Some regional stay-at-home orders in California indefinite, officials say

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (KRON/AP) – Top California health official Dr. Mark Ghaly confirmed the four California regions under a stay-at-home order will still have it in place indefinitely.

He says state leaders are actively calculating the newest data into ICU projections and will update us by tomorrow if anything changes.

However, the state’s rate of hospitalizations is beginning to decline and the state’s stay-at-home order and plan for hospital surge have been helping.

Gov. Newsom on Tuesday announced the Greater Sacramento region’s stay-at-home order was lifted and it could now move into the purple tier.

NEW: We’re seeing stabilization in ICUs & positivity rates. Greater Sacramento is coming out of the Regional Stay-at-Home & going back to purple tier effective today.

We must continue to wear a mask & stay home as much as possible.

There is a light at the end of this tunnel. pic.twitter.com/zHFxiZQqqW
— Office of the Governor of California (@CAgovernor) January 13, 2021

California coronavirus deaths topped 30,000 after state officials report 1,163 fatalities over the weekend.

Mass vaccinations for thousands of medical workers will be conducted at baseball stadiums in Los Angeles and San Diego and at fairgrounds in Fresno and Sacramento. They are among cities nationwide converting huge parking lots into massive vaccination stations to ramp up inoculations after the initial rollout fell below expectations.

Orange County and Disneyland Resort announced that a guest parking lot near the Anaheim theme park will be a vaccination site.

Meanwhile, new hospital admissions dropped from about 3,500 each day earlier this month to about 2,500, “a significant difference” that shows the earlier holiday surge from Christmas and Hanukkah “isn’t as significant as we had anticipated,” said Dr. Mark Ghaly, secretary of the California Health and Human Services Agency.

Yet recent frightening jumps in new positive cases show the state may simply have brought itself time to prepare for what officials still expect to be an end-of-month peak in part driven by New Year’s celebrations, Ghaly and Newsom said.

The state may have “a little breathing room,” Ghaly said, enough for hospitals to prepare, to ensure they can provide enough oxygen both in medical facilities and when sending patients home, and for 1,000 newly arriving contract medical workers to be augmented by another 1,000 or so before the surge peaks.