Most of the Bay Area’s population is now under a new stay-at-home order, with data showing the region is in the worst shape it has been since very early in the pandemic.
Statewide, the test positivity rate has skyrocketed to 10.3%, the highest rate the state has recorded since May when only a few thousand people were getting tested each day.
That translated to 30,000 new California COVID-19 cases in a single day on Saturday, the first time that barrier has been breached. 10,000 of those were in Los Angeles County alone.
"Los Angeles had 54,000 cases in the last seven days. San Bernardino 13,700, San Diego 11,000, Orange 9,000, Riverside 5,600,” said UCSF Epidemiologist Dr George Rutherford.
ICU capacity in two regions has also dropped well beyond the 15% threshold, which will trigger the state’s new stay-at-home order. In Southern California, capacity has dropped to 10.3% and the Central Valley has just 6.6% of ICU beds available.
That means those regions will have to close non-essential businesses like museums, nail salons, bars and wineries. Restaurants will only be open for takeout and delivery orders and retail capacity will be limited to 20%. All gatherings with people outside of your household are also prohibited, regardless of whether you are meeting indoors or outdoors.
But while the situation is worse in Southern California, there are troubling signs in the Bay Area as well, which is why San Francisco, Santa Clara, Contra Costa and Alameda Counties and the city of Berkeley have voluntarily adopted the state’s restrictions and Marin County will join in tomorrow.
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Santa Clara County has seen 4,900 new cases in the last week, or about 700 cases a day. The test positivity rate in Alameda County has quadrupled since just before Halloween to more than 6%.
And more and more of these cases are ending up in the hospital. For the first time since the start of the pandemic, more than 1,000 people are hospitalized in the Bay Area with COVID-19.
"If you drew a curve from the week or two before Thanksgiving and then a curve starting after Thanksgiving, it seems to be accelerating. So this is a steeper slope. So I think we can say there was a big bump after Thanksgiving. And alarmingly, deaths are starting to go up as well statewide from a nadir of about 50 deaths a day – which is 50 too many – getting closer to about 100 a day right now," said Dr. Rutherford.
Santa Clara, Contra Costa and San Francisco Counties all set new records over the weekend for the highest number of cases in a single day.
Dr. Rutherford says while pandemic fatigue has fully set in for many, he hopes people knuckle down and take this order seriously.
"Fewer people on the road, greater Doordash activity or whatever - delivery service activity - the people you do see out will all have masks on. I mean I think those are the kind of intermediate indicators we’d all like to see. And then the real indicator is whether there are more cases or not and the hospital cases start to go down."
This comes as the FDA is set to review Pfizer's virus vaccine this Thursday and if all goes well, California could start distributing doses by next week.