State officially surpasses 100K COVID deaths, health officials say

More than 100,000 Californians have now died of COVID-19, health officials said Thursday, crossing the milestone about three years after the state confirmed its first fatalities from coronavirus.

The state’s official death toll rose to 100,187 as of a weekly update Thursday from the California Department of Public Health, adding 227 from last week. Accounting for reporting delays, the latest sevenday average was 22 deaths per day, according to CDPH.

More than half of the state’s fatalities came in the first year of the pandemic, with a wave of deaths in the wake of a brutal surge that took hold in winter 2020.

At the height of that wave – California’s worst to date of the enduring health crisis, as the surge began before vaccines were made widely available in the early months of 2021 – the seven-day average rose to nearly 700 deaths from COVID-19 per day for a stretch of January 2021.

The state’s second-worst surge, spurred by the omicron variant from late 2021 through early 2022, peaked at about 280 daily deaths during February 2022.

California’s death toll topped 25,000 in December 2020, 50,000 in February 2021 and 75,000 in December 2021.

State health officials have tallied more than 11.1 million lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19 since the start of the crisis, which was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020. The first death of a California resident is listed by CDPH as occurring Feb. 6, 2020.

Following the arrival of the virus in 2020, California has seen six distinct surges of infections – one each summer and winter, spurred in some instances by genetic variants of the virus taking root as the new dominant strain in circulation.

The six-figure death milestone comes at a relative low point in COVID-19 transmission and hospitalizations, and with Gov. Gavin Newsom poised to lift California’s state of emergency at the end of this month.

CDPH on Thursday reported 2,607 patients in hospital beds with confirmed COVID-19, down from the most recent winter surge’s peak of more than 4,600 in hospitals during early January.

California peaked at more than 21,000 concurrently hospitalized coronavirus patients during the winter 2020 surge, and spiked to more than 15,000 in early 2022 during

the omicron surge, CDPH data show.

More than 35,000 of California’s deaths have come in Los Angeles County, the state and nation’s most populous county at just over 10 million residents.

The most deaths per capita have come in Imperial (508 deaths per 100,000 residents), Tuolumne (388), San Bernardino (368), Los Angeles (345) and Inyo (341) counties, CDPH data show.

In the capital region, CDPH as of Thursday reported 3,514 deaths in Sacramento County residents (224 per 100,000); 682 in Placer County (170 per 100,000); 442 in Yolo County (198 per 100,000); 244 in El Dorado County (126 per 100,000); 238 in Sutter County (225 per 100,000) and 134 in Yuba County (169 per 100,000).

COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic has been especially dangerous to older populations, who have made up a disproportionate share of deaths.

Californians of age 80 or older made up nearly 38,000 of the 100,000 deaths despite comprising just 2.7% of confirmed cases and 4% of the state’s total population, according to demographic data by CDPH last updated Feb. 7.

More than 23,000 who died of COVID-19 in California were in their 70s, nearly 20,000 were in their 60s and about 11,000 were in their 50s, state health data show.

At least 95 California children have died of the virus, including 34 who were younger than 5 years old. Juveniles have made up about 18% of cases but less than 0.1% of the statewide death toll, CDPH data show.