It’s been a month since the masks came off.
People are gathering in large numbers again to watch movies in the park, sing along at concerts and listen to the crack of a baseball bat at Dodgers and Angels games. In short, life is getting back to normal as pandemic-weary Southern Californians return to routines they abruptly cast aside as the coronavirus fastened its grip on the region in March 2020.
But while many residents are through with the multitude of restrictions that transformed their lives — most of which ended with the state’s June 15 “reopening” — the virus is showing no signs of being through with Southern California.
New cases have multiplied over the past month and the number of people getting sick enough to require hospital attention has doubled and tripled.
On Wednesday, July 14, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported 1,315 new cases of COVID-19. That marked the sixth consecutive day the county reported more than 1,000 infections. One month ago, the county was reporting about 200 new cases per day, the department said.
The number of people being treated in area hospitals also is rising.
After hospitalizations fell to a low of 212 in L.A. County on June 12 — a few days before the reopening — the number of patients with confirmed COVID-19 cases swelled to 406 as of Tuesday, July 13, according to state data.
Orange County hospitalizations stood at 119 Tuesday, up from 40 on June 26, the data show. There were 117 patients in San Bernardino County hospitals Tuesday, up from 41 on June 10. And Riverside County hospitalizations surged to 94 after falling to 27 on June 12.
The increases abruptly halted a sustained months-long decline in hospitalizations in all four counties.
“It was predictable,” Dr. Otto Yang, a professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and and expert on infectious disease, said by phone Wednesday.
But Dr. Anissa Davis, city health officer for Long Beach, where hospitalizations rose from 12 on June 15 to 33, said where the virus goes from here is unpredictable.
“One of the things we’ve learned about COVID is you can’t predict anything,” Davis said. “I’m hoping for the best. … It was such a horrible year and a half.”
Andrew Noymer, a UC Irvine professor and epidemiologist, said the increase is being fueled by the rise of the delta variant, now the dominant strain in California, as well as the reopening itself.
Dr. Adrian Cotton, chief of medical operations at Loma Linda University Health in San Bernardino County, said COVID-19 is an infectious disease that tends to spread rapidly when people gather in large numbers and in close proximity — as they have been doing since the middle of June.
And the highly contagious delta variant was recently estimated by state health officials to be responsible for about 43% of new infections.
Noymer said the slowdown in people getting coronavirus shots in recent weeks also is playing a role in the post-reopening uptick. That’s a trend to which public health officials throughout Southern California are calling attention.
“We’ve kind of hit a plateau,” Davis said. “Everybody who wanted to get vaccinated has gotten vaccinated.”
Noymer said the rise in cases and hospitalizations is a cautionary reminder that the pandemic is not over.
“California’s vaccination rate is not high enough to put this completely in the rear view mirror,” he said.
State data show that 50.6% of all Californians are fully vaccinated and 58.1% have had at least one dose of the vaccine.
Rates vary across the region. Locally, Orange County has the highest rates, with 53.6% of its residents fully vaccinated and 59.8% partially vaccinated, state data show. A little more than half, or 51.4%, of Los Angeles County residents are fully vaccinated, while 58.7% have had at least one shot. The respective numbers are 40.7% and 47.1% for Riverside County, and 37.7% and 43.4% for San Bernardino County.
San Bernardino County spokesperson David Wert said the county’s numbers partly reflect low vaccination rates in its far-flung remote communities.
“We’re seeing more hesitancy in our rural areas, questioning the need for the vaccine,” he said.
Wert said San Bernardino County officials aren’t “alarmed at the moment. The county expected some uptick following reopening.”
Cotton, of Loma Linda University, said, the increases, while large percentage-wise, are relatively moderate in actual numbers.
“We’re nowhere close to where we were last year,” said Dr. Shunling Tsang, deputy public health officer for Riverside County. “We’re nowhere close to where we were during the winter.”
By far the most frightening period of the pandemic was the holiday season spike, when hospitalizations peaked at 8,098 in Los Angeles County, 2,259 in Orange County, 1,785 in San Bernardino and 1,671 in Riverside County, state data show.
Tsang said it is unlikely that another surge would rival those holiday numbers because many people have received COVID-19 shots.
“We are optimistic because the pool of patients that can get COVID is significantly smaller,” she said.
Health officials say the vaccine has proven to be effective against the delta variant and other strains. And they say those who are at risk are largely those who haven’t been vaccinated.
Underscoring that point, about 90% of those who been hospitalized with COVID-19 in Orange County the past three weeks hadn’t received any vaccine, Dr. Clayton Chau, the county’s Health Care Agency, told the Orange County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday. The remaining 10% had received one of two doses or were fully vaccinated, Chau said.
Barbara Ferrer, L.A. County’s public health director, said earlier this week that more than 99% of current virus cases, hospitalizations and deaths are occurring among unvaccinated people.
“It’s really striking how big of a difference there is by vaccination status,” Noymer, the UCI epidemiologist, said. Infections are going down among those have received shots and climbing among those who haven’t, he said.
“This is not your flu shot. It’s better than your flu shot,” Noymer said. “The flu shot doesn’t actually work all that well. But this one works really well and it works against a much worse bug.”
At the moment, Noymer said he’s not “overly concerned” about the recent direction of virus numbers. But Noymer said there is still a chance that Southern California hospitals again could overflow with COVID-19 patients.
“There’s more than enough unvaccinated people in California to overload the hospital system,” he said.
Jakub Hlavka, research professor in health policy at USC, said it is encouraging that vaccines have proven to be effective.
“It’s one of the miracles of modern science that it happened so quickly,” he said.
Hlavka said, however, that the jump in cases since reopening points out the need to continue making sure people have access to vaccine.
“We need to keep encouraging people to get the shot,” he said.
Yang, the UCLA professor, called the trend “worrisome” and an indication California officials opened too extensively, too early. The state put itself in a position of no turning back by announcing in April that it would reopen June 15, he said.
“Opening should be determined based on what is happening on the ground,” Yang said.
Noymer, on the other hand, thought the timing was right.
“I actually don’t think we opened too much or too fast,” Noymer said. “The vaccine is available and people have had the ability to get vaccinated. To keep everything shut down is to hold everyone else hostage in a sense.”
Noymer added that huge numbers of people are weary of restrictions and have little appetite for more.
“I don’t think statewide people are going to mask up even if they are told to,” Noymer said. “Some people clearly don’t want to wear masks.”
At Tuesday’s San Bernardino County Supervisors meeting, several people strode to the podium to complain about restrictions. They wore T-shirts that read: “Unmasked, unmuzzled, unvaccinated.”
What there is an appetite for, said Riverside County’s Tsang, is getting back to normal this summer.
“That’s why we are pushing the vaccine so much,” she said. “That’s the pathway out.”
Staff writers Nikie Johnson and Alicia Robinson contributed to this report.
