SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) – State stay-at-home ordinances remain in effect in the Bay Area until at least Jan. 8 with potential to expand depending on intensive care unit capacity projections, health officials said Saturday.
The state stay-at-home order is triggered when a region’s average ICU capacity falls below 15 percent. According to the California Department of Public Health, the Bay Area’s current ICU capacity is 5.1 percent.
The San Joaquin Valley, Southern California and greater Sacramento regions remain under stay-at-home orders as their four-week ICU capacity projections do not meet the capacity to leave the order, the division said.
Available capacity in the greater Sacramento region is 6.9 percent, while the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California regions are only a stark 0 percent, according to the department.
The health department said on Saturday that California has 2,345,909 confirmed cases so far, although the numbers may not represent a true daily change, as test results reporting may be delayed. There were 53,341 new confirmed cases Friday, and the 7-day positivity rate is 14 percent, while the 14-day positivity rate is 12.6 percent, the department said.
33,391,442 tests were conducted in California, representing an increase of 333,131 during the previous 24-hour reporting period.
As the number of cases continues to rise in California, the total number of people with serious consequences will also increase. Since the start of the pandemic, there have been 26,357 COVID-19 deaths.
As of Wednesday, a total of 335,983 vaccine doses have been administered statewide. On Monday, a total of 1,762,900 vaccine doses were distributed across local health departments and health care systems with facilities in multiple counties.
HOPEFUL SIGNS
With December being dominated by declining ICU capacity and signs of a coronavirus spike over the holiday season, it was easy to overlook a bit of good news: A post-Thanksgiving spike finally ran out.
“So we’ve seen a slowing rate of the rise in our cases,” said Dr. Sara Cody, Santa Clara County health officer, just before Christmas.
“It will take about a week for everything to be resolved,” said UCSF epidemiologist George Rutherford. “I think we started to see a dip right before Christmas, which was good and we saw it on different indicators.”
Whether that positive trend has continued is a bit difficult to say at the moment. The holidays and weekends have reduced testing and reporting delays.
“I think things are going in the right direction,” said Rutherford. “The question is whether any damage has been done to these trends by New Year’s Eve. We won’t know until we know. “
However, Southern California is a different story – 20,000 new cases in Los Angeles on Friday, with a test positivity rate of more than 21 percent.
“You know, something interesting is being turned around, and that’s this British variety that has been found in San Diego on several occasions,” Rutherford explains. “The question that’s circulating a bit now is whether these might be tribal differences causing more disease in Southern California. I think that’s a very easy explanation based on 5 cases out of 20,000 … but it is something that needs to be investigated. “
Back in the Bay Area, the better numbers would be just that: an improvement from early December. Real progress would be a long way off.
“At some point we’ll be able to get ourselves out because a lot of people have been vaccinated,” Rutherford said. “I think we have a few more months to go until we have the vaccines firmly in place.”
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