Coronavirus cases in O.C. pass 900, total deaths reach 15

Confirmed COVID-19 cases have risen steadily over the last several days in Orange County, hitting 931 cases and 15 deaths on Tuesday.

The county had 711 total cases and 13 deaths as of Friday. The most recent death was announced Tuesday.

The current cumulative case count comes from 11,307 tests, the county Health Care Agency said in its Tuesday update — 8.2% of tests have returned positive, a rate that has been generally consistent over the past three weeks.

Between March 16, when the county started releasing the number of tests processed by both public and private labs, and Tuesday, the median rate of positive tests was an even 8%.

The deaths are spread over a range of age groups. Eight people were 65 or older, four were 45 to 64, one was 35 to 44 and two were 25 to 34. Eight were men and seven were women. County health officials did not provide further information about the people who died.

The agency also said Tuesday that 129 people were hospitalized with the virus, with 75 of them in intensive care.

David Souleles, director of public health services for the Orange County Health Care Agency, said the county’s case counts are still trending upward — meaning he didn’t see the curve flattening. “Flattening the curve” is the process of slowing the growth of infections to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed by seriously ill COVID-19 patients.

Orange County’s day-to-day new case counts have been up and down over the last week, spiking at 104 new cases on April 1. Since then the daily countywide new cases have been recorded as 55, 57, 72, 49, 50 and 50 — daily county data is preliminary and subject to change.

“We’ve had some high days, some low days, but overall the trend has been still moving in an upward trajectory,” Souleles said at a Monday news conference. “What we are watching for is for that to flatten out — have days where it doesn’t increase and multiple days in a row, ideally, where it begins to decrease. Once we see that we will begin to have pretty good confidence that we are moving in a downward trajectory.”

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Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a statewide stay-at-home order starting March 19, less than three weeks ago. Souleles said people want to know when restrictions will let up, but California is in this for a while yet.

“This is really the time for us to redouble our efforts and recommit to staying at home, to protecting those in our community who are most vulnerable so that we can begin to see the flattening of the curve that we want to see,” Souleles said.

Here are the latest case counts for select cities, with their numbers per 10,000 residents:

• Anaheim: 95 (2.6 cases per 10,000 residents)
• Irvine: 82 (2.9 cases per 10,000 residents)
• Newport Beach: 75 (8.6 cases per 10,000 residents)
• Huntington Beach: 67 (3.3 cases per 10,000 residents)
• Santa Ana: 65 (1.9 cases per 10,000 residents)
• Laguna Beach: 34 (14.6 cases per 10,000 residents)
• Costa Mesa: 21 (1.8 cases per 10,000 residents)
• Fountain Valley: 14 (2.5 cases per 10,000 residents)

Updated figures are posted daily at occovid19.ochealthinfo.com/coronavirus-in-oc.

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