Good Morning, Mission! Welcome to Virus Village, your daily data dump.
Pandemic Profiteering II. Pro Publica has story about a doctor who gets an antibody test from his employer, Physisicans Premier ER, which charged him $10,984 though the testing materials cost $8. His insurance company paid in full, no questions asked.
Apparently Dark Ages Donald’s announcement that a Covid-19 vaccine could be be ready before the election has prompted two-thirds of the country to say they won’t get it when first available. In response, drug companies racing to market their version of a vaccine pledge to follow “rigorous efficacy and safety standards”.
Locally, Mayor Breed has enlisted a more credible group of experts to advise the public on precautions to take this weekend.
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.
As of September 2, DPH reports the Mission has had 1296 cumulative positive cases.
The seven-day average number of daily cases for the week ending September 2 is 73, or an average of 8.4 daily cases per 100,000 residents. That number has been on a plateau since August 21, well within the DPH “high alert zone”, and an indicator the virus remains quite active in the City.
As with the average daily case count, the estimated R number in San Francisco has been relatively stable just below 1. With more extreme heat predicted for the valley this weekend, an ensemble of models put California’s number at around .89.
Hospitalization figures continue to slide downwards from their recent August peaks. DPH continues to report substantial bed availability in both ICU and Acute Care.
DPH continues to report a seven-day average positivity rate below 3 percent (as of August 29), based on a seven day average of 3746 tests.
DPH reports two new deaths in the past week, although that figure may increase. Due to changes in the way DPH reports Covid deaths, we can’t say with any precision when those deaths occurred or their demographic features.
Thank you so much for these meticulous updates! Do you (or does anyone out there) know what explains the big difference between Asian and Latinx ratios (among population, cases, deaths)? Is it that elderly Asians are getting (or got early on) the virus and dying (or died) in big numbers (maybe at one or more nursing homes?), while mainly young Latinx “essential workers” are catching it, and doing much better due to their age? It’s small death numbers, so it could be randomness, but it doesn’t look like that to me.