The Fresno County Department of Public Health reported 13 additional cases of COVID-19 as of Wednesday, April 22, bringing the county’s total to 384.
The total amount of confirmed cases in Clovis remains at 34. The City of Fresno has the highest amount in the county, with 205 cases total. Sanger and Firebaugh also rose to 18 cases each.
Seven people have died from the disease.
Out of the total number of cases, 151 were community spread or originated from an unknown source, 43 were travel related, 138 were spread by close contact and 52 are still under investigation.
The FCDPH said 81 people have been hospitalized with COVID-19 and another 132 have recovered. There are 245 active cases. A total of 5,372 people have been tested for the disease.
At a media briefing Wednesday evening, county interim health Officer Rais Vohra said Fresno County was selected by the state for a new testing site that would conduct more than 100 tests per day.
Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the same day that the state would open 86 testing sites in rural, African American and Latino communities. Fresno’s new testing site is one of those sites. Newsom said the testing sites will help California reach its goal of testing 25,000 people per day statewide.
Vohra said he was “very optimistic” that the county would reach its goal of testing 1,500 people for COVID-19 per day. Last week, Vohra shared a recommendation from health experts that suggested 152 people should be tested per 100,000 residents. Fresno county currently tests about 150 to 250 per day.
“I’m very optimistic that we will be able to get to our goal of testing about 1,500 people every day to make sure that we’re identifying every single cluster and infection of COVID across the county,” Vohra said.
Vohra said Fresno County is coordinating with the state to determine the best approach to reopen businesses, but said it was still premature to set a specific date for when the economy will completely reopen.
“I think this is the time to be thinking about how we can go ahead and look at how we are doing locally and think about what processes need to be in place to safely reopen some of the businesses,” he said.
“I think that it is still premature to assign a specific date to know exactly when we can go ahead and reopen everything. I think it’s going to happen in phases and I think we are going to carefully see just how our case counts are doing in every phase.”
Fresno’s shelter-in-place order is set to expire May 6.
Vohra also announced that the FCDPH is partnering with UC San Francisco to hold a virtual town hall meeting on Facebook live at 4 p.m. on Friday. More information will be released today and tomorrow.