Orange County reports 4,406 COVID-19 cases, drop in hospitalizations

UC Irvine Medical Center activated its mobile field hospital with 40 additional beds on Wednesday. Andrew Noymer, a UC Irvine associate professor of population health and disease prevention, said it’s hard to say if the county has reached its peak from Thanksgiving, but even so it’s likely a Christmas surge is coming. “We saw with Thanksgiving it took awhile to build,” Noymer said. “I’m expecting January to be severe. We haven’t seen the worst yet. But nobody can predict the future of this.” Noymer noted that the county’s positivity rate has been “highly volatile.”