Orange County has seen a rise in daily coronavirus cases, as the hospitalization rate here continues to go up. On July 30, 2021, the Orange County Health Care Agency (OCHCA) reported 593 more coronavirus cases. The county sees over 500 new coronavirus cases for the second day in a row for the first time since February 2021, long before California removed business capacity restrictions.
Over 1,100 coronavirus cases are reported in this county from July 29 to 30, 2021. Therefore, experts claim that the Delta strain has become Southern California’s most contagious virus variety ever. The rise in the daily case count is alarming, but experts like Andrew Noymer of UC Irvineregard the continuous increases in Orange County’s COVID-19-related hospitalization rates as a more troubling situation.
Noymer stated that testing could influence raw case figures, so the over 500 case count does not perturb him. Rather, what worries Noymer much are the continuing increases in hospitalizations and the percentage of positive test results.
Nationwide, the dashboard of the OCHCA indicates that 252 individuals are hospitalized with coronavirus disease, with 59 of them being in the ICU. It is worth noting that there have been double-digit increases in coronavirus hospitalizations four times from July 23 to 30, 2021.
When it comes to the hospitalization demographics, this agency has revealed a graph tracking the weekly rate for every 100,000 as per vaccination status. There is a 24.6 hospitalized case rate among people who are not completely vaccinated, which is 4.9 for every 100,000 among fully vaccinated individuals.
There have been 212 more reported coronavirus cases from July 20 to 27, 2021, in Irvine city. The weekly increase in the city’s COVID-19 case count is the highest reported here since it switched to updates per week this May.
California is moving to follow the CDC’s new guidance on the utilization of masks indoors, irrespective of coronavirus vaccination status. Now, the OCHCA created alternative news headlines, as data on an in-house CDC presentation implied that the Delta strain is as capable of being transmitted as Ebola and chickenpox.
As for Noymer, experts have mentioned the increased Delta variant transmission for a while. Further, as per Irvine’s Mayor Farrah N. Khan, even the people with full vaccination are in danger of contracting coronavirus.
Noymer stated that Delta has been shown to be quite a contagious strain for a while now. As for Noymer, the information that compares it to chickenpox agitates people, as a leaked presentation slide deck of the CDC is its source. Noymer said while it is difficult to quantify how contagious a virus is, he is considering hospitalizations a barometer of the present coronavirus disease landscape. Noymer also said that he lacks faith in the comparisons, as mathematical models are their source.
Describing hospitalizations as an important situation, Noymer implied that Delta is qualitatively a more transmittable coronavirus variant as compared to Alpha. As for Noymer, the cases could involve many 16-year-old kids being reported positive for COVID-19 without symptoms for their cross-country training. At the same time, Noymer claimed that percentage positive is important as when 6% of COVID-19 tests return positive results, it proves that the number of tests is not too many.
