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A declining 2020 kicked off on Thursday with the county health department announcing 62 more deaths from COVID-19, a new one-day high arriving on New Years Eve.
And there was one more reason to be concerned. The county public health laboratory, working with local researchers, confirmed three more cases of the UK coronavirus strain on Thursday, bringing the total to four, including the initial case involving a man in his 30s announced on Wednesday .
Officials said none of the four were linked and had no contact with each other until they tested positive.
The other three cases confirmed Thursday were all men. Case investigators interviewed two of the three people who did not report any recent trips outside the country. Two of the three new cases were in their 40s and the third in their 50s. The third case for which travel information was not available had not yet been questioned.
They live in La Mesa, Otay Mesa, Mission Beach and the Rancho Bernardo-Carmel Mountain area.
The county public health lab was still awaiting genetic test results to confirm whether close contact with the first British strain subject on Wednesday, who is believed to have shown symptoms of coronavirus infection, also has the UK strain.
Dr Eric McDonald, medical director of the county’s epidemiology department, said Thursday evening that the subject, a woman also in her 30s who is the wife of Wednesday’s UK case, was hospitalized after testing positive for the coronavirus. Genetic testing by Scripps Research will be needed to confirm the British strain was involved, but it seems very likely at this point.
“I would be shocked if it didn’t come back with whole genome sequencing to confirm it,” McDonald said.
He said the other three UK cases confirmed by genetic testing on Thursday were actually tested between December 20 and December 22. as having the revealing “s drop” signature that marked Wednesday’s case.
Having cases from different parts of the county that didn’t know each other, he said, shows that this strain, which is thought to spread more easily than other variants, is among us. since a while.
“It hasn’t just spread to many parts of the county among people who don’t know each other over the past two weeks,” McDonald said. “The geographic dispersion of these cases tells you he’s probably been in the county longer.”
With 99 deaths reported in the past two days alone, December is by far the deadliest month in the pandemic. According to county records, 488 deaths were recorded in December, more than double the previous monthly record of 197 recorded in July.
The most recent deaths announced Thursday range from 45 to 100, three in their 40s. As always, not all of the deaths reported on a given day occurred the day before the announcement. It can take days or weeks for death certificates and causes of death to be finalized before they are released to the public.
Taking the latter group into account, records show that a total of 28 deaths occurred on December 22, tying December 18 for the deadliest day in the pandemic.
McDonald said he was reviewing every death certificate before the county released new numbers. Seeing so many in December, he said, was particularly trying.
“Each of these is a person and has a family,” McDonald said. “This means more and more families in San Diego are facing the fact that this is a real and deadly pandemic.”
Deaths are what epidemiologists call a “lagging indicator,” usually occurring weeks or months after the onset of infections. As such, a spike in death on its own doesn’t say much about how a pathogen such as the novel coronavirus spreads in a community. The number of new positive cases arriving each day gives a more immediate idea of the current rate of infection.
The 2020 COVID-19 final report lists 3,083 new cases, again surpassing the 3,000 mark after three consecutive days below that mark. The result could signal the arrival of a new wave of cases linked to the Christmas celebrations, given that the average incubation period of the virus – the time spent in the body before symptoms usually start to appear – is d ‘about 6 days, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Pressure continues to mount on local hospitals with 1,580 total COVID-19 patients in beds across the county on Wednesday. COVID-positive patients occupied 35 percent of the 4,504 beds in total use. Intensive care admissions held steady at 621, 386 diagnosed with COVID-19 and 235 without.
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