California health officials plan for virus surge as state reopens

Coronavirus cases remain fairly steady in California as the state slowly reopens parts of the economy after a chaotic summer surge, but there are troubling signs that an uptick is in the near future, public health officials said Friday.

Dr. Mark Ghaly, head of the state Health and Human Services Agency, said cases are starting to trend up in a few counties, including Los Angeles, likely tied to Labor Day gatherings and more people mixing in the community as businesses open. The percent of coronavirus tests coming up positive also has picked up a little, after falling steadily for several weeks.

In turn, state health leaders are forecasting an 89% increase in hospitalizations for COVID19 over the next month, from about 2,500 current patients to nearly 5,000 by Oct. 25,

Ghaly said. The state has enough bed capacity to handle that increase, but it’s a worrisome prediction nonetheless, especially with the flu season on the horizon, he said.

“We want to see us respond to the slight increases by keeping our guard up, so we can keep transmission as low as we can while we move into fall, into winter, into flu season,” Ghaly said in a news briefing.

“We are concerned,” Ghaly said, explaining why he called

for a Friday afternoon briefing in anticipation of people wanting to socialize over the weekend. “We know that we have the tools to do many of the things to reduce transmission. By doing these simple things we can hopefully bring these early trends of increase back down and help us get back to where we were a week or two ago.”

Those tools should be familiar by now: wear face coverings, stay 6 feet from others, don’t socialize with people outside the household or bubble.

Cases have remained fairly low across the Bay Area. The sevenday average of new cases has crept up recently, from under 550 over the past week and a half to 562 as of Thursday, according to data collected by The Chronicle. But that’s still well under the 1,000plus new cases reported in July and August.

The sevenday average is climbing a bit statewide — it was regularly under 3,500 in the middle of the month and is now over 3,500. As with the Bay Area, that’s nowhere near the peak of nearly 10,000 cases a day in the summer.

A few counties, mostly in Southern California, are seeing hints of an uptick, Ghaly and other public health officials said. On Thursday, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said the local viral reproduction rate — a measure of how much transmission is happening in the community — had climbed over 1, which meant the outbreak was starting to grow again.

“We’ve been making progress over the last month,” Garcetti said, noting that Los Angeles was close to moving into a less restrictive tier under the state’s new reopening metrics. “But let’s keep our numbers at this level. The county now estimates the rate of transmission is at 1.02, slightly higher than last week, and the first time in a few weeks it’s been above 1. Let’s do everything we can to push it back down under 1.

“The bottom line: This virus is still here, and it’s still very dangerous,” Garcetti said.

San Francisco is inching toward a reproduction rate over 1, said Dr. George Rutherford, an infectious disease expert with UCSF, during a virtual town hall on Friday; UCSF scientists estimate the current value is 0.92. “We’re nudging up. And we need to turn the corner to get it down to the 0.8s again,” he said.

Though the Bay Area numbers are still holding, the Santa Clara County health officer this week advised that the region maintain a slow, cautious reopening schedule.

“We’re still at significant amounts of COVID spread,” Dr. Sara Cody told the Board of Supervisors. “And we don’t want to make the mistake that we collectively made earlier where we went a little bit too fast — and then spent the summer with quite a bit of COVID transmission.”

San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Mike Massa contributed to this report.