Bay Area gets OK to ‘slowly reopen’
Deaths: Toll still high, but losses in February took big plunge
COVID19 remains a deadly disease — but it took fewer lives in February than it did the month before.
The virus claimed 11,286 Californians in February, a shocking figure that is nevertheless 25% lower than the 14,953 COVID deaths in January. The virus killed an average of 403 Californians each day last month, compared with 482 a day in January, according to a Chronicle analysis of county figures.
The ninecounty Bay Area saw an even steeper plunge, with COVID19 deaths falling by a third in February compared to the month before. In all, the virus killed 1,127 people in the Bay Area last month, down 33% from January, when 1,677 people in the region died from the disease. An average of 40 people died from the coronavirus each day
during February, down from January’s average of 54.
“We are definitely past the big surge that we started to see back at the end of November, thank God. That was horrendous,” said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado of Stanford, an expert in infectious diseases and vaccines. “This is good news.”
The death toll remains high compared to December, when the average number of daily COVID deaths was 20 in the Bay Area, and 219 across the state.
Week over week in February, deaths did not uniformly decline. But throughout the state and in the Bay Area, there were fewer deaths in the final week of the month than in the first week.
Bay Area deaths dropped by 47% in the last week of February compared to the first week: 25 vs. 47. Statewide, deaths in the last week were 11% lower than in the first week: 410 vs. 461.
“It’s horribly sad, but the fact that there are fewer is encouraging,” said Dr. George Rutherford, a UCSF infectious disease expert.
He and other experts warned, however, that coronavirus case counts fall more quickly than do the number of deaths. Even as mask use and vaccines have slowed the rate of new infections, intensive care units still have many COVID patients who are not doing well.
“So there will be more deaths,” Rutherford said. “The real question on the table is whether there’s going to be a fourth wave” of infection.
The coronavirus has evolved into variants that are far more infectious than the original virus from Wuhan, China, and those variants are spreading around the world and have arrived in California and the Bay Area.
“We have three vaccines now, and we’re in a race against the variants,” Maldonado said. “The fact that they are more infectious means that you’ve got an increased risk of getting sick. So we want to avoid a new surge.”
Dr. John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley, also viewed the latest death statistics with a cautious optimism.
“The decline in deaths since the dark days of ... January is wonderfully gratifying,” Swartzberg said. “Still, we are far from where we need to be. I hope we can find the wherewithal to wear masks, socially distance, avoid crowds and, of course, get vaccinated as soon as you can.”