Coronavirus updates: Yolo reports 2 deaths, joins California watch list as state surge continues
California’s coronavirus surge has continued to deepen for about three weeks now, and another wave of shutdowns appears to be impending as at least three counties near Sacramento are preparing to land on the state’s watch list due to increasing virus activity.
Placer, Sutter and Yuba will likely join Sacramento and more than 20 other counties where the state has ordered bars and numerous types of indoor businesses, including dine-in restaurants, to close for at least three weeks, their health officers told The Bee on Tuesday.
Gov. Gavin Newsom issued those closure orders beginning one week ago for counties that have been on the state’s monitoring list more than three consecutive days.
Placer, Sutter and Yuba are not on the state’s list yet, but health leaders in those jurisdictions said their current trajectories for new cases and hospitalizations will almost certainly put them there in a matter of days, meaning business shutdowns could come within about a week. The state placed Yolo County on the watch list Wednesday morning, after officials there had voluntarily rolled back some business reopenings.
California as a whole is struggling with a COVID-19 surge that started around mid-June and doesn’t appear to be slowing down.
Nearly 6,000 patients are hospitalized with the respiratory disease; of those, 1,740 are in the ICU, according to a Tuesday data update by the state health department. Both figures are all-time highs for the state, and each have risen all but one day dating back to June 18. Hospitalizations have increased nearly 75 percent since that date, and the ICU total has spiked more than 54 percent.
California as of Tuesday reported more than 277,000 total infections and at least 6,448 deaths from COVID-19, the disease caused by the highly contagious coronavirus, since the pandemic began impacting the state in early March.
Masks or facial coverings have been mandatory while in most public and shared indoor settings across California since June 18.
Sacramento is becoming one of California’s hardest-hit counties. Since the start of the pandemic, the county has confirmed more than 4,500 infections and reported 76 related deaths. The state said Tuesday 157 patients were hospitalized with the virus countywide, a total that has surged after remaining below 40 for all of May and the first 20 days of June, state data show.
As of Tuesday, Sacramento County was on the state watch list due to increasing case totals, rising hospitalization rate and limited ICU capacity.
Yolo County to impose $10,000 fines for COVID-19 violations, now on watch list
Another of Sacramento’s neighbors, Yolo County, passed an emergency ordinance Tuesday that gave county code enforcement officers the authority to fine businesses up to $10,000 if they refuse to follow state and county COVID-19 health protocols.
“The recent rapid spike ... necessitates an increase in enforcement,” Gary Sandy, chair of the county Board of Supervisors, said as the board voted 5-0 Tuesday to introduce the fine system.
Individuals could be fined anywhere from $25 to $500, and businesses could face fines from $250 to $10,000.
County spokeswoman Jenny Tan said county officials will try to educate business owners first. But, if a business is “willfully noncompliant” and resistant to county efforts, the fine could be imposed, she said.
The state on Wednesday added Yolo to its watch list for counties, noting its elevated disease transmission rate and limited hospital capacity.
A state data chart shows Yolo County has no available ICU beds, though just two patients in the county are currently in the ICU among nine hospitalized patients.
“This is not a drill,” West Sacramento Mayor Christopher Cabaldon tweeted Wednesday afternoon in response to the lack of staffed ICU beds.
Tahoe tourists prompt concern for Placer, El Dorado officials
El Dorado County plans to hold an emergency meeting Thursday to address the recent surge of coronavirus cases it has linked to the Lake Tahoe area.
Of the county’s 262 cases, 130 are on the county’s side of the lake, which includes the region’s most populated city of South Lake Tahoe, county data show. Another 69 cases have been reported in the less populated Placer County side of the lake.
There’s concern those numbers will only spike following July 4, but the full impact of the holiday weekend won’t be evident in the test results for a couple of weeks.
“This weekend, the holiday weekend demonstrated that there are a lot of people following the rules, but there are a lot of people who are not,” El Dorado County spokeswoman Carla Hass said.
Hass said health officials there aren’t yet ready to return to an earlier campaign in which tourism officials took the unprecedented step of urging tourists to stay away. However, county officials fear it’s only a matter of time before the state orders lockdowns back in place if the COVID-19 trends continue.
Placer County supervisor Cindy Gustafson told her fellow board members Tuesday some locals were so upset they urged officials to close state freeways and highways to keep visitors away, though the county has no authority to do so.
“People wanted me to be able to shut it down because the visitation numbers are skyrocketing,” Gustafson said.
What is the state watch list? Which counties are on it?
The California Department of Public Health for several weeks has maintained a fluctuating list of counties that it is contacting and potentially intervening with due to concerning trends in coronavirus activity.
The state established the list shortly after Newsom’s office allowed for “regional variance” in economic reopening in May. That reopening system let some counties, where metrics suggested COVID-19 spread was less severe, accelerate ahead of others and the state as a whole in the process.
The watch list, in practice, had been primarily informative up until a few weeks ago, when Newsom first ordered bars to shut down in counties that had been on the list for two weeks or longer.
