The Numbers Behind the Public Health Orders

The county has been putting out the numbers every day now for nine months. The number of new cases of the coronavirus.

The numbers have grown from a handful in early March to now more than 111-thousand here in the middle of December.

For public health officials the numbers are important because they indicate the spread of the virus. But the number of cases is not as important as some of the other numbers...the numbers that tell the story of what this pandemic and all the public health orders are all about. The number of hospitalizations and the number of deaths, and those numbers keep going up as this holiday surge keeps surging to new highs.

32 deaths reported in one day and the number of hospitalizations getting so high this week that the medical director of the county’s Emergency Medical Services had to divert ambulances away from at least one hospital.

There have now been almost 12-hundred COVID-related deaths in the county.

And the grim news from California’s governor Tuesday about sending 5,000 body bags to certain counties including San Diego should be a wake-up call for anyone who does not take the pandemic seriously and does not follow the safety guidelines.

The public health orders have always been and still are…all about the number of hospitalizations….and the number of deaths.

And all of us need to do all we can, along with the help of vaccines, to help those numbers come down and eventually come to an end.

SEE LATEST NUMBERS IN SAN DIEGO COUNTY.

(Photo Getty Images)