On Wednesday, before California Governor Gavin Newsom addressed the coronavirus crisis in the state, he took time to elaborate on a 5.8 earthquake in the Owens Valley.
It was an appropriate preface, as Newsom announced that the state had seen another record number of newly diagnosed COVID-19 cases, 7,149 new infections. That’s a jump of 2,000 infections in just 24 hours.
“We cannot continue doing what we have done in the past few weeks,” Newsom said. He said some people had cabin fever, some people just let their guard down. “
“I am not naive,” Newsom said. People are mixing. We are spreading this virus. It is our behaviors that lead to these numbers. “
Southern Newsom Counties said it is most concerned about LA, Riverside, San Bernardino and Imperial County.
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“What we are not seeing is accountability at the local level,” he warned, before emphasizing that, according to the new budget proposal, the Newsom office may retain part of the COVID-19 funds of $ 2.5 billion allocated. to counties that are not complying Newsom then said that compliance will be assessed on a monthly basis, rather than an annual calendar. “We cannot reward bad behavior,” he said.
In addition to a record number of cases, the state also had a record number of tests, over 90,000. But, the governor said, “those numbers can be misleading.”
A more important number, he maintained, is the positivity rate of those analyzed. Newsom recalled that it was 40.8 percent at the peak of the last curve. He said the total, on the 14-day chart, is 5.6 percent. But that’s over 5.1 percent.
“We are seeing hospitalizations start to increase,” Newsom said, citing another key indicator. The state has seen “a 29 percent increase in hospitalizations over a 14-day period,” he said. As with hospitalizations, Newsom said the past few days have been even sharper than the long-term hotline.
However, Newsom said, “We have been preparing to reopen the economy … preparing for an increase in the spread of the community … hospitalizations.”
As a result, the state has increased its “scalability”. California now has an extra 6,000 hospital beds with augmentation capacity, according to the governor, and 1,500 alternative beds that can also be activated.
Currently, only eight percent of total hospital bed capacity is occupied, not including alternative care sites. That’s a lot of extra capacity. But, Newsom warned, Monday was “about 7 percent.”
More worrying: “ICU numbers are increasing just over 18 percent in the past 14 days.” 20 percent to 30 percent in the past few days. 1,268 beds occupied out of 4,034.
The California state health department reported what was then a record number of new cases of coronavirus on Tuesday. That 5,019 daily count was a huge jump from the previous record of 4,230, which was recorded on Monday. Hospitalizations, a confirmation that these are new infections versus the result of increased testing, also rose to a record 3,868 in total.
Hospitalization totals broke records both on Saturday and Sunday, with 3,702 COVID-19 patients reported in hospital beds. The peak before the weekend came almost two months earlier, on April 29. That was 3,497 new hospitalizations.
California was one of seven states to report the highest number of hospitalizations since the pandemic began Tuesday, according to the Washington Post. The others included Texas, Arizona, Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.
