COVID cases erupt to all-time high in Sacramento County, tripling in the past week
Sacramento County’s case rate for COVID-19 has exploded to the highest point of the pandemic, nearly tripling in one week as the extremely contagious omicron variant takes over.
The county’s latest seven-day case rate is 72 per 100,000, soaring well past the previous record of 64 set in December 2020 and with no sign of slowing. The local health office in a Monday update to its data dashboard, including four days of data due to the New Year’s holiday, reported more than 6,500 new cases.
The rate had been just 26 per 100,000 one week earlier and about 10 per 100,000 in late November, but the county set a daily record on the four most recent days with data available: 1,375 cases emerged Dec. 27, followed by 1,633 on Tuesday, 1,815 on Wednesday and 1,871 on Thursday in the county of about 1.5 million people.
County health officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the record-setting case numbers.
No new local restrictions have been announced as of midday Monday in response to the surge. California ordered a statewide indoor mask mandate in response to omicron, in effect Dec. 15 through at least Jan. 15, though Sacramento County already had its own local mask order in place.
The extremely steep increase in case rate comes as demand for testing also ramps up exponentially. Community testing sites in recent days have seen very long lines, and an outage involving a test registration system Monday morning halted testing at some sites before resuming at a slow pace.
Figures were not immediately available for total tests processed or test positivity, which the local health office updates weekly on Tuesdays. Sacramento County in last week’s update reported positivity at 6.7%, up from 3.7% the previous week.
The California Department of Public Health, which does not update COVID-19 data on weekends, also did not update state-level case rates or test positivity percentage Monday morning. As of Friday, California health officials reported a daily case rate of 46 per 100,000 with test positivity at 15.9%, just shy of the all-time record of 17.2% set during last winter’s surge.
No explanation was immediately available for the lack of update, but CDPH did not update those figures the Monday after Christmas and in that instance cited the holiday.
Hospitalizations and deaths
CDPH did provide updated hospitalization numbers, showing there are now nearly 6,800 hospitalized with confirmed cases of COVID-19 statewide, up 70% from the 4,001 reported one week earlier. More than 1,250 are in intensive care units, up 29% from a week earlier.
Experts have said the omicron variant does appear to cause milder illness than the previously dominant delta variant, but have warned that the sheer volume of cases could outweigh its mildness and potentially lead health systems to be overwhelmed.
Sacramento County hospitalizations with the virus have spiked from 165 to 267 in the past week, a 62% increase, with the ICU total up 42% from 43 to 61. In nearby Placer County, hospitalizations are up from 85 to 129 for a 52% increase, though the ICU total has held steady at 25.
To date, at least 179,928 Sacramento County residents have tested positive for the coronavirus over the course of the pandemic. At least 2,547 have died, according to the local health office.
The county did not report any new fatalities Monday.
This story was originally published January 3, 2022 at 12:24 PM.
