The city has 374 confirmed cases and six deaths. And there’s a growing outbreak in Laguna Honda Hospital, a long-term-care facility where nine staff and two residents have tested positive.
Six Bay Area counties on March 16 were the country’s first to issue stay-in-place orders. Soon after, Newsom made the shutdown statewide.
“We’re early into this, but we are seeing evidence that the epidemic curve elsewhere is steeper,” said Matt Willis, public health officer for Marin County.
Yet Los Angeles is close to New York-level spread, Mayor Eric Garcetti and Newsom said at a news conference Friday; the city could have as many cases per capita as early as this week. A Navy medical ship arrived in Los Angeles on Friday to provide extra hospital beds.
Even in towns with a flatter curve, “You’re not saying there are going to be fewer hospitalized people. You’re saying they’re going to occur over a longer period of time,” said Bela Matyas, public health officer in Solano County, in the Bay Area.
Distancing requires time to bring the disease to heel. Coronavirus can take nearly a week after transmission to yield symptoms and another week or two after that for the sickest patients to end up in intensive-care units, said Jeff Duchin, Seattle and King County health commissioner.
“What we are looking at today reflects infections that happened several weeks ago,” he said. “If we want to know how well we are doing today, it takes two to three weeks for those infections to mature into illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths.”
Still, there’s hope the initial progress will point the way for other states and cities.
“The next week or so will tell us an awful lot,” Providence’s Hochman said. “Depending on how this all turns out, one of the take-home messages is that the social distancing and the work the three governors in Washington, Oregon and Cailfornia did is actually going to make a difference. A lot of folks said they were overreacting. But they got on it early.”
Any gains, though, are hard-won and precarious, said Duchin.
“It looks like we are going in the right direction, but we don’t have a lot of certainty,” he said. “And if it’s true, it means we need to continue what we are doing, because if we stop, the epidemic will come roaring back.”
--With assistance from David R. Baker, Mark Niquette and Emma Court.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.