Good Morning, Mission! Welcome to Virus Village, your daily data dump.
Now that the numbers have stabilized for a while, the city on Tuesday issued a new re-reopening timeline.
And just this morning, UCSF released the results of its 24th Street testing study, which revealed a 9 percent infection rate among the 2,622 residents tested at the BART plaza over the past month, with a whopping 11 percent of Latinx participants testing positive. Compare that to the 2.5 positivity rate in San Francisco overall this past week.
Sadly, the 24th Street testing site is now closed, and this manner of low-barrier testing in affected communities is not the norm.
Without a competent testing-tracing-quarantine program we have become characters in a long-running absurdist play called “Waiting for The Vaccine.” Here are a couple reviews, positive and negative. The first comes from the New England Journal of Medicine which gives a fairly concise explanation of Operation Warp Speed. The second, more critical from journalist Matt Taibbi, notes that whether the vaccine is effective or not, Big Pharma will reap Big Profits.
With considerably less fanfare, it appears some degree of accountability, long overdue, may be coming to the SF Sherrif’s Department, one way or another.
Scroll down for today’s numbers.
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.
Only 5 cases were reported yesterday, bringing to the Mission’s cumulative case total to 1281 as of August 30.
The seven-day average number of daily cases, as of August 26 (when numbers are “more reliable”), was 73 or 8.4 per 100,000 residents. The average number of daily cases has been between 70 and 80 for a week.
No big change here, as the R number estimate continues to fluctuate between .9 and 1.0.
The positivity rate has also been fairly stable, between 2.5 percent and 3 percent since August 6.
The Latinx population continues to bear the brunt of the virus in terms of case numbers, and increasingly, in the percentage of deaths.
The San Francisco case fatality rate (CFR) is now 0.8 percent. Of the 84 deaths, 92 percent had one or more underlying conditions.
An influx of eight new patients in Acute Care account for a small increase in hospitalizations on August 31. However, DPH reports 10 fewer ICU beds (114) and 69 fewer Acute Care beds (455) available. Both are well within the goals set by DPH for the seven-day average percentage of availability.
Yes – thank you.
It really didn’t take much figuring to establish this type of viral infection would hit hard in the Mission.
If resources were poured in to stop the thing there – imagine where we would be.
“testing study” – really?
A “study”?
We need high capacity testing at 24th and 16th – like 24/7 – with accompanying contact tracing.
Stop it in the Mission NOW and we’ll have a much shorter timeline to the return of some semblance of normalcy for the entire city.
But then again – The City is run much like MUNI – so on and on we plod.
Thank you for doing this and keeping us informed (in a clear and concise way) of the impact of this pandemic on our city.