Good Morning, Mission! Welcome to Virus Village, your daily Covid-19 data dump.
Stop the Presses! The City has finally granted funds to the Latino Task Force and other community groups to fight the pandemic on the ground.
Worried about whether SF hospitals will get overrun in the current surge? Unfortunately I don’t think it’s fear mongering to say you should be. Hospitals in the U.S. are not set up to deal with a crisis.Ā For example, California has 1.8 hospital beds per 1000 residents (while Germany has 8 beds per 1000 residents). Why? Hospitals are “very much in love with this idea of just-in-time staffing and just-in-time supplies. Itās a manufacturing idea that doesnāt work out in hospitalsā explains University of Pennsylvania professor of nursing Dr Linda Aiken said.
Meanwhile, Manny Yekutiel was appointed the the SFMTA board by Mayor Breed. If he thought this was a plum job, afterĀ two hours of questions by the public, he may have second thoughts. The questions should not stop. MUNI’s in for a rough ride.
Scroll down for today’s Covid numbers.
Between November 9 and December 8, the Mission logged in 505 positive test results for a cumulative total of 2380 positive cases or 40 cases per 1000 residents.
For months DPH has been telling us SF hospitals had more than sufficient capacity to deal with a surge. Now that the surge has actually arrived, it’s another story. We’ll hunker down and hope earlier predictions were right. As of December 10, the City had 73 ICU beds and 313 Acute Care beds available. Daily snapshots are not as useful as longer trends. For the week ending December 10, the weekly rate of change in Covid positive patients roseĀ 34 percent. During that week, the seven-day average availability of ICU beds was 30 percent and for Acute Care beds 23 percent.Ā DPH continues to report 100 percent of required PPE on hand, but makes no mention of the people (hospital workers) who use that equipment.Ā
The R number offers little hope.Ā Both Covid-19 R estimation for California and the ensemble estimate the average transmission rate continues to fluctuate around 1.4.Ā The estimates for California range from UCLA’s .88 to UCSF’s 1.57.
Positive test results keep piling up. For the week ending December 4, the seven-day average number of Citywide daily cases rose to Ā 229 cases or 26.3 cases per 100,000 residents.
Looking at case numbers as a proportion of the a community’s population, in October, while the Citywide rate was 13.3,Ā the Latinx case rate was 34.7, the Black rate 12 and the White rate was 9. In November, the Citywide rate was 41.7, the White rate was 47, the Black rate 60 and the Latinx rate 157. See below for relative population percentages.
Given California is setting record highs in positivity rate, cases and hospitalizations almost every day, it’s difficult to understand UCLA’s consistently low estimation of the state R number.
Of the 167 deaths, at least 136 had one or more underlying condition while 3 had none.