Hello My Fellow Californians:
Despite the awful headline, , our numbers are trending better.
I say “seem” because the state’s computer system for tracking new cases was broken for most of July, and Trump’s “revised” system for counting hospitalizations has upended hospitalization numbers. But the state has integrated those changes, and the numbers of hospitalizations is decreasing. That’s good. That’s very good.
Six weeks after California began re-closing swaths of the economy, there is cautious optimism that coronavirus transmission is heading downward, officials said.
If it stays that way, the state may be on the cusp of curbing its second surge of the pandemic.
The potential crest comes after Gov. Gavin Newsom’s speedy economic reopening in May and early June led to a near doubling of the weekly death toll over the spring tally. California’s cumulative pandemic death toll is now about 11,000, one of the worst disasters in the state’s modern history.
But there are now several signs that Newsom’s second shutdown, which began in late June and broadened in early July, is finally having its intended effect. It can take three to five weeks to start seeing the health effects of stay-at-home orders, and six weeks have passed since much of the state was required to close bars and indoor dining rooms at restaurants, an order that was expanded to the rest of the state a month ago.
www.latimes.com/...
Our case numbers soared past 600,00 this morning as the huge July case backlog was absorbed. These will turn out, I think, to be the result of a July 4 surge and the long lag time it took for the June shut-down and mask orders to change behaviors.
Let’s get to it.
BY THE NUMBERS
Because of the computer snafu, new case numbers for July are not really helpful. Hospitalizations and mortality statistics were not affected by that mess, so they are more reliable. Hospitalizations: trending down. Mortality: still terrible.
Hospitalizations
STATEWIDE: The numbers are trending downwards.
Hospitalizations are the one piece of good news. They are trending down, which suggests the number of new cases from about a month ago also dropped.
Since hospitalizations trail infections by 3-4 weeks, the hospitalization numbers reflect new infections from mid-to-late July. This was about a month after the June shut-down and mask orders, so we can reasonably assume that new cases started trending downwards around then. Hopefully those numbers will hold as the case backlog gets properly assigned. Mortality should drop in about a week-10 days. Right now, mortality rates are terrible.
Among the promising trends is the number of COVID-19 patients hospitalized statewide. That figure has fallen roughly 19% in the past two weeks, from 6,753 on July 29 to 5,442 as of Tuesday, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Over that same time period, the state has seen a slide of about 16% in the number of patients in intensive care, from 2,029 to 1,699.
Good.
Bay Area
Bay Area hospitalization rates over the last two weeks have been trending down:
San Francisco: 16.6% decrease
San Mateo: 35.8% decrease
Alameda: 5.5% decrease
Contra Costa: 4% decrease
Santa Clara: .9% decrease
Marin : no % given, down from 22.4 to 20.4. No longer differentiating San Quentin cases.
Solano: 20.1% decrease
Napa 35.1 percent decrease
Sonoma 16.5 percent decrease
SoCal
Los Angeles County: Decreasing.
On July 20, officials confirmed 2,232 people were being hospitalized — more than on any other single day of the pandemic.
Last Wednesday, the health department said there are currently 1,538 people being hospitalized with about 32% being treated in intensive care units.
The 3-day average of daily hospitalizations — or the average of the last three days — has declined to about 1,600 from more 2,000 in late July, according to public health data.
The OC: Decreasing.
Before you even think about going to the beach, consider that the virus is still out of control in the densely populated and heavily minority communities of Anaheim and Santa Ana.
“While I think we had a decent week last week, I think we all need to still be very vigilant. We have high positivity rates in certain neighborhoods,” said interim Anaheim City Manager Greg Garcia at Tuesday’s City Council meeting.
Chau said the positivity rate in Anaheim is nearly 20%, and just over 19% for Santa Ana.
“Clearly it is more than two times higher (than the 7.6% countywide rate). We know there is a need to get people tested; we know that we need to outreach into the community,” he said at Thursday’s news conference.
Riverside and San Bernardino: Trending downwards, Riverside more so than San Berdu.
Riverside:
San Bernardino:
San Diego: After record-breaking numbers in early July, the numbers are trending downwards.
Central Valley
It’s hard to get definitive data, but a review of the LA Times’ daily analysis shows that Central Valley hospitalizations are trending downwards. That is good, because their mortality is not.
Mortality
Mortality continues its just-terrible trend. The pandemic has continued its shift to the suburbs and rural areas: LA’s part of statewide deaths is declining, but the Central Valley rate is skyrocketing. The state is still absorbing the last of the late June to mid-July surge, before the June shutdown and mask orders had an impact.
California statewide:
The Mercury News ( a GEM of a newspaper!) has a sobering summary.
The state has reported its eight highest daily death tolls since July 28 — 16 days ago — including the 161 Wednesday and 178 Tuesday.
When deaths began to rise about two weeks ago, epidemiologists warned California could be in for multiple weeks of daily death tolls in the triple digits. The death curve for COVID-19 can lag the case curve by two to four weeks, and the state experienced a plateau of about 9,000 cases per day for close to a month, meaning it could be another week or two still before California begins to see its daily death tolls decrease.
