CA Positivity Rate Falls As COVID-19 Surges In Neighboring States

CALIFORNIA — Coronavirus hospitalizations have fallen to a pandemic-record low, and California just announced a 1.1 percent positivity rate Monday — yet another all-time low. Meanwhile, neighboring Oregon and Washington are shutting down again amid a spring surge.

And it appears the surge is mostly entering younger circles in these states.

In Oregon, Gov. Kate Brown said that hospitalizations of those 18 to 34 increased by nearly 50 percent last week. On Friday, Brown shut down indoor dining in 15 Oregon counties.

"Cases are widespread, driven by new, more contagious variants," Brown said. "Hospitalizations have nearly doubled what they were a week ago. While fewer seniors are being hospitalized thanks to vaccinations, COVID-19 is now knocking more younger people off their feet.”

In Washington, hospital leaders said last week that a fourth surge in the state was driving hospitalizations up in young people, The Seattle Times reported.

"COVID fatigue has settled in in this group, and they are letting their guard down," said Tom DeBord, the chief operating officer of Overlake Medical Center in Bellevue, Washington, in a news briefing by the Washington State Hospital Association. "We have a group of folks who aren’t as highly vaccinated yet and are less likely to follow the guidance."

As these states batten down the hatches again, the Golden State remains virtually untouched. Why is this?

"You and everyone else are wondering the same thing," Dr. John Swartzberg, professor of vaccinology and infectious disease at the University of California, Berkeley, told Patch in an email Monday.

Swartzberg said there could be many factors why California has been able to evade the surge. In the Southland — previously dubbed the state's coronavirus epicenter — a higher percentage of California's population was already infected, and now they could be immune, he said.

Many factors could be at play, said Dr. Timothy Brewer, a professor of infectious disease at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. But he echoed the idea of a growing immunity in California.

"Oregon and Washington did not experience the large surge in cases that California did last summer and after Christmas," Brewer told Patch in an email Monday. "Therefore, while an estimated 20.4 percent of Californians have had COVID-19 according to the CDC (based on seroprevalence), only 6.3 percent of Oregon residents and 6.7 percent of Washingtonians have already been infected."

What's more, some 40 percent of adults have been fully vaccinated in California. Meanwhile, an estimated 28 percent of Oregon's population and an estimated 31.2 percent of Washington's population has been fully vaccinated, Brewer said.

Based on infections and vaccinations, about 60 percent of Californians have immunity to the coronavirus, compared to 34 percent of Oregonians and 37 percent of the Washington population, he said.

"Simply put, both states have larger percentages of susceptible persons in their residents than California does," Brewer said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists the Oregon case rate as the 11th-highest in the U.S. and Washington as the 18th-highest. California is listed as the lowest, Brewer said.

"Hopefully the higher level of population immunity and the ongoing push to vaccinate everyone — Los Angeles County just announced that appointments are no longer needed for COVID-19 vaccinations — means that California will not experience a rise in case rates similar to what is currently happening in Oregon and Washington."

The highly infectious B.1.1.7 variant, which became the dominant strain in early April, may also be fueling a surge in Oregon, where the variant may be circulating more, Swartzberg said.

"All in all, it's not clear why those states are doing appreciably worse than California. As a corollary, without understanding why California is doing so well, it's hard to know what we should be emphasizing to continue this trend (beyond vaccination)," Swartzberg said.

The Golden State could also simply be escaping the Pacific Northwest's surge by vaccinating its population at a faster pace, Dr. George Rutherford, a University of San Francisco epidemiologist told ABC7 on Friday.

"There's a real tipping point here, where if you can get enough people vaccinated or with naturally acquired immunity like what's going on in Los Angeles, you can get past these risky situations," he told the news station.

As the Pacific Northwest contends with a new surge, California has continued to leave its devastating winter surge further in the rearview mirror. On Monday, the state recorded just 1,941 hospitalizations. In January, the state hit its peak of almost 23,000 patients in a day.

On both Sunday and Monday, Los Angeles didn't report a single coronavirus death.

"We're hopeful that deaths will continue to remain very low in the weeks ahead," L.A. County public health Director Barbara Ferrer said.

Trends look good for the most part across the Golden State, but a worrisome trend in L.A. and in other parts of the state could disrupt this progress: a drop in people getting vaccinated.

Vaccination rates have declined in the last week, Ferrer said. For the week ending April 23, 611,592 doses were administered in the county, she said. Last week, only 467,134 doses were administered — a 24 percent drop.

It's unclear whether the drop can be attributed to vaccine hesitancy. Recently, federal data showed that just 11 percent of Californians are estimated to be reluctant to get inoculated against the coronavirus.

"Vaccine hesitancy" cannot be blamed entirely for the drop, although it does play a role, Ferrer said. There are also issues with people having easy access to vaccination sites or the ability to get there. Mobile vaccination efforts have been ramping up in an effort to reach more residents, and most vaccination sites are offering shots without an advance appointment.

"We have some urgency here because the more people that get vaccinated the less the risks are of both known and unknown variants of concern taking hold here and getting us back [to] a place where more people are dying, more people are in hospitals, and we have more cases," she said.

California Coronavirus Data As Of Monday

• California has 3,643,992 confirmed cases to date.

• There were 1,512 newly recorded confirmed cases Sunday.

• The seven-day positivity rate is 1.1 percent.

• There have been 60,709,771 tests conducted in California.

• There have been 60,763 COVID-19 deaths since the start of the pandemic.

• As of May 3, providers reported administering a total of 30,501,711 vaccine doses statewide.

The City News Service contributed to this report.