San Diego County public health officials reported 303 new COVID-19 infections and four virus-related deaths Wednesday, raising the region's totals to 51,327 cases and 844 deaths.
This comes a day after state data confirmed the county will remain in the red, or substantial, tier of the state's four-tier COVID-19 reopening plan for at least another week.
County supervisors Greg Cox and Nathan Fletcher said staying in red wasn't good enough. Cox said the red tier's restrictions still made it incredibly difficult for small businesses to stay open.
Fletcher agreed, saying the county needed to drive down positive tests and new case numbers.
"The overwhelming majority [of county residents] are doing everything right, but we need to see numbers go down," he said. "We need to get off this weekly cliff we stare down."
For several consecutive weeks, the county has remained in the red tier, but within very close range of that purple tier which would shutter almost all indoor business.
According to the California Department of Public Health on Tuesday, San Diego County's state-calculated, adjusted case rate is 6.8 daily infections per 100,000 residents, up from 6.5 the previous week. The unadjusted case rate was 7.2, up from 6.9 last Tuesday. The adjusted rate is due to San Diego County's high volume of tests.
The testing positivity percentage is 3%, below last week's 3.5%, and is in the third — or orange — tier.
To remain in the second tier of the four-tier COVID-19 reopening plan, the county must continue to have an adjusted case rate of less than 7.0 per 100,000 residents and a testing positivity percentage of less than 5%.
The county is preparing additional health and safety guidelines as school year moves forward, county Public Health Officer Dr. Wilma Wooten said Wednesday. A survey of the San Diego County Office of Education found that of the 42 school districts, 27 are reopen to at least some students for in-person learning, six will open later this month, three have a target date of January 2021, one is looking for a start date in October or November and two are still determining a start date.
Of the 9,662 tests reported Wednesday, 3% returned positive, bringing the 14-day rolling average percentage of positive cases at 3%. The seven-day daily average of tests was 10,472.
Of the total number of cases in the county, 3,710 — or 7.3% — have required hospitalization and 858 — or 1.7% of all cases — had to be admitted to an intensive care unit.
Four new community outbreaks were reported Tuesday — two in business settings, one in a restaurant/bar setting and one in a restaurant.
In the past seven days, 47 community outbreaks were confirmed, well above the trigger of seven or more in a week's time. A community setting outbreak is defined as three or more COVID-19 cases in a setting and in people of different households over the past 14 days. The county uses outbreaks to get a larger sense of the pandemic locally, but the state does not include the statistic in its weekly report.
Students living in three residence halls at Point Loma Nazarene University were ordered to shelter in place on Tuesday after "an increase of 12 cases on the Point Loma campus," according to university officials.
The latest cases bring the university's case total to 16, according to the university's COVID dashboard. No employees have tested positive for the illness.
In a news release Tuesday, campus officials said they identified three positive cases in Klassen Hall (3rd North), four positive cases in Hendricks Hall (1st South), three positive cases in Young Hall (4th Floor) and two unrelated cases in Nease Hall.
Campus officials also said that 50 students had been identified as "close contacts," meaning they were within 6 feet of an infected person for at least 15 minutes, either with or without a face covering.
Another metric the state released Tuesday is the health equity metric, which finds the positivity rate of the county's least healthy quartile. San Diego County's health equity is 5.7%, slightly less than double the county's positive testing average.
The metric will be used to determine how quickly a county may advance through the reopening plan.
Counties with a large disparity between the least and most sick members of a community will not be punished for the disparity by sliding back into more restrictive tiers, but such a disparity will stop counties from advancing to less-restrictive tiers.
To advance to the orange tier, the county would need to report a metric of less than 5.3%.
According to the state guidelines, the health equity metric will measure socially determined health circumstances, such as a community's transportation, housing, access to health care and testing, access to healthy food and parks.
Neighborhoods are grouped and scored by census tracts on the Healthy Places Index.
The California Department of Public Health will update the county's data next Tuesday.
