Are California cases exploding? Look at the data

The county where Covid-19 cases have been consistently highest, Los Angeles, has grown in ICU patients by only 3 percent; but sparsely populated counties have experienced double-digit daily growth in ICU occupied beds. Make sure you know the raw numbers of occupied ICU beds, though. They’re extremely low, since some of these counties have never had an ICU patient. One county, Yolo, has a total of five Covid-19 patients, with the previous day’s admission going from zero to 4 patients between June 23 and June 24. That’s an increase of 400 percent while the raw number of serious cases is extremely low. Still, it’s not nothing, and those four people could have had contact with several other people in these counties.

The raw number of ICU bed use is at an all-time high, at 1,268 in the state. That number has held steady between 1,000 and 1,100 through some of April, plus May and June.

Some of the counties in the middle range of growth in serious cases are seeing some increase, but it’s too early to tell if this foreshadows more serious cases and a spike in deaths. These counties would be San Bernardino, San Diego and Orange. And the total numbers for the state remain low, with more than 5,000 deaths total since the crisis began.