Coronavirus updates: California death toll hits 20,000 as brutal December unfolds
The coronavirus continues to spread rampantly in California, and though limited supplies of vaccine could begin distribution in just a few days if all goes according to plan, health officials are still warning that the next several weeks figure to be the worst stretch yet of the pandemic.
The state on Tuesday surpassed 20,000 COVID-19 deaths during the pandemic, reporting a one-day increase of 112 deaths. Nearly 1.39 million Californians have tested positive to date — with the five highest daily case totals of the crisis reported Friday through Tuesday combining for about 125,000 infections, according to the California Department of Public Health.
Over 10,500 people were hospitalized in California with confirmed cases of the virus, including 2,417 in intensive care units, the state reported Tuesday. Both are record-high figures, and the net increase of 497 hospitalized cases between Monday and Tuesday marked the state’s biggest one-day jump.
During a Monday news conference, Gov. Gavin Newsom shared a slide on hospitalizations showing that that day’s count of 10,070 virus patients came among about 47,000 total admitted patients statewide. This means that out of all people admitted in a California hospital for any reason, more than one-in-five were positive for COVID-19 .
That’s one of several reasons California is earmarking the first available doses of a vaccine, like the one from Pfizer that may get federal emergency use authorization as early as this Thursday or Friday, for health care workers. Pfizer’s vaccine was administered for the first time outside of a clinical trial setting Wednesday, in the United Kingdom.
CDPH on Tuesday reported a statewide test positivity rate of 8.7% for the past two weeks, blowing past July’s peak of 7.6%.
The surge is already far worse than that experienced during the summer, and it likely hasn’t yet hit its crescendo. Officials including state Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly say California is only just beginning to see the impact of Thanksgiving travel and gatherings on case totals.
Newsom last Thursday unveiled a regional stay-at-home order, breaking the state down into five regions based on mutual aid networks. In the order, tighter restrictions — including temporary bans on outdoor restaurant dining, other business closures and capacity limits on retail and grocery stores — are triggered across all counties in a region starting one day after that region’s available ICU capacity drops below 15%.
The state as a whole is below that mark, at 13.3%, and all five regions had their capacity drop Tuesday compared to Monday, according to CDPH.
Two regions, the San Joaquin Valley (5.6% capacity as of Tuesday) and Southern California (10.1%), entered the regional shutdown over the weekend.
Five Bay Area counties, despite that region maintaining close to 25% capacity since Newsom’s announcement, tightened their local orders late last week in advance of the state edict requiring them to do so, as did Yolo County near the capital.
The other two regions, Greater Sacramento and Northern California, had respective capacities of 18.8% and 25% and are not yet subject to the stricter order.
Because it can generally take up to two weeks for a diagnosed case to end up hospitalized, the latest infection totals coming on top of already-packed hospitals paint a bleak outlook for how the developing ICU crisis could intensify in mid-to-late December.
Ghaly has said that an estimated 12% of those infected end up hospitalized within the next two weeks, and of those that are hospitalized, about 30% end up needing intensive care.
Those percentages would amount to about 15,000 additional hospital patients and 4,500 additional ICU patients linked to the six-digit case total reported in the past five days.
Sacramento County could get 14,000 doses of vaccine soon
Sacramento County Public Health Officer Dr. Olivia Kasirye told The Sacramento Bee on Monday the region will likely drop under 15% in a matter of days, either late this week or early next week, based on the latest data trends.
“Our hope is this will be the last time we will be asking people to sacrifice,” she told the county Board of Supervisors in a Tuesday meeting.
If the FDA issues emergency authorization for the Pfizer vaccine on Thursday, Sacramento County expects to receive 14,000 doses, which could arrive as early as this weekend, Kasirye said. County documents show the exact total is 14,625.
The vaccine is a two-dose regimen, but the plan is to distribute that supply of 14,625 to the same number of people, then provide them with their second dose from a later shipment.
Kasirye said county health officials discussed the possibility of taking the same voluntary steps as Yolo and the Bay Area counties, but ultimately decided to wait for capacity to hit 15%. She noted the difficulty of balancing public health needs with the ravaging impact of shutdowns on local businesses.
