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In some parts of Mountain View, one in 50 people have now contracted COVID-19, hitting a high mark of cases as the coronavirus pandemic spreads throughout the country.
Health officials reported Monday that 1,479 residents in Mountain View have tested positive for the virus since the pandemic began, reflecting a local surge in cases that began in November. Daily case counts dwarf what took place in the spring and summer — reaching as high as 44 new cases in a single day — leading to nearly a twofold increase in cases since Nov. 21.
The city’s case count far exceeds Palo Alto and Los Altos and, when adjusted for population, now surpasses Sunnyvale.
For most of the pandemic, Mountain View’s hot spot was in the 94041 zip code — a small strip of the city composed of the Sylvan Park, Old Mountain View and Shoreline West neighborhoods. But the crush of new cases since November have disproportionately hammered residents south of El Camino Real, including the mostly single-family suburbs that make up much of the 94040 zip code, as well as the Castro City and San Antonio neighborhoods.
The total number of cases in the area is now 744, the equivalent of 2,076 cases per 100,000 residents.
City officials say they are redoubling efforts to contain the virus, including a push for larger testing sites in 2021 and a robust education campaign encouraging residents to follow public health orders — particularly the mask mandate. Ongoing financial support, funded by the city but run through Community Services Agency (CSA), is available to those struggling to pay rent while out of work during the pandemic.
“The city has dedicated resources for educating and informing the community about COVID-19 throughout this pandemic, which is especially crucial now as local case numbers jump and regional ICU capacity diminishes,” City Manager Kimbra McCarthy said in a statement. “While we understand COVID-19 fatigue, the virus isn’t done with us yet. Only with all of us remaining vigilant and following public health protocols can we minimize COVID-19’s toll on our city this winter.”
With daily case rates at an all-time high, Santa Clara County officials responded this month with stay-at-home orders that shut down most non-essential services. Some, including hair salons and outdoor dining, had only been open for a few months before being shut down again on Dec. 6.
The basis for the orders, and a symptom of the high case counts, is the local crunch in hospital capacity. As of Sunday, 94% of the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds had been occupied — 38% of them with COVID-19 patients — leaving only 18 beds remaining to serve a county with a population of close to 1.9 million.
So-called “staffed” surge capacity across county hospitals can handle an additional 19 ICU patients, but represent only a sliver of extra space.
Meanwhile, hospitals have become ground zero in a countywide effort to vaccinate residents and health care workers starting last week. On Saturday, El Camino Hospital and Stanford both began administering the vaccine, developed by Pfizer, to frontline health care workers.
In your article, you say: “The number of cases in the area is now 744, the equivalent of 2,076 cases per 100,000 residents.”
Are you saying that current active cases (not cumulative) in Mountain View are 2,076/100,000 people? That’s a very big number.
The best way to share this info with us is “average new cases/day/100,000” as that’s the data that’s consistent and shared throughout the U.S. That would really help us evaluate what’s happening best.
Just 3 days ago, the county posted this data, and it shows that Mountain View had 11 or fewer new cases/day/100,000. Our numbers have been 3-7 cases prior to this, so this is an increase. But nothing like the scary numbers your article is sharing.
I’d welcome having the numbers in this consistent framework. It would also be a great help to the reader not to share cumulative case numbers, as they have nothing to do with current reality.
Thank you for your efforts to report on this. I appreciate it’s not easy to separate wheat from chaff on this issue.
All the best!
Karen
The numbers Karen cites are not completely inconsistent with the article. The county reports average new cases per day over a 7 day or 14 day period. The article is talking about a month of cases, and only for about 40% of the city in 94040. You’d really need to know the number of cases in 94040 30 days ago, and 14 days ago, and 7 days ago, and realize that this is only 40% of the
city, in order to compare. Based on what the article implies, this is 740 total cases, and one can guess it’s saying 600 or so have happened over the most recent 30 days. That’s a rate of 20 cases a day for 35,000 people, or 57 per 100K in 94040. Average in the rest of the city and the rate for the city as a whole could be much lower, but still over 20 new cases per day per 100K people.
There have been 100 or so cases for nursing home residents and staff recently, quite a large part of the potential 600 in 94040.
Ah, 94040 is not just south of El Camino. It includes the area around San Antonio Center clear past Rengstorff all the way to Escuela north of El Camino Real as well. I believe nearly half the population of 94040 lives north of ECR and only the remainder live to the south. It’s not all single family neighborhoods by a long shot when you factor in these areas. The Crossings and Castro City have single family housing but there are a large number of apartments in there too.
I checked the county and 94040 is up to 751 total cases, or 7 cases in just one day. That rate would be about 20 new cases adjusted for 100K people, in just one day.
455 total cases for 94043 and 269 for 94041, about the same size 94043 as 94040 and 94041 is less than half either.
