California has lowest COVID-19 case rate in the United States

California has the lowest rate of COVID-19 cases in the United States, according to the most recent data from the CDC.

“Over 70% of Californians have received at least one dose. Keep it up, California – get vaccinated,” the tweet says.

According to CDC data, California has about 95 new cases over 7 days per 100,000 people. The United States as a whole is nearly three times the rate of California with about 251 new cases over seven days per 100,000 people. Connecticut has the second lowest case rate at 127, followed by Colorado at 128.

“We are not the most vaccinated state,” Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “But we are also a state that has not completely abandoned other methods of mitigation.”

Masks are mandatory in schools, hospitals, and on public transportation, and in counties like Los Angeles, masks are mandatory indoors as well.

Montana, Alaska and West Virginia are the three worst states in terms of case rates at 485, 562 and 716 per 100,000 population, respectively.

In California, CDC data shows the Bay Area has the lowest rates: Marin, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco counties all have seven-day total case rates below 80 per 100,000 people. Orange and Ventura counties have rates between around 105 and 115, while Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and Riverside counties have rates of 162, 161, and 160 respectively. These are higher than the state’s aggregate rate, but far from the U.S. aggregate rate.

Meanwhile, South Carolina is setting hospitalization records for COVID-19, and new cases are approaching peak levels last winter.

Since the state of emergency in South Carolina ended on June 7, Republican Gov. Henry McMaster has maintained that single parents should decide whether children wear masks in schools, even though new cases in the state rose from 150 per day on average to over 5,000.

Now teachers, students and parents are grappling with the fallout as more young people contract the delta variant, forcing nearly two dozen schools and two entire districts to return to online learning in the month following their return in person.

State health and education officials say the statewide ban on masks in schools has removed one of their best tools for stopping the spread of COVID-19. The state affected nearly 2,600 COVID-19 hospitalized patients in early September, a record.
“We upped football too soon. Instead of continuing to listen to medical professionals and interpret the data, it was guided by talking points from the Republican Governors Association,” the state senator said. Democrat Marlon Kimpson of Charleston.

Wyoming has one of the highest state rates, with a weekly figure of 659 cases per 100,000 population, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, and only half of its residents aged 18 and over are fully vaccinated – behind all states except West Virginia.

In Arizona, more than 100 daily coronavirus deaths have been reported for the second time since February.

The 108 confirmed deaths and 2,742 new cases of the coronavirus were reported on Saturday. Hospitalizations fell below 2,000 for the first time in nearly three weeks, with 1,981 COVID-19 patients occupying hospital beds on Friday.

This is down from the current high of 2,103 reached on September 11th.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.