Then, on July 1, Newsom and state health officials ordered all counties that had been on the list at least three days straight — at that point, 19 of them accounting for about 70 percent of the state’s population — to immediately close all bars and suspend indoor operations at a number of types of businesses, including restaurants, movie theaters, card rooms and other entertainment venues.
As of Wednesday morning, 26 counties are on the state monitoring list: Colusa, Contra Costa, Fresno, Glenn, Imperial, Kern, Kings, Los Angeles, Madera, Marin, Merced, Monterey, Napa, Orange, Riverside, Sacramento, San Benito, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Joaquin, Santa Barbara, Solano, Stanislaus, Tulare and Ventura. All but Colusa, Napa, San Benito and Yolo and have been there more than three days and are therefore subject to the reopening rollback.
The state health department looks at three main criteria: elevated disease transmission, increasing hospitalization and limited hospital capacity.
Disease transmission refers to new case rates. Any county with a 14-day increase of more than 100 new infections per 100,000 residents will be put on the watch list. Hard-hit Imperial County, for instance, is listed in part because it has reported more than 1,700 new cases in the past two weeks. With a population of about 192,000, this works out to about 900 cases per 100,000 — nine times the state’s threshold.
A county can also end up on the list for elevated disease transmission if it’s experienced at least 25 new infections per 100,000 people in the last two weeks, as well as a test positivity of 8 percent or higher over the past week. That condition currently applies to 13 counties, including Fresno County, where 12.4 percent have tested positive.
The next criteria is increasing hospitalization, which is determined by comparing the average number of hospitalized patients in a county from the most recent three-day stretch with the same figure from the previous three days. This only applies to counties with at least 20 patients currently hospitalized. Sacramento County is currently at more than double this threshold due to its soaring hospitalizations: an average of 149 patients were in hospitals July 4-6, a 22 percent jump from the average of 122 from July 1-3.
Finally, the state looks at hospital and medical equipment capacity. Any county with fewer than 20 percent of its hospitals’ ICU beds available, or less than 25 percent of its ventilator stock available, will be placed on the watch list.
Sacramento County is among those with diminishing ICU capacity, having just 17.7 percent available as of Tuesday’s state update.
Latest Sacramento-area numbers: Nearly 6,800 infected, 117 dead
The four-county region of Sacramento, El Dorado, Placer and Yolo counties has reported a combined total of nearly 6,800 infections. Nine total new deaths disclosed by Sacramento County health officials Monday through Wednesday, plus two reported deaths out of Yolo since last Friday, have increased the region’s combined death toll to 117.
Sacramento County reports 4,776 confirmed coronavirus infections since the pandemic started, of which 78 people have died, according to the county’s data dashboard. Two new deaths and 210 additional cases were reported in a Wednesday morning update.
Placer County public health officials reported 32 new cases Wednesday morning for an all-time total of 970. Placer officials say 27 patients are now hospitalized and six of them are in the ICU. Eleven people have died of COVID-19 in Placer County. Roughly 320 cases can be considered active.
Yolo County reported 37 new cases Wednesday, a record for single-day confirmations, with 24 coming from Woodland. The total is five more than the daily numbers county officials reported Saturday and Sunday. Yolo now has confirmed 760 infections from the coronavirus. Also Wednesday, two deaths were reported, increasing the countywide count to 28. The deaths are the first reported since Sunday.
El Dorado County on Wednesday evening reported 16 new COVID-19 cases after adding four on Tuesday and 36 on Monday that accumulated over the weekend. The county, which now has a total of 280 cases, has fared best in the Sacramento area for coronavirus activity. The county still is reporting no confirmed COVID-19 deaths, but has seen case totals climb faster in the past several days. Half of the county’s cases have been reported in the Lake Tahoe region.
North of the capital region, Sutter County has reported a record-setting 27 new cases Tuesday evening and one new death, bringing the all-time totals to 302 cases and four fatalities. Fourteen people are currently hospitalized with COVID-19.
Yuba County reported eight new COVID-19 cases Tuesday and now has recorded a total of 147 cases. The county reported its second death of the pandemic on Saturday; the other came in early April. Seven were hospitalized in Yuba as of Tuesday’s update from the Yuba-Sutter bicounty health office, up one from six hospitalized Monday.
World numbers: Death toll closing in on 550,000, with 132,000 in US
Nearly 12 million have tested positive for COVID-19 worldwide and over 547,000 have died as of Wednesday evening, according to data maintained by Johns Hopkins University.
About one-quarter of each — more than 3 million infections and 132,000 deaths — have come in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins.
After the U.S., the coronavirus has hit hardest in Brazil, where 1.7 million have tested positive and nearly 68,000 have died. Next by death toll are the United Kingdom at over 44,000, Italy at nearly 35,000, Mexico at over 32,000, France at just under 30,000, Spain at more than 28,000 and India at over 20,000 dead, according to Johns Hopkins.
What is COVID-19? How is the 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 July 8, 2020 at 7:47 AM.
