Orange County Sees 1,200 New Coronavirus Cases Overnight

Ashley Ludwig
·7 min read

ORANGE COUNTY, CA — Coronavirus patients are packing into Orange County's hospitals on Wednesday. Orange County Health Care Officials report 41 new patients and 13 of the sick admitted into intensive care units. The trend is close to matching peak hospitalization rates from July.

The Orange County Health Care Agency also reported 1,208 new COVID-19 diagnoses and one additional fatality, raising the cumulative case count to 80,551 and the death toll to 1,578.

Wednesday's reported fatality was the first so far this week. The county logged 26 coronavirus-related fatalities from Nov. 22 through Saturday.

Deaths are a lagging indicator, officials say, so time will tell where the county is over the next few weeks.

Andrew Noymer, a UC Irvine associate professor of population health and disease prevention, said deaths will rise a couple of weeks from now.

"I guarantee it," he told City News Service. "There's no cases without deaths."

Hospitalizations jumped from 648 on Tuesday to 689 on Wednesday, with the number of patients in intensive care climbing from 158 to 171. On Monday, there were 605 hospitalized in county medical centers, with 146 in ICUs.

"In the last two days, we've picked up 84 in hospitals," Noymer said. "That's like a 50% increase. It's getting worse before our very eyes."

The height of hospitalizations in Orange County was 722 admitted patients on July 14.

"We can't take much more than the 722 we had in July," Noymer said. "It's going to get worse is the problem. It's going to exceed 722. We're pushing into unknown territory."

The last time hospitalization rates were this high was July 25 — with 687 patients — and the previous time ICU rates were this high was Aug. 1.

On Tuesday, the county had 23% of its intensive care unit beds available, but that number dropped to 19% on Wednesday. The percentage of ventilators available decreased, from 61% to 59%.

Availability of beds is not as much of a problem as staffing them with the necessary medical personnel, Noymer said.

"You could rent all the motels in Orange County and have the beds, so it's not the bed itself — it's the staff," he said.

The rise of hospitalizations was not a surprise to Orange County CEO Frank Kim.

A massive increase in testing goes hand in hand with rising case rates, Kim says.

"We're at 100%, and we keep adding capacity" at the testing sites, Kim said. "They keep being fully utilized, so that would indicate a lot of people in Orange County are experiencing symptoms or were in close contact with someone with symptoms.

"In the past, we were below 50%, and we're operating basically at 100%, so based on those trends, I would expect the volume of new positive cases we've seen recently to continue at those levels. And that's a concern for us because we keep adding hospital bed usage, and not as many people are exiting the bed as coming into a bed."

County officials are eyeing a reopening of the Fairview Medical Center in Costa Mesa to care for the ill, Kim said.

"It's a good thing we have that flexibility in capacity and can do that," he said.

Hospitals are struggling with an ongoing nursing shortage, Kim said.

Orange County Supervisor Lisa Bartlett, president of the California State Association of Counties, expressed similar concerns.

"There's plenty of space for ICU expansion and equipment like ventilators and (personal protective equipment), but there's a potential major shortage of hospital staffing" for ICU beds, which require a higher degree of care skills and experience, she said Tuesday.

Orange County "has been in a bit of a bubble ... where we have significant hospital bed capacity that can be staffed and we've got ventilators and PPE," Bartlett said. "But other counties may not be in the same situation we're in, and that concerns me."

As they did this summer, Orange County's hospitals will have to take on patients from other more stressed hospital systems in the state, Bartlett said.

The mounting numbers over the holiday weekend seem to confirm officials' fears of a Thanksgiving-fueled surge. The full impact of the holiday and Black Friday shopping likely won't be seen for another week, according to Kim.

The state updated its tiered monitoring system metrics once again on Tuesday. The adjusted daily case rate per 100,000 rose from 18.7 on Monday to 22.2 on Tuesday, with the positivity rate going up from 7.6% to 8.8%.

The county's Health Equity Quartile Positivity Rate, which measures the cases in highly affected, needier parts of the county, stands at 13%, nearly three times higher than last reported Nov. 10.

