Orange County Cases Pass 40,000, Amid Confusion On The Accuracy Of Case Numbers In California

By Shivaune Field

The O.C. added 1051 COVID-19 cases today, taking the cumulative case count to 41,578. Ten deaths were reported on Tuesday resulting in a total of 734 deaths for the County so far. There have been 498,642 tests undertaken.

The good news is that more than 30,000 people have recovered from the novel coronavirus in OC. Hospitals and physicians are learning more about the disease and effective treatment. The County health department is evolving as more information comes to hand about the disease too. It is offering free drive-through testing in Anaheim for residents that can’t get tested through a doctor.

The County is also offering local restaurants a $1,000 grant as reimbursement for masks, employee training, site reconfiguration, cleaning supplies, and more. The funds are available through a $10-million allocation from the Federal CARES Act to support the safe reopening of restaurants.

The academic center of Orange County, UC Irvine, is innovating too. The UC Irvine COVID Awareness Group consists of faculty and students from the Departments of Public Health, Statistics, Virus Research, and Infectious Disease Science Initiative. The Group announced this week that it has developed a statistics site providing information on COVID-19 cases in Alameda, Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, and Santa Clara counties.

The dashboard illustrates that both Los Angeles and Orange Counties climbed significantly in mid-June about a month after the stay at home orders ended, and are now declining. The peak for LA County occurred in mid-July, one month after the spike in cases began. O.C.’s peak happened earlier, around July 10. Neither County is back to the pre-spike levels, though cases are moving in the right direction according to the UCI site.

Suellen Hopfer is an assistant professor of public health at UCI. “We do see things got worse in June and July after the lockdown was relaxed,” Hopfer told The Patch. “But it is leveling off, which is good. However, the deaths are trending upward, which is not great.”

It is important to note however that there is currently a backlog of cases that have not been reported due to inaccuracies in California’s reporting system. The trends noted above are based on potentially incorrect low figures, and an influx of case numbers is now anticipated. “We suspected there was something wrong with the system, and clearly there was something wrong with the system,” OC’s interim public health officer Clayton Chau said. “We are expecting a large test number, positive and negative, into our system.” 

The uncertainty around test numbers comes as schools are beginning their school year, and making important decisions on whether to open classrooms for in-person education. The County Health Care Agency is accepting applications from schools for waivers allowing them to open in fall. The approval process has been temporarily halted, however, because of concerns about inaccuracies in the number of cases reported.

The state also has to give permission for elementary schools to open in the County. It has set a benchmark of less than 200 confirmed cases per 100,000 residents in a two-week period, and it is unclear if O.C. is currently meeting that goal Amid all of the indecision, what has been decided is that elementary school teachers and students will have access to testing facilities at the Anaheim Convention Center. The board of supervisors confirmed their support of that measure in a meeting on Tuesday.

That is good news for the kids and parents who practiced social distancing measures today as they picked up their Ipads and school supplies for the new school year. Students were able to put a face to the name of their teachers, who they will be seeing online via distance learning in the next few weeks and potentially for the unforeseeable future.