Number of COVID-19 cases rising in California's Orange County, but health official says no apparent link to beach crowds

Orange County, California, is seeing its weekly coronavirus case count rise, but health officials say this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with crowds of people who gathered at the county's beaches on April 25 and 26.

"As of now, that is not something we are pointing to as a cause of cases," Orange County Health Officer Dr. Nichole Quick told the Los Angeles Times. After seeing images and video showing throngs of people at Huntington Beach not social distancing, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) moved to temporarily close Orange County's beaches. There have also been two protests in Huntington Beach against the state's stay-at-home measures, with most participants standing next to each other without masks.

Orange County confirmed 441 new COVID-19 cases between April 20 and 26, with the number jumping to 664 the next week and 787 the week after that. Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at UC San Francisco, told the Times further study is needed to determine whether the beaches contributed to the increase in cases, but "just us looking at it, there was a big jump in Orange County that was temporally consistent with possible transmission from that crowd event."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Quick said more tests have been conducted daily since April 28, and "as we loosen up any amount of the stay-at-home order or put more people to work, we do expect to see an increase in cases. So that would be something that would be expected." The Orange County Health Care Agency reported that as of Monday, there are 3,557 coronavirus cases in the county, with the death toll at 76.