The pace of new cases and COVID-19 deaths in California slowed down on Friday, but the 80 fatalities from the virus reported brought the total death toll in the state to 1,050.
The 80 deaths are down from the 92 reported in the state on Thursday and significantly less than the daily high of 103 deaths on Wednesday. Eleven of those 80 deaths were in Santa Clara, San Francisco, Contra Costa and Alameda counties, which combined have 5.7 million residents or about 14 percent of California’s population.
No deaths were reported in other Bay Area counties yesterday, including in San Mateo where on Monday the county’s health officer Dr. Scott Morrow indicated the county was on a positive trend.
“It appears that we have flattened the curve, at least this first curve, for now,” he wrote. “I am hopeful we have avoided the catastrophe that New York and Italy experienced, for the time being.”
California also reported 1,313 new cases on Friday, a nearly 5 percent increase from Thursday, according to data compiled by this news organization. That’s also a slower pace from earlier in the week — the number of cases had grown by 10 percent from the preceding Wednesday and Thursday.
The state now has 29,348 confirmed cases of coronavirus, although experts warn that number is likely an undercount, in part because of lack of testing and individuals who are infected but asymptomatic. A new Stanford University study that tested blood samples for evidence of exposure to the coronavirus suggested more than 48,000 people might have been infected in Santa Clara County, much more than the 1,870 cases currently confirmed by testing in the county.
On Friday, the state also saw a decline in COVID-19 patients in intensive care unit beds for the second day in a row, a 1.4 percent decrease for a total of 1,174. The total number of patients hospitalized with the virus increased by 1.2 percent, to 3,180. Most of those patients are in Southern California — half the patients are hospitalized or in an ICU bed in Los Angeles County.
