Coronavirus infections increased in the Bay Area during the week ending, with the average number of daily new cases at 475, 8.7% higher than the previous week ending March 26th.
The data may indicate that California is starting to fall in line with the rest of the United States, where coronavirus infections have gradually flattened or increased due to more infectious variants.
“On the West Coast we see a shallow,” which is not bad, said dr. George Rutherford, an expert in infectious diseases at UCSF, said. ‘We might go back a little. We can hit the bottom and bounce a little. ‘
This is the fourth consecutive week of increasing cases nationwide, according to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We know that these increases are partly due to more transferable variants, which we are closely monitoring,” Walensky said on Monday in a White House newsletter.
She said young people have the latest increase in infections, as the increasing vaccination rate among older Americans is the most severe cases among the group.
Walensky said the agency oversees several outbreaks related to youth sports and extracurricular activities, and urges caution to resume high-risk activities.
“I understand that people are tired and that they are ready for this pandemic, just like me,” she said. “Please keep hanging on there and keep doing things we know the virus is spreading.”
In the first week of this year, before a steady downturn began, an average of 4,500 cases were reported in the Bay daily. The weekly COVID-19 deaths averaged 78 for the week ending April 4, compared to 113 reported the previous week.
But as the region has moved closer to another tragic milestone of 6,000 deaths linked to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, some public health experts are concerned that new cases could disrupt positive trends in hospitalizations and deaths. Again, the high numbers of older people who can now be vaccinated can prevent the numbers from rising just as strongly as in pre-vaccination times.
The average number of virus-related deaths reported in California dropped from 200 a day on March 28 to 120 on Sunday. And hospitalizations for COVID-19 are at their lowest level in more than a year: about 2,000 COVID-19 patients and 500 in intensive care, a huge drop from early January when the numbers approached 22,000 and 4,900 respectively.
On Monday afternoon, the total number of deaths in the Bay Area amounted to 5,957, the data reviewed by The Chronicle showed. Across California, the pandemic took 59,293 lives. Nationally, 555,000 died from COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University.
“It is fair to say that we are currently experiencing an increase in parts of the United States,” said John Swartzberg, an expert in infectious diseases at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. Call it a swell if we like, but it’s a clear increase in cases where Michigan is the poster child. The real variable is going to be how much immunity we have in different parts of the country to resist the spread of states with a problem. ”
He said he feels optimistic about California’s ability to evade a serious national boom, based in part on large parts of the state that are likely to have a high degree of immunity to previous infection or vaccination.
“I’m not sure in which direction California is going, but we are currently in a very good state,” Swartzberg said.
Government Gavin Newsom’s office said on Friday it was preparing to retire the state’s color-coded, redesigned reopening system as vaccination rates improved and coronavirus cases continued to decline.
Swartzberg said he prefers California public health officials to postpone further reopening by another month.
The state plans to open access to vaccines to anyone 16 years and older in less than two weeks, as supply improves.
“My policy for this month would not open up as we do. “I think we’re making a terrible mistake,” he said. “If we drag our feet for this month, we can keep California in a very good place in the pandemic. But maybe the public policy people are right and we can get away with it. ‘
California announced in early March a plan to link the number of vaccinations in low-income communities to an accelerated reopening system. The allocations were already loosened once when the state achieved 2 million vaccinations in those communities. They will be further released when the state gets 4 million vaccinations.
On Monday afternoon, the state was on 3.96 million vaccinations in low-income communities. Once it reached the 4 million target, the provinces in the Bay Area were able to quickly resume activities such as indoor dining, concerts, events, professional sports and other activities considered too high risk in the past year.
‘We need to be aware of what could happen during family reunions during Easter yesterday. And we need to be aware of what is going on with rapid reopening, ”Rutherford said. “I’m still pretty confident that we’ll avoid a new boom in the West. People in general got the message. And we graft at a fairly fast cut. ‘
There are also concerns that variants could also have an impact on the progress of the Bay.
The Stanford Clinical Virology Lab on Sunday identified and confirmed one case of an emerging variant that originated in India, said Lisa Kim, a spokeswoman for Stanford Health Care.
The variant is called the “double mutant” because it contains two mutations in the virus that help it to attach to cells. That could be responsible for the worrying new increase in business in India, with the country reporting its biggest one-day rise on Monday, more than 103,000 confirmed cases since the pandemic began. It was at the top of the previous daily peak of almost 98,000 cases recorded at the end of September. India’s death toll is 165 101.
Kim said it is not yet known whether the variant is more contagious or resistant to vaccine bodies than the initial coronavirus. Stanford is investigating seven other suspicions; the location of the confirmed person infected with the variant was not disclosed.
The latest discovery adds to the list of worrying variants that have migrated to the US, including the widespread B.1.1.7 variant, which is 50% more contagious. The P.1 strain that originated in Brazil and a variant from South Africa, were both found in the Bay, and both are presumably somewhat resistant to vaccines.
Chronicle staff author Michael Massa contributed to this report.
Aidin Vaziri and Erin Allday are staff writers for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected], [email protected]