Here are the latest COVID death totals, new cases in Fresno area
In Fresno County and across the central San Joaquin Valley, October is poised to surpass September among the five deadliest months of the coronavirus pandemic since the first local cases were identified in March 2020.
Through the first two weeks of the month, officials with the Fresno County Department of Public Health have reported 94 deaths officially attributed to COVID-19, compared to 167 for the entire month of September 2021.
Valleywide, there were 300 coronavirus deaths reported in September; so far in October, 198 were confirmed as of Friday across Fresno, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Merced and Tulare counties.
The number of new confirmed COVID-19 infections, however, continues to slide after peaking at nearly 5,000 cases in a single week in Fresno County and more than 8,500 the same week in early September.
As of Friday, just over 1,900 new cases were reported this week in Fresno County, and fewer than 4,200 this week across the region.
To date, more than 132,400 Fresno County residents have tested positive for COVID-19 over the past 20 months, including 2,051 who lost their lives to the virus.
One of the reasons that death reports are on the rise is the process used by health officials to confirm whether the cause of death was COVID-19, rather than some other cause and the patient also happened to test positive for the virus, said Joe Prado, interim assistant director for the Fresno County Department of Public Health.
As such, deaths become a lagging indicator of the pandemic’s effects in a community, rather than a predictive factor.
“With surges overall, we don’t see deaths immediately,” Prado said. “They’re delayed; they start trickling in afterward. It’s 15 to 30 days later when we see death counts start to increase” from a surge in cases.
Valleywide, there have been more than 292,000 laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases since March 2020. Of those, almost 4,200 have succumbed to the respiratory disease and other complications caused by the coronavirus.
