January 26 coronavirus news - CNN

As some elected officials continue to question the timing of the state lifting its stay-at-home order, California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly said in a news conference Tuesday that he believes it was lifted “at the right time.” 

“This was not a regional stay-at-home order based on community transmission rates only, it was really focused on what we would see in the hospitals a few weeks out,” Ghaly explained.

The state lifted its regional stay-at-home order for all five regions on Monday as health officials now expect the intensive care unit bed capacity to meet the 15% threshold in four weeks.

Since health officials look at a four-week projection, Ghaly said that he has previously mentioned that the stay-at-home order can be lifted when hospitals still have a high census of coronavirus patients.

“We know today’s cases become hospital cases in about two weeks, ICU cases three to four weeks later, so we want to really determine what the impact is of our current case numbers, our current transmission rates, our current test positivity on where we’re going to be in the hospitals,” Ghaly said. “We have to look about four weeks out.”

What the numbers show: The state continues to see a downward trend in its cases, deaths, and hospitalizations.

California on Tuesday reported 17,028 new cases of the virus and 409 additional deaths, both numbers well below the 14-day average of 28,993 cases and 501 deaths.

The 14-day test positivity rate has also dropped to 9%, a 33% decrease since the state reported its highest percentage earlier this month, according to Ghaly.

In the past two weeks, hospitalizations have decreased over 20%.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of when the first two cases of the virus were reported to the California Department of Public Health, one case in Los Angeles County and another in Orange County. In one year, over 37,500 Californians have lost their lives to the virus, which Ghaly called an “immeasurable loss.”

To date, California has a total of 3,153,186 coronavirus cases and 37,527 deaths.

Note: These numbers were released by the California Department of Public Health and may not line up exactly in real time with CNN’s database drawn from Johns Hopkins University and the Covid Tracking Project. 

The Link Lonk


January 27, 2021 at 11:59AM
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January 26 coronavirus news - CNN

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