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Even as California moved closer to the sobering milestone of 40,000 deaths from COVID-19, signs of hope continued to emerge.
As of Friday, case rates, positive test rates and hospitalizations continued to fall or hold steady statewide. Over the past seven days, the state has recorded an average of 22,200 cases per day, about half the number from two weeks ago.
Nationwide, hospitalizations due to COVID-19 fell to their lowest level since December 7.
“We are clearly on a downward slope,” Dr George Rutherford, an infectious disease expert at UCSF, said at a forum hosted by the school on Thursday.
Despite promising trends, Santa Clara County has hit a dark threshold with more than 100,000 cumulative COVID-19 cases and more than 1,300 deaths since the discovery of the first case of the disease in the Bay Area on January 31 in a resident from Santa Clara who arrived by plane from Wuhan, China a week earlier.
Deaths, which remain a late indicator of the direction of the pandemic, have remained high.
Across California, more than a third of deaths across the pandemic were reported in January – and the 13,594 deaths recorded statewide in January are twice the 6,772 reported in December .
“I think it’s plausible that the virus did what it can do,” Shane Crotty, a scientist from the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, told the UCSF forum.
More doses of the vaccine are on the way, though much slower than health officials would like, as the federal and state governments scramble to sort out distribution issues.
California says nearly two-thirds of the vaccine doses shipped have been administered. Some providers have withheld the doses for the second injections, accounting for a part of a third not yet administered.
“With vaccinations, we hope to see the end of this pandemic soon,” Santa Clara County COVID-19 testing and vaccine manager Dr. Marty Fenstersheib said during a press briefing on Friday.
At least three other vaccine candidates will likely be allowed for use in the United States this summer, including products from AstraZeneca, Novavax and Johnson & Johnson, Rutherford said.
Johnson & Johnson announced on Friday that its single-dose coronavirus vaccine was found to be 66% effective in trials. The company is seeking emergency use authorization from the FDA.
European regulators also approved AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine for people over 18 on Friday after it was shown to be around 60% effective in trials.
Both vaccines are cheaper and easier to store than currently available vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, but fall well below the 94-95% efficacy rate of these two vaccines, which are already approved for use in the states. -United.
Novavax Inc. said on Thursday that its COVID-19 vaccine appears to be 89% effective based on early results from a UK study, and that it also appears to work – but not as well – against new mutated versions of the virus circulating in this country and South Africa.
Variants remain a big question mark in the pandemic.
At UCSF, researchers are still analyzing data from a virus variant discovered in the state in December to determine if it is more infectious than the common virus. They also hope to know if the currently licensed vaccines will be effective against him and hope to have more information on this next week.
A highly transmissible coronavirus variant first identified in South Africa was detected in South Carolina on Thursday – the first time it was discovered in the United States – in two people with no travel history, indicating it spreads in the community.
Dr Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Americans should assume the variants are widespread in the country, beyond the few identified cases.
“I think we should treat each case as if it were a variant during this pandemic right now,” Walensky said during a coronavirus briefing at the White House on Friday.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading infectious disease expert, echoed the sentiment, saying the United States must prepare for the emergence and increasing spread of coronavirus mutations. This includes the variants first identified in the UK and Brazil.
“It’s a wake-up call for all of us,” Fauci said. “We have to be nimble in order to easily adapt to create versions of the vaccine that are actually specifically directed at the mutation that is actually present at any given time.”
Aidin Vaziri is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected]
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