California COVID cases falling rapidly, despite surges in Oregon and Washington

LOS ANGELES Even 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 last 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, 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: So we have a 37% decline in cases overall, and a 5% decline in hospitalizations, and almost a 50% drop, over the last 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 deaths related to COVID-19. Although officials cautioned that the figure was probably an undercount because of reporting delays on weekends, it still marked a bright spot, capping 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 last week the kinds of 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 officials confirmed 29 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.

And 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 riskreduction 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. Still, overall, California has one of the lowest rates of vaccine hesitancy in the nation. Some of the counties that have done well with vaccinations include San Francisco and San Diego counties, where more than 60% of residents have received at least one dose of the shot. In L.A. County, 47% of residents have received at least one shot; in Orange and Ventura counties, 49% have done so; only 38% have received a shot in Riverside County; and 35% have in San Bernardino County.