Although California was approaching the sobering milestone of 40,000 deaths due to COVID-19, there were still signs of hope.
Business, positive tests and hospitalizations continued to decline or hold in the state on Friday. Over the past seven days, the state has averaged 22,200 cases per day, about half the number two weeks ago.
Nationwide, hospitalizations due to COVID-19 have dropped to their lowest level since December 7th.
“We are clearly falling apart,” said Dr. George Rutherford, an expert infectious disease at UCSF, said during a forum hosted by the school on Thursday.
Despite promising trends, Santa Clara County has hit a bad mark with more than 100,000 cumulative COVID-19 cases and more than 1,300 deaths since the first case was discovered in the Bay Area of the disease on January 31 in a Santa resident Clara who was from Wuhan, China, a week earlier.
Deaths, which remain a backward indication of where the pandemic is headed, have remained high.
In California, more than a third of the deaths were reported during the entire pandemic in January – and the 13,594 deaths recorded across the country in January are twice as many as the 6,772 reported in December.
“I think it’s plausible that the virus did what it could,” said Shane Crotty, a scientist at the La Jolla Institute of Immunology, at the UCSF forum.
More doses of vaccines are on the way, though it is much slower than health officials want, as the federal government and the state want to iron out the distribution problems.
California says nearly two-thirds of the vaccine doses sent have been administered. Some providers withheld doses for second shots, which are part of the third that has not yet been administered.
“With vaccinations, we will hopefully see an end to this pandemic soon,” said Dr. Marty Fenstersheib, COVID-19 testing and vaccine officer in Santa Clara County, said during a news conference on Friday.
There are likely to be at least three more competitors against the vaccine this summer in the United States, including products from AstraZeneca, Novavax and Johnson & Johnson, Rutherford said.
Johnson & Johnson announced Friday that the single-dose coronavirus vaccine was 66% effective in trials. The company is seeking permission for emergency use from the FDA.
European regulators also approved the COVID-19 vaccine for AstraZeneca for people over 18 on Friday after it showed efficiencies of around 60% in trials.
Both vaccines are cheaper and easier to store than the currently available vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, but fall below the 94-95% efficacy of the two vaccines, which have already been approved for use in the US.
Novavax Inc. said on Thursday that the COVID-19 vaccine appears to be 89% effective, based on early findings from a British study, and that it appears to work – though not as well – against new mutated versions of the virus found in that country. spread and South Africa.
The variants remain a major question mark in the pandemic.
At UCSF, researchers are still analyzing data from a virus variant discovered in the state in December to determine if it is more contagious than the common virus. They also hope to find out if the vaccines currently being approved against it are effective and expect to have more information about it next week.
A highly transmissible coronavirus variant first identified in South Africa was detected in South Carolina on Thursday – the first time it was found in the US – in two people without a history of travel, indicating that it spreads in the community.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Americans should accept that the variants are widespread in the country, with the exception of the few cases identified.
“I believe we should now treat each case as if it were a variant during this pandemic,” Walensky said during a Coronavirus briefing in the White House on Friday.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading expert on infectious diseases, reflected the sentiment, saying the US should focus on the emergence and increasing spread of coronavirus mutations. This includes variants first identified in the UK and Brazil.
“It’s a wake-up call for all of us,” Fauci said. “We need to be vigilant to adapt easily to make versions of the vaccine that are actually specifically targeted at the mutation that actually occurs at any given time.”
Aidin Vaziri is a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected]