The delta variant of the coronavirus roared into California midsummer, striking hard even in places where many people were vaccinated. Cases spiked. Hospitals again began to swell with patients. The daily death toll climbed into the triple digits for the first time in months.
But after a season in which the highly transmissible variant wreaked havoc on the nation, the Washington Post reports that California is reporting sustained progress against delta. And this is also good news for workers’ compensation claims in the state.
Earlier this week, California dropped from “high” to “substantial” virus spread, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It later bounced back up, but total new cases per 100,000 residents are still lower than any other state. The change in CDC designation – a barometer of how well states are doing in combating the virus – was celebrated by public health officials, who suggested it was a signal that California could be close to a turning point.
An aggressive push for vaccines, coupled with masks mandates at the local level and a public largely willing to go along with them, appear to have helped flatten the state’s curve, experts said.
“California, as compared to many other states in the nation, took rapid steps to recognize the extent of the problem and to apply more covid control measures,” said Robert Kim-Farley, a infectious-disease expert at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. “I think if California had not taken these steps to curb transmission, we could have ended up with much higher levels.”
The fight against delta is far from over in the Golden State, which still faces a host of challenges in containing cases. Though infections have dropped in California’s population hubs in recent weeks, they remain high in parts of the Central Valley and rural north. An influx of patients has overwhelmed some intensive care units in those regions.
Compounding the problem, California hospitals are facing staffing shortages. Medical workers have struggled with burnout, and surges in other states have created intense competition for nurses, said Bryan Bucklew, president and chief executive of Hospital Council of Northern & Central California, a nonprofit trade association.
“The numbers may be flattening, but the impact to the health-care system is extremely challenging,” he said. “We have a good handle on how to treat covid, with monoclonal antibodies, vaccines. We just have a lot less staff. It’s more of a workforce issue for us than a covid issue.”
Statewide, infections are still far higher than they were early in the summer, averaging about 9,300 new cases per day compared with 758 on July according to tracking by The Washington Post.
But they’re down from a summer peak of about 14,400 per day on average, the data shows. Hospitalizations have fallen statewide by about 10 percent over the past week. Positivity rates have also dropped recently, at a time when the state is administering more tests than at almost any point in the pandemic – another indicator that the spread is slowing.
At its worst point over the summer, cases per 100,000 people in California rose to about 35 per day on average, according to The Post’s analysis of state data. In Florida, where the governor has sought to ban public health mandates, per capita cases topped 100 during the peak of infections, and in Texas they’ve hovered around 60 for weeks, the data shows.
As of Thursday, California had 24 cases per 100,000 residents, less than half as many as Florida, with 55 per capita, and Texas with 59, according to The Post’s data.
John Swartzberg, an infectious-disease expert at the University of California at Berkeley, said California has benefited from a population that’s generally receptive to public health directives. He said the attitude was rooted in the public health response to the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s.