California coronavirus cases continue to fall ‘like a rock’

Gov. says he wants to ‘ fully reopen’ the economy on June 15

LOS ANGELES — As Oregon and Washington face new COVID-19 surges, there is growing optimism that California remains in recovery mode as coronavirus cases continued to fall dramatically, along with related deaths.

California has continued to do better than any other state, with the lowest per capita coronavirus case rate in the nation over the past week. Texas has double California’s rate; New York, quadruple; and Florida has nearly six times California’s case rate. Michigan still has the nation’s highest rate, at 299 cases per 100,000 residents — 10 times California’s rate of 29 cases per 100,000 residents.

“In California, we’ve done much better,” University of California, San Francisco epidemiologist Dr. George Rutherford said. “We’re truly No. 1 here again: We have a 37% decline in cases overall and a 5% decline in hospitalizations, and almost a 50% drop over the past two weeks in terms of mortality.”

The coronavirus positivity rate “has fallen like a rock,” he said last week, hovering around 1%.

In a sign of this progress, Los Angeles County public health authorities on Sunday reported no new virusrelated deaths. Although officials cautioned that the figure was probably an undercount because of reporting delays on weekends, it still marked capped several months of progress in the fight against the coronavirus.

There are now fewer than 2,000 new confirmed coronavirus cases a day on average over the past week in California, a huge drop from about 45,000 cases a day at the peak of the surge in December and January. About 60 Californians have died every day from COVID-19 over the past week — numbers not seen in six months — down from a peak of 562 deaths a day in January.

Cumulatively, there have been more than 61,500 COVID-19 deaths in California.

Although 2,000 new cases a day still shows the coronavirus “has not gone away,” Rutherford said California has staged “a remarkable accomplishment, given the depth of the epidemic here and the complexity of the state.”

There are still some areas of California doing worse than others; of the state’s 58 counties, none is in the most restrictive purple tier of the state’s color-coded reopening plan, but 13 are in the second-most restrictive, or red, tier. They are largely in the Central Valley, the Sierra foothills and sparsely populated counties on the far northern end of the state. Near Lake Tahoe, officials ordered a quarantine of “a significant number” of Truckee High School students after 29 confirmed positive cases.

If improving trends hold, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Marin and Trinity counties could enter California’s most lenient yellow tier as soon as this week, allowing gyms, movie theaters, amusement parks, sports venues and museums to expand allowed capacity.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has said he wants California to “fully reopen its economy” on June 15 and retire the tier system as long as hospitalization rates remain stable and low, and vaccine supply is ample, while retaining some “common-sense” risk-reduction measures.

There remains some concern about decreasing interest in vaccinations; last week, L.A. County reported a 50% drop in booked appointments for the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. Overall, California has one of the lowest rates of vaccine hesitancy in the nation.