California coronavirus surveillance list for troubled counties is reactivated after massive glitches in a database of test results threw down key metrics used by public health officials to track the pandemic – which for weeks made Orange County and others better look like they really were.
Orange County remains on the waiting list, but there are positive signs that local rates of new cases and what percentage of tests are positive – two measures that have kept Orange County above state borders – are trending toward compliance goals for public health.
Trends in business rates, tests of positivity, and other data points that are monitored daily by state and county health officials indicate that San Diego County neighbors could be removed from the waiting list as of Tuesday, August 18th. said Govin Newsom during a press conference Monday, Aug. 17.
Newsom said the state Department of Public Health had added a few rural counties to the watch list, but removed Santa Cruz County, bringing the total to 42 of the state’s 58 counties.
Dr. Clayton Chau, director of the Orange County Health Care Agency and acting health officer, has suggested that the county is performing well enough that it could also be removed from the watch list soon, now that the state’s data problems have been resolved and local health officials have a clearer picture of where Orange County stands.
“We are calculating our own data and we are seeing a trend where we are likely to be off the list,” Chau said.
By Monday, the Orange County case rate – new cases over two weeks – was 118 cases per 100,000 residents, still above the state health department’s threshold of 100 per 100,000.
The business rate, down from peaks in mid-July, is the only metric keeping Orange County on the waiting list.
Positivity testing – the share of positive tests from all tests performed during the week – has fallen below the 8% limit on Monday – to 6.8%.
Orange County has been on the waiting list since late June, added due to increasing cases of cases and tests of positivity, followed by high rates of new COVID-19 hospitalizations – those have also been declining since.
Leaving Orange County on the watch list could lead to the reopening of personal education, as well as the reduction of other COVID-19 lockdowns that have hampered normal public life for months.
But, it will be the call of the state health officer whether certain indoor businesses – malls, gyms, salons – will be allowed to reopen, even if a province is removed from the waiting list. And schools would not immediately be in a position to return students to campus.
“Even if we were off the list, it would take 14 days before schools could reopen,” Chau said.
Chau warned that while Orange County could be removed from the list, margins would be thin as the fight to suppress COVID-19 continues, and the province could find itself on the list again.
“Even if our numbers are good for a few days and we jump over the state threshold, we would have to restart the clock,” he said.
Rather than wait, more than 80 mostly private elementary schools around Orange County have applied for an exemption to sign up now for online learning and to teach their students in person.
Orange County officials have told the registry that so far applications submitted go through an initial screening to ensure completeness, and that no one has been approved or denied because of the state’s data problems.
Coronavirus suitcase rates have been artificially low since late July, when state health officials said that server failure in their CalREDIE test results data system, along with reporting the end of one of California’s largest test labs, caused test totals to dive. The state’s CalREDIE system is being replaced and officials are investigating the burglary.
Newsom said Monday the resulting backlog of 295,000 tests has been resolved, and the state had worked in nearly 15,000 positive cases from that pool.
Even with the reported problem resolved, Orange County appears to have had a period of fewer tests in late July – dropping from a high of 50,000 in the week ending July 12 to about 38,000 in the week ending some on July 26th. This followed the opening of a large-scale test site at the Anaheim Convention Center, where hundreds of people were swabbed daily.
Test number has returned and Orange County is the state target of 150 tests per day per 100,000 inhabitants. That’s a new threshold state health officials have added since the data problems became apparent to ensure counties test adequately.
On Monday, Orange County averaged 200 tests per 100,000 residents.
