Record-low Coronavirus Rates in California

California continues to make strides in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, with the state recording record-low positivity rates over the past week.

The Los Angeles Times reported Monday:

Over the last seven days, just 3.5% of COVID-19 tests in California came back positive, the lowest rate since the state began reporting the data in late March. A month ago, the positive test rate was nearly twice as high.

The number of new confirmed cases has fallen to the lowest level since mid-June, according to a Times analysis of state data. Hospitalizations for COVID-19 have fallen to the lowest levels since the start of April, with 2,869 patients in hospital beds Saturday.

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The data have left officials feeling cautiously optimistic about California’s progress against the pandemic as the state nears the end of the sixth month of stay-at-home orders. They urged residents to stay vigilant and to keep taking the precautions that are working: wearing face coverings in public, observing social distancing with anyone outside the immediate household and staying home whenever possible.

The San Francisco Chronicle added that the Bay Area has recovered from the summer’s surge in cases:

The spread of coronavirus has slowed significantly since the peak of the Bay Area’s summer surge, with new cases falling over 60% since the difficult days of mid-August.

Specifically, the region’s nine Bay Area counties reported an average of 513 new cases per day in the week ending Sunday, down 35% from an average of 788 per day in the week ending the previous Sunday. The last time the Bay Area reported fewer than 500 cases a day, on average, was in June, around the time the summer surge began to accelerate.

If you compare last week’s numbers to the mid-August peak of 1,409 cases per week, that’s a 64% decline, according to data collected by The Chronicle.

President Donald Trump told Fox & Friends on Tuesday morning that a vaccine was expected within weeks.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.