The number of coronavirus cases in California has significantly worsened this past week, hitting a level not seen since the winter’s Omicron surge and raising concerns about the possibility of a big jump in infections this summer.
Weekly coronavirus cases roughly doubled across wide swaths of California, including Riverside and Santa Barbara counties, as well as the Central Valley and Silicon Valley. They rose by roughly 85% in Orange, San Bernardino and Ventura counties.
Statewide, the increase was 63%, bringing the case rate to 231 for every 100,000 residents. A rate of 100 and above is considered a high rate of transmission.
Hospitalization rates, while increasing for the last four weeks, remain low. Hospitals in two of California’s most populous regions, L.A. County and the San Francisco Bay Area, are not under strain, and the rate of new weekly coronavirus-positive hospitalizations has remained at only a fraction of the number seen in New York and some other East Coast cities.
California officials remain hopeful that a relatively robust effort to get residents to take booster shots plus suggestions to wear masks and get tested frequently can help the state avoid the kind of intense surge those cities have experienced.
“The task in front of us is similar to work we had to do at other points over the past 2½ years: slowing transmission,” L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said in a statement. “We know what works—masking, testing, and vaccination, along with systems and policies that support the use of these and other effective safety measures.”
Nationally over the past two weeks, coronavirus cases have risen by more than 50% and hospitalizations by more than 30%, said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, a UC San Francisco infectious-disease expert.
The San Francisco Bay Area is currently home to California’s worst coronavirus case rate. The region is likely being hit hard with new infections now because of the “latest supercharged transmissible variant,” whose contagiousness is approaching that of measles, one of the most readily transmitted diseases for humans, Chin-Hong said in a briefing he gave to campus staff Friday.
Another factor behind the soaring case rates could be that a relatively large number of people in the Bay Area have not been exposed to the coronavirus until this point of the pandemic because of the region’s intensive efforts to keep the virus at bay.
Dr. Robert Kosnik, director of UC San Francisco’s occupational health program, said at the briefing that he expects coronavirus cases to continue going up for at least the next couple of weeks.
“I know that’s not good news, but that’s kind of what the data is pointing to,” he said.
The latest surge has been so disruptive that the Berkeley public school system has “only been able to fill about 50% of our teacher absences with substitute teachers,” the school district said in a statement. That has forced administrators to help out in classrooms.
Berkeley schools announced Friday a new order to reinstate an indoor mask mandate for students and staff for the remainder of the school year, effective Monday, including indoor graduations.
UC San Francisco is beginning to require universal masking at all large events with 100 or more attendees.
San Francisco had the highest case rate this past week of any California county: 460 for every 100,000 residents. The Bay Area overall is reporting 369 cases per 100,000.
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