Coronavirus hitting some Fresno-area counties harder than others. Infection rates keep climbing
As a region, the central San Joaquin Valley isn’t getting hit as hard by the spread of the novel coronavirus as more urban, densely populated parts of the state.
As of Tuesday morning, the collective number of confirmed COVID-19 cases across Fresno, Kings, Madera, Merced and Tulare counties stood at 345. That works out to about 16.4 cases per 100,000 people.
That pales in comparison to other parts of California where the virus’ documented spread is much more prevalent. In the San Francisco Bay Area, rates per 100,000 residents are as high as almost 76 cases in San Mateo County; 70 cases in San Francisco; and more than 62 cases in Santa Clara County. To the south, Los Angeles County is reporting almost 62 cases per 100,000 residents.
Valley counties are nowhere close to those numbers. But health officials say that’s no reason to relax. The persistent lack of testing capacity to screen residents who aren’t showing any symptoms of the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus means no one really knows how many people may have been exposed and are carrying the contagion without even being aware of it.
Additionally, because populations are lower in the San Joaquin Valley, each new confirmed case of COVID-19 has a statistically larger impact here on the rate per 100,000 than where there are more people in the first place.
The statewide average, encompassing counties populated by 20,000 or fewer residents and urban metroplexes with 1 million or more people, works out to just over 41 cases per 100,000.
High rate in Tulare
Some Valley counties, however, are getting hit harder than others.
In Tulare County, where 157 positive COVID-19 cases and six deaths have been reported, the infection rate is almost 33 per 100,000 people.
Tulare County saw an increase of 22 cases from Monday to Tuesday. Of the positive cases, at least 44 have come from Redwood Springs Healthcare Center, a 176-bed nursing home in Visalia. As of Monday, those cases counted for almost half of the cases reported in the city, the Visalia Times Delta reported.
Madera and Kings counties each have populations under 160,000, but their concentrations of cases are far different. Kings County’s five confirmed cases as of Tuesday morning works out to about 3.2 cases per 100,000. In Madera County, there are 30 cases, or almost 19 per 100,000 population.
With just over 1 million people, Fresno’s 124 cases represents a rate of infection of 12.1 per 100,000. The county on Monday reported its second death, an elderly man. The county said 102 of the 124 cases are in the Fresno/Clovis metro area.
No time for complacency
Dr. Rais Vohra, Fresno County’s interim health officer, cautioned residents against looking at a map, taking comfort in how few cases are in their area, and disregard stay-at-home orders or stop practicing social or physical distancing of 6 feet in public.
“It would be very counterproductive for someone to sit and look at a map and say, ‘Oh, there’s no COVID in my neighborhood or in my cities, so I don’t need to be doing the social distancing or all these other safe, preventative things that I’m hearing about,’” Vohra said Monday.
“There’s no neighborhood and there’s no city that’s not currently at risk,” he added. “Even if you don’t have a case of COVID reported in the area where you’re living, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not at risk, especially the vulnerable people in your life” who are older or have underlying medical conditions that make them more susceptible to the coronavirus.
One of the challenges confronting Vohra and his counterparts around the Valley is the current inability to test residents beyond those who are most at risk.
“Our priority has been to ensure that those high-risk patients are tested and our emergency response personnel – firefighters, law enforcement, folks that may have been exposed to somebody who is a positive COVID patient – that they are tested as well,” said David Pomaville, director of the Fresno County Department of Public Health.
Absent more widespread testing, health officials are staying in close contact with medical offices, clinics and hospitals “to get a better idea of what’s going on in our community” with the spread of the disease, Vohra said.
As more testing capacity is developed, “we’d like to start a program of surveillance testing, … just looking for people that are asymptomatic to see if (the virus) is affecting different communities,” Vohra said. Some counties in other parts of the state have been able to conduct such tests, he added, “and we’re thinking hard about how we can do that with the limited resources we have.”
Vohra said he hopes his department can begin doing such surveillance testing by the middle of April.
