COVID-19 is No. 1 cause of death in Fresno County. See the August surge in 4 charts
Each month since the first COVID-19 cases were confirmed in Fresno and the central San Joaquin Valley in early March, the coronavirus pandemic has claimed a larger number of lives.
August was the deadliest month yet for the pandemic locally, with 152 deaths in Fresno County – more than the prior five months combined. There were 315 fatalities across Fresno, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Merced and Tulare counties combined.
“I myself was pretty astounded,” said Dr. Rais Vohra, Fresno County’s interim health officer, as he reported 27 additional deaths over the past weekend to wrap up the month. “For the last few days we’ve had just dozens of deaths upon deaths, which is very concerning.”
Vohra said he believes the larger number of deaths in August is connected to a surge in new infections surfacing each day starting in July. “Some of these people have been hospitalized for several weeks, while others just caught the infection very recently but didn’t have very much reserve” because they also have other afflictions that affected their overall health, he said.
Those other conditions, he added, “just left them with no room to recover once they caught this viral infection.”
COVID-19 killed more people last month, both in Fresno County and the broader Valley region, than the numbers of people who typically die from either heart disease or cancer in August, according to cause-of-death data for 2016, 2017 and 2018 from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.
In Fresno County and the Valley, the two leading causes of death in August over that three-year span have been heart disease and cancer, by a wide margin. Heart disease killed an average of 129 people each August in Fresno County, and 255 people in the six-county central San Joaquin Valley region. Various forms of cancer claimed an average of 120 people in Fresno County and 246 residents Valleywide in those same months.
Higher risk factors
Of the 290 people who have died since March in Fresno County, almost 215 had some other “co-morbidity,” or underlying medical condition that affected their overall health. But county health officials noted that COVID-19 is cited as their primary cause of death.
The most numerous conditions seen among patients who died of coronavirus disease are diabetes, hypertension, lung disease and asthma, kidney disease, cardiovascular disease, liver disease and immune disorders, according to data from the Fresno County Department of Public Health.
Fresno County and nearby counties have significant numbers of residents with these risk factors – and some who have more than one, according to recent health studies.
“In terms of the broad contours, it’s evident that co-morbid diseases do play a role in many of these deaths,” Vohra said. “Especially as these patients get older, the majority of them do have some other disease process that also is afflicting them, perhaps a chronic disease process.”
Additionally, half of the deaths were among people age 75 or older. But almost 30% of the deaths were among patients who were under the age of 65 – including two people age 17 or younger and 15 people between the ages of 18 and 45. “The spread in terms of ages really skews in terms of older than 65,” Vohra said.
“But … your eye just always trips over the 30-year-old, the 40-year-old; that’s a little too close for comfort because it just feels like, wow, that could be any one of us,” he added. “These are not necessarily elderly, older patients. Sometimes they’re very young, healthy middle-age people that just get cut down in the prime of life.”
Surge in deaths follows surge in cases
Health officials have previously called deaths a lagging indicator of the pandemic that follows increases in cases and hospitalizations – an idea that Vohra repeated this week. Vohra described increasing numbers of new coronavirus cases that accelerated in July, after moves to reopen sectors of businesses that had been closed to prevent the spread of the contagion, and continued through mid-August.
“Whenever we talk about a surge, first you get a case count that goes up, and out of that case count, fortunately not a lot of people get hospitalized, but we know people do,” he said. “And then as the hospitalizations go up, the next thing that happens is that the number of deaths go up, as well. That’s just how surges work.”
Vohra cautioned that Fresno County and the Valley will likely see more increases in new COVID-19 cases as California begins a slower process of reopening businesses that have been under restrictions to slow the spread of the virus.
“We actually experienced that here in Fresno County and around California when we did our reopening the first time,” he said of easing limitations in May and June. “When we do reopen, we’ll do it very slowly and cautiously so we don’t have another surge like we had before.”
“The first time we hit the gas, we went a little too hard,” Vohra added. “The next time, we’re going to hit the gas a little bit more gently and not accelerate so fast so we can manage the numbers” of patients requiring treatment in hospitals and intensive-care units.
Vohra noted that many of the deaths occurred after patients had been hospitalized for treatment that proved unsuccessful.
“That speaks to the fact that we don’t have cures for every single case,” he said, describing drug treatments and other therapies that doctors use to help their patients. “Even though those will help a lot of patients, there’s still going to be deaths because not all patients respond to those.”
“It is a sobering reality of where we’re at, that this is still a very new type of infection,” Vohra added. “It’s still something we’re learning more about. And it’s unfortunately still something that’s claiming way too many lives.”
This story was originally published September 3, 2020 at 11:53 AM.
