If residents continue to stay at home, Humboldt County would reach a peak in cases of hospitalized coronavirus patients sometime in December, a model developed by the county indicates.
County officials said Thursday businesses will be allowed to open back up in gradual steps. In a scenario where everything opened back up at the start of May, five-to-six times more people would die from the virus, according to the county’s models.
The projections — first shown publicly at an official town hall Thursday evening — display the difference between two extreme scenarios: Unilaterally lifting stay-at-home restrictions in May versus keeping the current order in place through September.
In reality, the county will look to “thread the needle” and navigate an uncertain middle ground, said health officer Dr. Teresa Frankovich, adding that the key will be to proceed slowly.
“An incubation period is two weeks,” Frankovich said. “Maybe we wait a couple of these incubation periods and then we open up the faucet a little bit more… There may be times when you’ve opened things up too much and you need to pull back.”
There are a number of factors that determine when a county can start to phase out the stay-at-home order. Deputy health officer Josh Ennis said at Thursday’s town hall that testing capabilities need to improve in order to confirm cases quickly — hospitalization rates are a “much-too-late indicator” of how widely the virus has spread, he said.
As of now, the county projects a maximum number of 275 beds that could be occupied by coroanvirus patients. According to the county’s models, a stay-at-home order through September would mean a peak of around 145 patients occupying hospital beds at one time — well within local capacity.
But it’s unlikely the order will remain absolutely in place for that long, especially given its recent success in slowing the increase of confirmed COVID-19 cases. Sheriff William Honsal said that given the county’s natural wide spaces and lower population, it could very well flatten the curve faster than the rest of the state.
“We should not be treated the same as Los Angeles County,” Honsal said. “If we rely on (Gov. Gavin Newsom’s) roadmap and we are meeting those requirements, we shouldn’t have to wait for other countries to catch up.”
Hypothetically, if the county were to open up right away at the beginning of May, the number of coronavirus hospitalizations, intensive-care treatments and needed ventilators would sharply rise, far above the county’s capacity.
There would be around 188 deaths, between five and six times more than the 26 deaths projected by the “stay at home through September” model.
Ennis warned that the main takeaway from the global pandemic so far is that the number of cases can “quickly spiral out of control.”
“Think of it as a hundred-car freight train and it’s speeding along down the railway,” Ennis said. “You have to pull the brake and it takes a long time for it to slow down.”
Ennis presented another chart, which displays the difference between the two curves. In between is where the county will try to proceed.
Opening up businesses will mean that people get sick, but in the long run the county will attempt to strike a balance, Frankovich said.
Gov. Newsom hasn’t yet provided an end date to the statewide shelter-in-place order. But Honsal cryptically alluded to news that may emerge in a couple weeks’ time.
“A lot of things are happening behind the scenes that we can’t be really talking about,” Honsal said. “But there’s a lot of things that are coming.”
Shomik Mukherjee can be reached at 707-441-0504.
