California may have weathered the worst of the COVID-19 holiday surge, with the trends moving in the right direction.
After weeks of doom and gloom, California Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Mark Ghaly delivered a briefing full of promising trends. The seven-day positivity rate in California has fallen below 10%, and hospitalizations are down more than 8% over the last two weeks.
"Good news demonstrating that we are seeing some reductions in transmission," Dr. Ghaly said. "You’ll see that theme…but I think we’re seeing that statewide, not just in certain parts that often have seen that decrease first, but we’re seeing it also in some of those most heavily impacted areas like Southern California and San Joaquin Valley."
Most importantly, Ghaly said, the R effective rate has fallen below 1, to 0.95%, which means the average person with the coronavirus is spreading it to less than one other person.
Dr. Ghaly credited the stay-at-home order, saying all those masks and distance and not mingling are working to stop the pandemic. Because of that, he said, the winter surge was not as bad as projected. California has given out more than 1.5 million shots of the vaccines now, with a record 110,000 on Friday, but still lags behind the efficiency of most other states, with more than half its doses still in freezers.
Dr. Ghaly promised more clarity and consistency in information on how to get those shots, in the days ahead.
Meanwhile, officials are still trying to determine whether new strains of the virus are more contagious or vaccine-resistant, but at the moment, they don’t appear to be making the pandemic worse.
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