'Life And Death': Bay Area Issues Grim Warning Ahead Of Christmas

BAY AREA, CA — When Bay Area health officials implored residents in the week leading up to Thanksgiving to avoid gatherings outside their immediate household, they were mostly asking the public to take their warnings on faith that holiday gatherings would lead to an explosion of coronavirus cases.

On the eve of another major holiday, officials are again pleading with the public to stay home this Christmas, but this time they have hard data to back up their warning.

Santa Clara County Health Officer Dr. Sara Cody is pointing to a post-Thanksgiving COVID-19 case surge that links holiday gatherings to the most devastating surge the South Bay and much of the country has experienced in recent weeks.

Since Nov. 19, a week before Thanksgiving, the county’s average seven-day positivity rate has more than doubled from 3.4 percent to as high as 7.7 percent on Dec. 13.

On May 27, after more than two months of some of the nation’s toughest lockdown measures, the county brought the positivity rate down to 1.3 percent.

The county averaged three deaths per day a week before Thanksgiving. It has nearly doubled to almost six per day.

It is no coincidence that the surge in cases has followed late-November holiday gatherings, according to Cody.

"In spite of imploring, begging our community to please not travel and to please not gather, we still had a surge at Thanksgiving," Cody said in a statement Wednesday.

The architect of the Bay Area’s shelter orders that went into effect March 17 is now warning the public that a failure to adhere to admonitions to stay home this holiday season would overwhelm hospital capacity.

Gatherings of any kind between multiple households are prohibited by the state's stay-at-home order, which is in effect in Santa Clara County and the rest of the Bay Area at least through Jan. 7. The county also mandates that residents who travel more than 150 miles away from the county quarantine for 10 days upon their return.

"It has taken all of our collective might to try to calm things down," Cody said. "But if we have a surge on top of a surge, we will definitely break. We cannot afford that."

Such a scenario could lead to potentially catastrophic outcomes for anyone who needs urgent care, officials said.

Cody and Dr. Ahmed Kamal, the county's COVID-19 director of health care preparedness, painted a bleak picture of county residents with non-coronavirus maladies such as heart attacks and injuries from car accidents being turned away at hospitals because they're filled to capacity with coronavirus patients.

According to Kamal, the county is down to 35 intensive care unit beds, with eight of the county's 10 hospitals having five or fewer ICU beds.

Three of them, he said, have fewer than 10 hospital beds of any kind available. Because of the dearth of beds, nearly 70 emergency room patients on Tuesday had to wait for a hospital bed to open up.

"We are talking about rationing what scarce resources our exhausted health system has left to those who will benefit the most," Kamal said.

"We are talking about people dying who should not have to die."

Kamal implored residents to cancel their holiday plans immediately if they have yet to do so, even if those plans included driving to a relatively close destination rather than flying.

"I cannot emphasize enough how our collective actions today and tomorrow and the next day are a matter of life and death," he said.

— Bay City News and Patch Editor Gideon Rubin contributed to this report