Coronavirus updates: More than 80 dead in California; U.S. cases of infection top 100,000
As infection and death figures for the coronavirus continue to rise at alarming rates worldwide, and as much of everyday life as we know it in the United States has been brought to a halt, still more closures and cancellations are pouring in.
From recreational sites at national forests throughout the state to all of the Department of Motor Vehicles’ field offices, California’s shutdown is growing ever tighter as the state has now seen more than 80 people die from the illness.
All of those measures come in response to the coronavirus pandemic, as the top priority among state and local government leaders remains flattening the growth curve of the highly contagious virus to a level that won’t overwhelm hospital systems.
It has now been eight days since Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a mandatory stay-at-home order, requiring the state’s nearly 40 million residents to remain at their residences except for essential activities such as shopping for groceries or staple supplies, or going to work at a business that is critical to infrastructure.
While the definition of “essential” has sparked varying levels of debate across industries, California and the U.S. at large have each shattered records for unemployment claims in recent days and weeks as vast numbers of businesses shut down, laid off employees or did both.
The United States now leads the world in volume of confirmed COVID-19, with about 100,717 of the world’s more than 575,000 infections, according to data maintained by Johns Hopkins University.
More than 1,505 people have died in the U.S. as of Friday afternoon. Close to half of the nation’s cases and more than one-third of the fatalities have come in New York state, where more than 44,000 have been infected and 500-plus have died, with daily increases in both of those tallies still growing at dramatic rates.
There’s serious concern that other states will follow similar trajectories, including the country’s most populous, California, and that infection and hospitalization rates will outpace hospitals’ supplies of ventilators, which are critical devices for patients with severe cases of the respiratory disease.
The California Department of Public Health, in a Friday update, confirmed 3,801 total COVID-19 cases and 78 coronavirus deaths as of 2 p.m. Thursday. The death toll had been at just 40 deaths Sunday afternoon, with the jump to 78 representing a 95 percent increase in 72 hours.
CDPH officials said 48 health workers have been infected statewide.
The state also released new breakdowns of the ages of those who have tested positive: 45 cases have been found in children under 18; the majority of cases, 1,906 or 50 percent, were in people age 18 to 49; there were 967 cases in people between 50 and 64 and 847 cases in people 65 years and older.
Among the positive cases, according to the state’s figures, 44 percent of cases (1,680) were among women and 55 percent (2,074) of cases were among men; 47 cases were unknown, they said.
And according to a Bee survey count of numbers released by counties’ public health departments, fatalities are still climbing fast: At least 90 people have died from the virus among at least 4,569 confirmed cases as of midday Friday.
Latest coronavirus numbers: U.S. leads the world
The United States is now leading the world in total coronavirus cases, reaching 100,717 by 3 p.m. Friday, according to Johns Hopkins.
About 1,500 people have died from the virus, including more than 250 on Friday.
The jump in U.S. cases comes a day after it surpassed the total of coronavirus cases in China or Italy, which have reported about 82,000 and 86,000 infections, respectively, according to the Johns Hopkins map.
While China’s case number and its death total, of about 3,300, have stagnated in recent weeks, fatalities continue to rise exponentially in other countries, such as Italy and Spain. Italy reports 8,200 of the world’s 2,500 total deaths as of 8 a.m. Pacific Time, according to Johns Hopkins, and Spain is approaching 5,000 deaths.
France, where over 33,000 cases of the virus have been reported, has confirmed almost 2,000 coronavirus deaths. The United Kingdom, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Friday announced he tested positive for COVID-19, is has nearly 15,000 total cases and 749 fatalities.
Within the United States, after New York’s staggering totals of nearly 45,000 infected and over 500 dead including 366 deaths in New York City, New Jersey has reported almost 7,000 cases and 82 deaths. Washington state is at about 3,200 infections and 150 dead.
After Washington and California, which according to The Bee’s survey count has reached more than 4,200 infections and over 80 deaths, 11 states had reported between 1,000 and 3,000 infections as of noon Pacific Time, per Johns Hopkins
Those states were Michigan, Illinois, Florida, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Texas, Georgia, Colorado, Tennessee and Connecticut. Fatalities range from three, in Tennessee, to 119, in Louisiana, where fatalities have been highly concentrated in the New Orleans area.
