The number of COVID-19 patients in Bay Area intensive care units declined for the fourth day in a row Saturday, adding to a sense of “cautious optimism” that the region’s shelter-in-place orders were paying dividends.

The news came even as some local governments are adjusting those orders to avoid Easter weekend crowds, especially in parks and at beaches.

The total of 179 patients in ICU in the five-county Bay Area was down from a peak of 199 on Wednesday, and represented the lowest total since Monday, when comprehensive ICU and hospitalization data from the state first became available. The number of COVID-19 hospitalizations ticked up slightly from Friday, but, at 427, the figure is still down about 4 percent from a peak of 445 on Wednesday. The number of total cases still increased by 215 from the previous day to a total of 4,411, and four new deaths brought the total to 117.

Dr. Arthur Reingold, division head of epidemiology and biostatistics at UC Berkeley, said he hadn’t seen the latest data on COVID-19 patient data but the decline lines up with his expectations.

“That’s certainly what we hope and believe may be happening, that at least in the Bay Area, some counties in the Bay Area are beginning to see the results of shelter in place and social distancing,” Reingold said.

On Saturday some Bay Area cities and counties tightened certain shelter in place orders with hopes of preventing crowds at popular parks and beaches, especially with forecasts calling for pleasant weather over the Easter weekend. Meanwhile, Oakland rolled out a new program banishing all but local automobile traffic from 74 miles of residential streets to give pedestrians and bicyclists more space to safely stretch their legs.

Home-sheltering efforts may well be paying off, at least according to the number of hospitalizations and patients in ICU. Those statistics are seen as a somewhat more reliable measure of the spread of the virus because they’re not dependent on widespread testing, according to Reingold. The tradeoff is that hospitalization data is usually a few weeks behind where things actually are.

“Even as transmission of the virus declines, we wouldn’t expect really a decline in hospitalizations until at least several weeks after that, so I think most of us are cautiously optimistic,” he said. “Most of us will feel better if we see another week or two of this trend.”

San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara have seen the bulk of the decline, with their combined 117 ICU patients down significantly from a peak of 139 on Wednesday. Santa Clara County had 119 patients hospitalized with acute COVID-19 cases, up slightly from day before but still down significantly from 189 on Wednesday, according to the county’s public health website. And both San Mateo and Santa Clara counties reported roughly three-quarters of their ventilators were available — 771 devices between the two jurisdictions.

The trend is not as clear for Contra Costa and Alameda counties, where their combined 62 ICU patients are up slightly from Wednesday, when there were 60 ICU patients.

In Oakland, the new street closures seemed to be off to a slow start in many parts of the city, but not on 42nd Street, which was mostly car-free for its entire length across the Longfellow and Temescal neighborhoods.

Mary Sunshine Luna hadn’t realized her usually busy street was one of the dozens across Oakland closed to most traffic, but said she found it to be a pleasant surprise as her children, 1 and 4, worked on chalk drawings of a heart and rainbow on the asphalt Saturday afternoon. Other neighbors, on foot, bicycle, scooter and longboard, made their way up and down the street, with plenty of space to go around.

“We were just going to do sidewalk chalk and I said, ‘Oh, we have the whole street,’” Luna said. “It’s more fun to look out the window and see people, not cars.”

But as the Bay Area weighed its progress against coronavirus, reports Saturday suggested the virus has been here longer than people originally believed. Although the first confirmed cases in the region were detected in late February, Dr. Jeff Smith, Santa Clara County CEO, said he thinks it’s possible the virus could’ve been here as early as December.

“It’s not a scientific number to say December, but I think it’s a reasonable conclusion that it’s been around for a while,” Smith said.

Many early Bay Area cases could have been mistaken for simply being part of an unusually severe flu season, he said.

Reingold, at UC Berkeley, said it’s certainly likely the virus has been in the Bay Area earlier than late February.

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Pac-12 football will be back in 2020, but the specifics remain a mystery “The evidence is the virus probably originated in China, in perhaps late November. So could people have gotten on a plane in early December and arrived somewhere else?” he said, “Sure, that’s possible.”

Smith and Reingold both said determining that would require extensive research, for example checking blood samples of people taken in December and January and seeing if any of them had been exposed to the virus by then. The answer, however, wouldn’t change his view on how the region responded to the emerging pandemic.

“I don’t think the response here in the Bay Area could’ve been much faster, frankly,” he said.

Reporter Harriet Rowan contributed to this report.