Other states are watching COVID-19 rates rise. California’s coronavirus numbers are steady
Coronavirus hospitalizations in California are plateauing.
So are intensive care unit admissions.
Texas, the second most populous state after California, has 10 million fewer people. Yet as of mid-October, it had recorded more COVID-19 deaths.
As coronavirus cases rise across the country, California – at least for now – has managed to stabilize its infection rate.
“We have done better than other states,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said last week. “But we’ve had to be tough, and we’ve had to be vigilant, and we’ve had to be mindful.”
The state’s improving COVID-19 rates, however, come at a cost to the state’s economic prosperity, said Sanjay Varshney, a finance professor at California State University, Sacramento.
California had the 10th lowest state positivity rate in the country on Sunday, but the third highest unemployment rate, according to Johns Hopkins University and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“There’s always a trade-off between lives and livelihoods,” Varshney said. “We have one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, so we paid the price.”
California’s coronavirus success came after a summer spike in infections, when the rate of positive tests over a two-week period often exceeded 7%, well above the World Health Organization’s recommended 5% threshold for governments to consider reopening.
Now, while individual counties vary, the state’s positive test rate has dropped to about 3%, according to the California Department of Public Health.
The average number of new cases per day declined steadily from mid-August to mid-September, and has since hovered over 3,000, down from July highs over 9,000. Average deaths per day have declined from a high of more than 140 in mid-July to about 56.
Newsom and others say the state’s first reopening attempts didn’t do enough to emphasize the precautions people should take. Newsom issued a statewide mask order in June, after the state had already allowed many businesses to reopen and cases were rising.
In response to the summer spike, officials ordered some businesses that had reopened to shutter their doors once more or move to outdoor-only service.
The Newsom administration also rolled out a new color-coded reopening structure designed to be easier to understand and slower-moving than the previous system. The new system sorts counties into four tiers based on the severity of the outbreak in their communities, which determines what types of businesses can be open and what restrictions they must follow. Counties must wait several weeks before they can move into new tiers.
Many business owners say the new rules are unfair. The events industry and theme parks have argued that the state has kept their sectors of the economy shuttered for longer than necessary to protect public safety, at the expense of many workers’ livelihoods.
Republican lawmakers have also criticized Newsom’s strategy. Assemblyman Kevin Kiley blasted the new system as too broad because it imposes county-wide restrictions instead of more targeted intervention.
“Treating similarly situated communities in very different ways creates needless hardship,” the Rocklin Republican said in a written statement. “There is no scientific reason why our state cannot allow low-risk areas within counties to reopen their economies and restore the livelihoods of their residents.”
Newsom and his allies argue the restrictions will help businesses in the long run by avoiding having to stop and start the economy as cases flare and recede, as he predicts will be the case in states with less stringent rules.
“As we have now tamed this growth and we are now reopening, we’re doing it much more methodically,” Newsom said Friday during an event hosted by the Milken Institute. “We’re doing it much more stubbornly, but in a way I think will ultimately aid our economic recovery.”
Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, an epidemiologist and infection disease expert at UCLA, said that the state’s tiered system is likely a major reason the state has been able to improve its case rates. He said the slow nature of the approach – requiring counties to stay in one tier for several weeks before they can move to the next – is essential to combating the virus.
He compares the state of California to a “supertanker,” a ship so massive that it must be steered well in advance of an obstacle. Because it takes weeks for actions like reopening businesses or shutting them down to affect coronavirus numbers, having a slow approach is essential.
He added that the state’s “consistent messaging” around the importance of mask wearing and other preventative measures has also helped. In many other states, politicians and public health officials have given mixed messages about precautions like masks, which has likely driven up their case rates.
Newsom has also overseen an improvement in testing turnaround time, now down to between 24 to 48 hours for most people. At one point this summer, county officials complained that test results sometimes took more than a week to obtain.
The improved test turnaround time, along with diminishing case rates, has given contact tracers time to catch up.
The Newsom administration says local health departments are now able to complete contact tracing investigations for the vast majority of cases within the same day a department receives word of a positive case in their jurisdiction. That’s a dramatic improvement from major delays in July that prevented tracing from being effective.
Experts say contact tracing is essential for communities to keep their infection rates low by identifying potentially infected people quickly and directing them to quarantine. Maintaining an effective contact tracing program could help California keep its rates low.
Yet the state still has too many cases for contact tracing to realistically identify all potential new infections, Kim-Farley said.
California’s health and human services secretary, Dr. Mark Ghaly, said the state’s progress indicates its new color-coded reopening system is working. He also attributed the progress to Californians themselves, who he said are adjusting to taking precautions to avoid spreading the disease, including wearing masks and maintaining distance from others.
But he stressed that Californians must continue to be careful, especially as the country approaches an anticipated spike in the winter. He expects colder weather to drive people inside, where the virus spreads more easily.
The state has already begun to offer guidance on celebrating holidays. State officials strongly discourage trick or treating, and say any celebrations should be held outside. They still discourage all gatherings, but say any events that do occur should be limited to members of no more than three households.
“What we’re seeing here is what we hope to maintain,” Ghaly said during a press conference reviewing the numbers earlier this month. “I think we are assimilating, conditioning to certain lifestyle adaptations that we all know are going to help us carry through.”
This story was originally published October 26, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Other states are watching COVID-19 rates rise. California’s coronavirus numbers are steady."