Sacramento County reports 6th death
County public health officials said Friday that the number of confirmed coronavirus cases has jumped to 164, and that a sixth person has died from the virus.
Officials declined to offer details about the sixth death from the virus in the county, other than saying the person was older and had underlying health issues prior to contracting the virus.
That new number of infections represents a 45 percent increase in two days, an indication that Sacramento County residents will have to continue to be on guard for the virus for weeks, if not months, to come, county health officials said.
Officials did caution that the fast-growing number is more the result of a notable increase in testing over the past few days, not an indication that the virus has suddenly increased its rate of spread in the county.
“Although these numbers are unsettling, they are not surprising,” said Dr. Peter Beilenson, director of the Sacramento County Department of Health Services. “Together, using social distancing, we are reducing new cases today, which will stagger the rate of cases in the weeks to come.”
South Lake Tahoe to fine non-essential violators
The South Lake Tahoe City Council has authorized administrative citations and fines for anyone violating the governor’s stay-at-home order, including nonessential businesses that were still open to the public, vacation rental homes, hotels, motels and campgrounds hosting guests and visitors to one these businesses not listed in an exempt category.
“The primary concern is safety here,” Mayor Jason Collin said in a news release. “We are going to do everything in our power to keep our residents safe.”
The city has been asking short-term rental owners to stop renting until further notice, and this week El Dorado County issued the same directive. The emergency order issued Friday morning allows a fine of $1,000 per day and each day of a violation could constitute a separate offense. The City Council asked for strict enforcement, so violators should not expect a warning, according to the news release.
Sacramento school closures extended
The Sacramento County Office of Education announced Friday afternoon that all public K-12 districts will now be closed through at least May 1.
“On the advice of the Department of Public Health, we feel that is necessary to continue our fight against the COVID-19 outbreak, and this will make our students and our families hopefully as safe as possible as we battle this virus,” Sacramento County Superintendent of Schools David Gordon said.
Friday’s extension came following the initial closure announced March 13, in which county officials indicated campuses would be closed for up to three weeks.
Nearly 500,000 students in the four-county capital region — Sacramento, El Dorado, Placer and Yolo counties — are currently out of school. Gordon said he had never seen closures on this scale.
How many are hospitalized with coronavirus in Sacramento area?
While it remains unclear how many people admitted to Sacramento-area hospitals have been tested for COVID-19, officials are beginning to say how many have been hospitalized after testing positive for it.
David Lubarsky, CEO of UC Davis Health, on Thursday night said there were approximately 11 COVID-19 patients at UC Davis Medical Center, but hospital spokesman Charles Casey in a Friday email said the total was down to eight patients.
The hospital has 625 beds. Lubarsky did not say how many patients had actually been tested for the disease or how many tests per day were being administered.
“Right now, actually, the level of uptick ... is nowhere near that of New York,” Lubarsky said of the hospitalizations. “I think it’s going to be a little while, that is, several weeks at least, before we really see the major uptick that some other places have seen.”
Lubarsky made the comments during a telephone town hall hosted by Sen. Richard Pan.
Elsewhere, Placer County’s three hospitals, with 467 licensed adult beds, reported 54 confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19 as of Thursday, said Chris Gray-Garcia, a county spokesman. The hospitals take patients from across the region.
Up at Marshall Medical Center in Placerville, only one of the hospital’s 125 adult beds was occupied by a patient fighting the respiratory illness, which is caused by the new coronavirus.
In an internal email this week, Lubarsky said there had been “the first of what will be many” UC Davis Medical Center employees who tested positive for COVID-19. It remains unclear how many health care workers were sickened, though Lubarsky was adamant they did not acquire it from working in the hospital.
Lubarsky on the Thursday call said testing capacity at the hospital would be increasing next week. He also said the hospital system was not limiting the use of personal protective equipment for “appropriate use,” possibly referring to concerns among many health care workers that they should be allowed to wear masks as a precaution when interacting with patients, especially given the apparently limited number of people who have been tested.
Yolo County, Dignity Health, Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Health would not provide information on how many beds were occupied by COVID-19 patients.
