Governor Gavin Newsom delivered good news to Californians on Friday reporting 7,934 news coronavirus infections. While that number is still significant, it is well below the 11,645 reported on Wednesday. Wednesday’s count included 6,212 overdue cases, according to Newsom, which meant the actual daily total was around 5,300.
Likewise, the governor announced that 4,429 of Friday’s cases came from the previously reported backlog of data. That means, he says, if you subtract that number of arrears from the total of 7,934, new cases in the state were actually only 3,505 on Friday. This is the lowest number of new daily cases reported by the state since June 16.
Newsom said the state had faced around 295,000 backlogged cases and that there were “around 20,000 positive cases in this cohort.”
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“This will be the last day we have to report backlogged cases,” Newsom said. “It was the day we made a commitment to account for our efforts, to clear the backlog, to bring forward all the positive cases related to the backlog,” he said.
He said the state had seen a 19.9% decrease in hospitalizations over the past 14 days. There has been a 14% drop in occupants of ICUs affected by COVID-19.
“Even in the central valley,” Newsom said, “we are seeing a growth rate starting to decline.”
If these trends continue, the governor said schools will reopen “sooner or later”.
The last days, CaliforniaThe new daily case numbers of swung wildly. California’s COVID-19 dashboard said on Thursday that the state had 7,085 new cases. This is much less than the 11,645 reported Wednesday. In fact, it looked a lot more like the 7,751 new cases reported on Monday, before the backlog numbers started showing.
Still, the infection rate and the number of cases in California appear to be declining.
The state-reported COVID death numbers, however, are unaffected by these errors. The state recorded 188 more deaths on Friday, putting it at the threshold of 11,000 coronavirus deaths recorded since the start of the pandemic. The exact number is 10,996.
Those numbers have remained stubbornly high as coronavirus hospitalizations and the need for intensive care declined. But deaths are a late indicator. This means that, as fewer patients need this intensive care, the number of deaths from the virus will also decrease.
But the state may not be out of the woods yet. Newsom has warned that, even with intensified testing, he believes the coronavirus is “significantly more widespread than these numbers [suggest] and that’s because we haven’t scaled up our tests “to meet the scale of the crisis.
Watch Newsom’s press conference below.
The Director of the Centers for Disease Control issued his own warning Thursday. Dr James Redfield said the pandemic, coupled with the looming influenza season, could create the “worst public health fall we have ever had.”
Redfield said the severity of the fall depends on how often Americans wear face masks, stay 6 feet from each other, wash their hands and avoid crowded gatherings.
The scenario that health experts warn is an influenza season on top of an already widespread and active pandemic. It would overwhelm hospitals and lead to many more deaths as people cannot get treatment.
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