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An early leader in battling COVID-19, the Bay Area this week logged the region’s highest number of deaths in a single day, driven by Alameda County, which has reported 38 deaths in the past two days.
California has been battling a summer wave of cases and deaths that started after state officials began easing lockdown restrictions in June, with infections and deaths peaking in July and August in much of the state and rising sharply in Southern California and the Central Valley.
More recently, the tide has seemed to be turning, with the seven-day average of new cases in Southern California down 64 percent from its mid-July peak. But the Bay Area, which has far fewer cases overall, has yet to decline as rapidly: the region is down 43 percent from its mid-August peak.
Hospitalizations in the Bay Area are down about 30 percent from their peak compared to parts of Southern California and the Central Valley which have cut their rates in about half.
Orange County, one of the hardest hit in the state, had fewer patients hospitalized with COVID-19 on Wednesday than it did in late May. But in Alameda County, which has more cases and deaths than any county in the Bay Area, hospitalizations on Wednesday were 55 percent higher than they were on June 1.
Still, the Bay Area has had a fraction of the hospitalizations that Southern California has seen — both in raw numbers and per capita measurements — and on Wednesday the Bay Area as a whole had fewer than half the hospitalizations of Los Angeles County.
But with Labor Day coming and additional business re-openings in Alameda County announced Thursday, the Bay Area is at a “delicate threshold,” said Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UC San Francisco.
“If we just focus on the Bay Area, we’re sort of at the downslope of the second wave,” she said. “It’s not the time to be complacent about any of this because we’re still at a case rate that’s much higher than it was before this current wave.”
The most concerning sign is death rates, the statistic which tends to be the last to rise when infection spreads, and the last to decline when new cases ebb.
Alameda County reported 17 new COVID-19 deaths Wednesday, the most in any single day during the pandemic. That record was broken Thursday, with 21 new deaths reported, for a total of 295 since the pandemic began, according to data compiled by this news organization.
The entire nine-county region, plus Santa Cruz County, recorded 27 deaths on Wednesday, eclipsing a previous high of 21 on April 22. Not all counties had reported their Thursday totals by early evening.
Many of the new cases and deaths have been concentrated in the heavily Black and Latinx neighborhoods of East Oakland, where three zip codes that include Fruitvale, the Coliseum and the Oakland International Airport down to the San Leandro border, all have at least 355 cases per 10,000 residents, more than twice the rate of anywhere …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Health
