Santa Barbara County reported eight new COVID-19 cases and no additional deaths on Saturday, according to the Public Health Department.
The county has confirmed 34,439 COVID-19 cases since the first positive case was reported in March 2020.
There were no new COVID-19-related fatalities on Saturday, so the county’s death toll remained at 450 since the public health crisis started more than a year ago.
More than 33,900 people have recovered in the county, which is about 98% of the overall cases, according to the Public Health Department.
Local hospitals were treating 12 confirmed COVID-19 patients on Saturday, including three in intensive-care units, according to the Public Health Department.
The county on Saturday reported its lowest daily number of people hospitalized with a confirmed COVID-19 case since early May, according to Noozhawk‘s data tracking. The last time the county reported fewer than 12 hospitalized COVID-19 patients was nine patients on May 9.
There were more than 60 new positive COVID-19 cases reported in the past seven days in the county, for an average of nearly nine cases per day. In the previous seven days, the county logged about 80 new cases, an average of about 11 cases per day.
Of Saturday’s new cases, two each were from Goleta, the Lompoc Valley and Orcutt. Santa Barbara and the Montecito-Summerland-Carpinteria area each reported one new positive case.
As of Saturday, more than 50 residents countywide were considered still infectious with COVID-19, according to the Public Health Department’s COVID-19 status report released Saturday.
The county’s test positivity rate was 1% and its health equity testing positivity rate was 1.3% on Saturday, which both put the region in the minimal yellow tier under California’s Blueprint for a Safer Economy restriction levels.
The county reported an adjusted case rate of 2.1 daily new cases per 100,000 people, a number that meets the moderate orange tier criteria.
Santa Barbara County is in the orange tier of the state’s color-coded reopening system.
California is slated to exit the color-coded tier system on June 15, according to state officials.
Click here for vaccine-related information from the Public Health Department.
Click here to read stories in Noozhawk’s Coronavirus Crisis section.
— Noozhawk staff writer Brooke Holland can be reached at bholland@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
