San Luis Obispo County reported 887 new COVID-19 cases over New Year’s weekend, according to a Jan. 4 San Luis Obispo County press release.
The nearly 900 newly reported cases include cases from this past weekend as well as the remainder of last week’s backlog in cases from the Christmas holiday.
However, it was announced in the press release that the state’s COVID-19 database, CalREDIE, is undergoing outages and it is unclear when the database will be running again. Due to this outage, the county’s numbers for Jan. 3 and Jan. 4 have not been reported.
The database outage will not dramatically affect the county’s actions to reduce the spread of COVID-19, County Public Health Officer Dr. Penny Borenstein said. Borenstein said that the county relies on weekly data instead of daily data to identify trends in cases and help combat surges of COVID-19.
With this delay in the state’s data, a surge of COVID-19 cases is likely to be reported in the next few days as data from this weekend and early this week are accounted for, according to the county press release.
This delay does not affect the county’s reporting of the number of hospitalizations, ICU cases, or deaths due to COVID-19 in the county, as that data is not accessed through CalREDIE, according to the press release.
The county reported record-high numbers of COVID-19 cases in December. The county’s 14-day case count averaged 185 cases per day, an all-time high. Forty-four COVID-19 deaths were reported in the month of December accounting for half of the total local deaths. There were also 4,086 recorded cases in the month of December, accounting for 40% of the total number of local cases, according to the county press release.