California continues to move forward with reopening its economy from the coronavirus pandemic, even though the pandemic shows no signs of slowing.
In fact, cases of COVID-19 are up in California, with 11 counties already on a state watchlist because of growing concern about their rising caseloads.
Much of the state will move into Phase 3 of the reopening process Friday, meaning bars and gyms and day camps can resume operations, much to many people's relief, but to others' trepidation. California is seeing a spike in cases as more people are out and about, but Gov. Gavin Newsom said while we are not out of the woods, he is confident that the state now has an ample supply of test kits and protective equipment, that the testing and tracing protocols are in place to monitor the spread, and that hospitals are well-equipped to handle any new surge in cases. He also believes that the rising number of cases in California - now about 139,000 confirmed statewide, with almost 5,000 confirmed deaths - is largely due to more widespread testing.
More than 2.5 million Californians have been tested so far for the virus.
Dr. Nicholas Jewell, professor of Biostatistics at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, joined KCBS Radio's "The State Of California."
How concerned are you about the pace of reopening in California, or more broadly, the nation? What it could mean for the spread of the coronavirus?
I'm, like a lot of other health care professionals, quite concerned nationwide about the rate of reopening, but more concerned about the rate of growth in certain parts of the country. Places like Arizona and California, to some extent, too, in the way the number of positive cases are growing day-to-day.
Where are we really in the fight against COVID-19?
You can look at testing as the percent of the tests that show positive. If you see a very high number there, that means you're not testing very much, you may be testing mostly people with symptoms as that percentage drops that means you're reaching out to people who are not showing symptoms. In testing in California, it's around 5% or 6% of the test each day that are coming back positive. For a state that's further along in the pandemic, New York, they're showing about a 1% positive rate. They're not now finding as many cases. It seems to me strange that three months into the epidemic we're still talking about doing enough testing. But, here we are. California has been doing 50,000 to 60,000 tests a day for the last month. That number hasn't grown considerably in the last month. So that is not the full explanation of why we're seeing more cases this week than perhaps we did a few weeks ago.
Is the positivity rate in some California counties growing?
I can't speak for every county. I don't have them all at my fingertips. I wouldn't say the positivity rate is growing, it's just not down as low as we'd like. In some parts of New York it was much, much higher in the middle of the crisis stage of their epidemic. Now it's down to 1% in New York. It's about 5% in California in the last week.
If we don't see it dropping, is that cause for concern?
You have to hold both numbers in your head at the same time. It's great to see that number not going up, given that we're testing in a fierce rate, that number not going up means we're not finding an increasing faction of cases. On the other hand, to see that number staying steady at the same time as the case numbers are increasing is not a great position to be in either. I would be much happier if the positivity rate was staying steady or going down, maybe even testing a little more, but we weren't seeing the raw number of cases increase. Now it is true that the number of hospitalizations statewide have not gone up dramatically and that's not as affected by testing. I think it's also important for listeners to know that New York is a different epidemic from California, that's been obvious from the beginning. Even within California, there are different epidemics going on. It's really much more serious at the moment in Southern California than it is in Northern California. Even when you look at Northern California, Alameda County is different from Yolo County and Monterey County. It's very difficult in a soundbite to cover the whole state with a single message of what's happening. We have to watch locally and react locally to what is happening.
Are you expecting a second wave in the fall or an overlap with the seasonal flu?
The flu is interesting because we don't quite know that's going to play out, given that the flu usually moves from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern Hemisphere, but the Southern Hemisphere has been sheltering-in-place during their normal flu season, which is our summer. How it will play out, I don't know. I think before I talk about a second wave in the fall, I remain concerned we're not through the first wave yet. We're very plateaued in the United States and even in California, it's not really going down as dramatically as we would like. We're still seeing 3,000 a day in California, at least in the last few days. That's a lot. We should be focusing on that number at this point as well as looking down the road to the fall.
