Well, we did it. California officially ranks first in a race that no one wants to win. As of Saturday, the state has the highest number of new COVID cases per capita in the US:
Last week, the state reported the fourth highest number of daily COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents over a seven-day period, but California jumped to the top spot when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its case per capita on Saturday. population.
According to Saturday’s CDC update, California has reported an average of 100.5 daily COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents over the past seven days, putting it comfortably ahead of second-place Tennessee, which saw an average of 89.6 daily cases per 100,000. residents in the same period.
The daily per capita figure in California is actually down from the 109.3 it was last week, which is likely due to delays in reporting due to the Christmas holidays.
The winter wave in California is about twice the one we had in the spring / summer based on the number of people hospitalized.
On Monday, more than 19,750 patients with confirmed cases of the virus were hospitalized in California, including 4,228 treated in intensive care units. Both totals are now officially more than double the peak seen during the summer wave, when about 7,200 were hospitalized and 2,050 in intensive care.
ICU bed availability is still 0% in Southern California and the Central Valley. Officials have not yet said the three-week lockdown will be extended, but that is certainly the case. At a press conference today, Governor Newsom said the decision would be announced tomorrow. The framework for ending the lockdown is the same as that for entering, namely ICU capacity of 15%. So right now, the entire southern half of the state is nowhere close. What we don’t know is how long the lockdown will be extended.
All of this raises a question that Politico highlighted last week. Why is this happening? California has taken this virus seriously from the start. It was the first state to close in the spring and has had a shutdown in the most severely affected areas for most of this month. But so far it seems that those measures have not really worked.
The turnaround has confused leaders and health experts. They could point to a number of reasons that contributed to California’s rise in recent weeks. But it is difficult to pinpoint a single factor – and equally difficult to find a silver bullet …
All along in Los Angeles, officials have said that people gathered too often. They blamed parties and post-season viewing parties when the Dodgers and Lakers won championships this fall.
Some have blamed the strict rules themselves, saying that incarcerated Californians could no longer take it and decided they had to live their lives. Others have said that municipal environments remain a serious concern in a state with limited housing, especially in low-income communities where residents live in tight quarters and must continue to work in person to survive.
Assembly member Jordan Cunningham (R-Templeton) argued that the state’s attempt to “shut down types of human interaction without seeing if it is effective” caused some kind of backlash – “inducing people to engage in higher risk activities” like gathering indoors, rather than places like restaurants.
There is some data to support this idea of pushing people back against the lockdowns. Cell phone data from earlier this month seemed to support the idea that Californians in the Bay Area just aren’t as strict as they were in the spring:
The data company Unacast, a company that collects cell phone location data from millions of phones for private companies, created the “Social Distancing Scoreboard” that shows which counties in California and beyond are complying to keep people at home. Each province and state is rated on an A to F scale based on three criteria: change in average mobility based on distance traveled, change in non-essential visits, and difference in meeting density …
… Data from Dec. 17 – nearly two weeks after five Bay Area counties prematurely passed the home obligation – shows that only one county gets an “A” rating.
If I had to point out one factor that could convince people not to take this so seriously this time around, it would be the hypocrisy of Democratic leaders who preached social distance and then got caught up in fancy dinners in closed rooms. Both Governor Newsom and Mayor of San Francisco London Breed were caught doing this and I think it suggests to most people that they can fudge things the same way instead of being strict about it. Hypocrisy has made California the epicenter of the winter wave.