For many vaccinated people in California, life is starting to get a sense of normalcy again.
But health experts are becoming increasingly concerned about the dangers to people who have not yet been vaccinated.
California announced Tuesday that it will discontinue its color-coded pandemic reopening system on June 15 and reopen most sectors of the economy at or near full capacity. But thousands of people in the Bay have not yet been vaccinated and will not be for the next few weeks – a fact that experts worry about the prevalence of transmissible and potentially deadly variants around the state.
“Despite the reopening of the state and the impending extension of vaccine admission, nothing has changed to the person who has not been vaccinated and has never been infected,” said Dr. Bob Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at the UCSF.
“What has changed is that the virus to which they may be exposed probably works better than the one that was in circulation in 2020,” he said.
As the state leads to reopening, two key variables – the increasing prevalence of highly contagious variants and the fact that many have not yet been vaccinated – make the environment more dangerous for unvaccinated people than in other phases of the pandemic, Bay Area experts said. . .
Young people, most of whom have not yet been vaccinated, have experienced the latest increase in infections nationwide, CDC officials said this week. In the Bay, coronavirus infections are also on the rise – which experts attribute in part to the dominant variants of the state, such as the B.1.1.7 variant which is 50% more contagious.
The situation is a bit different in San Francisco, where 50% of the population has received a vaccine. The city has seen only six deaths due to the coronavirus in the past four weeks and has a current positivity rate of 0.9%. At UCSF hospitals, there are only seven COVID-19 patients and among the city’s population of 875,000 people, new cases average 37 per day.
But experts are concerned that this could change if variants such as those first detected in Brazil and South Africa – both of which respond less to vaccines and are more lethal – spread across the Bay. Cases of both variants have already been identified in the region.
“I think April is an important month for everyone,” said John Swartzberg, an UC Berkeley infectious disease expert. “If we can get through this month without a significant increase, we will be in a very good condition.”
But if we do not, Swartzberg says, the Bay Area could face a new boom in cases and hospitalizations, such as Michigan leading the country into new infections. A ‘double mutant’ variant that partially responds to India’s astronomical surges has already been identified in the Bay, Stanford virologists confirmed Sunday.
“I feel uncertain about what is going to happen this month, what direction things are going to take,” Swartzberg said. He worries that a new upswing could pose a huge risk to all the progress in California so far, especially for the unvaccinated, weeks away to get their shots. ‘Where we are currently in California looks really sweet … I’m worried about a storm that could be abroad and we just can not see it yet. ‘
It is particularly challenging to weigh these concerns, as the messages from public health officials were optimistic – both about the progress of the Bay Area pandemic and the greater prospect that ‘life would return to normal’, experts said. But as of Monday, there were 2,800 new cases of the coronavirus in California.
“With protection for all who are so close, it feels like a particularly tragic time to become infected,” said Dr. Robert Siegel, professor of virology at Stanford, said.
‘Yes, everyone is pandemically tired, especially when we look at those around us who are being vaccinated. And yes, public policies are opening up, giving the illusion that the pandemic is over – but the risk is still real. ‘
Annie Vainshtein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected]. Twitter: @annievain