Once again this week, San Diego County posted a COVID-19 case rate low enough to avoid the two-week process of falling to the most-restrictive level of the state’s reopening system. And for a third straight week, testing saved the day.
San Diego’s raw case rate came in at 7.4 cases per 100,000 residents in the California Department of Public Health’s weekly tier assessment report released midday Tuesday. That’s four-tenths of a case over the limit of 7, a score that, if it continued for a second consecutive week, would have caused San Diego to fall from the red to the purple tier. Such a fall would force restaurants, places of worship and other types of enterprise to stop using the 25 percent of indoor space that they are currently allowed.
But San Diego again retained its red tier perch due to a local coronavirus testing rate of 309 tests performed per 100,000 residents, significantly higher than the state median of 239. Exceeding that mark earned San Diego County nearly a 12 percent downward adjustment of its raw case rate, moving the number from a purple score of 7.4 to a red score of 6.5.
This has been the pattern for reports issued on Oct. 27, 20 and 13, with testing turning purple scores red. The last time San Diego County received a raw rate low enough to qualify for the red tier without a testing adjustment was Oct. 6 with a score of 7.
County supervisors received the updated tier information Tuesday morning during their regular biweekly COVID-19 update from their public health director, Dr. Wilma Wooten.
Though all applauded county staff for working to keep the region in the red, some continued to chafe at the very notion that the state should be “picking winners and losers” in the specific types of businesses allowed to open and at which levels.
As he has for months, Supervisor Jim Desmond urged his colleagues to keep requesting local control of decisions about the pace and scope of reopening. Hospital capacity, the main resource that pandemic closures are designed to protect, has been stable for months with COVID-19 positive patients occupying less than 10 percent of total bed capacity, Desmond noted.
“We are supposed to be the land of opportunity, and all I’ve been asking for is the governor to give us local control and the opportunity to allow businesses to open safely,” Desmond said.
The cost of continued restrictions was made very clear for the board Tuesday during a presentation on the economic impacts of the pandemic across the region. An analysis from the San Diego Association of Governments estimated that about 180,000 people have lost their jobs, hemorrhaging between $4.5 billion and $5.5 billion in lost wages. Overall taxable sales are down between $5 billion and $7 billion.
Lessening that financial pain would require the county board to defy the state’s reopening system, a bridge that, so far, supervisors have been unwilling to cross.
But the pressure continues to mount with the latest pain point being the continued prohibition of youth sports competition in California.
On Monday, the Vista Unified School District released a statement that said one student who tested positive while attending Mission Vista High School last week was suspected of becoming infected not at school but “while traveling on a club athletic team not affiliated with school.”
Supervisor Kristin Gaspar said there is a growing trend among parents, weary of watching “their kids rotting behind devices each and every day,” traveling to participate in sports tournaments in other states such as Arizona, Nevada and Florida where COVID-related restrictions are fewer.
Continuing to restrict athletic activity, she argued, just pushes it somewhere else, and that other place might not be doing as well preventing infections as San Diego County has been.
“It would be preferable that we keep our kids in county for play,” Gaspar said. “That’s a safer alternative. Please also keep in mind that it’s not just the child going out of state, it’s the entire family.”
Tuesday’s county coronavirus status report listed 269 additional cases with 239 COVID-related hospitalizations, representing 6 percent of 3,996 occupied beds. Seven additional COVID-related deaths were included in the latest report. All had other health problems in addition to confirmed coronavirus infections.
Those daily numbers feed into the state’s weekly tier report which considers not just the number of cases per capita but also test positivity rate. That’s the percentage of tests conducted that come back positive out of all tests conducted. Though its case rate has consistently been high enough to risk the region falling to the purple tier, the local case rate has just as consistently been well under 5 percent. Anything under that mark allows a county to move up to the next-least-restrictive tier — color-coded orange — which lessens the limits on indoor space usage doubling the usable capacity 25 percent to 50 percent.
Though San Diego County’s overall positivity rate increased in this week’s report, moving up slightly from 3.3 percent to 3.5 percent, it still remains well under the 4.9 percent limit for the orange tier.
The state now also calculates a separate positivity rate for regions of each county deemed to have the least equitable access to resources needed to live a healthy life. In San Diego County, these regions have a positivity rate of 5.1 percent, down somewhat from last week’s score of 5.5 percent.
Counties cannot move up to a less-restrictive tier unless their score in equity areas also meets state requirements.
While it might seem like the health equity score should still be in the red because it is over 5 percent, it’s not quite that simple. The 5.1 percent rate for equity areas actually qualified the region for an orange score because, according to the CDPH, equity areas can score up to 5 percent higher than their counties as a whole and still qualify to move up a tier.
So, while the region’s overall positivity rate must be under 5 percent to move up to orange, the rate for equity areas needs to be under 5.2 percent.
This positivity rate polka will only matter if and when the region gets its case rates under 4 cases per 100 residents, which is the limit for the orange tier. Both positivity rate and case rate must meet orange tier values for two consecutive rates for an upward move.
The Link LonkOctober 28, 2020 at 07:19AM
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/health/story/2020-10-27/its-another-week-in-the-red-for-san-diego-county
It's another week in the red for San Diego County - The San Diego Union-Tribune
https://news.google.com/search?q=Red&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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