I bristled at this article’s characterization of 94040. Sure, lots of single family homes can be found in the zip code, but there’s also loads of high density housing of all income levels— take a look at what’s on Latham and San Antonio for good examples. Generally, I really like the perspective of MVV but this left me feeling like the story angle was decided before the facts.
@LongResident
There are a whole lot of ways to interpret the data and the city’s roughly 1,500 cumulative cases, but I’ll take a crack at clarifying the recent surge.
Let’s look specifically at the 94040 zip code again, since that’s getting a lot of attention. It had a total of 100 positive cases of COVID-19 as of early August, and typically wobbled between 0-5 daily new cases. Between Aug. 10 and Sept. 20, the average daily new cases was 3.25 — a pretty modest and stable rate.
Now let’s look at post-Thanksgiving. From Nov. 26 to Dec. 21, the average daily case rate shot up four-fold to 14.19 (whipsawing between 5 and 35 new cases a day) and represented a disproportionate share of the city’s new cases even when adjusting for population. Deducting the nursing home cases would bring the cumulative number down, but it would still be the city’s hotspot.
Because 94040 covers a vast area (from MV high school all the way to the farthest tip at Alma) and disparate communities of Mountain View, it would seem more accurate and helpful to know which sections/neighborhoods are creating these numbers, also keeping in mind the senior/convalescent care facilities that are located in this zip code. I imagine those more specific identifiers are not made public, but in this case it would be useful for residents to know. Your article, as I read it, seems to infer that the rising cases are located within the single-family residences south of El Camino – so maybe those numbers are available?
Thx Karen and all for the calm objective ‘attempt’ at parsing thru this data. I say attempt, not to denigrate the effort, but to underscore just how difficult it seems to be to get an overview of what’s going on. In that regard, IMO current cases are of interest. Total cases to date, not so much.
If I’m not mistaken, this
https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard-cases-by-zip-code-and-city.aspx
is the county’s page with the data by zip code. If there is another page that y’all are referring to pls LMK as I find this page quite hard to use or understand.
Agree that a zip code like 94040 is not granular enough to draw conclusions. One thing to keep in mind also, is that the county reports where people live not where they caught the virus.
The granularity of the size of 94040 is pretty good, 35,000 in a county of 1.9M. What is misleading is the shape of the zip code or the geography. It’s too many cases and it is seeing a dangerous change over recent period of time.
Numbers are in for another day of new cases. 94040 is now up to 763 cases, or 12 new cases in 35,000 people, a rate of about 35 per 100K–very very concerning, evenif the county average as a whole is more than twice that.
94043 is up to 461 and 94040 at 270. 6 new cases in 94043 at 31K people and 1 in 94041 at 14K people. Behaviors that were slightly risky in the past are now much more so with regard to propagating this within the residential areas and these are DIFFERENT areas than previously as the article explains.
An average daily rate of 14.2 in 94040 is a rate of about 2.8 times that per 100K people, or 40. The county-wide rate is reported for different points in time, but it’s about 60, and it has been rising. A rate of 40 per 100K is very worrying..
These numbers are terrible. It’s especially tragic to have our health system near collapse just as the first vaccines are arriving.
For me, not getting together with anyone for Christmas feels awful. But that’s what we all need to do for this one year. The vaccines are coming to the general population in the coming months. This will not be forever.
A global pandemic is kind of like a world war. Many lives are tragically lost, and many people’s lives are disrupted. Holidays too. Think of the soldiers in World War 2 listening to Irving Berlin’s “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” and pining for home and peacetime.
We’ve already had to sacrifice a year of our lives, and it really sucks. The next few months are the most important of all. Let’s continue to hunker down and we’ll get through this.
Is this the source of part of the increase in positive cases
https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2020/12/21/covid-19-outbreaks-reported-in-local-nursing-homes-as-cases-surge-in-santa-clara-county
Victor, does it really matter where or who is getting sick, we have t prevent more and talk less.
Lets give the readers the actual dashboard it is here regarding the ICU capacity, which is only 11% (https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard-hospitals.aspx#capacity). 42% are COVID patients.
Also the Blueprint dashboard is found here (https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/blueprint-dashboard.aspx) and it reports a 7.6% positivity rate and adjusted 25 per 100,000 people currently infected and the adjusted test rate of 362 per 100,000.
Finally when it comes to the capacity of the hospitals there are only 1754 non ICU beds in the county, and we have NO BEDS LEFT if you look at this dashboard (https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard-hospitals.aspx#capacity)
You really need to look more carefully. We are actually at maximum capacity at this time and some people are going to die because of that alone, not COVID.
No more of your misleading information on this discussion, I hope.