Sacramento County referred The Bee to hospital operators.
Yolo County announces new exemption for non-essential businesses
Yolo County in a Friday morning statement said that effective immediately, it will allow non-essential local businesses to process orders for home delivery.
Physical locations for these businesses must still remain closed, the county said.
“As residents stay home longer due to shelter in place orders from the County and state of California, non-essential items will start to become essential for many communities,” the county said in a news release. “
“The benefits to allowing local deliveries is three-fold: one, it enables individuals to continue sheltering in place, thus maintaining their health and safety; secondly, it reduces the number of individuals who are out moving around the community potentially spreading the virus or exposing themselves to it; and finally, it enables a sector of our struggling local economy to resume business activities which provide employment and services,” Yolo County Board Chair Gary Sandy said in a statement.
Yolo County on Friday announced two new cases of the coronavirus for a total of 13. One person has died in the jurisdiction.
Mass unemployment, layoffs continue
As businesses shut down in droves, last week the state processed 186,809 unemployment claims, triple the number from a week ago. California could lose 1.6 million jobs by June, according to a Sacramento Bee analysis of projections from the Economic Policy Institute, bringing unemployment to levels comparable to the Great Recession.
Although some experts say the comeback could be robust once the public health crisis eases, so far the economic shutdown has devastated entire industries. Casinos and hotels have closed, along with taverns, most retailers and vast sections of the service industry, such as hair salons.
Providing a further glimpse of the swiftness of the economic downturn, the EDD also released a rash of recent WARN Act filings — notices issued by employers laying off workers. You can see the chart here; look toward the bottom for the recent list of mass layoffs.
Among those issuing pink slips: Sports Clips Haircuts in Carmichael, Davis and Roseville, 50 jobs. European Wax Centers in Sacramento, Elk Grove, Roseville, Rocklin, Folsom and Davis, 133 jobs.
The listings are far from comprehensive; Newsom issued an executive order allowing employers to lay off workers without filing the WARN Act notices. Typically, employers have to give 60-day written notice before imposing major layoffs.
It seems like an artifact from a lifetime ago, but here it is: In February, the unemployment rate in the Sacramento region fell to 3.8 percent. The California Employment Development Department released new unemployment figures Friday that were instantly outdated and felt like a slap in the face.
They show that, before the coronavirus pandemic shut down much of the economy, employers were continuing to hire at a brisk rate: 6,000 new jobs in the four-county metro area. Unemployment dropped a tenth of a percentage point from the month before. A total of 1,032,500 people were working.
Statewide, employers took on 29,000 new workers “as record job expansion continued,” the agency reported. The state’s unemployment rate held steady at 3.9 percent for the second straight month, the lowest recorded California unemployment rate since the 1970s.
That number is expected to skyrocket on the next report as the state continues mandatory stay-at-home protocols.
DMV closing field offices statewide
California’s Department of Motor Vehicles, for instance, has temporarily closed all of its field offices beginning Friday.
In a message to DMV employees Thursday afternoon, the department said the offices will be closed so they can be thoroughly cleaned in order to “protect the health and safety of customers and employees during the coronavirus pandemic.”
According to an internal memo obtained by The Sacramento Bee, those offices will reopen to employees next Wednesday, while the DMV plans to transition some services online, such as vehicle title transfers and vehicle registration renewals that were previously only possible via in-person office visits.
Field offices had previously remained open despite Newsom’s statewide shutdown order, with DMV Director Steve Gordon saying earlier this week the department’s services are “essential,” exempt from the stay-at-home directive because the DMV is in the “critical infrastructure sector.”
The DMV employs close to 10,000 statewide, including more than 6,800 field office workers.
Parks, recreational sites in California closing
Randy Moore, forester for the Pacific Southwest Region, issued the order Wednesday. Moore says warm spring weather and the proximity to large city populations like San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego has led to an increase of park visitors across the region, even though Gov. Gavin Newsom last week issued a statewide stay-at-home order.
“Despite the state order, droves of people have been gathering in national forests, both in groups larger than 10 and without adhering to the 6-feet social distancing requirement,” Moore wrote in his closure order.
