San Diego County Case Rate Falls Below Threshold To Get Off State's Monitoring List

Speaker 1: 00:00 A welcome bit of good news emerged from San Diego's latest update on COVID-19 cases, daily numbers of positive cases. Wednesday dropped below the state's watchlist threshold. It's the first time we got below 100 cases per 100,000 residents since San Diego was placed on the watch list at the beginning of July KPBS health reporter, Taran mento explains what that drop means or doesn't mean for the prospects of easing restrictions in San Diego and Taran. Welcome to the program. Thank you, Maureen. First of all, how much below that threshold did San Diego get on Wednesday? Speaker 2: 00:38 Right. So the case rate dropped to 94.1 new cases per 100,000 residents. The state, as you mentioned in your intro, wants to us to be at no more than 100 new cases per 100,000 residents. So just about six points below what we want, you know, but we've, we've seen the case rate number fluctuate up and down in the past. Um, so it will likely change day to day, but you know, every everyone's hoping these ups will still stay below that 100 per 100,000 threshold. Speaker 1: 01:07 And when was the last time we had a positive case number as low as this, Speaker 2: 01:12 We got on the watch list in early July. And so that means that in early July, we went above 100 per 100,000. Um, so it's been a while we're talking five, six weeks here that we've been consistently, um, at, above above 100. And I think we've been, uh, you know, at 150, 154 cases per 100,000 residents before, you know, um, later in July, but it's been coming down pretty steadily over the last couple of weeks. Um, so that's, that's been an improvement that we've seen, Speaker 1: 01:46 But this is not the positivity rate, correct? This is the total number of people who test positive. So conceivably the rate could be affected by the number of tests taking place, Speaker 2: 01:58 Right? The audience is probably hearing positivity rate case rate hospitalization, like so many rates that we keep hearing. So the case rate is the number of confirmed cases, confirmed positive results over a two week period that's, that's divided for, for every 100,000 residents. And that's a simplified explanation of the calculation. And so the rate could be influenced by testing. Sure. Um, but you know, except for two or three days over the last month, um, you know, when we saw very low testing around 4,000 daily tests reported or very high testing around 16,000 daily tests reporting, the range has really been around 5,600 to a bit over 9,000 data tests reported with a handful of, you know, days above 10,000. Sorry if that was confusing for the audience to follow, but you know, it's about a month ago, the County and state, you know, also didn't limit who could be tested. So it's limited to those who are very sick or, or at high risk, at least those, they took priority. You know, meaning we are testing people who could be more likely to be causative our goal to see a 67, about 6,700 tests a day. And lately, for the most part we've been near or above that Speaker 1: 03:09 Now one day for San Diego to be below threshold numbers does not get us off the watch list. As I understand it, what would we have to do to get off that list? Speaker 2: 03:20 So just to get off the watch list, you have to day below the threshold for, uh, or at the threshold for three days. Now this is a little bit complicated because we hear about, we heard about that reporting glitch. Um, the state may have not accurately reported all of the cases to the counties and that just caused a whole bunch of confusion. Now, the County says that they've received all of those backdated case positives, um, and maybe there'll be a few trickling in here and there over the next couple of days. And then the state, I believe says that everything should be kind of up to date as of the end of this week. So we still have to wait and see if we do maintain this, this, uh, below this threshold for the next couple of days, what will happen? Will the state allow us to get off the watch list? Um, so that's something we're still kind of a little unclear on Speaker 1: 04:08 What daily positive test number do we have to stay below to stay below that threshold of 100 per 100,000 resumes. Speaker 2: 04:16 So dr. Wilmer, Lou and the county's public health officer has said for a while now that, um, if we stay, if we report no more than 240 cases a day for two weeks, we will be able to get off the list and stay there. So 240 is the goal. I mean, but if you look back, you'll see that there has been many, a days recently where we have not been, um, at, or below that number, but we still have been lower than we have been in the past. So the County says that's what allowed us to, to, um, reduce our case rate. But if we want to, to really stay there with confidence, dr. Wilma Wooten has said 240 or fewer new daily cases is what we need to stay at and hold there for two weeks. Speaker 1: 05:00 No governor Newsome announced some hopeful news for the state during his COVID briefing yesterday. What did he report? Speaker 2: 05:07 So he focused a lot on the hospitalizations and it, and those that are in ICU for COVID. And we saw decreases, um, about 19% with hospitalizations over the last two weeks and decreases of ICU admissions, I think about 16%. And so this is, um, this is a really, really, um, easy, easy number to track. And it's really, um, it really tells, it gives us a better sampling of them cases, because as you mentioned, that can kind of fluctuate with testing. Um, so this is really, really a good indicator of how we're improving, um, on, um, reducing the spread of COVID by seeing these numbers go down. So he was very happy about that. And we've seen similar trends here in San Diego are hospitalizations. Number of hospitalizations have, have fallen as well. Speaker 1: 05:55 Getting back to San Diego, a sort of the full picture, what were the new numbers on deaths and outbreaks? Speaker 2: 06:02 So we're still seeing, you know, deaths are still, we're still seeing them reported and we're still seeing outbreaks now outbreaks. I can say that, um, for a while we were doing well and what San Diego wants us to stick to is no more than six community outbreaks reported in a week period. Well, we have been way above that for a long time. And so, you know, we reached 40 outbreaks reported in one week period, and then we were, we were coming down, we're still kind of coming down, but we're still pretty high. Like the County reported 26 community outbreaks were confirmed in the last seven days. So still very high, but a little bit better than we saw earlier. That's, we're still seeing people. Um, we're still seeing reports of people of dying. Uh, there was, I believe, six or eight reported, um, over a couple of days, each day, this week we've seen large numbers, um, fewer numbers. Um, but you know, people are still dying from this. Speaker 1: 06:56 The new testing site opened yesterday at the San Ysidro border. What is the County hoping to achieve with that new site? Speaker 2: 07:03 Right? So they're providing up to 200 daily tasks for people who are authorized to cross over from Mexico into the U S these are usually essential workers. And we know that hospitals in the South Bay have been overwhelmed with a patient's COVID patients. And I had a high percentage of those that have recently traveled to Mexico. So we, this is an effort by the County to provide more resources at the border to just provide, um, provide help where, where the metrics are showing it's needed. Speaker 1: 07:31 Speaking with KPBS health reporter, Karen mento, and Taran. Thank you. Speaker 2: 07:35 Thank you.