redeploy staff and resources to these hot spots,” Alan Morgan, CEO of the National Rural Health Association, recently told The Bee. “We really were talking about hot spots. The problem now is when every place is a hot spot, you lose the ability to redeploy.”
Many health care workers dealing with COVID-19 patients have also gotten sick with the disease themselves, exacerbating personnel shortages. This is one of the main reasons that Newsom and the state have announced that the earliest available rounds of emergency-approved vaccines, which may come as early as December, will go to health workers.
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Sacramento teachers concerned for their safety, unions say
Local teachers unions are asking county leaders to bolster health and safety measures before reopening any further.
Leaders of 11 of the county’s 13 teachers unions in a recent letter urged Beilenson and Sacramento County schools superintendent Dave Gordon not to allow in-person campus openings until they can “ensure that safety measures actually (are) implemented including: regular and accessible testing-for-prevention dedicated to schools; rapid case notification and contact tracing; isolation support and medical care for our most vulnerable students and families; and data transparency of cases, outbreaks, and quarantines in schools.”
About 5,000 Folsom Cordova Unified School District elementary students returned to in-person learning last week, even as Sacramento County was downgraded to the purple tier and a handful of other districts aiming for November openings had their plans put on hold.
Folsom Cordova Unified openings were allowed to proceed because campus opening plans had already been in place for that week.
Within days, four classrooms had to close as at least four people at two campuses tested positive.
State and local health officials have said there does not appear to be any evidence linking large outbreaks or surges to reopening schools.
But school employees have gotten sick, and some have died. Sacramento City Unified has had about 30 staff members test positive during the pandemic. Two died, not including a substitute teacher who passed away in the spring, according to an emailed notification from the district.
Six-county region approaches 50,000 cases. Over 700 dead
The six-county Sacramento region has combined for at least 712 COVID-19 deaths and close to 49,000 total confirmed cases during the ongoing health crisis. Nearly 370 of the infected are currently hospitalized.
Sacramento County has recorded 32,865 lab-positive coronavirus cases and 546 resident deaths from the virus. The county set a record high Thursday with 559 cases, then reported 454 more on Friday.
Hospitalizations continue to grow intensely, reaching 231 on Friday, four higher than Thursday. The previous three days saw net increases of 19, 17 and 19, state data show. The county’s high from the summer surge was 281.
The county now has 50 patients in ICUs, down four from Thursday.
The city of Sacramento surpassed 300 coronavirus deaths on Thursday, and that increased to 304 with Friday’s update.
County health officials have now confirmed 26 deaths for the first two weeks of November. The county’s October death toll has grown by two, from 54 to 56, after additional cause of death determinations were completed.
Yolo County has reported 3,981 total lab-confirmed cases during the pandemic, adding 53 on Thursday. The county reported one new death for 72 all-time.
Yolo has 13 patients in hospitals with COVID-19, up one from Thursday and with seven still in ICUs, according to state data updated Friday.
Placer County has reported 5,687 cases during the pandemic, adding 54 on Wednesday, 99 on Thursday and 45 on Friday.
The county has reported four deaths this week: one Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. The countywide death toll is now 67.
Placer’s massive spike in hospitalized cases continues to break records on a daily basis. The county says it has 91 patients in hospital beds with confirmed coronavirus as of Friday, a number that has tripled since Halloween, with 83 (91%) in hospitals specifically “because of COVID.” Both totals well exceed the peaks from the summer surge, in which Placer never had more than 70 hospitalized virus patients at any one time.
The county says 10 are now in ICUs, nine of whom are being treated specifically for the disease.
State data updated Friday, which has varied slightly from the county’s self-reported numbers, showed Placer at 86 hospitalized and 12 in ICUs.
El Dorado County is one of a few California counties with a single-digit death toll, with just four fatalities since the start of the pandemic. But new cases are coming at an accelerated pace and hospitalizations are rising fast as well.
The county on Thursday added 52 new cases for a cumulative total of 1,899. Though a large share of recent cases have come from the Lake Tahoe region, the biggest plurality from Thursday’s total came from El Dorado Hills at 15, the county said in an update.
El Dorado has eight hospitalized COVID-19 patients as of Friday with half of them in ICUs, the same totals as Thursday.
Sutter County health officials have reported a total of 2,601 people positive for coronavirus and 13 deaths. The county added 81 new cases Thursday, breaking a daily record of 80 set Monday.
The past seven days have marked Sutter County’s seven highest daily infection totals of the pandemic, the local health dashboard shows.
Yuba County officials have reported a total of 1,706 COVID-19 infections and 10 deaths. The county reported 41 new infections Thursday, the second-most in any day of the pandemic.
Sutter and Yuba, sister counties that share a public health office and have a combined total of one hospital, have seen the COVID-19 patient total at that hospital shoot up very quickly. Adventist Health/Rideout in Marysville was treating 24 virus patients as of Wednesday, up from 10 as of Nov. 13.
Rideout’s president, Rick Rawson, in a video message earlier this week pleaded for local residents to follow health orders and avoid gatherings to keep his hospital from becoming overwhelmed.
The Bee’s Rosalio Ahumada, Tony Bizjak, Sophia Bollag, Dale Kasler, Sawsan Morrar, Jason Pohl, Ryan Sabalow, Andrew Sheeler and Molly Sullivan contributed to this story. Listen to our daily briefing:
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