The onset of winter coronavirus is here; Orange County Register – sinks into the hard purple layer

Orange County has an unwelcome visitor for the holidays: another coronavirus wave that might match the summer.

The county’s rate of new coronavirus cases has tripled in the past two weeks, prompting public health officials to suspect “covid fatigue.” And it’s happening at the confluence of the flu season and the end of the year holidays.

Governor Gavin News took a public health “emergency break” in the state last week, placing Orange County and most others in California at the most restrictive purple level of the state’s surveillance system, which has plagued many commercial and public sectors – restaurants, gyms, worship houses. To go out of town.

But the slide in troubled territory was not slowed: Orange County is now seeing about 17 new cases of the virus every day for every 100,000 residents – up from 10.8 last week and 5.6 two weeks ago.

The part of swab tests in the updated statistics released by the state’s public health department on Tuesday, November 24, is also returning to a positive – test positivity rate. Last week the positivity of the test was 6.6%.

In July, at the height of the summer intensity, the Orange County case rate reached about 27 cases per 100,000 inhabitants and, within a week, the test positivity reached over 12.7%.

“It’s just a kind of inevitable fall wave,” said Andrew Numer, an epidemiologist and public health professor at UC Irwin. “At the county level, it’s a little harder to call exactly where the peaks will be.”

The tire assignments and metrics, announced by state officials every Tuesday after the four-tier system was launched in late August, will be announced once a week, officials said.

Most recently, Orange County conducted 354 tests per 100,000 inhabitants, beating 272 tests per 100,000 state average.

County Anaheim and Costa Mesa have two test “super sites”. Tim Shirata, director of strategy at the Cl 36060 clinic, which operates the sites, said the two snore together about 1,000,000 times a day. Most patients get their swab test results back in two or three days, he said, and the test is free for everyone, whether they have health insurance or not.

Shirata said Cl 360 clinic workers are hiring about 0000 workers to meet the growing testing demand – they especially want to hire people who may have been laid off in the local hospitality industry. It took about 15 minutes to cross the drive-through line at Megha Maidan on Tuesday morning, he said.

“As you know, coronavirus has increased, and with holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up, we expect that more tests are going to take place,” Shirota said.

County leaders launched an unofficial fee this week, the first of its kind saliva test kits, first available to residents of Anaheim and Santa Ana – where hotspots of the virus are still being tampered with – in a second push to make comprehensive testing faster and easier.

Dr. Clayton Chow, director of the OC Health Care Agency and county health officer, said local drivers of recent new cases include Halloween parties, voting during elections and other reasons why people gather even in relatively small groups.

Secretary of State for Health and Human Services Dr. “We’re really in the midst of a boom here in California,” Mark Galli said during a news conference Tuesday. “These cases are partly because they really indirectly affect how our hospitals are affected.”

Predictably, the most vulnerable residents have been hospitalized in the past month; Gali said that typically about 12% of COVID-19 patients need to be hospitalized two to three weeks after infection.

The coronavirus-related hospital in Orange County’s 33 hospitals has seen an increase of 3,463 people as of Tuesday last month.

“Statewide, I don’t think we’ve ever seen as many hospital admissions … as we’ve done in the last 24 hours, and I hope, but don’t expect it to be the most we have.” Gali said.

Orange County emergency rooms are better prepared than ever before for an expected outbreak of coronavirus patients, hospital officials said, as they have proven growth plans and a collection of equipment.

Despite an increase in coronavirus patients in recent health care agency reports, the county’s hospitals show a stable overall bed occupation, indicating that hospitals are adding and subtracting beds – and staffing – a requirement.

Nursing homes and other group accommodation facilities, which became guards at the beginning of the epidemic, also made arrangements to protect residents and have not seen much of it in the summer.