All of the county's metrics now fall within the state's most- restrictive purple tier.

The county's unadjusted case rate per 100,000, which doesn't consider testing rates and other factors, stands at 29.8. That is "middle of the pack" in Southern California with San Bernardino at 46.1 and Riverside at 28.5, Kim said.

Across Orange County cities, here are the latest coronavirus case-counts as of Wednesday:

  • Aliso Viejo - 634 Total Cases

  • Anaheim - 13488 Total Cases

  • Brea - 860 Total Cases

  • Buena Park - 2307 Total Cases

  • Costa Mesa - 2702 Total Cases

  • Coto de Caza - 72 Total Cases

  • Cypress - 831 Total Cases

  • Dana Point - 437 Total Cases

  • Fountain Valley - 893 Total Cases

  • Fullerton - 3839 Total Cases

  • Garden Grove - 4624 Total Cases

  • Huntington Beach - 3437 Total Cases

  • Irvine - 2815 Total Cases

  • La Habra - 2170 Total Cases

  • La Palma - 227 Total Cases

  • Ladera Ranch - 281 Total Cases

  • Laguna Beach - 341 Total Cases

  • Laguna Hills - 493 Total Cases

  • Laguna Niguel - 730 Total Cases

  • Laguna Woods - 105 Total Cases

  • Lake Forest - 1289 Total Cases

  • Los Alamitos - 325 Total Cases

  • Midway City - 200 Total Cases

  • Mission Viejo - 1362 Total Cases

  • Newport Beach - 1511 Total Cases

  • Orange - 3833 Total Cases

  • Placentia - 1455 Total Cases

  • Rancho Mission Viejo - 109 Total Cases

  • Rancho Santa Margarita - 534 Total Cases

  • Rossmoor - 77 Total Cases

  • San Clemente - 913 Total Cases

  • San Juan Capistrano - 901 Total Cases

  • Santa Ana - 15609 Total Cases

  • Seal Beach - 375 Total Cases

  • Silverado - 45 Total Cases

  • Stanton - 955 Total Cases

  • Trabuco Canyon - 300 Total Cases

  • Tustin - 1960 Total Cases

  • Villa Park - 95 Total Cases

  • Westminster - 1796 Total Cases

  • Yorba Linda - 1228 Total Cases

He said he was encouraged to see the county's testing rate per 100,000 at 411.2. Officials hope that testing will encourage the afflicted to quarantine and contact others about exposure, encouraging all to socially distance.

The number of tests conducted in the county stands at 1,482,285, including 12,851 reported Wednesday.

The county has also received about 500 some take-home testing kits that were disseminated starting last week. About 50 of them came back positive, in keeping with the general positivity rate, Kim said. The county expects another shipment of about 5,000 of the take-home tests soon, he said.

Officials recommend waiting at least two days after traveling or attending an event or gathering to get tested because the infection might not be detected right away.

The county is expecting to receive its first shipment of vaccines by mid-December, Kim said. Larger hospital systems will get them directly, but the county will receive vaccines to hand out individual, stand-alone hospitals, Kim said.

Frontline health care workers will be among the first to receive vaccinations, along with people with underlying health conditions that make them especially vulnerable to the disease.

County officials are concerned about whether enough people will get shots to achieve herd immunity, so they sent out a survey and received about 20,000 responses that they hope to use to guide a public awareness campaign, Kim said.

Kim was also encouraged about the news of a bipartisan group of senators floating an economic stimulus bill. Counties and cities need the money to continue financing widespread testing, he said.

"I'm hoping that's a sign of good news that Congress will engage and do the right thing and return some of those tax dollars into the community so we can continue our testing programs and other things," Kim said.

Without stimulus funding, the county would have to cut back on testing and core public services fueled by the pandemic, Kim said.

"Ultimately, when you have a loss of revenue you have a growing demand for services with a matching-grant requirement -- and you can't say no because it's an entitlement program," Kim said. "I have to squeeze somewhere else in the county, and it's going to push up against public safety and public health unless I get stimulus."

This article originally appeared on the Orange County Patch