Governor Gavin Newsom delivered some good news to California on Friday when he reported 7,934 new coronavirus infections. Although that number is still significant, it is much lower than the 11,645 reported on Wednesday. Wednesday’s number included 6,212 overdue cases, according to Newsom, meaning the actual daily total was about 5,300.
Similarly, the governor announced that 4,429 of Friday’s cases came from the previously reported data judgment. That means, he said, new cases in the state were actually only 3,505 on Friday. That is the lowest number of daily new cases the state has reported since June 16.
Newsom said the state had been through roughly 295,000 overdue cases and that there were “about 20,000 positives in that cohort.”
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“This will be the last day that we will have to report overdue cases,” Newsom said. “This was the day we planned to report our efforts, to clear up the backlog, to bring all the positive cases related to the backlog,” he said.
He announced that the state has seen a 19.9 percent decrease in hospitalizations over the past 14 days. There was a 14 percent decline in ICU residents affected by COVID-19.
“Even in the Central Valley,” Newsom said, “we are seeing a growth rate that is starting to slow down.”
If these trends continue, the mayor said schools will reopen “sooner rather than later”.
Over the past few days, California’s new daily business numbers have swung wildly. California’s COVID-19 dashboard reported Thursday that the state had 7,085 new cases. That is much less than the 11,645 reported on Wednesday. In fact, it looked much more like the 75,751 new cases reported Monday, before the backlog numbers began to show.
However, California’s infection numbers and case numbers seem to be declining.
However, the state’s reported COVID-related death numbers have not been affected by these errors. On Friday, the state saw an additional 188 deaths, putting it on the brink of 11,000 recorded deaths from coronavirus since the pandemic began. The exact number is 10,996.
Those numbers have remained stubbornly high as coronavirus-related hospitalizations and ICU use have declined. But deaths are a lagging indicator. This means that because fewer patients require that critical care, the number of deaths due to the virus will also decrease.
But, the state may not be out of the woods yet. Newsom warned that, even given step-by-step tests, he feels that coronavirus “is significantly more prevalent than those numbers [suggest] and it is because we do not have our tests scales “to meet the scale of the crisis.
Check out Newsom’s news conference below.
The director of the Centers for Disease Control issued his own warning on Thursday. Dr. James Redfield said the pandemic, combined with the upcoming flu season, could “make the worst fall, from a public health perspective, that we have ever had.”
Redfield said the severity of the fall depends on how consistently Americans wear face masks, stay 6 feet apart, wash their hands and avoid crowded meetings.
The scenario that health experts warn of is a flu season looming on top of an already widespread and active pandemic. That would overwhelm hospitals and result in many more deaths because people are unable to get treatment.