In a sign of how the pandemic has shifted, LA’s slice of the statewide deaths is shrinking, while the Central Valley’s is growing.
About 25% of the state lives in Los Angeles County, but it accounts for about 47% of the state’s deaths from COVID-19 to date (5,109). In the past week, however, LA’s share is more in line with its population — about 30%. Meanwhile, the eight-county San Joaquin Valley, home to about 4.3 million people or a little more than 10% of the state’s population, has accounted for 20% of the state’s deaths in the past week. Its share of the total deaths, about 11%, is more in line with its population.
The Bay Area reported its second consecutive day of double-digit deaths, led by seven in Alameda County and three in Contra Costa County, but it has continued to largely stave off the worst of the virus. It has seen fewer deaths than the San Joaquin Valley, both since the start of the pandemic and in the past week, despite the Bay Area’s population being nearly double the size. The region has accounted for fewer than 1 in 10 deaths and just over 1 in 10 cases statewide since the pandemic began.
www.mercurynews.com/...
Conclusion: Tentative good news. Don’t let your guard down. Stay safe.
TESTING NEWS
- It’s still shocking that California tech or universities still haven’t developed a rapid, cheap, accurate, in-home COVID test. New Jersey and Michigan did it; baffling.
LA Mayor Eric Garcetti thinks so too, evidently. On Wednesday he announced that Los Angeles was convening a national group of medical experts, bioscience firms and government leaders to accelerate research into rapid, at-home COVID-19 tests. Geez. In other words, Gavin Newsom totally dropped the testing ball ( we know that) and now a California mayor has had enough.
The city will research the cost of such testing and its ability to scale up volume, working with partners like USC, which will conduct studies on the tests’ efficacy.
The mayor said it could eventually help identify outbreaks more quickly and “get our children back to school, having daily tests for workers, teachers and students who could see the results and know if they are infectious.”
If necessary, L.A. will also dedicate funding toward manufacturing of the tests, Garcetti said. He added that while the diagnostic tests currently used at city screening centers cost up to $200, it’s estimated the at-home test strips can be manufactured for as little as $5 or $10.
It will likely be several weeks or months before at-home testing becomes a reality. But the mayor said it would dramatically ramp up the city’s testing capacity.
“We’ve done 1.1 million tests so far through city testing centers,” he said. “If we get this right, we could be doing as many as a million tests a week using paper strip testing, here in Los Angeles alone.”
- The newest California player in the race for testing gold is Helix, which got emergency authorization to bring a gene-sequencing technology to the testing market. The main thing about this test is that the turnaround time is (theoretically) fast. They are trying to scale up to 100k tests by the fall. That seems like so many, but of course it’s a drop in the testing bucket. Helix is based in the Bay Area with its lab in San Diego. It’s still a lab-based test.
C’mon, people. California needs to come up with the COVID pregnancy-style at home test!
IN THE NEWS
- It takes a pandemic to slap us around about our priorities: The California Public Health brain trust is leaving the stage at a staggering rate, decimating California’s once-proud public health system.
- Years of underfunding, playing second fiddle to louder budget voices, an absurdly rigid bureaucracy and a health crisis the state was utterly unprepared for have decimated the ranks of the Very Smart People advising the state on the pandemic. The turnover is staggering. A few examples:
- 4 Department of Health Care Services directors since September
- Resignation of the DPH Director last week
- Resignation of DPH second in command last month
You can read the whole sorry story here.
Meanwhile, the already underfunded and overtaxed local public health departments have to both pick up the slack, and run around like decapitated chickens every day to keep up with Gavin Newsom’s orders and guidelines-du-jour. One former official called it “the daily fire drill.”
This has been years in the making. Shame on us.
- LA County estimates that 1 out of every 8 residents has already had COVID — many of them asymptomatic. Be careful down there.
To add insult to injury, tech workers with lots of money have driven up Tahoe prices as they decide they’d like to work from home in a beautiful place. Tahoe is a tight-knit community and they are not liking it one bit.
- Success! No expensive trailers needed. You can decontaminate your N-95 mask in a rice cooker. A pair of researchers at the University of Illinois came up with a cheap, practical solution to re-using N-95 masks, without a massive trailer spraying hydrogen peroxide. Sometimes brilliant inventions are just really simple.
"It just happened that both Vishal and myself and a number of our students are Asian, and we cook rice every night," Nguyen said. "We said like, 'Oh, maybe some type of electric cooker might work.' "
She swiftly dispatched one of her students to Walmart with specific instructions. "Look for something at Walmart anyone can buy," she said. "Something easy. They just hit the button."
The student came back with a Farberware multifunction pressure cooker that cost about $50.
In a recently published study, Nguyen and Verma detailed how the dry heat produced by such electric cookers (rice cookers or multicookers such as Instant Pots) may be an effective way of decontaminating medical-grade N95 masks. Using the rice preset on the Farberware cooker and N95 respirators from 3M, a major manufacturer of the protective coverings, the researchers found that 50-minute treatments without pressure at a temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit left the masks thoroughly cleaned without compromising fit or filtration efficiency.
