Not only is the coronavirus pandemic not slowing down, Thursday brought the most new cases yet nationwide, including thousands more in California, pushing the state past 200,000.
There were 5,052 positive tests for COVID-19 and another 81 deaths from the virus reported Thursday around California, pushing the state’s confirmed case count to 200,476, according to data compiled by this news organization. The new fatalities — more than half in Los Angeles County — raised California’s death toll to 5,804.
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, on Thursday estimated that there were as many as 10 times the cases than have been detected by tests. That would equate to 2 million Californians, or 5% of the state’s population.
Before this week, there had been two days on which the number of new cases in California was higher than 4,000. Of the four days this week, there has been one with less than 5,000 cases.
After surging to new highs earlier this week, the slew of new cases in Bay Area slowed Thursday, as only Alameda County added more than 100 positive tests to its count. But there were another 13 deaths in the region Thursday, the most here in a single day since May 19.
Marin County, with 54 new cases — one more than Contra Costa (53) and behind only Santa Clara (56) and Alameda (107) — became the seventh county in the region and 23rd statewide to cross the 1,000-case threshold.
The dramatic spike in confirmed cases has swelled the state’s seven-day average to 4,780 — 40% higher than a week ago. It also, however, comes amid a surge in testing. Labs around the state are processing nearly 100,000 tests per day — 32% more than a week ago.
On Thursday, California crossed the 100,000 mark for the first time, reporting 101,446 test results. But even as the state tests more people, more and more of those people are testing positive. The test positivity rate over the past seven days is 5.6%, the highest that mark has been since May 6, when the state was testing about 30,000 people a day.
The country is following a similar pattern. It also set a new testing mark Thursday with 636,622 tests nationwide. But it also recorded its most new cases yet — 39,045, according to Johns Hopkins University — and its positivity rate was also at its highest since May 20 — 6.1%. There were nine states Thursday — Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Nevada, South Carolina, Texas and Utah — with at least 10% of their tests coming back positive, including a 23.2% rate in Arizona, the highest in the nation.
Hospitalizations also continue to rise in California. The 4,240 patients in hospital beds who have tested positive for the virus is the most it has ever been — up 24% from a week ago — while another 1,282 are suspected to have the virus. The combined total is its highest since April 8.
Still, as cases and hospitalizations spike around the state and the nation, there hasn’t been a significant increase in deaths attributed to the virus. Health officials, however, have cautioned that deaths lag behind hospitalizations and cases. Dr. Anthony Fauci repeated that assertion in in front of Congress this week.
“You might remember at the time that New York was in their worst situation where the deaths were going up, but the cases were starting to go down,” Fauci told a House committee on Tuesday. “The deaths only came down multiple weeks later.”
