Hundreds of already successful COVID-19 tests were not reported in Santa Cruz County until Thursday, health officials there said, due to continuing technical problems with the state’s online database.
Two-thirds of the 848 publicly reported cases in the county have come in the past two weeks, Dr. Gail Newell, the county health officer, said Thursday, and she expected that number to be “well above 1,000” early in the year. next week.
“We are overwhelmed by the sheer number of cases that are increasing every day,” Newell said. Although the county has a larger contact tracking operation than the state recommends, the extension has grown too large to test and track every case.
The numbers already in the system were enough to push the county to exceed one of the state’s monitoring thresholds for the first time in the pandemic, and authorities expect new state restrictions next week.
According to the county’s count, its number of cases per capita in the past 14 days exceeded 100 per 100,000 residents on Wednesday, which means it should appear on the watch list over the weekend and interior companies would have to close sometime next week.
“After three days on the monitoring list, we will be asked to establish more economic restrictions,” Newell said. “We are on day two of six before we start working on the orders of the health officers.”
Those orders would close all gyms, houses of worship, shopping malls, nonessential offices, and personal services, such as hair salons and nail salons, putting Santa Cruz in the line of 90% of the state’s population and in any other county in the Area. from the Bay, except San Mateo, which has also been dancing above and below the monitoring threshold.
This news organization, which collects real-time county-reported data, shows a per capita rate in Santa Cruz of approximately 126 cases per 100,000 residents in the past 14 days. The state uses a slightly different formula, however, it classifies cases by date of infection. Their method also reflects a seven-day delay to capture any inconsistencies between counties.
Those only reflect the infections captured by the tests. The actual number of cases could be 20 to 30 times higher, Newell estimated.
“With the paucity of evidence, I would say that the number of asymptomatic people who have no idea that they are infected is much greater than nine times our number of cases,” he said. “I would say it is closer to the 20 or 30 that have been cited in earlier times during this pandemic. So instead of 1,000 people infected in our community, it could be 20,000 or 30,000. ”
County officials also reported the fourth death associated with the virus: a man in his 70s who tested positive for COVID-19 when admitted to the hospital for heart problems.
Local officials had no control over CalREDIE delays, but moved to ease another hurdle when it comes to timely test results. The UC Santa Cruz lab will receive $ 1 million of Santa Cruz County federal CARES money to quadruple its ability to process tests.
Currently, the county prioritizes tests performed by patients in hospitals or by private health care providers. Dr. Mimi Hall, director of the county’s health care services agency, said she has tried to make an appointment at the state-run testing site in Ramsey Park and has been unable to do so for weeks. That site sends its samples for analysis by the large Quest Diagnostics laboratory, which has experienced delays across the country.
Test results that occur three weeks after the original collection of a sample are “totally useless,” Hall said.
Test delays across the country are due to a global shortage of the reagent needed to run the tests, Hall said, while the UC Santa Cruz laboratory has a “large supply” – they just need more equipment.
“We help them get the equipment they need, they have an ample supply of the reagents they need,” said Hall. “They don’t depend on a commercial entity to produce them.”
Since the Ramsey Park site will close on August 31, county officials hope to maintain and even increase testing capacity by integrating it into people’s routine health care. The UCSC lab will not administer tests; will process tests, which the county hopes to implement where people would normally receive care, rather than a separate site.
The county of approximately 273,000 people has been a beacon of hope in the region, but its destiny has begun to change. It was still one of five counties with at least 100,000 residents and fewer than 1,000 cases total, but that list was expected to narrow to four in the coming days, making Napa the most populous county with fewer than 1,000 cases.
Still, Santa Cruz has the fewest per capita cases of any county in the Bay Area. But they are increasing “dramatically,” Newell said, and soon, the county will be in the same position as the rest of the region.
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