With 4 more Merced County COVID-19 deaths reported, 19 dead since New Year’s Eve
The Merced County Department of Public Health confirmed four more COVID-19-related fatalities on Friday.
Merced County lives lost to the pandemic rose to 279 with the new resident deaths. Nineteen of those fatalities have been recorded since New Year’s Eve.
Three women and one man accounted for the most recent deaths, according to County Public Health. One of the deceased individuals was between age 50-64, while the other three were 65-years-old or older.
Three of the deceased had underlying health conditions prior to death, County Public Health reported. The health status of the fourth is unknown at this time.
Following a brief dip on Thursday, new laboratory confirmed cases climbed again to 367 on Friday — the fourth highest single day increase recorded to date.
The four highest daily case counts have all taken place within the past four weeks.
As of Friday, total positive tests during the pandemic tallied 21,506.
Of those, infections considered active rose considerably by 145 cases to 3,231. Active cases are estimated via the number of new positive cases within the prior two weeks.
While new cases continue to number high in Merced County, new daily cases per 100,000 over the past week — an important data point used by the state to assign county reopening tiers — has worsened. The metric on Friday grew to 64 cases per 100,000 residents from 62 the prior day.
A new daily case count of seven or fewer per 100,000 residents is needed before more Merced County businesses may reopen.
Test positivity, another data point used by the state that measures the percentage of positive tests compared to all tests during the past week, remained at 15.2% on Friday. The metric must decrease to at least 7% or less for more local businesses to open.
Also barring businesses like restaurants, bars and wineries from opening their doors are the stay-at-home orders triggered by low intensive care unit capacity in the San Joaquin Valley. The region again showed 0% ICU bed availability on Friday, as did Southern California.
Some Merced County COVID-19 metrics improve, slightly
While Valley hospital resources remain overall strained, Merced County’s number of free ICU beds has slowly — and only slightly — improved in recent days.
After dipping to the worst-case scenario of zero free ICU beds on Dec. 29 and 30, the number has since inched up to four free beds as of Thursday, according to the most recently available state data.
Still, a bed count that low is enough to keep Merced County on thin ice, local public health officials have said.
More recent county-provided data reported that at 54, one fewer COVID-19 patient was hospitalized in Merced County as of Friday.
Active local COVID-19 outbreaks also decreased for another day in a row on Friday. Three workplace locations’ outbreaks were cleared and no additional facilities were added to the outbreak list.
Workplaces struck from the outbreak list were God’s Love Outreach Ministries’ adult residential facility, New Bethany nursing home and Teasdale Latin Foods.
A workplace is deemed to have an outbreak if at least three cases of the virus are linked to it within two weeks. At skilled nursing facilities, however, just one case constitutes an outbreak due to the high risk setting.
Locations are cleared of active outbreak status when no further cases are traced back for two weeks.
This story was originally published January 8, 2021 at 5:07 PM.
