As available ICU beds remain at critically low levels, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday warned that the state’s regional stay-at-home order would be extended in certain parts of the state as early as Tuesday, the latest sign that California’s battle against COVID-19 wages on.
For the regional order to be lifted, a region’s hospital intensive care unit capacity four weeks out must be projected to meet the state’s 15% threshold of available beds.
Extension of the order would prolong complete closures of personal care services, including barbershops and nail salons; bars and wineries; and all entertainment centers, including amusement parks, movie theaters, card rooms and casinos. It will also extend reduce retail capacity, restrictions on restaurants to takeout only and keep religious services outdoors. Under the order, travel is also prohibited “except as necessary for permitted activities.”
Monday marked the first time that the Southern California and San Joaquin Valley regions were eligible to come out from under the state’s three-week-long order, but each region still reported zero available capacity in staffed and licensed intensive care units. State officials are analyzing the data and on Tuesday are expected to provide an update on exactly what date the mandates will be extended to.
The Sacramento region, which maintains 16.6% ICU availability as of Monday, will receive an update on its order Jan. 1, while the Bay Area will get an update on Jan. 8, according to Newsom. As of Monday, the Bay Area’s ICU availability sat at 9.5%.
“It is clear and understandable that it’s likely that those stay at home orders will be extended,” Newsom said during a news briefing Monday.
The governor’s announcement comes as California’s record-breaking COVID-19 surge was hardly curtailed over the holidays, with tens of thousands of new cases reported each day and nearly three times as many patients hospitalized as on Thanksgiving a month ago.
Over the past week, the state has averaged about 37,500 new coronavirus cases per day and about 230 deaths a day from the virus. Following the holiday slowdown, California’s case count remains about 17% shy of its pre-Christmas peak but still three times higher than it was a month ago.
Several Bay Area hospitals, including Kaiser Permanente, Good Samaritan Hospital in San Jose and John Muir Medical Center in Concord and Walnut Creek, all announced in recent days that they were postponing elective surgeries through at least the next week as a rise in COVID-19 patients continues to inundate hospital rooms and ICUs.
Still, in many areas of the state, including the Bay Area, health officials are seeing a “subtle but important trend” where the rate of rise in cases and hospitalizations is beginning to plateau.
George Rutherford, an epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at UC San Francisco, said Monday that he was “cautiously optimistic” about the slight downturn take shape in the Bay Area more specifically. Over the past few weeks, he has monitored the spread diligently, watching as the transmission rate of the virus in San Fransisco — of the number of people that one person infects — dropped from 1.46 at the start of the region’s stay-at-home order to 1.24 just last week.
“I can’t overemphasize how soft this downturn is, but nonetheless those signs are there,” Rutherford said in an interview Monday.
The question, though, is whether that trend will last following the winter holidays.
“We’re worried not just about what happened over the past couple of weeks — that piece of good news — but what’s really going to happen as we see the cases from the Christmas holiday and Hanukkah coming up now with the New Year’s celebration,” California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly said during a news briefing Monday.
California officials meanwhile are beginning to collect and test samples of the coronavirus from patients across the state to determine whether a new, potentially more contagious strain of COVID-19 discovered in Britain has made its way to California, potentially helping to fuel the state’s latest surge.The California Department of Public Health has asked health care providers to collect and submit samples from COVID-19 patients who have recently traveled or have been exposed to people who have traveled to the United Kingdom or Europe, patients who have marked differences in their virus sequencing or patients who have tested positive for the virus twice within 90 days and may have been reinfected.