GoldyCISSP- why are you copying and pasting the same comment from one thread to another. I posted a legitimate story from the MV Voice and asked if that would account for the increase in local cases. This story does not discuss ICU capacity or positivity rate. And yes, it is important to know the source of the positive cases. everyone understands that. Try to stay on point and stop bullying people that disagree with you
In response to Victor Bishop you wrote:
What explains it is that people like yourself promoted things like participating in activities with higher risk than the safe actions. Doing so made you more likely to get infected. The TESTS only DETECT when you are infected and nothing more. You wrote:
“People are tested, who may be positive, results are not returned for a week.”
If people were acting safely, the testing would not even be necessary. Because these people would not have been at risk. But instead, you and your friends encouraged more risky behaviors, right? You wrote:
“Meanwhil these infected people are spreading the virus to others. If that was the case, it is a monumental failure of our county health officials.”
The OFFICIALS cannot prevent poor judgement from the people from getting them sick. You and your kind lobbied and forced the health officials to only have guidelines and rarely enforced them. The solution is that if ANYONE is caught doing anything unsafe regarding COVID should be taken into custody and quarantined, right? Then you can hold them responsible. You wrote:
“And once again you are trying to bully people that disagree with you.”
Not bullying anyone, just pointing out that you were a contributor to the current crisis all along.
GoldiCISSP says: “If people were acting safely, the testing would not even be necessary.”
LOL. what can you say to someone with that kind of logic!!!!!!
Victor,
What you can say is this.
Me and my friends always took the safest course of action, so far NONE of us have been made sick.
PREVENTION is the responsibility of EVERYONE.
It is like being a virgin makes it impossible to get pregnant, as long as you are STILL a virgin. As long as you don’t smoke, you will not have any tar in your lungs if you didn’t breath second hand smoke or are near a fire, or nicotine in any elevated levels in your body. As long as you don’t drink, you can’t be accused of a DUI. If your car is in park, it can’t be caught speeding unless it is being towed by a speeding tow truck. You get it?
All you have to do is look at the history of COVID, when strict social controls are in place, the infections eventually taper off. But EVERY time we opened up, we got another wave of uncontrolled infection.
You KNOW this.
GoldiCSSip says: “ Me and my friends always took the safest course of action, so far NONE of us have been made sick.”
Neither have I nor the friends I have met for socially distanced events.
You couldn’t get pregnant even if you were not a virgin
The infection rate in 94040 is increasing faster than the increase in the county at large, which is already terribly bad.
The state “Blueprint” website uses data starting back 14 days ago rather than current data. With rapid increases like this the county situation is under reported on the state web site. A better up to date set of data is visible at the Harvard Global Health Institute map here: https://globalepidemics.org/key-metrics-for-covid-suppression/
Right now HGHI reports the state at a rate of 111 per day per 100K people. The state blueprint site still says 80.7 updated Tuesday 22 December. The state data is average ending a week prior to the update.
So HGHI has Santa Clara County at a rate of 54.7 and the State Blueprint site is back at 49 (per 100K per day). The adjusted rate is not reliably relevant to the
affect on infection. One thing that can be said is our county is doing better than the state as a whole, but it’s so bad in the state that this is cold comfort.
Sure, posting here isn’t affecting anything, as the problem is caused by people who are unlikely to read these comments, or even the article. It is meaningful though that the rate of infection growth in 94040 is 5-8 times in 30 days what it was back in November. Maybe someone should drive a loudspeaker truck around the crowded areas of 94040 and urge people to increase their concern.
Victor Bishop,
You may have as well as your friends but some have argued:
“In a Darwinian world those who elect to use their personal “freedom” to ignore essential virus protection precautions would simply bear the consequences of their actions.”
Thank you for showing the danger of the situation.
Also:
“Wrong. Many even more democratic nations than the US have accomplished this and without resorting to heavy handed legislation but rather by raising the bar of social responsibility led by superb elected officials.”
When Gavin Newsom took the bull by the horns and Dr. Cody tried to educate the masses they were met with claims of “totalitarianism” and threats. Isn’t it bad to see that many here are simply too irresponsible or worse? Also:
“Travel restrictions, like lockdowns, are only useful if they are a part of an integrated national plan that also includes masks, social distancing, widespread testing, contact tracing and isolation of infected individuals.”
You are right about it except for the fact we are going to always be behind the virus. We need to continually test EVERY person daily to achieve this right?
What we need to do proactively to actually get our hospitals in good shape is to take action to proactively prohibit the spread.
Now I here that Pfizer can get 100,000,000 doses of their vaccine done by July, that will only cover 50,000,000 of the 330,000,000 people in the country.
It will take at least 1.5 to 2 years to get EVERY person vaccinated, right?
So, lets start talking like adults and understand we still have at least about 2 years of patience we need to have. And to deal with the immediate control of the virus the only successful method is unfortunately a lockdown, because as you said, there are too many people out there that are irresponsible.