If it feels like California just passed the half-a-million case milestone, or just overtook New York for the most cases of any state, well, both occurred in the past month. And yet, again, on Thursday, the Golden State earned another not-so-golden accolade: the first state with 600,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19.
Counties around the state, continuing to account for a backlog of some 300,000 tests, reported another 8,230 new cases Thursday to push the state’s count to 602,672, according to data compiled by this news organization, 14 days after it crossed the 500,000-case mark.
With California’s case curve bending downward in recent weeks, it took the longest to accrue 100,000 new cases since the jump from 200,000 to 300,000, which the state hit July 9, 15 days after its 200,000th case. It took 12 days to go from 300,000 to 400,000 and just 10 days after that to hit 500,000.
Cases in the state have doubled in just over a month, adding as many since July 9 as it had in the prior three-plus months of the pandemic.
California’s death toll has also nearly doubled in that time and was on the verge of hitting 11,000 Friday. Counties around the state reported their fourth-highest single-day death toll Thursday, with 188 fatalities from the virus spread around 24 counties.
The seven-day average of deaths in the state hasn’t fallen below 130 per day since the month of August began. It ticked back up Thursday to about 139 per day over the past week, about 4% lower than California’s deadliest seven-day period, which ended Aug. 6, when the virus claimed 1,016 lives.
While Los Angeles, Riverside and Orange counties led the way with about 60% of the statewide fatalities Thursday, Merced County checked in with 15 deaths, the fourth-most in the state and the highest single-day total for the Central Valley county of about 275,000 people.
Deaths are on the rise across the whole eight-county San Joaquin Valley. The region, which accounts for about a tenth of the state’s population, reported about 4.9 deaths per 100,000 residents in the past week, or about 21.8% of the statewide total. It reported more deaths over the past seven days than any previous seven-day period.
The per-capita rate of deaths in the San Joaquin Valley was 63% higher than hard-hit Los Angeles County and nearly twice as high as LA’s neighboring counties. Each accounts for about a quarter of California’s population and about 30% of the state’s cases in the past week.
In the Bay Area, the death curve was already bending downward. There were fewer than 1 deaths per 100,000 Bay Area residents in the past week (0.83), about 25% lower than its peak last week and a per-capita rate almost six times lower than the San Joaquin Valley.
There were eight fatalities reported around the Bay Area on Thursday, led by four in Alameda County and two in Contra Costa, along with one each in Santa Clara and Marin counties.
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Despite accounting for about 20% of California’s population, the Bay Area is responsible for about 10% of the COVID-19 cases and deaths in California.
While the 600,000 cases in California top the list of states by cumulative count, it doesn’t crack the top-20 when accounting for population. Florida and Texas were closing in on California for the top spot, but California has begun to outpace its fellow sunbelt states again, adding about 25% more cases than either in the past week.
In total, there were at least 5.2 million cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. on Thursday, with new cases still coming at a rate of more than 50,000 per day. More than 167,000 Americans have died from the virus, the most of any country in the world.
