Highest hospitalization ever for 1 in 98 people in California infected with coronavirus | Nationwide

Hospitals in Southern California and Central Valley are beginning to feel pressure. In other counties, such as Sacramento, Placer, and Yolo, less than 20% of intensive care beds are available, so caution is required.

Governor of the State of California Gavin Newtham announced last week the total closure of businesses and schools, delaying record numbers of infections and hospitalization. It’s another week before the local health authorities check if the closure has the intended effect.

Sacramento County Health Director Dr Peter Beilenson told Sacramento on Monday that the practice did not seem to contribute to a “near-anywhere” virus infection, as civilian gatherings continue.

Nonetheless, these resumptions could have given the false impression that the worst of the pandemic had ended, Dr. Olivia Cassier, county health official, told Bee earlier.

Municipal and state authorities continue to emphasize the importance of wearing a mask and being physically separated from those who are not in the same household as a simple but important way to help slow the spread of the virus.

About 7.5% of the tests have been positive in the last two weeks. This is an increase from the 14-day average reported two weeks ago, and about 6.8% of the tests were positive. The increase means that the increase in cases cannot be attributed to more tests than simply being done.

There are too many COVID-19 cases in California to realistically investigate and track new infections, Dr. Mark Gurley of the California Department of Health and Human Services said Tuesday.

“At the level of infection seen across the state, it would be difficult for even the most powerful contact-tracking teams in all counties to reach out to all cases,” Gurley said. “No one expected to build a program to contact us to track the level of cases we are seeing here.”

The state assists the county with a contact tracking program designed to train approximately 3,600 state workers to reach and convince all infected and their contacts to be quarantined. But the California Department of Health said that as of last week, almost two-thirds of these state workers were not assigned to do the job.

On Tuesday, Gurley cited bureaucratic hurdles at the county level, including issues related to onboarding of state-trained tracers.

“Despite the staff available at the state level, it will take time for counties to assimilate them into their programs,” Gurley said.

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According to Bee’s analysis of data from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the proportion of confirmed COVID-19 cases has risen rapidly in the four county Sacramento region, but remains lower than in the major US metropolitan areas. is.

In the Sacramento area, approximately 6,730 new cases were reported during the four weeks from June 21 to July 19, and approximately 294 new cases were reported per 100,000 people. This is lower than the rate of 504 new cases per 100,000 inhabitants in all US metropolitan areas with at least 1 million inhabitants.

However, it is about 20 times higher than the new infection rate reported in the Sacramento area from late April to late May. During that period, Sacramento’s metro area had the lowest infection rates of any large metro in the country.

Miami, Phoenix, and Orlando have the highest rates of new infections in 53 US metros with over 1 million residents in the last four weeks. Recent infection rates were lowest in Hartford, Connecticut and Rochester, New York.

According to data maintained by Johns Hopkins University, nearly 15 million people worldwide tested positive for COVID-19, with more than 617,000 dead as of Wednesday morning.

According to Johns Hopkins, about one-quarter of each, about 3.9 million, and more than 142,000 deaths occur in the United States.

Following the United States, coronavirus was the hardest hit in Brazil. More than 2.1 million people are positive and more than 81,000 die in Brazil.

According to Johns Hopkins, the next death toll is over 45,500 in Britain, over 40,400 in Mexico, over 35,000 in Italy, over 30,000 in France, and over 28,000 in Spain and India.

(Sacramento Bee Rosario Ahmada, Sofia Borag, Francesca Chambers, and David Wrightman contributed to this article.)

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