Good Morning, Mission! Welcome to Virus Village, your daily Covid-19 data dump.
Since yesterday, less than twenty “new” cases were added to San Francisco’s total. Either the virus took the day off, or this is another example of delays in test analysis and reporting.
Is contact tracing in San Francisco a shining success, an abysmal failure, or something in between? From the minimal information DPH offers, it’s almost impossible to tell. Except for a few percentage points, plus or minus, the numbers never change. To be fair, if SF is failing in contact tracing, we are not alone. It’s a problem that has plagued this country and most of Europe.
Maybe a new approach is needed. An excellent article in The Atlantic suggests the best way to control the virus would be to understand how an individual became infected, Â looking for clusters, or super spreading events (like a reception for a Supreme Court nominee), rather than tracing who that individual subsequently contacted.
Scroll down for today’s Covid 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.Â
Between September 3 and October 2, DPH added 176 cases for the Mission. In contrast, Glen Park reported only 3.
A better way to understand the flow of the virus is to look at averages rather than headlines. The seven-day Citywide average number of daily cases for the week ending September 29 fell to 49, or 5.6 per 100,000 residents.
Citywide average test numbers continue to rise as the average positivity rate has remained under 2 percent since September 18. Unfortunately these numbers don’t reflect what’s really happening in the Mission or the most vulnerable populations.
Latinx cases still account for half of the City’s cases. How has the City expanded or changed testing and tracing among this most vulnerable demographic? Besides rhetoric and photo ops, how has the City leveraged community assets? How has the $28.5 million Mayor Breed touted to aid the Latinx community been allocated?
For the week ending October 3, the rate of weekly change in Covid positive hospitalizations was -8 percent. For that week, the average percentage of ICU beds available was 40 percent, and 24 percent for Acute beds.
Because the R number tracks the average transmission from an individual case, it obscures super spreading transmission, or overdispersion, referenced in the Atlantic article above.
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