In California: ICU numbers trending positive, butterfly numbers trending negative

In California brings you top Golden State stories and commentary from across the USA TODAY Network and beyond. Get it free, straight to your inbox. I'm Julie Makinen, California editor for the USA Today Network, bringing you Tuesday's headlines.​​​

COVID-19: ICU capacity falls in NorCal, state fines Kaiser for safety violations

Northern California was the only one of the state's five regions in which ICU availability dropped over the past week. Tuesday afternoon, state public health officials announced the latest percentages of ICU beds available to new patients in each of California's five regions. They are:

• Northern California: 33.3% (down from 36% last week)
• Greater Sacramento: 22.4% (up from 19.5%)
• Bay Area: 24% (up from 21.6%)
• San Joaquin Valley: 13% (up from 10.5%)
• Southern California: 14.8% (up from 10.6%)

About 3.5% of people being tested for coronavirus are getting back positive results, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday, a rate that's dropped precipitously in recent weeks. The numbers of people in hospitals and intensive care units and case rates are declining — all factors in determining when counties can begin further reopening.

Bynext week, a “substantial" number of counties are likely to enter the “red" tier, which allows indoor dining at 25% capacity, and the opening of other indoor spaces such as movie theaters, museums and gyms with limits, Associated Press reported. 

Meanwhile, Kaiser Permanente has on multiple occasions failed to provide hospital employees the gear or training needed to protect them from COVID-19 in the early stages of the pandemic according to 12 citations issued by California’s enforcer of workplace safety laws, Cal/OSHA, CalMatters found.

The agency has issued more citations against Kaiser than any other health care employer in California, fining it almost $500,000. Santa Clara County separately penalized the hospital for not immediately reporting an outbreak in December. Kaiser is appealing all 12 of the state’s citations and Santa Clara's.    

Travel on your mind? Desert X, Yosemite Firefall and the Blythe Intaglios

Yosemite 'firefall' returns to the national park this week. Here's how to see the phenomenon

Desert X 2021 has announced its participating artists. These are the upcoming works

The Blythe Intaglios are not Italian ice cream. Check out these figures etched into the desert floor.  

Why the huge power outages in Texas are much worse than our summer blackouts

The San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting take on Texas’ energy grid failures this week amid a snowstorm, comparing them to our recent wildfire-induced shutoffs.

For one thing, Texas' blackouts are on a much vaster scale. As of Tuesday, more than 3.6 million customers were still without electricity.  The storm in Texas froze many gas wells. The weather has resulted in a 30-gigawatt energy shortage — equivalent to 30 big power plants going offline, according to Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy at UC Berkeley. Twenty-six of those lost gigawatts are from gas shortages, and four are from lost wind power due to frozen windmills.

“We have an incredible shortage of gas,” said Michael Webber, energy professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

California's biggest power shutoff last year — affecting up to 500,000 customers — wasn’t about supply, Webber noted. Rather, the threat of an electricity-sparked wildfire made it unsafe for PG&E to operate. “These were pre-emptive, intentional shortages where you created one problem — energy outage — to spare another, a wildfire,” he said.

California saw a demand-driven energy shortage in August when a heatwave drove up air-conditioner use and forced rolling blackouts. But that shortage affected fewer than 250,000 customers (or about 750,000 people), and didn’t affect California’s own supply of electricity. However, it did increase demand in other states, meaning California couldn’t borrow energy from its neighbors.

California relies on energy from the Western Interconnection, one of two main electrical grids (the Eastern Interconnection is the other) that serve the entire U.S. — with the exception of Texas. The Lone Star state relies almost entirely on its own energy grid, called ERCOT. Established at least partly to avoid the reach of federal regulators, ERCOT is a point of pride for many Texans. But unlike any other state, when Texas runs into supply issues,  it has no one to turn to — unlike the Golden State.

“If Texas has a problem, we cannot lean on our neighbors to bail us out,” Webber told the Chronicle. “If California is having a problem, they can lean on neighboring states. That’s an advantage that California has.” Unless, of course, those neighboring states are seeing increased demand, too, as was the case during California’s heatwave.

Butterfly Town, USA, misses its monarchs  

For years, people flocked to California's central coast from October to February to observe thousands of monarch butterflies.  Before last year, the Pismo State Beach butterfly grove was one of only five sites in California that saw over 10,000 butterflies yearly as they sought shelter from northern winters, according to the Conference & Visitors Bureau of Pismo Beach.

The Pismo Beach colony is one of the largest in the nation and is run by state parks. In 1990, there were more than 230,000 monarchs counted. However, the total number of monarchs reported has been on the decline since 2016.

The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation held its annual count across hundreds of sites from Nov. 14 to Dec. 6. Volunteers counted a total of 1,914 monarchs, a 99.9% decline since the 1980s.

“Iconic and beloved monarch overwintering sites like Pismo Beach and Natural Bridges reported only a few hundred monarchs during the count,” the Xerces Society said. “More startling, Pacific Grove, which goes by the name 'Butterfly Town, USA' because of its overwintering sites, had no monarchs at all.”

 In California is a roundup of news from across USA Today network newsrooms. Also contributing: San Francisco Chronicle, CalMatters, Associated Press.

Julie Makinen is California editor for the USA Today Network. Follow her on Twitter at @Julie_Makinen