Sacramento County surpasses 1,500 COVID-19 deaths, about 1 for every 1,000 residents
Sacramento County’s reported coronavirus death toll surpassed 1,500 Thursday, one death for about every 1,000 residents.
The county reached the milestone in a daily update from the local health office, which increased the toll by eight for an official tally of 1,506 since the COVID-19 pandemic began a year ago.
The 1,500th fatality was reported a little less than a year after the county’s first, which health office data show was March 9, 2020.
Nearly half of the deaths — about 700 of them — occurred from December through January, in the wake of a brutal surge in infections and hospitalizations that first took hold in November at both the local level and throughout California.
The pace of new infections has slowed substantially, declining from nearly 1,000 a day in early January to fewer than 200 a day since mid-February. Deaths are the last virus metric to fall, as those who succumb to COVID-19 can die weeks after infection, so even as new cases and hospitalizations plummeted, the county still suffered at least 117 deaths in February, local data show.
COVID-19 was the fourth-leading cause of death in Sacramento County in 2020. It trailed only cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s.
Deaths have not come evenly across the county’s populace.
COVID-19 is far deadlier for older populations while fatalities are much rarer in young people. Health officials reported about 700 of Sacramento County’s deaths came in residents ages 80 and older, nearly 350 were in their 70s and 270 were in their 60s.
Those age groups combine for 87% of the county’s fatalities, even though they made up only about 17% of its lab-confirmed cases, county health data show.
Another 122 who died of COVID-19 were in their 50s. Just 67 residents ages 0 to 49 died of the virus, which is less than 5% of the overall death toll, despite comprising nearly 70% of the county’s cases.
Fatalities haven’t been distributed evenly geographically, either.
In a Monday update, the county reported 839 deaths came from residents living within Sacramento city limits. For the capital city of about a half-million people, that’s more than one death per every 600 residents, far worse than the county’s overall rate. More than 51,000 of the nearly 94,000 lab-confirmed cases of the disease reported through Thursday have been city residents.
Unincorporated territories in the county made up at least 309 deaths, followed by Elk Grove at 124, Citrus Heights at 76, Rancho Cordova at 57, Galt at 41 and Folsom at 35.
There have been disparities within Sacramento city limits as well, with data showing socioeconomically disadvantaged ZIP codes having higher rates of both infection and death than more affluent areas.
Sacramento County ranks worse in deaths per capita than the three other counties in the four-county capital region. Yolo’s 185 reported deaths amount to about one per 1,200 residents, Placer’s 232 deaths equal about one per 1,725 and El Dorado’s 100 work out to roughly one per 1,930.
This story was originally published March 4, 2021 at 11:04 AM.
