COVID-19 ‘appears under control’ in Fresno County, top doctor says. See the data here
Coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths in Fresno County and across the surrounding central San Joaquin Valley continued on a downward trend as March drew to a close and April began, according to the latest data from state and county health officials.
“We certainly are reassured that the number of (COVID-19) cases in hospitals is going down,” said Dr. Rais Vohra, Fresno County’s interim health officer, in a media briefing Friday afternoon. Vohra, who had just completed a shift in the emergency department at Community Regional Medical Center in downtown Fresno, said he and his colleagues are seeing far fewer cases of COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases than just a few weeks earlier.
Fresno County reported 4,051 confirmed new coronavirus cases in the month of March, the lowest case count for any month since last summer. The broader central San Joaquin Valley, encompassing Fresno, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Merced and Tulare counties, had a total of 8,624 new confirmed COVID-19 cases in the month, also the fewest since July 2022.
The end of March also saw hospitals treating their lowest number of coronavirus patients in months, both in Fresno County and across the Valley. Hospitals in Fresno County held 85 confirmed COVID-19 cases on Thursday, with 112 in the six-county region — both the fewest patients since mid- to late July 2021.
Deaths attributed to COVID-19 were down from February in both Fresno County and across the Valley, but not as dramatically as cases and hospitalizations. A total of 101 deaths were reported in March, compared to 158 in February. Over the six-county region, deaths in March totaled 280, a slight decline from 304 in February.
While the indicators are positive, Vohra said, the increasing prevalence of the new BA.2 subvariant of COVID-19’s omicron strain is of concern. Vohra said health officials estimate that BA.2 represents at least half of all new coronavirus cases, and perhaps as much as 60% in some places. “We estimate that it is somewhere in that ballpark” in Fresno County, he added.
“This variant has very appropriately raised concerns,” Vohra said. “It’s more contagious and it may be more severe. … It could throw us a curve ball here in the U.S. and in California,” he added, just as a cadre of masking, testing and vaccine mandates are being relaxed to allow people to resume many of their pre-pandemic public and social activities.
“Right now it appears that the (case) numbers are under control,” he said. “That’s why people feel more comfortable doing their social activities.”
But “people should keep in mind that could change. We have to be agile and flexible,” Vohra added. “We understand how things could get worse because we’ve been there before. … We’ve learned the hard way what surges can do to our health care system, to ourselves and our neighbors.”
Since the region’s first local cases of COVID-19 surfaced more than two years ago, there have been almost 231,000 laboratory-confirmed infections among Fresno County residents, and more than 497,000 cases across the Valley.
The death toll from the virus in Fresno County stands at 2,722; across the Valley, 5,786 lives have been lost to COVID-19.
This story was originally published April 1, 2022 at 5:41 PM.
