Coronavirus cases are rising in the Sacramento region. Business closings may be coming
With coronavirus cases again on the rise, Sacramento County’s top public health chief put out a plea Wednesday for families to think twice before gathering in groups for Thanksgiving, holiday dinners or other celebrations.
The Sacramento region and California as a whole are still faring far better than most states at the moment, and far better than during the state’s summer COVID-19 surge when hospital intensive care units nearly filled, county health chief Dr. Peter Beilenson said.
But with rates rising and more people heading indoors, where virus transmission happens more easily, Beilenson warned of a potential winter surge.
“Thanksgiving is going to be a real problem,” he said. “It’s understandable. People want to get together with family. We ask that you do a virtual Thanksgiving gathering so that the whole family can enjoy the next 30 years of in-person Thanksgiving gatherings.”
New data released by the state on Wednesday reveal that most counties in the Sacramento region and several in other parts of the state are showing regression toward higher infection rates. Only a handful are trending in the right direction, notching progress in advancing toward looser restrictions within the state’s opening process.
Sacramento, Yolo, El Dorado and Placer could all be faced with imposing tighter health restrictions on some types of businesses within the next few weeks.
The four have combined for more than 35,000 lab-confirmed cases and 630 deaths from the contagious respiratory disease since the start of the pandemic, with recent data indicating a resurgence in infections after decline from mid-August through most of September.
All four were notified in the state’s weekly assessment of COVID-19 risk levels that they failed to meet the standards required for their current tier levels within the state’s reopening framework.
That means, barring a state-issued exemption or a change to the process itself, each county would be demoted to a stricter tier if the numbers don’t improve. Red-tier Sacramento and Yolo counties, in that instance, would have to tell restaurants to discontinue the limited level of indoor dining that has been allowed since late September.
California COVID infection increases
Statewide, COVID-19 infection and hospital rates have been on the rise since the latter half of October. The California Department of Public Health reported more than 5,300 new cases Wednesday, the most since late August in a single day not linked to the input of backlogged data.
The day’s tally boosted the state’s all-time count past 940,000 lab-confirmed cases, and the average daily case total for the last two weeks is now over 4,400. The daily rate had stayed below 3,400 throughout the first half of October before beginning to climb.
The statewide test positivity rate, as a rolling 14-day average, has increased from 2.5% to 3.3% in the past three weeks. That suggests true spread of the disease is rising, and the spike in cases is not just a product of higher testing capacity.
Additionally, the number of patients with confirmed COVID-19 in California hospitals, a figure that had plateaued between 2,200 and 2,400 for most of October, is now approaching 2,700 amid a steady climb. The total in intensive care units increased by 5% Tuesday and another 5% Wednesday, and it’s up 28% in less than two weeks — from 610 to 779 requiring ICU care.
Those are trends made all the more concerning by the influx of potential new cases that could be linked to Halloween weekend and in-person Election Day voting, neither of which are expected to show up in the data until around mid-November. And as Beilenson notes, colder weather and Thanksgiving await after that.
Will businesses have to close back down?
Gov. Gavin Newsom and state health officials introduced the tiered reopening framework at the start of September, and it has gone relatively smoothly.
Tiers determine which businesses and other activities can remain open and under which sets of restrictions. The move from the purple tier to red is most substantial, allowing restaurants, places of worship and more to reopen for indoor operations with strict capacity limits. Moves to the less-restrictive orange and yellow tiers increase those capacity limits and allow more, mainly entertainment-based sectors to open up.
This week’s tier list update from the state, delayed from the usual Tuesday to Wednesday due to the election, brought more foreshadowing than immediate change.
Health officials demoted two Northern California counties to stricter tiers and promoted another one to looser restrictions: Shasta County went from red to purple, Plumas County from yellow to orange and Colusa County was promoted from red to orange.
There are now 10 counties in the purple tier and nine in the yellow tier. The remaining 39 counties — the bulk of California — are in the middle two tiers.
But 13 of California’s red, orange and yellow counties failed to meet the necessary criteria for their current tiers this week, including the four in the immediate capital region.
The two main metrics considered in tier classifications are daily new infections per 100,000 residents and the percentage of diagnostic tests returning positive. The state also looks at a health equity metric for counties of more than 106,000 people, which considers test positivity rate in a county’s neighborhoods considered most disadvantaged.
Because of built-in lag times in the opening framework, this week’s update looking at data from Oct. 18 to Oct. 24 is the first to fully take into account the statewide spike in cases that started around the mid-point of the month. Infections have increased significantly in the greater Sacramento area since then, with nursing facility outbreaks and nursing home outbreaks pointed to as potential key sources, as The Sacramento Bee reported last week.
Sacramento and Yolo counties each met the state’s test positivity requirement of 4.9% or less for the orange tier. Sacramento’s was 3.4% and Yolo’s was 2.7%, with both increasing by a half-point compared to last week.
But each averaged more than seven new daily cases per 100,000 residents, which is the red-to-purple threshold.
El Dorado and Placer counties also failed to meet their criteria for the orange tier in this week’s update. Similar to Sacramento and Yolo, the two foothill counties had too many new cases per capita; test positivity, while higher than the previous week, stayed in the allowable range.
In most circumstances, it takes two consecutive weeks of meeting a less-restrictive tier’s requirements or failing to meet the currently assigned tier’s requirements to be promoted or demoted, respectively.
Yolo County immediately issued a news release announcing it had met purple-tier metrics for its first week, urging residents to follow health protocols like social distancing, mask use and avoiding large gatherings in an effort to mitigate the current spike and avoid business shutdowns.
“We must all cooperate and take personal responsibility for diminishing the spread of this virus,” Yolo County Board of Supervisors chair Gary Sandy said in a written statement.
There are exceptions that can prevent demotion. CDPH and the county can engage in “tier adjudication,” which is essentially an appeal process letting the county argue that a data discrepancy or other factor skewed its weekly numbers in an abnormal way.
Placer County remains in orange despite two straight weeks of red-tier numbers because it has sought adjudication from the state. Its formal adjudication document isn’t due to the state until Thursday evening.
This story was originally published November 4, 2020 at 1:59 PM.
