In the spring, while New York suffered untold devastation from the COVID-19 pandemic, California was so successful in keeping the virus at bay that at least one expert called it the “California miracle.”.

So when the coronavirus began to proliferate with unprecedented fury in November, transforming California into the epicenter of the pandemic, health experts and residents struggled to understand what had gone wrong.

Now, with the crisis showing signs of easing, the main reason for the catastrophic surge is coming into focus: a false confidence that the pandemic could be kept in check.

Officials, for their part, were caught off-guard by how rapidly, and how broadly, the virus spread once the numbers began to climb.

By Christmas, so many patients struggling to breathe needed to be hospitalized in California that emergency rooms in large swaths of the state closed to ambulances as doctors stuffed patients in hospital corridors.

The holiday surge has so far killed more than 18,100 Californians, more than doubling the state’s total death toll from the pandemic in less than three months.

“We never, never planned for something like this to happen,” California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr.

The state’s mask mandates, business closures and stay-at-home orders, he said, “were all designed to try to avoid this.”.

California sees record-breaking COVID-19 deaths, a lagging indicator of winter surge.

California sees record-breaking COVID-19 deaths, a lagging indicator of winter surge.

In the fall, masking dipped in California while social distancing fell to the lowest levels since the pandemic began, according to one analysis.

And when a coronavirus wave started building in late October, Californians didn’t cut down on their risky activities as quickly as they had earlier in the pandemic.

Instead, the state faced the alarming prospect of a series of amplifying events with Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah and Christmas, followed by New Year’s.

Though people let their guard down across the nation as the pandemic wore on, California requires a higher degree of compliance to stave off a New York-style disaster, given the state’s high rates of poverty and its relatively low number of hospital beds, experts say.

Others argue that a dizzying array of health orders exhausted and confused Californians and sparked backlash.

For the six-day period that ended on New Year’s Day, California had the highest per capita COVID-19 death rate in the nation.

But I expected to see it throughout the United States,” said UC Berkeley public health professor Dr.

To be clear, even after the awful surge, California maintains a comparatively low per-capita COVID-19 death rate overall, ranking 37th out of the 50 states.

And, following several weeks of horror, the state appears to have finally turned the corner as coronavirus cases and hospitalizations begin to drop, though new variants of the virus have raised fresh concerns.

In the eyes of Ghaly, who leads the state’s response to the pandemic, what went wrong in California comes down to COVID fatigue, or what he sometimes calls “COVID resentment.”.

When can I come visit?’” Ghaly said.

Nail salons, tattoo shops and massage parlors in California will be permitted to start to reopen in a week as the state continues to ease stay-at-home restrictions put in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus, state officials announced Friday.

Californians’ perceived risk of catching the coronavirus fell to the lowest level since the pandemic began, while the percentage of Californians who had close contact with people they didn’t live with peaked, according to the USC survey.

The spread of the coronavirus began to quicken in the state, due to a false sense of security aided by low case numbers, said IHME epidemiologist Ali Mokdad.

“You pay a price for your success,” he said.

When officials began warning in late October for people to limit their activities as coronavirus cases began to surge, the pleas increasingly fell on deaf ears.

Gavin Newsom ate at the French Laundry restaurant in defiance of his own health orders.

Wilma Wooten, the San Diego County health officer, said she had hoped a warning issued a month earlier about the resurgence of the pandemic “would mark a change in the public’s personal and collective behavior

Whereas other states reopened schools and many outdoor, low-risk activities when case numbers were low, California’s more restrictive orders created a feeling of being in lockdown for 10 months, she said

“We don’t experience the fruits of all of the good work that we’ve done because we’re never quite open and so it feels hard to close down, even [when we’re] hearing what is a real message from our public health officials: that we’re in a crisis right now.”

There is a relatively small window in which for officials to act to stop a devastating surge of the coronavirus, since each new infection makes it more likely that more people will become infected

California officials, seeing the writing on the wall, rushed to put in place policies in November and December to try to slow the spread

Malls have continued to welcome holiday shoppers, even as officials have banned other forms of gathering amid a massive surge in coronavirus cases

University of Florida epidemiologist Cindy Prins said she thinks California may have benefited from being more liberal with its rules for outdoor spaces

Some law enforcement officials in Sacramento, Orange, Fresno, Riverside and San Bernardino counties said they would not enforce Newsom’s stay-at-home orders

The loud debate around these orders dissolved the united front needed to gain adherence to public health measures, experts say

While the pushback to the regulations had been much more severe in the southern part of the state, the surge was too — a sign of how important widespread cooperation with the rules can be, experts say

Ron DeSantis, have said that the disaster in California is proof that mask mandates and stay-at-home orders don’t work

Experts say they can be effective, but California simply requires a much higher rate of compliance with these measures than a state such as Florida due to its innate vulnerabilities

That California could somehow avoid a large COVID-19 surge without a China-style lockdown was naive, said UC Irvine public health professor Andrew Noymer

There is some randomness in when outbreaks hit — Illinois’ worst surge came in November while California’s hit in December — but there won’t be safety from the pandemic until herd immunity via a vaccine is achieved, he said

The number of people in the hospital with COVID-19 in California has begun to decline, as have new case numbers

The shifts are probably due to Californians’ decline in activity, which began to gradually decrease in November and hit a low — the lowest since May — in December, due to a combination of local and state rules, increased warnings and the public’s natural tendency to become more cautious after witnessing the devastation around them, experts say

‘The end is not yet in sight’: Coronavirus danger remains even as some metrics improve, L.A

‘The end is not yet in sight’: Coronavirus danger remains even as some metrics improve, L.A

Ghaly said he thinks this progress shows that the state can control the pandemic, a spot of good news in a surge where the story has often been “that things have only gone wrong.”

Overall too, California has tallied 90 deaths for every 100,000 Californians since the pandemic began, compared with 212 per 100,000 people in New York, 158 out of 100,000 in Illinois and 119 out of 100,000 in Florida

In other words, if California had the same death rate as Florida, California would have a cumulative death toll of more than 47,000, instead of the 35,000 it does today

Rong-Gong Lin II is a metro reporter based in San Francisco who specializes in covering statewide earthquake safety issues and the COVID-19 pandemic