Coronavirus updates: COVID-19 hospitalizations could triple in December, Newsom says

Health officials and hospital leaders in California and across the U.S. are sounding about as much alarm as they possibly can about the autumn surge of coronavirus activity, which continues to intensify by the day in essentially every state but Hawaii, and which in many regions is posing a serious threat of overrunning hospitals’ beds, staffing and other health care resources.

The state’s projections now show California’s hospitalized total could increase two- to threefold during December if state-imposed business and activity restrictions don’t do enough to reverse the latest infection trends, Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a Monday news conference.

Renewed stay-at-home orders effectively locking down purple-tier counties may be necessary, the governor warned.

“We’re going to have to take much more dramatic, arguably drastic, action” if the surging trend continues as it is projected to, Newsom said.

One particularly worrying chart Newsom shared showed intensive care units in every part of California except the Bay Area are expected to meet capacity during December. Bay Area counties could then hit their limits by early January.

The state currently projects ICUs at 112% of capacity statewide by Christmas Eve, a pace suggesting California could run out of non-surge-added intensive care beds by mid-December. In the greater Sacramento area, the projection model predicts ICU capacity could run out by late December. North of the Sacramento area, where ICUs are already 85% full, available beds are expected to run out in early December, Newsom said.

In response to the worsening crisis, a number of new measures have already been issued by local health offices in hard-hit parts of California.

Los Angeles County on Friday issued a fuller stay-at-home order, expanding beyond a temporary ban on both indoor and outdoor restaurant dining implemented earlier in the week. Santa Clara County put a three-week halt on contact sports, including pro football, displacing the NFL’s 49ers from their home stadium and practice facilities.

In the capital region, Sacramento County on Saturday surpassed its summer record for concurrent hospitalized coronavirus patients, then breached 300 for the first time during the pandemic a day later. Neighboring Placer County, dealing with its own quick ascent and approaching double its summer peak, now has more than 120 hospitalized with the virus. Nearly one-fifth of Placer’s licensed hospital bed were occupied by COVID-19 cases as of Sunday.

Public Health Officer Dr. Olivia Kasirye said last week that Sacramento County wasn’t considering implementing its own tighter measures like the one in Los Angeles but will adhere to state-issued guidelines if those are adjusted.

Two of the last well-populated counties that had remained in the state’s second-most restrictive red tier — San Francisco and San Mateo— were downgraded to the stringent purple level in a weekend update from the California Department of Public Health.

Now, activities including restaurant dining, church worship and gym workouts must remain closed on an indoor basis in 51 counties combining for 99.1% of California’s population.

California surpassed 1.2 million cases on Monday, and has reported more than 13,000 new infections a day over the past two weeks. The state has surpassed 19,000 COVID-19 fatalities.

Hospitalized totals tripled across much of California in 4 weeks

Newsom’s suggestion that hospitalized patients could triple during December isn’t at all far-fetched, because it already happened in November. That month’s explosion in hospitalized COVID-19 patients has been not only staggering in scale, but left virtually no part of California untouched.

In four weeks, from Nov. 1 to Nov. 28, the statewide total in hospital beds with confirmed cases of the respiratory disease erupted from about 2,500 to 7,400, breaking the summer record of 7,170. The hospitalized total grew again, by a net of 372 patients with Monday’s update, to hit a new record high of 7,787.

During the current surge, hospitalized caseloads have increased by more than triple in 24 of California’s 58 counties; jumped by between double and triple in 12 others; and spiked between 40% and 60% in another three, The Bee calculated based on COVID-19 data from the California Open Data Portal.

Three Sacramento-area counties — Placer, Yolo and Yuba — had their patient totals increase by at least quadruple. Sacramento County’s rise from 85 to 303 patients represents a 257% growth in four weeks.

Patient totals decreased, very slightly, in just three counties with single-digit totals: San Luis Obispo, Humboldt and Lake.

The above-mentioned 42 counties make up the vast majority of California’s 40 million residents, and they combined for 99.8% of the 7,415 reported hospitalized with COVID-19 as of Sunday, according to CDPH. The remaining counties, most of them among the state’s least populous, started the month with zero hospitalized patients — some because they’re so small they don’t have a hospital within their county lines — and either stayed at zero or increased to single-digit totals by late November.

The trends have potentially disastrous implications. Earlier in the pandemic, a summer surge flooded hospitals with patients, but much of the most severe activity was concentrated in urban hubs.

