Is California winning the battle against coronavirus spread? Here are the surprising numbers
Has California turned the corner in its fight to slow the coronavirus?
No public health official is talking quite that boldly. But Gov. Gavin Newsom’s health agency provided The Bee with perhaps the most telling numbers yet that the state is staving off the surge of serious cases that overwhelmed hospitals in New York, China, Italy and Spain.
A Johns Hopkins University modeling program used by Newsom’s health team projected there would be nearly 11,000 patients with COVID-19 symptoms in California hospitals by now.
On Monday, a still-cautious Newsom reported only 3,015 hospital beds in use around the state for people who have tested positive for COVID-19, citing data from the previous day. Another 2,000 hospital patients are suspected to have the virus but have not yet received positive test results.
On Sunday, 1,178 confirmed coronavirus patients were in intensive care unit beds, “a modest” 2.9 percent increase over the previous day after flattening briefly at the end of last week, Newsom said.
“Things seem to be stabilizing from the ICU perspective,” Newsom said.
If those numbers remain low, they will be far under projections from Newsom’s office that indicated the state would need to add more than 50,000 hospital beds to accommodate a surge in COVID-19 patients.
So far in California, there have been more than 22,000 confirmed cases and 687 deaths, according to the latest data from the California Department of Public Health.
On Friday, California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly said the state is seeing numbers that fall within its broad projection windows, but toward the lower end - evidence Californians are slowing the spread of the virus by staying home and practicing social distancing.
“This is signaling to us that our peak may not be as high as we planned around and expected,” Ghaly said. “The difference between what we’re seeing today in our hospitals may not be that much different than where we are going to peak in the many weeks to come.”
In Sacramento County, health officer Dr. Olivia Kasirye said local data in recent days “is giving some glimmer of hope” that worst-case scenarios won’t happen in the capital city area. As of Monday, only 70 of the estimated available 600 critical care beds at Sacramento County hospitals were in use for people with COVID-19 symptoms.
Almost universally, though, healthcare officials say it is too early to tell whether California has weathered the worst of the storm. While the new infection and death data is trending better than predicted two weeks ago, it may reflect a plateau moment on a continued uphill climb of more infections and deaths in the coming weeks and months.
Newsom’s State Public Health Officer Sonia Angell warned that the government and the public must be cautious in reading the latest statistics. For one, testing in California is still limited by supply shortages, meaning there may be many more people with the illness than the state knows.
She said the state needs, in particular, more research about what is happening in places where the vulnerable are grouped and the virus can spread quickly, including prisons, homeless shelters and nursing homes.
And administration officials, as well as health experts around the state, say the numbers can turn ugly again if residents stop sheltering in place and increase social interactions.
Newsom revealed last week that he has been laying plans to reopen the state economy. He said he will offer some details to the public on Tuesday, but said he does not have a timeline and will only ease social restrictions if data shows viral transmission is slowing significantly.
“There is no pinpointed date,” Newsom said. “It will be driven by facts, driven by evidence, driven by science, it will be driven by public health advisers.”
State officials will “figure out a way of doing this where we don’t invite a second wave, where we don’t let down our guard and we don’t put ourselves in a position where we don’t regret moving too quickly,” he said.
Keeping state-at-home orders in place
Many health experts are saying the next few weeks and months will be critical. It’s too early to talk about a widespread move to get people back to work without trade-offs, said Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of public health at the University of California, Irvine.
Case in point, he said: Los Angeles County’s public health department on Friday put out projections showing that if stay-at-home orders ended now and people returned to their typical habits, a staggering 95.6 percent of residents would be infected with the coronavirus by Aug. 1.
As long as cases are still rising, even with sheltering in place, “there’s no reason to expect anything but more rising when you ease it up,” Noymer said.
“It’s not safer now. If you haven’t had it yet, you’re just as susceptible as before. If anything the risk is higher,” he said.
Various estimates of the virus’s growth, though, have thrown confusion into the equation.
One often-quoted research center, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, projects that California hospitals saw their potential peak loads as of Monday, April 13, and that the number of daily deaths in California will peak on Wednesday.
That forecast has been used by the White House and officials in numerous states and counties as part of their planning process. The Washington Institute has been lauded for its efforts to create a data-based projection to help hospitals plan for beds and ventilators, but some epidemiologists have criticized the analysis as too optimistic.
The projections are based on mortality rates in states for respiratory illnesses, overlaid with current coronavirus data. Dr. Ali Mokdad, professor of health metrics science at the Washington institute, described it as reverse engineering to compensate for spotty COVID-19 testing.
Jeffrey Martin, an epidemiologist at UC San Francisco, said it is almost pointless to try to precisely predict the pandemic peak. “You are not going to know the peak until you are past it. Not until solid a week past a high number can you know.”
Newsom’s team uses the more conservative Johns Hopkins model which bases its results on 1,000 simulations corresponding with non-pharmaceutical interventions similar to safety precautions, such as the social distancing implemented in California on March 20.
Newsom, for his part, has deflected questions about when he thinks the peak will arrive, saying it will be later than April. As California flattens its curve, it also pushes the point of peak infection further into the future, Newsom said.
Noymer said, “California has not dodged the bullet.”
Efforts like social distancing “only delay cases, it doesn’t eliminate them,” Noymer said. People are getting impatient, he said, and may be shirking restrictions. There’s a delay between what’s happening in reality and when it’s reflected in data projections — “We’re talking about May 1 before we’ll even know if we’ll pay a price for Easter,” he said.
“It’s too early to take a victory lap,” he said.
This story was originally published April 14, 2020 at 8:58 AM with the headline "Is California winning the battle against coronavirus spread? Here are the surprising numbers."