“People want to comply (with health orders), but they have bills to pay,” she said. “We finally made the decision we will wait. The numbers do go up and down a bit.”
On top of the swelling case totals linked to Thanksgiving, the next four weeks will be marked by a string of holidays that will again tempt multi-household get togethers among friends, family and other loved ones.
Hanukkah begins this week. Christmas comes two weeks after that. And New Year celebrations, saying goodbye and a much-deserved good riddance to 2020, will come one week after Christmas.
“The hope is that in the new year, once we get past the major celebrations, we will see reductions” in cases and hospitalizations, Kasirye told The Bee.
Case rate, test positivity still high in Sacramento area
The regional stay-at-home order supersedes the tier framework where it is in effect, but the color-coded system remains the reopening protocol for counties not under the regional order.
In a Tuesday update, CDPH demoted Amador and Marin counties to the purple tier. With that move, 99.9% of California’s population is now in that tier, the tightest of the four but not as restrictive as the new region-based order. Four counties with just over 40,000 residents between them are in less-restrictive tiers — Alpine, Inyo and Mariposa in red, plus Sierra in orange.
The state also released its weekly data for the two main COVID-19 metrics across all 58 counties.
The latest edition — the first to reflect case data from the week of Thanksgiving — shows that test positivity and new case rates across the capital region remain high and are still rising.
The six main counties that make up the Sacramento area — Sacramento, El Dorado, Placer, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba — all had test positivity rates above 10%, more than double the World Health Organization’s recommended rate for economic opening.
Sutter’s positivity increased one point since the last update from 20.1% to 21.1%, now ranking second-worst in the state behind tiny Modoc County. Yuba’s rate is now 17.7%, up 1.5% from the previous week.
El Dorado, which long fared much better than neighboring counties in terms of infections, came next at 12.1%. Sacramento, Placer and Yolo counties were all between 10% and 11%.
As for the remaining seven counties that make up what the state now considers the “Greater Sacramento” region: Colusa had positivity of 15%; Nevada’s was 10%; Butte and Plumas were around 6%; Amador and Alpine were near 4.5%; and Sierra County, where 3,100 people live, had the state’s best rate at 1.3%.
Tuesday’s CDPH assessment looked at data from the week ending Nov. 28.
Sleep Train Arena in Natomas will open as field hospital
Officials are prepping to set up the practice gym at Sleep Train Arena, the former home of the Sacramento Kings, as an overflow hospital.
Newsom announced last week that the emergency hospital site will open Wednesday with its first 20 beds available. Another 200 can go online if necessary.
The site was first set up in April and started handling patients in May, but treated just handfuls in the spring before going into “warm” shutdown mode in June.
The Sleep Train alternative care facility will treat patients at “sub-acute” level of need, with no plans for ICU care, state Office of Emergency Services officials said. But opening the site will provide regular hospitals with more physical space and staffing to deal with ICU patients.
The Sleep Train site is one of 11 surge facilities set up statewide, and the only one in the Sacramento area.
Assembly members dine at restaurant, raising questions
A quintet of California state Assembly members, plus the fiancée of one of those lawmakers, ate dinner together outside at a midtown Sacramento restaurant Monday evening, a few hours after their socially distanced swearing-in session at Golden 1 Center.
Assembly members Adrin Nazarian, D-West Toluca Lake, Chad Mayes, I-Yucca Valley, Tasha Boerner Horvath, D-Encinitas, Marc Levine, D-Marin County, and Chris Ward, D-San Diego dined at Maydoon, a Bee reporter observed.
California’s rules for restaurants don’t specify the number of households allowed at an outdoor table, but state health officials have repeatedly recommended that people from no more than three households meet for a meal. Restaurant dining, especially indoors but with a growing number of tight restrictions restricting outdoor eating as well, are viewed by experts as a particularly risky activity because it requires removing one’s mask.
Sacramento County’s own local health order “continues to discourage social gatherings,” according to the most recent version amended in late November, and reiterates that those choosing to attend gatherings should limit their size to a max of three households.
With Newsom facing sustained backlash after his now-infamous attendance at a lobbyist’s birthday dinner at a Napa Valley restaurant, there have been questions regarding the logic within the state’s COVID-19 guidelines: Does a restaurant meal constitute a “social gathering”? If not, should it?
