Both daily totals of new cases and hospitalizations may be peaking or peaking in San Francisco, indicating a possible possible! – extension of the current outbreak. And SF Public Health Director Dr. Grant Colfax wants everyone to know that he is proud of you.
The tone of these weekly COVID press conferences across the city of San Francisco has fluctuated wildly over the past eight months amid the intense and horrible predictions of the near future, to calm assurance and congratulations on a well-executed social distance. Tuesday’s briefing, in which Colfax addressed reporters and the public without Mayor London Breed, was in the latter category, and Colfax is starting to sound more cautiously optimistic than last week about the next month or two – at less in SF.
“I’m here to report on our collective progress in overcoming the current increase in COVID-19 in San Francisco,” began Colfax. “As we look back on this difficult year of 2020, I want to thank all San Franciscans for their incredible efforts during these past few months – months that were unimaginable just a year ago, when reports of this virus first emerged.”
Today, the data suggests that new daily cases in SF, although still about three times as high as in early December – 30 per 100,000 people versus 9 per 100,000 people on December 4 – are starting to stabilize. And while Colfax warns that we are still “far from off limits”, he at least is not sounding as severe and severe as he did just a few weeks ago.
“We are seeing some reasons for hope, but we are still in a precarious position,” said Colfax.
He notes that the availability of beds in the ICU is hovering around 9% around the bay area – a drop from the weekend, when it was around 11%. And COVID hospitalizations in San Francisco are just around 200, with the sharp increase in cases in recent weeks suggesting that many more people will need hospitalization in the coming weeks.
But the reproductive rate (Re) of the virus has declined since the first week of December, so the worst forecasts about hospitals becoming crowded may not materialize. On December 26, the Re was 1.13, down from 1.45 estimated on December 5 – which means that instead of seeing a peak in hospitalizations in mid-February with about 1,500 COVID patients in hospitals, things remain stable, hospitalizations will peak at 290 patients in mid-February. If, in the next few days, the Re rate fell below 1.0, Colfax explained, it would mean that the city’s peak hospitalization would happen on January 4, and only an additional 68 deaths would occur until April, against 108 at the current rate.
Social gatherings remain the main driver of viral spread – far more than retail activities or many other things besides frontline work.
Colfax said that the city will not know where things are in terms of counting cases resulting from the holiday season until the first weeks of January – January 2, we can see evidence of Christmas parties and, on January 8, we can start seeing evidence from New Year’s Eve meetings.
Despite the drama surrounding home stay orders, San Francisco continued to have one of the lowest case counts and death rates of any major city in this pandemic. San Francisco is second only to Seattle now when it comes to metropolitan areas with a low number of new daily cases per 100,000 – the SF number was 27.2 on Monday, while Seattle’s was 18.5. And, as the Chronicle reports, the November-December surge in Seattle decreased faster than here, with more than 900 new cases reported on December 4 and 104 new cases on December 26.
Colfax raised the question of the new variant of coronavirus detected in the UK, which appears to have the ability to infect people more readily. On Tuesday, as the Washington Post reports, federal scientists claim to have confirmed the presence of the variant in the United States in a patient in Colorado with no travel history. The lack of any known travel or contact with an infected person means that the variant is probably widely present here and simply was not detected, said the scientist, and “we can expect it to be detected elsewhere”.
Colfax said that the same efforts to prevent the spread will work against the variant. He added: “As we learn more [about the variant], we will adjust our efforts, as we did during this pandemic. “
You can watch the full briefing below.
Related: The signs point to the plateau in the bay area. COVID cases, hospitalizations, as some hospitals cancel non-emergency surgeries