Both daily total cases and hospitalizations could peak in San Francisco or peak, indicating a possible possible! – postponement in the current boom. Grant Colfax, director of public health, of SF wants everyone to know that he is proud of you.
The tone of these weekly COVID press conferences by the city of San Francisco has swung wildly over the past eight months between intense, gruesome predictions about the near future to calm reassurance and congratulations for the well-done social form. Tuesday’s briefing, in which Colfax addressed reporters and the public without Mayor London Breed, was in the latter category, and Colfax began to sound more cautiously optimistic than he was last week over the next month or two – at least in SF.
“I am here to report on our joint progress in reversing the current increase in COVID-19 in San Francisco,” Colfax began. “Looking back on this difficult year of 2020, I want to thank all the San Franciscans for their incredible efforts over the past months – months that were unimaginable just a year ago when reports of this virus first surfaced.”
Today, the data indicate that daily new cases in SF, although about three times higher than at the beginning of December – 30 per 100,000 people compared to 9 per 100,000 people on 4 December – are starting to level off. And while Colfax warns that we are still ‘far from the woods’, at least he does not sound as strict as a few weeks back.
“We see some reasons for hope, but we are still in a precarious position,” Colfax said.
He notes that the availability of beds in industry sectors is around 9 per cent around the Bay, which is less than at the weekend when it was around 11 per cent. And the COVID hospitalizations in San Francisco are about 200, with the sharp increase in cases over the past few weeks indicating that in the coming weeks there will be many more people in need of hospitalization.
But the reproduction rate (Re) of the virus has been declining since the first week of December so that the most prosperous predictions about hospitals can be overwhelmed. On December 26, the Re was 1.13, down from an estimated 1.45 on December 5 – meaning that instead of seeing a peak in hospitalizations around mid-February with around 1,500 COVID patients in hospitals, if the situation persisted is, hospitalizations will peak at 290 patients by mid-February. If the Re rate were to fall below 1.0 in the next few days, Colfax explained, it would mean that the city’s peak in hospitalizations would occur by January 4, and that only 68 additional deaths would occur by April, compared to 108 against the current rate.
Social gatherings are still the most important factor in the spread of viruses – much more than retail activities or most other things besides frontline work.
Colfax said the city will not know where matters stand in terms of the matter arising from holiday gatherings until the first weeks of January to January 2. We can see evidence of Christmas gatherings, and by January 8, we can see evidence emanating from New Year’s Eve gatherings.
Despite the drama surrounding the stay-at-home orders, San Francisco still has one of the lowest cases and death rates in any major city in this pandemic. San Francisco is currently second in Seattle when it comes to metropolitan areas with a low number of daily new cases per 100,000 – SF’s number was 27.2 on Monday, while Seattle was 18.5. And as the Chronicle reports, Seattle’s upswing in November-December slowed faster than here, with more than 900 new cases on December 4 and 104 new cases on December 26.
Colfax has raised the issue of the new coronavirus variant detected in the UK and apparently has the ability to infect humans more easily. On Tuesday, as the Washington Post reported, federal scientists say they have confirmed the presence of the variant in the U.S. in a patient in Colorado with no travel history. The lack of travel or known contact with an infected person means that the variant is likely to be common here and just not detected, the scientist said, and ‘we can expect it to be detected elsewhere.’
Colfax said the same efforts to stop the spread would work against the variant. And he added: ‘As we learn more [about the variant], we will adjust our efforts as during this pandemic. “
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Related: Signs point to a plateau in Bay Area COVID cases, hospitalizations because some hospitals cancel non-emergency operations