Mayes said the state’s COVID-19 regulations have been “very unclear” and hard to follow.
Pandemic unemployment fraud may total $2 billion
In a letter to state legislators, Bank of America said Monday that it has uncovered fraudulent pandemic unemployment activity in California spanning more than 345,000 different accounts “on the order of approximately $2 billion,” roughly doubling an earlier monetary estimate given by district attorneys late last month.
The scam allegedly involves a massive fraud ring, mainly involving inmates in the state prison system and their accomplices.
The state Employment Development Department was responsible for administering federal aid allocated from the spring stimulus, and Bank of America’s letter said California’s unemployment system was vulnerable to multiple forms of fraud.
Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, leader of the prosecutors’ task force, called it the biggest fraud case in California history.
Capital region: Sacramento County sets another case record
The six counties that make up the bulk of the Greater Sacramento region by population — Sacramento, El Dorado, Placer, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba — have combined for nearly 68,000 confirmed cases and at least 843 COVID-19 deaths.
Sacramento County has reported a total of 44,688 infections and 635 COVID-19 deaths since the onset of the pandemic. The county blew past another daily record with 1,262 new cases reported Tuesday, breaking the mark of a little over 1,100 set one week earlier.
In terms of episode date, which is the earliest of either onset of symptoms or the positive test specimen being collected, Nov. 30, last Tuesday and last Wednesday marked the county’s three largest case loads of the pandemic by far, at 971, 974 and 858, respectively. The previous high had been 662 infections one week earlier on Nov. 23, county data show.
Local health officials have now confirmed at least 89 virus deaths in Sacramento County residents for November. That makes it the third-deadliest month of the pandemic, edging past July but below the tallies for August and September.
Countywide, 385 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 on Tuesday, a new record, with 81 of them in ICUs, state data show.
The city of Sacramento stands at 360 dead and nearly 25,000 infected. The latter equates to about one in every 20 capital city residents having tested positive for the virus since the start of the health crisis.
Yolo County has reported a total of 5,549 infections and 84 deaths, with three fatalities coming Saturday. The county reported 59 new cases following 125 on Monday.
Yolo had a record-high 23 hospitalized with the virus including 11 in intensive care as of Tuesday.
Placer County health officials have reported a total of 7,979 infections and 81 deaths, updated Monday to add 1,069 cases and seven deaths since Friday’s update.
The latest county data indicates a weekly positivity rate of 10.6%, compared to 3.9% one month earlier, reflecting an increase in true spread for the virus even as testing capacity sees a boost.
State data as of Tuesday showed 149 people were in Placer hospitals with COVID-19, including 24 in ICUs.
El Dorado County has reported a total of 3,356 positive test results and eight deaths as of Tuesday. The county’s case count was at 2,882 a day prior, but officials wrote in Monday’s update to its health dashboard that it has an outstanding backlog from the weekend.
Health officials say 20 people are hospitalized in El Dorado with the virus, including an all-time high of nine in ICUs.
In Sutter County, at least 4,234 people have been infected and 25 have died. Local health officials confirmed 106 cases Friday and one death, then reported 319 cases and three more fatalities over the weekend.
Neighboring Yuba County has reported 2,572 infections, with 169 reported Monday for a span including the weekend. Yuba’s reported death toll fell from 11 to 10. This happens occasionally in counties due to a data correction, most frequently involving a decedent’s official place of residence being reclassified into a different county.
The latest test positivity rate in Sutter County was 21.1%, second-highest in the state. Yuba County’s most recent rate according to CDPH was 17.7%, fourth-highest among the 58 counties.
The bi-county health office dashboard showed 44 Sutter residents and 16 Yuba residents hospitalized as of Monday, a record-high 60 for the two counties, though not all of them are being treated at Adventist-Rideout in Yuba County.
Rideout as of Tuesday’s state data update had 42 coronavirus patients, including 10 in intensive care.
This story was originally published December 8, 2020 at 8:46 AM with the headline "Coronavirus updates: California death toll hits 20,000 as brutal December unfolds."
