Good Morning, Mission! Welcome to Virus Village, your daily Covid-19 data dump.
The Vaccination didn’t come this morning. Tomorrow morning for certain. Or maybe not, as a Bidenista wisely warns against extravagant expectations. Of course what’s happening in NYC, definitely won’t happen here. We’ve got this.
While local restauranteur and wino Gavin Newsom struggles to get a coherent state vaccination in place, the City can take immediate action. Matt Haney provides suggestions.
Many in the Mission have more pressing, and old fashioned concerns, like rent.
Today’s comic relief is provided by the Police Commission which urged the SFPD to investigate itself with respect to last week’s Capitol Hill riots.
Even wearing a mask, John Johnson, a security guard on Mission Street, can still smile.
Scroll down for today’s Covid numbers.
Between December 12 and January 10, DPH reports 835 new cases in the Mission for a cumulative total of 3356, or 56.3 cases per 1000 residents. The case rate in Bayview Hunters Point, the new locus of the pandemic, has soared to 82 cases per 1000 residents, while Visitacion Valley has 58.4, Tenderloin 56.7, Excelsior 53, Bernal Heights 34, Western Addition 29.4, Marina 24, Castro 21, Sunset/Parkside 14.1, Chinatown 13.6, Inner Sunset 12.8 and Seacliff 10 cases per 1000 residents.
DPH today strangely reports stagnating case numbers. For the week ending January 6, the reported seven-day average of new cases is the same as yesterday, 303, or 34.8 daily new cases per 100,000 residents. We can probably expect substantial increases tomorrow and in the days to come.
DPH won’t be reporting much on new cases by race/ethnicity until next week.
Today’s numbers include 3 transfers, all in Acute Care as hospitalizations continue to rise. For the week ending January 11, the weekly change in Covid positive patients rose 13 percent. During the week ending January 11, the seven-day average availability of ICU beds was 26 percent and for Acute Care beds 23 percent. On January 11, DPH reports 69 ICU beds and 316 Acute Care beds available. DPH does not report if available beds are staffed, but continues to assert 100 percent of required PPE on hand.
Are California hospitlizations plateauing or do recent numbers reflect the lack of space and staff?
Estimates for San Francisco’s R number also dropped a bit today to average 1.09. California’s R number estimates range from .86 to 1.14 for an average of 1.
Though still above 5 percent, the Citywide weekly average positivity rate fell for the first time this month.
The City’s intrepid contact tracers have improved their numbers with postive test takers, reaching 79 percent over the two weeks ending January 8. During that time they reached 74 percent of named contacts. What they’ve found out from such “successful” contact tracing, information we pay for, is kept secret from us, which DPH has yet to learn, does little to engender trust.
San Francisco has 27 Covid deaths per 100,000 residents. Sacramento has 68.3, San Diego 57.5, Portland 53, Seattle 52.5, Denver 102, Dallas 89, Nashville 94.4, Charleston 85.6, Atlanta 81.4, Cincinatti 52.6, Philadelphia 170.7 and Boston 182.9 deaths per 100,000 residents.
“What they’ve found out from such “successful” contact tracing, information we pay for, is kept secret from us, which DPH has yet to learn, does little to engender trust.” Grant Colfax doesn’t care…about anything. The worst of the worst.
RE: “DPH today strangely reports stagnating case numbers.”
That is because the 7-day average includes the very low number from New Years Day when very few tests were done.
RE: “We can probably expect substantial increases tomorrow and in the days to come.”
The 7-day average will jump from 303 in today’s report to 363 or higher by Saturday. If the curve turns out to be similar to that for the post-Thanksgiving surge, the 7-day average will go over 400 in the next 2 weeks before it starts to come down.
The “shape” of 7-day average curves for SF, Santa Clara, and Contra Costa are very similar in how they go up and come down. Santa Clara and Contra Costa cases are much higher than SF now even though the rate of increase in the surge and the cases at the start of the surge were only slightly higher than SF. In the next 2 weeks, SF per capita case rate looks to top out at less than 70% of the peak of Santa Clara post-Thanksgiving surge. At the same time, Santa Clara could start to approach Southern California post-Thanksgiving case rate levels in Santa Clara’s post-New Years surge. SF ICU availability will be OK while that of Santa Clara is critical and will get worse. That is just the way exponential growth works and shows mitigating actions taken to keep cases low at the start of a surge are much more effective than waiting until cases are increasing rapidly.
Shelter in place and business shutdowns are a hurt and our leaders have the unenviable job of balancing the hurt now versus the hurt later and getting vaccinations rolled out. We need to hold on until the case rates start to come down and more folks get vaccination. My hope is for end of January instead of the “indefinite” extensions.