State reaches 1 million infections
1 in 40 Californians has tested positive for virus that is seeing a nationwide surge
California recorded its millionth infection Thursday of the new coronavirus that has unleashed a devastating pandemic since January, a staggering milestone for the disease once again surging throughout the nation.
Roughly 1 in 40 Californians — or about the entire population of San Jose — have tested positive for the virus, and more than 18,000 have died.
Dr. Sara Cody, who led the Bay Area in the nation’s first major lockdown in mid-March to corral the burgeoning contagion, said Thursday she could not imagine the state would see so many infections when she announced the region’s first case in January.
“Not in my wildest dreams — or nightmares,” Cody said.
Consider that the Golden State, with
its expansive freeways and legendary car culture, has seen nearly four times as many Californians infected as its average number of annual motor vehicle injuries in the most recent five-year period — 260,725.
Though it’s not surprising that California, the nation’s most populous state, would reach such a grim infection milestone in a month when the U.S. notched its 10 millionth case, it’s noteworthy that the Golden State didn’t get there first.
There are about 10 million more Californians than Texans, but the much less restrictive Lone Star State logged its millionth coronavirus infection a day before California. Across the nation, active hospitalizations are at an all-time high, and 49 states are reporting rising numbers of cases as weather cools, more people spend time inside and the holidays are ahead.
Dr. John Swartzberg, professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology at UC Berkeley, said the U.S. has “done a horrific job managing this pandemic,” with about 4% of the world’s population and 20% of its infections and fatalities. But in California, with 12% of the country’s population and 10% of its cases, “we’re doing a little bit better than we are nationally.”
The trajectory of the pandemic was unimaginable Jan. 26 when California recorded its first two cases in Los Angeles and Orange counties in recently returned travelers to China, where the virus emerged. There were just two other U.S. cases at the time. The Bay Area saw its first case on Jan. 31 in a San Jose man who also had traveled to China and has since recovered.
The trickle of cases in February around California and the rest of the U.S. belied the budding catastrophe. In San Francisco, thousands of people filled downtown streets for the annual Chinese New Year Parade, the largest and oldest outside of Asia, even as similar events were canceled around the country over virus fears.
The Bay Area’s four cases in early February were the most in the U.S. at the time, but public health officials then considered the threat low, as all the known cases were linked to recent China travel.
They would not learn for another two months that a San Jose woman who died Feb. 6 had been the first U. S. fatality from the disease.
But an ominous sign emerged toward the end of February in a Solano County woman who became the country’s first known case of “community transmission” with a coronavirus infection not linked to foreign travel or exposure to any other infected people. Things unraveled quickly from there.
By mid-March, Bay Area health officers imposed the first lockdown order of any U.S. metropolitan area, followed three days later by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s firstin- the- country statewide stay-home mandate.
California’s place in the national spotlight for COVID-19 cases was quickly eclipsed, however, by an explosive spread of the virus in New York City that evoked horrific triage scenes from hard-hit China and Italy. Newsom, in seeking federal aid from the Trump administration, said half the state’s residents could be infected by the summer.
Yet while refrigerator trucks collected bodies outside overwhelmed New York City hospitals, makeshift surge hospitals in California sat mostly empty. Then, as spring weather arrived, lockdown-weary Californians flocked to beaches and restaurants.
California would see its cases multiply tenfold, from 50,000 in May to 500,000 by the end of July as a summer surge swept across the country’s southern regions. That prompted Newsom to reverse plans for reopening classrooms in August in much of the state and overhaul his administration’s reopening rules for counties. In New York, strict lockdowns had crushed the spring spike.
“California’s made its mistakes,” Swartzberg said. “The biggest mistake was opening up too quickly.”
Infection rates began to fall in September and October, and many urban counties once again moved to reopen. But by Halloween, California was starting to see the sharp rise in cases that was already sweeping across the country. Now, cases in the Bay Area are rising more rapidly than in most parts of California.
“The virus is increasing in states all across the country — no state is being spared,” said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, epidemiology and biostatistics professor at UC San Francisco, adding it’s critical that residents continue wearing masks and social distancing. “Just when you let your guard down a little bit, the virus accelerates, and it accelerates not linearly but exponentially.”
California’s COVID-19 infections now are almost six times the 172,040 new cancer cases of all sorts that the American Cancer Society expects in California this year.
They are more than double the 454,920 Californians born in 2018, the most recent year surveyed.
And the number equals the average 2019 attendance of 30 San Francisco Giants or 48 Oakland Athletics games. The pandemic forced the teams to play in nearly empty stadiums without fans and with fake recorded crowd cheers piped over the loudspeakers.
“It’s frustrating how many cases we’ve had,” Swartzberg said. “But considering the fact that we have 40 million people in an enormous geographic area and such a diverse population, I think we’ve done a pretty good job in the face of a horrific pandemic.”