California recorded some of the first cases of COVID-19 in the United States and the country’s first known death, in what would become a global pandemic. She responded with the nation’s initial order to stay home. Now, the Golden State affirms another dubious distinction: more confirmed cases of coronavirus than any other state.
California passed New York for that record Wednesday morning, reaching more than 409,000 cases and dwarfing New York’s 408,886, according to the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University.
California is number 1 in part because it is the most populous state, but also because millions of residents have been unwilling or unable to practice social distancing and wearing masks, which public health experts say are the best measures to keep SARS-CoV -2 somewhat in check.
“I think we started leaving the shelter somewhere around Memorial Day, both emotionally and physically. And we are paying the price for that, ”said Nicholas Jewell, a biostatistics authority at UC Berkeley. “It is as if we were tiptoeing on the ice. What we did, instead, was that everything ran out on the ice, some not too cautiously. And a lot of people fell through the ice. “
Not so long ago that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was being hit by his state’s slow response to the pandemic, while California seemed to have dodged the disaster with its early action.
But things have changed and the march of the disease here showed no signs of slowing down on Wednesday, as Governor Gavin Newsom reported that 12,807 cases had been registered in the last 24 hours. That set a new record for California and pushed the pandemic total to 413,576.
“It is just another reminder,” Newsom said, “of the magnitude of the impact this virus continues to have.”
Although it passed to New York in the total number affected, California (with almost 40 million residents, more than double the population of the Empire State) has accounted for more than 8,000 deaths from COVID-19, less than a third of the number of deaths. In New York .
As in other states, some of California’s largest outbreaks have been in nursing homes, jails, and meat packing plants. But the disease has spread to places without such tight spaces, such as Mono County, where restaurant workers have been among the hardest hit.
New York City saw the intensive care wards overwhelmed and the morgues flooded with bodies as deaths rose to about 800 per day. Those scenes of suffering continue to epitomize the threat of the new respiratory illness in the United States. Even with recent increases, California has not been overwhelmed by its intensive care system. The deadliest day for COVID-19 was July 8, when 149 people died.
The New York spring crisis should continue to be a warning to Californians, said Dr. Grant Colfax, San Francisco’s director of public health. He said the New York emergency revealed “how serious the pandemic can be and how quickly it can get worse.” You should also warn the Golden State that even a sophisticated and well-funded healthcare system can be overwhelmed.
If cases in the Bay Area continue to rise, “it is plausible that we can deal with the New York situation in late summer or fall,” Colfax said.
But the New York experience also confirms that increases in COVID-19 can be reversed with concerted public effort. “I just hope we can do that before a massive increase,” said Colfax. “New York unfortunately had to do that after a massive increase.”
The New York pandemic storm seemed to come with a silver lining, forcing New Yorkers to “make a more dramatic and sustained change in behavior,” said Dr. Geoffrey Leung, outpatient medical director of the University of Health System. Riverside in the Inland Empire.
“In New York, everyone knew someone who had COVID,” added Leung, while many Californians still only know the disease secondhand and therefore lack “the emotional controller they had in New York.”
Leung said the Riverside health system has had to expand its intensive care capacity from 36 to 54 beds due to the influx of patients. Several doctors said that physical space is easier to provide than the emotional resilience of health workers.
“The concrete that a hospital makes will not wear out. But humans wear out, ”said Dr. Armand Dorian, medical director of USC’s Verdugo Hills Hospital. “My hardest product to maintain is my front line workers. How are we going to replace these people or give them a break? That is an issue that we do not discuss enough. “
The increase in hospitalization figures represents one of the “subsequent” impacts of the increase in infections. They hit a new high this week, with 7,170 hospitalized across the state as of Tuesday. More than 2,000 of those patients occupied intensive care beds, according to the state Department of Public Health.
The death toll also continues to rise, with 674 deaths during the week ending Monday, the highest total of seven days to date. That number broke the record set the week before, when 640 died. The week before that, COVID-19 deaths totaled 474.
State officials sought to put the statistics in perspective.
“I didn’t over-read the importance of that number myself,” California Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Mark Ghaly said Tuesday, when asked about California becomes number 1 in total coronavirus infections.
He pointed out the state’s population and geographic size, adding: “In the end, I really hope and hope that California is the state that has adapted the most, learned the most, prepared the best, and that we are really going to reduce its impact.”
Newsom agreed that, especially given the state’s size, even a slight increase in people who have social contact would cause an increase in the state’s numbers. However, he called the California case “a sober reminder of why we are taking things as seriously as we are.”
Total hospitalizations and deaths that are reaching new highs reflect exposure to the virus that occurred weeks ago, experts said. That becomes one of the key challenges in the fight against COVID-19: it may take weeks to see if the steps taken to stop the spread of the disease are working.
Conversely, it can also take weeks to see the repercussions of not taking the contagion seriously, such as when people don’t wear masks around others, mix with people they don’t live with, and refuse to regularly wash and disinfect their hands.
Hospital administrator Dorian fears that a secondary type of epidemic, a lack of public trust, is making it more difficult to achieve broad public compliance. “It should be a simple notion, ‘Just wear a mask,’ but now I often face people who say it’s a political statement. It is not.”
State health authorities issued an order for people in public to wear a mask on June 18 and re-imposed restrictions on many other activities last week. But Ghaly said it will take three to five weeks to determine if those restrictions have reduced infection rates. Jewell, an epidemiologist at the University of Berkeley, said restrictions on some trips would also help curb the “mixing” effect of coronavirus carriers that spread the virus throughout California and between states.
“We did well in March and April with some of the restrictions,” said Jewell. “But we are getting impatient. There is much more risk now than there was back then, but it will be much more difficult to get people to follow those rules again. “
Times staff writers Maura Dolan, Iris Lee, Rong-Gong Lin II, and Colleen Shalby contributed to this report.
