After first being spared, rural California now being ravaged by the coronavirus
SAN FRANCISCO
– It was once said that California’s coronavirus pandemic was hitting dense urban areas the hardest.
Now, it’s rural, agricultural areas that are among the most severely affected.
“The epidemic is moving from urban Latino populations to rural Latino populations,” Dr. George Rutherford, epidemiologist and infectious-diseases expert at the University of California, San Francisco, said Wednesday. The risk factors are the same: lowincome essential workers who live in crowded housing and must leave home to work and earn money and who may be less likely to speak up to call attention to problematic workplace safety conditions.
Earlier in the pandemic, Los Angeles County was one of the hot spots for new infections. By June, it was Imperial County. The rural, agricultural and impoverished county east of San Diego soared up the list as California’s hardest hit county, in terms of new cases per 100,000 residents over the past two weeks. Imperial County hit its worst number on June 16, when there were 1,438 cases per 100,000 residents over the previous two weeks.
Now, it’s clear that the virus is hitting the Central Valley the hardest. Kern County, home to Bakersfield, is now recording 1,160 cases per 100,000 residents over the past two weeks. The rate reached its highest point on Saturday, reaching 1,376 cases per 100,000 residents over the prior two weeks – a figure more than 9 times as much as it was at the beginning of July, when the county reported 136 cases per 100,000 residents.
In other words, for the seven-day period that ended Sunday, Kern County reported 12,098 cases; just a month ago, the county was reporting only about 1,350 cases a week.
State officials recommend counties have a case rate of no more than 100 cases per 100,000 residents over the past two weeks. Case rates may be artificially lower due to a glitch in the state’s reporting system.
The Central Valley is among the areas of the nation that federal officials are particularly worried about. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious diseases expert, said the big problem is the uptick in the rate at which coronavirus tests are confirming infections.
The 14-day positive test rate climbed to 24% in Kern County on Monday, more than triple the state’s average of 7% on that day.
“This is a predictor of trouble ahead,” Fauci said on CNN Thursday. A high rate of tests confirming infections is “a clear indication that you are getting an uptick in cases, which inevitably – as we’ve seen in the Southern states – leads to surges, and then you get hospitalizations, and then you get deaths.”
“Now is the time to accelerate the fundamental preventive measures ... masks, social distancing, avoiding crowds,” Fauci said.
While California’s second surge of coronavirus this summer is showing signs of stabilization, the levels of circulating virus in places like the Central Valley are a source of deep worry among physicians because of how much higher they are now.
“Although L.A. may be looking a bit better, there’s significant movement of virus from Bakersfield all the way up the Central Valley into Stockton,” Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, said in a recording of a conference call obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.
Of the 10 California counties with the highest infection rates per capita over the past two weeks, eight were in the Central Valley as of Thursday, according to the Los Angeles Times’ California coronavirus tracker. Besides Kern County, they were Merced County (656 cases per 100,000 residents over the past two weeks); Kings (568); Colusa (545); Tulare
(538); Fresno (497); Stanislaus (440); and Madera (437).
Imperial County also made the top 10 list, with a rate of 415 cases per 100,000 residents; as did San Bernardino County, with a rate of 397 cases per 100,000 residents.
Other rural areas are also seeing a rise in cases, such as the Salinas Valley in Monterey County and fields in Ventura County, Rutherford said.