In a harrowing milestone, California passed 40,000 deaths from COVID-19 on Friday.
However, cases are beginning to decline.
Even as the death toll from the pandemic remains shockingly high, there are emerging signs of hope.
“Deaths unfortunately lag behind case counts by about three weeks,” UCSF Professor of epidemiology Dr. George Rutherford said. “So, it should be this week that we start to see the mortality fall, we hope.”
Dr. Rutherford told KCBS Radio that complicating that projection, though, are a number of potential wild cards that could change the math quickly.
“There’s a wild card – the variants – that’s a major wild card,” he noted. “The second thing is how fast we can get vaccine out. The faster the better.”
California is now second only to New York for total number of COVID-19 deaths, and with so many lives lost, it may seem like residents are already living through the worst case scenario.
But, Dr. Rutherford points out in fact, they’re not.
“The deaths aren’t nearly as high as they could have been,” he said. “In 1918, in San Francisco there were 3,000 deaths from flu. So far, there have been fewer than 300.”
The doctor said that’s a sign that all this difficult public health work has been paying off.
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