As coronavirus hospitalizations continue to decline in California, counties reported more than 13,000 new cases Monday, a notable uptick as they began processing the thousands of lab reports backlogged into the state’s reporting system for more than a week .
The new cases caused the state to average an average of seven days with more than 700 cases jumping in one day, to 7,612. That is likely to continue in the coming days as counties press through a swell of cases dating to late July, and in some cases even earlier.
The majority of new cases were filed in Southern California, with counties of Los Angeles, Riverside and Sacramento reporting more than 1,000 new cases Monday. Although Los Angeles leads the week in terms of new cases for weeks, Riverside and Sacramento otherwise had an average of 490 and 104 weekly reports, respectively.
In the Bay Area, Santa Clara County reported 740 new infections on Monday – a huge increase from the 189 on average it reported last week – that it received in the state’s latest data dump. Some positive cases were originally recorded on July 8, but most were from last week, the health department said in a statement.
California Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Mark Ghaly said Friday that the state would update its system to reflect the missing lab reports over the weekend, after which counties would see their numbers. Govin Gavin Newsom has since commissioned an investigation into the chain of events that led to the backlog.
Meanwhile, counties reported 94 new deaths statewide on Monday, a rise from the 65 deaths reported Sunday, when many counties did not update their data dashboards. The seven-day average for the dead has more than doubled since a previous low of 57 at the beginning of July, hitting 137 on Monday.
Most of Monday’s deaths were concentrated in Southern California, where 21 people died in Riverside County and another 19 died in Los Angeles. In the Bay Area, health officials reported three deaths in Marin County Monday, plus one each in Solano and Napa counties, on the heels of 13 deaths reported over the weekend.
However, even as deaths have risen, hospitalizations in California have dropped dramatically in recent weeks, with notable reductions in Bay Area in San Francsico and Alameda counties. In the state, just 5,596 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 as of Monday, from a peak of 7,170 people on July 21, the largest peak since the start of the pandemic. A total of 693 coronavirus patients are hospitalized in the 10-county Bay Area, with Alameda and San Francisco accounting for approximately 17% and 26% of their COVID-19 patients, respectively.
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