Well, we did it. California is officially in first place in a race that no one wants to win. As of Saturday, the state has the highest number of new COVID cases per capita in the US:
Last week, the state reported the country’s fourth highest number of daily cases of COVID-19 per 100,000 residents over a seven-day period, but California jumped to first place when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported its case on Saturday. updated capita tracker.
According to the CDC update on Saturday, California has reported an average of 100.5 daily COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents over the past seven days, placing it comfortably ahead of second-place Tennessee, averaging 89.6 daily cases per 100,000 people have seen. residents over the same period.
California’s daily per capita figure is actually lower than the 109.3 mark it was last week, probably due to delays caused by the Christmas holidays.
The winter push in California is about twice as severe as we had in the spring / summer, based on the number of people admitted to the hospital.
As of Monday, more than 19,750 patients had been admitted to the hospital with confirmed cases of the virus in California, including 4,228 treated in intensive care units. Both totals were now officially more than double the peak observed during the summer boom, when about 7,200 were admitted to the hospital with 2,050 intensive care units.
The availability of ICU beds is still at 0% in Southern California and the Central Valley. Officials have not yet said the three-week exclusion will be extended, but it is certainly the case. Newsom government said at a news conference today that the decision would be announced tomorrow. The framework for terminating the closure is the same as for accession, ie the ICU capacity of 15%. So at the moment, the entire southern half of the state is nowhere near. What we do not know is how long the exclusion will be extended.
All of this raises a question that Politico highlighted last week. Why is this happening? California has taken this virus seriously from the beginning. It was the first state to close in the spring and shut down most of this month in the areas worst affected. But so far it seems that the measures have not really worked.
The turnaround has confused leaders and health experts. They may point to a number of reasons that have contributed to California’s boom over the past few weeks. But it’s hard to pinpoint a single factor – and just as hard to find a silver bullet …
In Los Angeles, officials have always said that people meet too often. They blame festivals and post-season parties when the Dodgers and Lakers won this fall championship.
Some blamed the strict rules themselves, saying that the educated Californians could no longer endure it and decided that they should live their lives. Others said that municipal institutions are a serious source of concern in a limited housing situation, especially in low-income communities where residents live in a close neighborhood and must continue to work personally to survive …
MEP Jordan Cunningham (R-Templeton) argued that the state’s attempt to ‘end types of human interaction without seeing whether it is effective’ creates a kind of setback – ‘to drive people to higher risk activities’ such as to get inside at home, rather than places like restaurants.
There is some data to confirm this idea that people are pushing back towards closure. It seems the cell phone data from earlier this month supports the idea that Californians in the Bay just don’t follow the rules as strictly as they did in the spring:
The data company Unacast, a company that collects cell phone location data from millions of phones for private companies, has created the ‘Social Distancing Scoreboard’ which shows which provinces in California and beyond see satisfaction in keeping people at home. Each province and state is rated on an A to F scale based on three criteria: change in average mobility based on distance traveled, change in non-important visits and difference in meeting density …
… data drawn from 17 December – almost two weeks after five provinces in the Bay Area adopted the home order early from the state – it appears that only one country receives an A-grade.
If I have to point to one factor that can convince people not to take it so seriously this time, it is the hypocrisy of democratic leaders who preached social distance and were then caught out at fancy dinners in closed rooms. Both Governor Newsom and the Mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, have been caught doing this, and I think that suggests to most people that they can be fooled in the same way instead of being strict about it. Hypocrisy has made California the center of winter stagnation.