California continues to see new daily records of COVID-19 cases and officials are hinting at returning to stay-at-home orders
In California, COVID-19 has been surging at record levels in both cases and deaths. As officials are assuming this trend will continue, cities have begun a month long quarantine to help with this crisis.
With people returning back to their daily routines after celebrating Thanksgiving, there has been a growing number of people catching COVID-19 throughout the USA. With some of the biggest cities witnessing record high counts of positive tests and rising death counts, government officials have expressed concerns over what steps to take to ease the situation.
During the months of late August to late October, cases were dwindling throughout the state. However, in late October, COVID-19 began to surge in many of the major cities. These two charts by The New York Times show this trend of decreasing numbers which was around 3,000 cases per day before it started to shoot back up to 16,000 cases per day. It also presents the recent spike of deaths averaging over 100 deaths per day in all of California.
With this information, COVID-19 has reached its peak since it’s arrival to the United States in late December of last year. The LA Times stated, “There are now so many people infected with the coronavirus that, in a number of ways, the past week has been the worst of any during the pandemic.”
This is mainly due to an increase in traveling along with people returning back from their vacations to celebrate Thanksgiving. With people now returning back to their daily lives along with the winter season, health officials warn of an increased rate of cases and deaths.
As The Hill reported, “Fauci’s colleague on the White House coronavirus task force, Deborah Birx, similarly warned that officials were ‘deeply worried’ about infection rates after the holiday, noting that [w]e’re entering this post-Thanksgiving surge with three, four and 10 times as much disease across the country.”
Officials also noted that hospitals will face a crisis if this trend continues to last all the way to Christmas. As AP News summarized, “Hospitalizations from COVID-19 have increased nearly 90% and could triple by Christmas, officials said Monday.”
With this alarming rate of positive cases, California hospitals face a tough battle ahead with shortages of room, staff and time as new patients continue to flow in.
CapRadio wrote, “California’s COVID-19 case numbers and hospitalizations are now worse than at any point during the pandemic. Health officials say 12 percent of new cases will likely end up as hospitalizations within two weeks. Based on those trends, Newsom says intensive care units at California hospitals will be over capacity by mid-December.”
Due to this news, officials from the state have placed down quarantine once again on the hardest hit areas. The biggest has been in Los Angeles county, due to the results of it bearing more cases than any other county in California. Information from The California Department of Public Health shows that the plan has now been put into motion in their recent report called “Regional Stay At Home Order” that was passed on Dec. 3rd.
As the department laid out in a recent order, “This Limited Stay at Home Order will reduce opportunities for disease transmission with the goal of decreasing the number of hours individuals are in the community and mixing with individuals outside of their household.” This came before Los Angeles Mayor, Eric Garcetti, urged residents to stay indoors as the city faces its highest level of cases as CBS News summarized.
In a recent conference, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a new stay-at-home order last Thursday. As KGO-TV reported, “The state is being broken into five regions: Northern California, Greater Sacramento, Bay Area, San Joaquin Valley and Southern California. When the region’s ICU hospital capacity falls below 15% capacity, the new stay-at-home order is triggered for a period of at least three weeks.” This recent news shows the growing tensity of COVID-19 surging all throughout the state.