"The N95 can be reused using a very simple method," said Nguyen, whose research focuses on pathogen transmission and control. "We are not testing exhaustively every device out there, everything, but we want to show that this concept works. Then people can use the idea and apply to other things."
- UCSF researchers are developing an anti-COVID nasal spray using artificially created nanobodies, a type of antibody that occurs naturally in mammals.
SARS-CoV-2 invades human cells by attaching its notorious spikes to a protein called ACE2 on the cells’ surface. The challenge for scientists is how to thwart that process to prevent new COVID-19 infections and mitigate existing ones.
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, say they may have found a way. Inspired by antibodies naturally produced by camelids like camels, alpacas and llamas, the team has synthesized a potent nanobody that disarms the virus’ spikes.
….
In lab tests, the compound binds to the coronavirus spike proteins locking them down in an inactive position.
“It’s almost like a mousetrap that never lets go,” said Peter Walter, a renowned biochemist and the other co-leader, told Stat News.
One big advantage of the synthetic nanobody, dubbed Aeronab 6, is that it’s so stable that it can be converted to a dry powder and aerosolized as a nasal spray or inhaler, a formulation that the scientists are calling “AeroNabs.”
The gurus still need to test it in animals, and they need a manufacturing partner. There are other hurdles and the final product, if it gets here, could take months. Still, good to know things are percolating.
- Nasal sprays have been on the radar for a few months. An Austrian company called CEBINA GmbH recently identified Azelastine, an antihistamine currently available as a nasal spray, as a potential topical preventive or post-exposure anti-COVID-19 approach. It’s in studies now. CEBINA has been looking at repurposing existing drugs for use against COVID, and Azelastine shows promise. Lots of promises around here. Azelastine is a prescription drug and is sold in the US as of Astelin, Astelin- Ready Spray, and Astepro.
The study shows that passengers have 1 in 4,300 chance of catching the coronavirus on a full, two-hour flight. If the airline leaves the middle seat open, your chances of contracting the bug are nearly cut in half, to 1 in 7,700. And the chances of dying from COVID-19 contracted on a flight are between 1 in 400,000 and 1 in 600,000 depending on your age and other risk factors. That's according to Arnold Barnett, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has been trying to quantify the odds of catching COVID-19 while flying. The study was revealed in a recent Bloomberg story, which points out that the findings are not yet peer reviewed, but will likely be of immense interest to anyone thinking about flying soon.
Thanks but no thanks. I’m with Dr. Fauci. He isn’t flying either. And even if the plane is safe-ish, you still have to get through the airport.
- Don’t be stupid just because it’s hot: The Bay Area is being socked by a 100+ heat wave this weekend. Please do not be stupid and covidify yourself at a crowded beach. Officials are worried. We are all worried. Get a hose or a bucket of water and dump it on your head. Maybe the cities could put those gizmos on the fire hydrants like we used to do in New York.
- Apropos of nothing in particular except earthquakes — has anyone noticed increasing earthquake activity? There was a 3.1 in La Quinta this morning. A friend in Honduras told me about a 5.3 last week. It’s earthquake weather up in the Bay.
Stay safe out there.
AND FINALLY….
Not apropos of COVID, thank goodness, but we must celebrate our home gal and next VP Kamala Harris for her generalized awesomeness and for being put on the Democratic ticket. You go girl!
Meanwhile, it has not escaped the notice of the Bay Area that Kamala is a wine aficionado. Her pick has set off total pandemonium among wine lovers and wine sellers everywhere. #winemomsforKamalaHarris has been reactivated. SNL’s Maya Rudolph is being deluged with requests to reprise her Kamala Harris role. People want to know: which wines
does she drink?
While everyone has been obsessing over Kamala Harris’ political record, there’s one very important aspect of the Democratic ticket’s vice presidential candidate that I’m simply astonished no one has been talking about: her taste in wine.
...Still, the question burned: What kind of wine does Harris like to drink?? That question has now been answered, at least in part. Harris is a wine club member at Rock Wall Wine Co. in Alameda, the winery confirms.
“I had a true fan girl moment,” says Rock Wall owner-winemaker Shauna Rosenblum.
That moment came earlier this spring, while Rosenblum was working the drive-through pick-up line at her tasting room, which remains closed under Alameda County’s coronavirus shutdown plan. A woman drove up in her car to pick up her wine shipment. Rosenblum asked whether she’d like her wine placed in the backseat or the trunk, and she opted for the backseat. “Enjoy the vino!” she called out to the customer.
“Thank you Shauna!” the customer replied.
“I closed the door and the car drove off and I said, ‘That woman sure looked a lot like Kamala Harris,’” Rosenblum recalls. Her colleague confirmed that it was Harris; she
uses a pseudonym for her wine club membership. According to the colleague, Harris is a regular at Rock Wall’s tasting room and loves Rosenblum’s wines.
There are a few things I like about this anecdote. First, Harris supports local, independent wineries. Second, she goes to pick up her own wine in her own car, which is something I always assume important people have assistants do for them. Third, she knows good wine when she sees it. I endorse her choice of Rock Wall.
There are so many reasons to love Kamala. Here is another truly California reason.
Total awesomeness, right here.
