A look back on California’s record-breaking January

The first month of the new year arrived with health experts warning it could bring with it the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic. With January now in the rearview mirror, it’s clear those dire predictions came true. But the light at the end of the tunnel is growing brighter as more Californians are vaccinated each day and fewer test positive.

On Sunday, the final day of January, California reported 22,318 new cases of COVID-19 and 231 deaths from the virus, according to data compiled by The Mercury News, bringing its monthly case total over 1 million and monthly death toll to within 50 of 15,000. January was California’s deadliest month of the pandemic more than twice over and also its second straight month of at least 1 million cases, after it took eight months to reach its first million.

As the calendar turns to February, deaths are still coming in larger numbers than any other period of the pandemic, but California has cut its average daily cases in half from their peak about three weeks ago, and hospital admissions have followed.

At approximately 21,360 per day over the past week, California is averaging 46% fewer cases than it was two weeks ago. There were still more than 3,800 deaths across the state over the past week, an average of about 543 per day, close its deadliest seven days of the pandemic but only 6% more than two weeks ago.

On Saturday, the number of Californians hospitalized with COVID-19 fell below 15,000 for the first time since Dec. 15, and the number of those receiving intensive care dropped below 4,000 for the first time since Christmas Eve. In the past two weeks, California’s active hospitalizations have fallen by 27% and its ICU patients by 16.5%.

When January began, cases and hospitalizations in California were still on the rise, but each metric crested around the middle of the month and has since been on a rapid descent. California has also more than halved its positivity rate from its mid-January peak, north of 14%, down to 6.7%, as of Sunday, the lowest rate of tests to come back positive since the final week of November.

The improvements have been spread almost evenly across California’s regions, but Southern California continues to account for a disproportionate share of the new cases and fatalities in the state. In January, nearly three in every four deaths in California came in the region — a total of 10,865, including 6,425 in Los Angeles County alone — despite it making up just over half of the statewide population.

The Bay Area, meanwhile, nearly tripled its previously record for fatalities in a month, with 1,732, but still only accounted for approximately one in every nine deaths in California in the past month, despite about one in every five Californians residing in the region.

Over the past week, California has lowered its percapita infection rate to approximately 54.1 daily cases per 100,000 residents. In the Bay Area, however, the infection rate over the past week was about 34.9/100K, while in Southern California, it was still about 58.3/100K.

On Sunday, nine counties accounted for all 231 coronavirus deaths in the state, led by 123 in Los Angeles County and followed by 44 in Orange County, 19 in Santa Clara County, 18 in San Bernardino County, 16 in San Diego County, six in Alameda County, three in Kings County and one apiece in San Francisco and Mendocino counties.

Over the course of the pandemic, 40,923 Californians have lost their lives to COVID-19, with more than a third of those coming just in the past month. According to the state’s projection models, its death toll could reach 49,000 by Feb. 20.

Through the first 31 days of the new year, the county’s coronavirus death toll has already increased by more than 95,000 to a total of more than 440,000 American lives lost to COVID-19 over the course of the pandemic, according to data collected by the New York Times. As in California, the pace of new cases has slowed but deaths continue to come at near their highest rate of the pandemic: more than 3,100 per day — a level of death greater than September 11 terrorist attacks sustained every day for almost the entire month of January.

California’s COVID-19 progression, by the numbers*

Jan. 1-31: 14,952 deaths | 1,016,593 cases

Dec. 1-31: 6,758 deaths | 1,065,596 cases

Nov. 1-30: 1,548 deaths | 297,501 cases

Oct. 1-31: 1,767 deaths | 112,651 cases

Sept. 1-30: 2,897 deaths | 107,154 cases

Aug. 1-31: 3,796 deaths | 211,269 cases

July 1-31: 3,139 deaths | 262,878 cases

June 1-30: 1,945 deaths | 123,012 cases

May 1-31: 2,088 deaths | 62,877 cases

April 1-30: 1,917 deaths | 42,306 cases

Pre-April: 214 deaths | 9,846 cases

*cases and deaths reflect date they were reported

Source: Bay Area News Group tracking of county health department databases