California counties suffer from coronavirus case rates

This is a frequent indicator in conversations about. A passport to a more normal life in the COVID-19 pandemic, resuming California’s economy.

The fate of a company depends on it. In many counties, that’s all that prevents people from eating indoors in restaurants, watching movies on the big screen, or enjoying spin classes in the gym.

Number: 7.0.

In California’s latest reopening plan, state officials require counties to meet certain benchmarks before more companies unlock doors and welcome customers. The counties from Los Angeles to Butte and Sonoma to San Bernardino are stuck trying to record up to 7 new cases of coronavirus per 100,000 inhabitants each day.

A bite metric, known as the adjusted case rate, shows how many people are sick every day in the county.

This standard is part of the state’s endeavor. A delicate balance to avoid surges When the restrictions are relaxed. Ideally, if the communication is low enough, a slight increase in spreads due to more businesses open will not overwhelm the healthcare system.

“All of these concepts and approaches come from this slow and rigorous concept … so you don’t have to go back later,” California Secretary of Health and Welfare Dr. Mark Garry said in a recent briefing. It was.

However, experts say it’s a bit of a guess that you need to set the threshold accurately. No one knows what constitutes a secure transmission level for resuming.

Governor Gavin Newsom in late August Announcing a new system for resuming It assigns a hierarchy to each county based on transmission penetration. This layer corresponds to what is allowed to resume. The county can move to a less restrictive hierarchy by meeting a benchmark that shows that spreads have declined for two consecutive weeks.

For example, Sacramento County has long been stuck in the most restrictive purple layer, and most companies that are deemed unnecessary are either closed or allowed to operate only outdoors.

But last week, the state announced for the first time that the county reduced the number of new daily cases to less than 7 per 100,000 inhabitants. Olivia, the county’s public health sector, said that if Sacramento continued to make progress, it would move into the red this week and quickly resume indoor operations (with restrictions) in gyms, restaurants, museums, churches and other facilities.・ Dr. Casserie said. Officer.

“We want and expect to officially move to Red Tear,” Casserie said in an interview.

The current state system relies heavily on two metrics: case rate and positive rate. This is the percentage of virus tests that have returned positive.

These indicators were chosen rather than the number of hospitalizations and deaths because it is necessary to clarify relatively early whether there is a surge in cases in a region. He said it could take weeks for the surge to lead to hospitalization and death.

To move from the purple layer to the red layer, the county’s positive rate must be less than 8%, but the daily case rate is less than 7 per 100,000 inhabitants. Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, states that these numbers are only partial estimates.

“It’s all arbitrary,” Rutherford said. “There are no pages in epidemiology textbooks that can point out and say,’This is your way.’ … we are learning as we progress. “

The state has chosen to adjust the case numbers to account for the amount of testing each county is conducting. I don’t want to penalize the county for catching more cases. If the county runs more tests than the state average, the case rate will decrease slightly. Conversely, in counties that lag behind the state average in testing, the case rate is revised upwards.

In the last week when the data were released, Kern County recorded 6.3 cases per 100,000 inhabitants daily. Nevertheless, the state has recalculated Khan’s rate to account for less than the county’s average test volume. This raised the case rate to 7.2, above the threshold for moving to the lower layers.

In contrast, the Los Angeles County case rate dropped from 7.7 to 7.0 due to extensive testing.

Based on these adjusted rates, 11 counties, including Ventura, Kahn, and Monterey, have a positive rate of less than 8%, but remain in the purple layer with a case rate of over 7.0.Red-rise San Diego County recently On the verge of returning to purple This is because the case rate has begun to exceed 7.0.

LA, despite recently falling to 7.0 Continue to struggle with that case rate.. Barbara Ferrer, director of public health at LA County, said he expects the county to be disqualified from reopening when new figures are released on Tuesday due to rising incident rates. Although the positive rate is below 3%, she says the case rates are likely to be inconsistent.

“The most difficult problem for us was … that daily case rate. We had to reduce the adjusted rate to 7 new cases per 100,000 people,” Ferrer said on Monday. It was.

The fact that the county continues to meet the positive rate requirements but does not meet the case rate criteria is due to the design, Gary said. As the county increased the number of tests, their positive rate would usually begin to decline, he said. With more testing, counties can ultimately reduce infections using cases identified for contact tracing and isolation.

“When we see all of this coming together, it’s actually working as expected. The positive rate of the test drops a little faster than the case rate, allowing the county to move on to the next level with some confidence. It will be like this, “Garry said.