This time, there’s rampant increase virtually everywhere, including rural areas where hospitals are smaller and alternatives are few and far between.

In the foothills, Nevada County watched its hospitalized total boom from one to 15 in a matter of four weeks. Near the Oregon border, Siskiyou went from one to 14.

At Marysville’s Adventist Health/Rideout, the only general acute care hospital in the Yuba-Sutter bi-county region, the patient load increased more than tenfold: from three to 32. Rideout’s president, Rick Rawson, earlier this month pleaded for the community to take health protocols seriously to keep the hospital from being overrun with patients.

Even more concerning, there’s no sign of relief in the immediate future, especially with colder weather and winter holidays approaching in December.

Hospitalizations tend to trail behind new cases by more than a week, and the rolling two-week average for new statewide cases has increased every day since Nov. 7. Overall hospitalizations and ICU patients have each climbed every day since Oct. 25 — growing slowly at first, then exploding exponentially starting around the second week of November.

Monday marks two weeks since the state widely rolled back most counties to the purple tier, and Friday will mark two weeks since the state imposed a 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew on non-essential activities in those purple counties. That means a correlating slowdown in the rate of new cases could appear in California’s data within the next several days.

But, as Dr. Anthony Fauci pointed out for the U.S. at large, the improvement could very likely be countered or overshadowed by a post-Thanksgiving uptick.

Alarm bells continue post-Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving has passed, as has Black Friday. While some people and families likely heeded health experts’ pleas not to gather for large celebrations, federal air travel data suggests many did not, convening anyway for multi-household gatherings — precisely the type of activity that numerous officials have blamed for the current surge.

It’ll take another couple of weeks for infection data to reflect the true scope of the holiday week’s impact, but officials expect it to be significant.

Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, said Sunday on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that Thanksgiving could present a second surge “superimposed on the surge we are already in” emerging by early December.

Other warnings have been even more dramatic, and calls to action increasingly urgent.

Late last week, a group of researchers at the University of Arizona sent a letter to that state’s health department, saying their data modeling shows Arizona on track to run out of intensive care unit capacity in early December and exhaust hospital beds of any kind by late December if more significant action to clamp down on virus spread is not taken.

The researchers wrote that a hospital crisis is already imminent, and without immediate action such as a wider statewide mask order, that crisis “risks a catastrophe on a scale of the worst natural disaster (Arizona) has ever experienced,” the Associated Press reported.

“It would be akin to facing a major forest fire without evacuation orders,” the Arizona researchers wrote, using a metaphor that resonates for Californians who suffered through a historically bad fire season in 2020.

Nearly all of Sacramento region faring worse than state average

On Saturday, as CDPH demoted Calaveras, Plumas, San Francisco and San Mateo counties to the tighter purple tier, it also provided updated data on coronavirus infection metrics, primarily new cases per 100,000 residents and test positivity rate, in all counties.

The numbers continue to bode very poorly for the greater Sacramento area, especially the Yuba-Sutter region.

Sutter again ranked worst in the entire state in terms of positivity, with 19.8% of diagnostic tests returning positive for the survey period of Nov. 16 to Nov. 22. Yuba was third-worst at 15.3%.

Both are more than triple the World Health Organization’s recommended rate of 5% for regions to keep their economies open, and well above California’s 8% benchmark for the purple tier.

Yolo (9.1%) and Sacramento (8.4%) also came in above 8%. El Dorado is fast-approaching that mark, now at 7.8%. Those three counties, along with Yuba and Sutter, are at their highest points yet in terms of the metric, which health officials say is useful in tracking true spread of the virus while accounting for testing differences. El Dorado’s rate had been as low as 1.1% in mid-October.

Statewide test positivity was 6.6% for the week ending Nov. 22. In the six-county region, only Placer came in below that, at 5.5%.

In terms of cases per capita, Sutter reported an average of 66.6 new daily infections per 100,000 residents for the week ending Nov. 22. That’s nearly 10 times higher than the purple-tier cutoff of seven, and ranks second only to Alpine, California’s smallest county with just over 1,000 residents, which had 76.7 per 100,000.

All but one county — Marin — were at or above seven new daily cases per 100,000 as of Saturday’s update.

