California’s COVID positivity rate is now just shy of record high from the past 12 months

Statewide, the COVID positivity rate continues to skyrocket, with Friday’s update showing the percent of all COVID tests that come back positive is just one tenth of a percent shy of the high from the last 12 months. There have been only a handful of weeks in the past three years that have had a positivity rate over 13%.

After reaching record lows in March, and growing slowly in May, the portion of COVID tests coming back positive started to shoot up sharply in June.

On June 1, the positivity rate was 4.1%, up from just under 2% in May. The rate has now tripled to 13.0% as of July 8, the most recent date for which data was available. The state now has a higher positivity rate than during this winter’s COVID spike, when it reached just over 11%, and is poised to surpass the recent high of 13.1% in September of 2023.

Since COVID tests became readily available, the highest the positivity rate has ever been was in December of 2021 and January 2022, when it reached over 20% for nearly three weeks.

Deaths have also increased slightly in the past several weeks. COVID is responsible for nearly 2% of deaths in California in the first days of July, the most recent available data. That is still lower than the 3.5% in January of this year during the winter surge, and way below January 2021, when 40% of all deaths in California were due to COVID.

But deaths tend to lag by several weeks, and the data can take weeks to catch up.

Before this summer surge, the percent of deaths due to COVID had reached new lows, staying well under 1% since March of this year, the lowest it has been consistently since the start of the pandemic.