The coronavirus pandemic in California is stabilizing and has additional symptoms of improvement, the state’s most sensible fitness officer said Tuesday.
Across the state, and hospitalizations have declined overall, said Dr. Mark Ghaly, secretary of Health and Human Services.
The number of Californians hospitalized by COVID-19 had declined by more than two weeks, but higher for the first time on Monday, Ghaly said. He added that it was too early to say whether reversal was a component of a broader or unique trend.
“Overall, the state stage is stabilizing and cutting something,” he said. “But it’s not about the total, it’s about what’s happening at the regional and county level.”
California reported 636,883 cases, 11,390 deaths, Tuesday afternoon. The Bay Area recorded 73,916 cases, 985 deaths.
Ghaly’s comments are based on the cautious optimism of Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday, when he said that the state, after getting rid of an accumulation of instances of a statewide knowledge communication challenge that began in July, still has a lot of instances, but that “they are heading in the right direction.”
Parts of the Bay Area are seeing promising signs of improvement, fitness officials have warned that it is too early to report sustainable and long-term progress.
Marin County is beginning to see “a certain flattening of the curve,” Dr. Matt Willis, a fitness employee, an update of COVID-19 to the supervisory board, said Tuesday.
“We’re seeing that our transmission has declined,” he said.
The 14-day case rate in Marin County was higher than more than two hundred for another 100,000 people on August 1 to August 171% on August 13, according to county data.
Hospitalizations and response times of the controls have been reduced, and R0, which is pronounced “R nothing”, a measure of the number of other people inflamed by the patient, is now less than 1, Willis said.
“The sum of those gives a reassuring picture of a decrease in our transmission,” he said.
Test times for Quest Diagnostics, a leading provider of lab services, have decreased in Marin County for more than two weeks, from 7 to 10 days to approximately 4 days.
Similarly, statewide testing time is also a component because the State Testing Working Group has been running to send the tests to labs that can process them more quickly.
“We’re starting to see the culmination of part of our work,” Ghaly said. “This combination of supply and demand has been effective and will pay off.”
Another sign of improvement: Napa County met all of the state’s knowledge goals for its local outbreak tuesday and may be removed from the California Public Fitness Watch list later this week. The nine counties in the Bay Area have been on the watch list since July 9. Napa County is the first in the region to meet state-required parameters.
The state froze the watch list last week due to knowledge-gathering errors, but reopened it Monday. Five counties were then added to the list and Santa Cruz County was removed.
The state has not yet said what happens when counties are removed from the list. A 10th of July fitness ordinance requires counties on the watch list to close nearly all in-room activities for 3 or more consecutive days, but it is unclear whether they can reopen those businesses without delay once they are removed from the list.
In Santa Clara County, where public fitness opened a mass detection clinic on Tuesday at the county fairgrounds, fitness leader Sara Cody said they were still in a crisis that requires immense concentration and a collection of resources.
According to the county website, public aptitude officers are lately analyzing the recently gained past overdue knowledge of the state and examining “all remaining deficiencies.”
“We’re here as a point 0 for COVID in america, and six months later we’re still fighting,” Cody said Tuesday at a press conference. “The explanation for why we keep fighting is that we don’t have the team to get out of it. And one of the most vital equipment is the test.”
The fair site will be to review up to 1,000 more people a day until the end of the week, and can extend up to 5,000 according to the day, making it the largest control clinic in the Bay Area, Cody said. The site will also be used to deliver influenza vaccines and, eventually, a coronavirus vaccine.
“Testing is what we’re going to get through this: get tested, know your prestige and act,” Cody said. “Spread the word out to families, friends, and co-workers to do the same.”
Catherine Ho and Erin Allday are editors of the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] [email protected] Twitter: @Cat_Ho @ErinAllday