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High school athletes rally at Capitol

A group of about 200 student-athletes, parents, coaches and others rallied outside Sacramento’s Capitol building Sunday afternoon, protesting coronavirus restrictions that have put high school sports on hold.

Some held signs with slogans like “Let Us Play” and “Kids Need Sports.”

The California Interscholastic Federation in July pushed back the start of the sports calendar to January. High school sports won’t be allowed to resume until counties’ health departments allow for it.

The state’s tier system has made the reopening of on-campus learning and activities at K-12 schools a complicated process. Districts were allowed to reopen in counties that had been out of the purple stage for at least two weeks, but not all did so right away — many needed additional time to establish their opening plans.

In Sacramento County, Folsom Cordova Unified was the only major district to formally begin the reopening process before the county was demoted back to purple earlier this month, sending roughly 5,000 elementary students back to campuses. Other large districts including Elk Grove Unified and Natomas Unified had been planning to reopen in November or December, but now won’t open their doors until at least January.

Sacramento area by the numbers: 755 dead, 56,000 cases

The six-county Sacramento area has combined for at least 755 deaths and more than 56,000 total confirmed infections during the health crisis.

As of Monday, hospitals in those six counties were treating more than 515 COVID-19 patients.

Sacramento County has recorded 37,884 lab-positive coronavirus cases and 581 resident deaths from the virus.

The local health office reported 1,254 new cases for the three-day window of Monday plus the weekend, following 891 combined total for Thanksgiving and Friday. That equates to an average of about 430 new cases each of those five days.

The county now estimates about 8,200 lab-confirmed cases — more than one-fifth of the all-time total — are currently active.

Hospitalizations continue to surge and on Saturday surpassed summer’s record of 281 concurrent patients. By Monday, the countywide total reached 316, including 69 in ICUs, according to state data. The ICU total increased by eight compared to Sunday, an apparent one-day record for the county.

At least 53 Sacramento County residents have died from Nov. 1 through Nov. 22, health officials said Monday.

Since the start of the pandemic, at least 325 capital city residents have died, the county says.

Yolo County has reported 4,893 total lab-confirmed cases during the pandemic, adding 66 on Monday. The county set a single-day record last Wednesday with 114.

At least 77 Yolo residents have died of COVID-19 to date, including one new fatality reported Monday. Forty-five of those deaths have been linked to skilled nursing or assisted living facilities, mainly in Woodland.

Yolo reached a new record of 21 virus patients in hospitals with confirmed cases Monday, with eight in ICUs, each up by one since Sunday.

Placer County has reported 6,354 cases, most recently adding 130 total for Thanksgiving and Friday. The countywide death toll is 68.

Placer’s spike in hospitalized cases continues to break records on a daily basis, hitting triple-digits for the first time early last week. The county as of Friday reported having 125 patients in hospital beds with confirmed coronavirus, 114 of them (91%) in hospitals specifically “because of COVID.” The county says 13 were in ICUs, 12 of them being treated specifically for the disease.

State data, which varies slightly from the county’s own numbers, on Monday showed 125 hospitalized but 13 in ICUs. The state makes no distinction between patients in hospital beds who have tested positive for COVID-19 and those admitted specifically for the disease.

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.

County health officials added 231 new cases covering the weekend and Monday, bringing the cumulative total to 2,546. El Dorado officials reported 185 cases Friday for the two-day period including Thanksgiving.

El Dorado had 16 hospitalized COVID-19 patients as of Monday, the most since mid-April, with five in ICUs.

Sutter County health officials have reported a total of 3,332 people positive for the coronavirus and 16 deaths, with one fatality reported last Tuesday and another on Saturday.

The county did not report new cases for Thanksgiving, then added 77 on Friday and 112 on Saturday.

Yuba County has reported a total of 2,036 COVID-19 infections and 10 deaths. Yuba added 15 case Friday and 40 more on Saturday.

Sutter and Yuba, sister counties that share a public health office and have just one general acute hospital between them, have seen their COVID-19 patient total skyrocket. According to state data updated Monday, Rideout in Marysville was treating 38 virus patients, including 10 in ICUs. Two staffed ICU bed remained available, compared to one on Sunday.

The Bee’s Cathie Anderson, Sophia Bollag, Tony Bizjak, Joe Davidson, Noel Harris, Sawsan Morrar, Jason Pohl and Ryan Sabalow; and The Associated Press contributed to this story. Listen to our daily briefing:

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