What is going on with California?

Every night when I pull in numbers for the day, California just keeps topping the list. The data lately has been just eye-popping. California was the first state to impose some kind of lockdown and they’ve had some mask mandates and some restrictions on social gatherings, and yet, the case counts are in the stratosphere.

You can see that the cases, death counts and hospitalization are almost going straight up. Here’s a map of California (scaled up for increased legibility) with some HHS hospitalization data imposed over it: the dots represents percentage of icu beds filled, with darker red meaning higher number of beds filled, and the colored areas designates the average household income. This image comes from the ArcGIS mapping feature in Power BI. I played around with the layers feature in that tool which is pretty interesting. The green dots represents no data – probably because there may be no icu beds available in those rural areas. I have to play around with those data some more.

Here are some raw numbers (again image scaled up for legibility):

There are some really eyepopping numbers. First, the case count went from 12K on 12/1 to 53K on 12/16. The last two days the count has hovered around 40K. The total December count so far (through 12/19) is around 595K, basically doubled that of the entire month of November. Just in the last 6 days (between 12/14 and 12/19), the state reported 295K in cases. Eyepopping indeed. Same thing with the death counts: in the last few days, California has reported in the solid 250+ deaths per day and December’s average death count is greater than anything see this year. California is going from record to record, almost on a daily basis.

Considering that the governor has been quick to impose health guidelines regarding business openings, masks and social gatherings, I was wondering why California looks so ugly. That map of icu beds filled and income that I showed earlier shows that the dark reds are heavily clustered in higher income areas such as San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles, meaning the icu beds are being filled up in high income areas. I was reminded that a few months ago, I had read quite a few articles about the social influencers, mostly on the very young side, breaking COVID social gathering restrictions and attending parties without masks and no social distancing.

So, I thought that those social influencers and other relatively wealthy young people are ignoring the health guidelines and spreading the virus. Those social influencers are going grocery shopping or some kind of retail shopping, exposing the poorer essential workers to the virus. The essential workers have to work; they have no choice. The social influencers have a choice; they can forego parties. That was my thinking on what going be driving the spread.

There has been a couple of articles lately about the situation in California and the fact that the hospitals are running out of capacity. This one, “We’re getting crushed” is an alarming one and this one, “No more beds are the main hospital in the nation’s largest county” gives some reasons as to why California is skyrocketing. One that I keep forgetting is covid fatigue but the article does mention that the essential workers have to work but are often then infected with the virus.

These articles should be read to understand why we must try everything we can to reduce our social gathering, especially over the holidays. The second article mentioned that we are seeing the light at the end of this dark period when a vaccine is just being rolled out, so we must do everything we can to save ourselves and others to get to the other side.

Try to hold on and get to the other side. Wait until next year to enjoy your holidays.