Some virus metrics level off

California is on pace to cross 3 million cases soon and the US is expected to record its 400,000th fatality

As California closes in on its 3 millionth case of COVID-19 and the country’s death toll approaches 400,000, the pandemic’s trajectory continued to make modest improvements Monday, locally and nationally. However, Monday’s report was similarly incomplete to Sunday, as only a fraction of the health departments issued updates on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

For the first time since prior to its pre-Christmas peak, fewer than 11% of all COVID-19 tests in California in the past week have come back positive, and the state’s daily averages of cases and deaths dropped precipitously but are likely to rebound slightly once there is a full accounting of data from the holiday weekend. The 24,924 new cases reported Monday — by just 22 of the 58 counties in the state — were fewer than half that came the previous Monday, sending the average down to about 35,500 per day over the past week, its lowest point since a similar holiday reporting lull following Christmas. Following Monday’s tally, California was within 6,000 of surpassing 3 million total cases over the course of the pandemic, according to data compiled by this news organization, the most of any state in the nation by almost a full million.

With 141 fatalities reported Monday, California’s average daily death count also fell, to approximately 465 per day over the past week, but remains near its highest point of the pandemic, with 10 times as many Californians perishing, on average, each day than just prior to Thanksgiving. Just since the new year, California has racked up more than 7,700 coronavirus casualties, already a thousand more than any previous month and nearly a quarter of its entire death toll, which climbed to 33,733 on Monday, recently reclaiming from Texas the second spot on the national leaderboard behind New York.

Hospitalizations and ICU admissions have leveled off, but the Bay Area, Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley all remain under the stay-athome order with projected ICU capacities below 15%. Statewide, with 20,138 Californians hospitalized with COVID-19 as of Sunday, there were about 7% fewer active hospitalizations than a week ago and, with 4,719 receiving intensive care, about 3% fewer patients in ICUs.

Once again, Los Angeles County was responsible for the largest share of the statewide death toll on Monday. Of the 141 deaths in California, 88 came in LA County, followed by 11 in Santa Clara County and 10 in each of the San Joaquin Valley counties of Stanislaus and Kings. Since the onset of the pandemic, LA County has accounted for more than 40% of the deaths in California — 13,936 as of Monday — despite making up about a quarter of its population.

Elsewhere in the Bay Area, San Francisco’s death toll grew by eight, to 262, Alameda County’s by two, to 759, and Contra Costa County’s by one, to 450. Santa Clara County, where the death toll crossed 1,000 last week, leads the region in fatalities but checks in seventh on the statewide leaderboard; Alameda is the only other county in the region to crack the top 10.

Hospitals in some parts of the region continue to face more dire straits than others, with staffed and licensed ICU beds filled to 92% capacity in Santa Clara County and 97% capacity in Contra Costa County, according to county data. In San Francisco, 29% of ICU beds are open, and in Alameda County, 30% of ICU beds are still available.

When California cracks 3 million cases on Tuesday, it will have taken 27 days to reach that mark from the time it recorded its 2 millionth case on Dec. 23. For California to go from 1 million to 2 million, it took 41 days. And for that first million, about eight months.

And when the U.S. records its 400,000th fatality from COVID-19 on Tuesday, it will do so on President Donald Trump’s penultimate day in office. His successor, Joe Biden, has pledged to vaccinate 100 million Americans in his first 100 days in office, which will demand a faster pace than the nation’s initial rollout. In the past week, inoculations have ramped up to nearly 900,000 per day, according to Bloomberg News.

While cases in the U.S. have declined sharply from a post-New Year’s peak, the Biden Administration will take the helm of a country losing an average of more than 3,000 of its citizens each day and more than 200,000 testing positive, though like in California, hospitalizations have also begun to fall. Since the onset of the pandemic, more than 24.1 million Americans have contracted the virus and more than 399,000 have died from it.