Coronavirus cases top 100 in Fresno area. Here’s where increases are happening
The number of coronavirus cases in the central San Joaquin Valley climbed past 100 over the weekend, as Tulare County reported 19 more confirmed positive tests among its residents. The county also reported its first death from COVID-19.
Tulare County confirmed nine new cases in an online briefing Monday – including two children under the age of 18. This brings the total number of cases in the six-county region to 116 since the first two cases came to light on March 6.
Fresno County was scheduled to give an update during its regular late-afternoon Monday report.
Fresno County added a dozen cases to its count on Saturday. Madera County’s total rose by four on Saturday and three on Sunday, while two more cases were reported in Merced County and one in Kings County. Kings County’s second case was reported Sunday morning, while Merced County reported its ninth case Sunday afternoon.
Mariposa County has not reported a case.
Tulare County announced 10 new cases over the weekend (the county originally said 11, but discovered duplicate paperwork for one case), including the county’s first death, and Monday’s addition brought the county total to 43. Of the nine new cases announced Monday, eight were spread via person-to-person contact, said public information officer Tammie Weyker-Adkins. The other case is still under investigation.
Madera County has reported one coronavirus-related death, too.
The increase in cases comes as local and state “shelter in place” and “social distancing” orders continue, directing businesses that are deemed non-essential to remain closed and asking residents to stay at home except for needed trips for shopping or other vital appointments. Such measures are intended to reduce potential person-to-person exposure to the virus and sever what doctors call the chain of transmission.
So far, seven cases in the Valley have been attributed to “community spread” – situations in which investigators presume the patient caught it in their day-to-day activities in the community and cannot precisely pin down the source of exposure. Thirty-two cases are associated with travel by the patients.
Person-to-person contact with other exposed people is responsible for 33 cases, while the source of exposure remains under investigation for another 29 cases across the region.
Kings and Merced counties did not specify the source for 10 of the 11 cases they have between them. At least two patients in the region have recovered from their bouts with the virus, one in Madera County and one in Tulare County.
The ongoing spread of the contagion and continued measures to minimize exposure prompted the leader of the Fresno Diocese of the Roman Catholic Church to indefinitely extend a restriction on public Masses – a decision that will affect Holy Week and Easter Sunday observances at churches throughout the diocese that reaches from Merced and Mariposa counties to Kern County.
“The pandemic we face has grown and all indications are that it will continue to do so for some time,” Bishop Joseph V. Brennan wrote in a letter to parishioners on the diocese’s website. “We were all hoping that the restriction on the celebration of public Masses would end” by March 30, but “that is no longer the case.”
State and national situation
Statewide, confirmed coronavirus cases were reported in 47 of California’s 58 counties. As of Sunday afternoon, about 5,780 cases, including 126 deaths, were attributed by individual counties to COVID-19.
Los Angeles County had the most cases in the state at 1,804 as of Saturday afternoon, along with 32 deaths. Eleven California counties, mostly in remote and rural parts of the state, report that they’ve seen none of their residents show positive test results for the virus.
The United States had nearly 137,000 cases and more than 2,600 deaths from coronavirus as of Sunday afternoon, according to a global pandemic tracker by Johns Hopkins University of Medicine in Maryland.
This story was originally published March 29, 2020 at 2:56 PM.