Moore cited the Stanislaus National Forest’s Pine Crest Lake area, which is typically a popular destination in the summer. But “the area was completely packed this weekend,” he said.
Meanwhile, the county and city of Sacramento as well as West Sacramento have each closed playgrounds at all of their parks. Spaces for walking, hiking, jogging and biking remain open at most of those parks, as well as Sacramento County park golf courses and parks’ restrooms. Safe social distancing of at least 6 feet from anyone not in one’s household are still required when at any park.
Sacramento hospitals bracing for coronavirus surge
Hospital systems in the Sacramento area and all across California are preparing for what is projected to be a vast uptick in patients requiring medical care due to the coronavirus.
Newsom said earlier this week that the state will need to add 50,000 beds to the hospital system to treat COVID-19 patients atop the 75,000 beds already in the system, including overflow measures.
Roughly 3,600 licensed hospital beds are in the four-county Sacramento region, according to the California Department of Public Health database.
Dignity Health Greater Sacramento CEO Laurie Harting said the current expectation is that the surge and “crest” in COVID-19 cases will come the first week of April.
Sutter Health and Kaiser Permanente are also each growing their surge capacities. In a statement earlier this week, Kaiser officials said they are taking “aggressive and proactive action” to find more beds including increasing capacity and assessing nontraditional spaces in and around medical centers. Sutter Health said they are focusing “every resource we have” on preparing for a surge in patients.
UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento has teamed with the state and local emergency managers, and is prepared to set up three mobile field tents to expand the numbers of on-campus beds, leaders told The Sacramento Bee in a Tuesday statement.
All of this is on top of the health and safety concerns that health workers themselves are facing, including those working at UC Davis Medical Center, which last month drew national attention as it treated the first known, community-transmitted case of the coronavirus.
Two nurses at the Sacramento research hospital, while speaking with The Bee this week under condition of anonymity, said they believed they contracted the coronavirus while treating patients. The hospital system has disputed some elements of those claims, but in a memo and statements earlier this week confirmed that multiple employees of UC Davis Medical Center have tested positive for COVID-19.
The state in its Thursday update said that of the 3,000 confirmed cases, at least 42 are health care workers.
Virus concerns high in county jail, state prison systems
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reports that at least 12 state prison employees have tested positive for COVID-19 as of Thursday evening.
The department has established a database that tracks how many staff members and inmates have tested positive.
As of Thursday, four prison employees tested positive for COVID-19 at the California Institution for Men in Chino; three at California State Prison, Sacramento, which is in Folsom; and one each at Folsom State Prison, California Health Care Facility in Stockton and the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison at Corcoran. Infections were announced Thursday at Wasco State Prison in Kern County and at San Quentin.
The department has tested 167 inmates and so far one inmate, at California State Prison Los Angeles County, has tested positive.
Lawyers for California inmates have asked a federal three-judge panel for an order to release thousands of inmates from custody due to the risk of coronavirus to those behind bars. The state’s prisons are currently at about 131 percent of their design capacity.
At the county level, Sacramento County Sheriff’s officials have announced two waves of early release to free up space at its two jails.
The most recent order, from Sacramento Superior Court, directs the sheriff to release any inmates who have less than 60 days remaining on their sentences and who are not serving time for domestic violence, driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs or any offense that requires registration as a sex offender.
The order will free 421 inmates total, between the main jail downtown and the Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center near Elk Grove, next Monday. The two jails also released 120 inmates near the end of their sentences last week.
Reminder: What is COVID-19? How is coronavirus spread?
Coronavirus is spread through contact between people within 6 feet of each other, especially through coughing and sneezing that expels respiratory droplets that land in the mouths or noses of people nearby. The CDC says it’s possible to catch the disease COVID-19 by touching something that has the virus on it, and then touching your own face, “but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.”
Symptoms of the virus that causes COVID-19 include fever, cough and shortness of breath, which may occur two days to two weeks after exposure. Most develop only mild symptoms, but some people develop more severe symptoms, including pneumonia, which can be fatal. The disease is especially dangerous to the elderly and others with weaker immune systems.
This story was originally published March 27, 2020 at 8:47 AM.
