Covid Tracker: 13,139 cases, 151 deaths

Good Morning, Mission! Welcome to Virus Village, your daily Covid-19 data dump.

If you believe the R number indicates the current and near-future local spread of the virus, pull up your mask. The effective R number for San Francisco according to Covid-19 R Estimation for California, is approximately 1.53, the level it at this past July.

Although the big news yesterday was all about the positive results from Pfizer vaccine trials, there was more good news on the Covid front. Lab results from Abbot’s new rapid test  (first studied in the Mission) were very enccouraging, and the FDA gave emergency approval to a treatment which may keep people at high risk out of the hospital.

Locally, the concept of Community Wellness Teams, which has found success in the Mission, may finally get some support from the City.

For those interested in a deeper dive into San Francisco’s Covid data, check out the Phoenix Data Project

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. 

Last month a single census tract in the Mission (bounded by 17th, 22nd, Valencia and South Van Ness) recorded a positive case rate of 53.1 cases per 10,000 residents, a higher rate than any entire neighborhood in the City (including the Mission). The Citywide average rate for the month was 16.6 cases per 10,000 residents.

The model we use is generally high in its R number estimates compared to other models. An ensemble of other models estmates the transmission rate at .98, though one of those models has  been consistently very low.

However you judge the models estimating the R number, positive cases are on the rise.  For the week ending November 2, the Citywide seven-day average number of daily cases rose to 60 or 6.9 cases per 100,000, higher than we’ve seen since late September.

A rising rate of positive cases in the White and Asian communities joins the recent rise Latinx cases over the past couple weeks.

Though still relatively low, the Citywide average positivity rate has noticeably risen over the past two weeks.

California’s positivity rate continues its upward trend.

The increasing R number, case numbers and positivity rate have yet to show up in the hospital. The raw number of confirmed and suspected Covid patients remains relatively steady, though the number of confirmed patients rose 13 percent compared to a week ago. For the week ending November 8, the seven-day average percentage of ICU beds available was 34 percent, Acute Care 24 percent.

We don’t know where the majority of new cases are coming from. Only 40 percent of the City’s cases can be traced to a known case.