Good Morning, Mission! Welcome to Virus Village, your daily Covid-19 data dump.
Let’s give some credit where (some) credit is due. Though coronavirus testing in San Francisco has been overstated at times, compared to other cities and regions in the country, it still stands out as a “model” for other cities to emulate. Or so says Atul Gawande in a recent New Yorker piece entitled “We can solve the coronavirus-test mess now — if we want to.”
What sets SF apart from others is a network of free drive-through and walk-in sites, open to anyone who lives or works in the city.
Yes, we may look good when compared with other places, but as we’ve learned, much more targetted testing is sorely needed.
Stuck inside again and bored with burritos? Check out the flame-grilled chicken and meats from recently arrived Il Pollaio. And they’ve got steak fries!
Scroll down for today’s numbers which don’t smell as bad as the air.
HiGeorge, a data visualization startup, developed some new visualizations for Mission Local, which we will be using and fine-tuning in the days to come.
As of September 9, DPH reports a total of 1386 cases in the Mission.
A week ago, when numbers were “more reliable” the seven-day average number of daily cases for the week the average was 69, on the high plateau where it’s been since August 21.
The R number model we primarily use to gauge the virus transmission puts the estimate for SF in a range from .75 to 1.05. while the estimate for California is between .81 and .84.
The seven-day rolling average of positive cases also remains low. It was 2.05 percent for the week ending September 5 . In California, the 14 day average is 4.0 percent, a notable improvement from a couple weeks earlier then the positivity rate was above 6 percent.
The number of Covid patients in SF hospitals shows a modest rise. However, the rate of weekly change in Covid positive patients, which had been recently dropping, shot up 9 percent. The DPH goal is to keep the increase below 10 percent. Availability of ICU and Acute Care beds remains sufficient to handle a potential surge.
It has been obvious for a long time that the virus won’t be contained in San Francisco until the City makes a substantial committment and effort to test, trace and quarantine the Latinx population. And pay the volunteers who have spearheaded the effort so far.
Covid deaths continue to rise. Though the Case Fatality Rate remains below 1 percent, deaths have increased over 44 percent over the past two months.
That’s a well captured orange skyline of SF.
Why is no one holding Breed and Colfax to account over their lack of a strategy for protecting the latinx community that in turn would allow the city’s small businesses to begin operating safely again? Why do we allow Breed and Colfax to keep destroying lives and livelihoods by keeping everyone under a useless one-size-fits-all lockdown policy that should have been abandoned months ago for something more targeted and effective?