California hit daily high of new coronavirus cases. It may not be as bad as it sounds

California hit another grim milestone in the coronavirus outbreak this week, with its largest single-day number of new cases Tuesday — a statewide total of 2,546 COVID-19 infections coming amid torrid debate over whether it’s safe to start lifting economically crippling lock-downs.

But although the Golden State now has surpassed 60,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, Tuesday’s new high number of daily cases doesn’t necessarily reflect a rapidly expanding contagion. It may simply be the result of the state’s push to expand testing.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration Wednesday would not comment on the figure, indicating a need to see more days worth of data before drawing conclusions.

Still, in regard to the number of positive cases in his daily news briefing, Newsom acknowledged that people were likely “going to hear a lot about case rates — the percentage of people testing positive versus the number of people testing positive” as testing for the novel coronavirus increases.

Newsom noted that other numbers are more encouraging. Hospitalizations of both confirmed and suspected COVID-19 patients — a key metric health officials are using to assess the timing of reopenings — have leveled off statewide, totaling 4,681 Wednesday. Intensive-care cases also have plateaued.

Meanwhile, the daily number of COVID-19 fatalities has been trending downward, from a high of 118 on April 22. After a spike of 94 deaths Tuesday, the number of people who succumbed to COVID-19 on Wednesday dropped to 83.

According to data compiled by this news organization, California reported just over 1,900 newly confirmed cases Wednesday, bringing its total cases to 60,500. In all, 2,459 people have died from coronavirus in the state.

Dr. Robert Siegel, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University, said increased testing and other factors could have played a role in the spike in new cases earlier this week. After a slow start, total statewide tests for COVID-19 have gradually risen, reaching more than 809,000 Wednesday.

“The amount of testing continues to go up, and that reveals more infected individuals,” Siegel said.

The state now is conducting more than 30,000 tests each day, Newsom said. On Wednesday, his administration unveiled a new website that helps Californians find and schedule appointments at nearby COVID-19 community testing sites.

There are likely to be more positive results, Siegel said, because testing has increased for groups that are at higher risk of exposure to the virus, including hospital workers and residents of long-term care facilities.

“Those are going to produce an arbitrarily high rate of positivity because there are more infections there,” Siegel said.

Moreover, he noted, positive test results are lagging indicators of new infections. It takes an average five days after infection for a person to become symptomatic, he said, and patients typically don’t get tested until symptoms become severe.

“I don’t think everybody who first starts feeling funny is going to go out to get tested that day,” Siegel said. “It might be days after they first got sick.”

All of that means reopening will have to be carefully thought through, Siegel said.

Several California counties have continued moving in that direction. Yuba and Sutter counties earlier this week reopened restaurant dining rooms, gyms, hair salons and shopping malls, joining remote Modoc County in going far beyond what the state’s shelter-in-place mandate allows — moves that have drawn condemnation from Newsom.

The governor has said he plans to modify statewide orders on Friday to start allowing certain businesses such as bookstores, florists, clothing stores and sporting goods stores to open for curbside transactions. Under the Bay Area’s more restrictive shelter-in-place order — which remains in effect through the end of May — only “essential” retailers will be allowed stay open.

“You can open up a lot of stuff if you do it very carefully,” Siegel said. “If we do it the wrong way, we’ll be right back where we started from.”

While reiterating that securing adequate supplies of personal protective equipment will be key to the reopening process, Newsom on Wednesday defended his handling of state contracts for those products, including a deal totaling nearly $1 billion that his administration made with the Chinese company BYD.

“We just want to make sure we deliver ultimately on the needs of so many, whose lives literally are at risk if we don’t,” Newsom said.

Legislators and the press have pushed for more transparency about that and other contracts for protective equipment. Those calls ratcheted up this week with the news that the U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation into a newly formed medical supply company that received  nearly half a billion dollars for protective equipment from California before the state changed its mind, clawing that money back when the deal fell through.

Newsom also announced an executive order extending worker’s compensation benefits to employees in essential jobs such as grocery stores and transit that have stayed open amid the lockdown if they fall ill with COVID-19.

Under the order, the state will provide benefits to health care, public safety and other front-line workers with the assumption that their infection happened while they were on the job. Those benefits will apply for workers infected since March 19 and will extend for 60 days after other state and federal benefits run out.

More broadly, though, the governor warned that it would take years for California to recover from the economic toll of a virus that upended the state’s outlook in a matter of weeks, sending it from record employment levels and a multi-billion-dollar projected budget surplus in January to dire unemployment and deficit numbers today.

“We’ve never experienced anything like this in our lifetime — (these are) Depression-era numbers in terms of the unemployment you’ll see across this country, not just in the state of California,” Newsom said. “The next few years we are going to have to work through these challenges. But we will work through them, and we will get out the other side.”