COVID Tracker: The delta blues

Good Morning Mission and welcome to Virus Village, your (somewhat regular) Covid 19 data dump.

Recent figures show local hospitalizations are not rising at the same rate as the last year’s summer and fall surges which suggest a “decoupling” between hospitalizations and case numbers. In counties with similarly high vaccination rates, the same phenomenon can be seen.

But not necessarily (after all we’re living in Covid time). In a briefing on August 5, Department of Public Health Director Dr. Grant Colfax said that projections at that time showed hositalizations would peak around September 3 with a total of 336, far in excess of the peak reached in January this year. The lastest from Phoenix Data Project also projects record high numbers of hospitalizations this round, especially in ICU.

At this stage, hospitalizations are below last July’s peak although cases are more than double what they were at that point.

The notion of what constitutes a “case” has become more murky with the CDC’s failure to collect data on infections of fully vaccinated people. Nor is it absolutely clear what constitutes a “breakthrough infection.”

In case you missed it, San Francisco will now require teachers and school staff to be vaccinated or get weekly tests.

And the FDA has authorized a treatment which is “postexposure prophylaxis of COVID-19 in individuals (12 years of age and older weighing at least 40kg) who are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19, including hospitalization or death.”

Scroll down for today’s Covid numbers.

The CDC data used for the chart lags behind the data supplied from SFDPH. As of August 10, DPH reports over 77 percent of all San Francisco residents have received one dose, and 71 percent  are completely vaccinated. On August 10, the seven-day rolling average of shots per day to new recipients was 492. For information on where to get vaccinated in and around the Mission, visit our Vaccination Page.

Due to a DPH reporting glitch, we don’t have our usual hospitalization graph. The visualization above is a screen shot from the sf.gov website . On August 7, DPH reports there were 107 hospitalizations, 71 in Acute Care, 36 in ICU. According to the CDC, for the 7 days ending August 8, there were 72 new admissions to SF hospitals, no change over the prior seven days. Covid patients account for 5.36 percent of hospital beds (up .96 percent) and 12.36 percent of ICU beds (up 3.78 percent).

The latest report from the federal Department of Health and Human Services shows SFGH with 16 Covid patients and 70 percent ICU occupancy, while across the Mission, CPMC had 15 Covid patients and 70 percent ICU occupancy. Of 99 reported Covid patients, 48 were at either SFGH or UCSF.

Between June 7 and August 6, DPH reported 484 new cases among Mission residents (or 82 new cases per 10,000 residents) and 536 new cases in Bayview Hunters Point (141 cases per 10,000 residents). Other than Bayview Hunters Point, 4 other neighborhoods had case rates in excess of 100 per 10,000 residents including the Castro (120), SOMA (110) and Western Addition (111) and Japantown (100).

For the week ending August 3, the seven-day rolling average of daily new cases in the City was 263 new cases, or approximately 29.8 new cases per day per 100,000 residents (based on 881,000 population).

Numbers for August are not yet available from DPH, but the graph, showing daily raw numbers indicates the delta surge is affecting White San Franciscan in greater numbers than other groups, and more than in prior surges.

Between June 7 and August 6, DPH reports a 3.9 percent positivity rate in the Mission. Over that period, Bayview Hunters Point had the highest positivity rate of 5.8 percent, while the lowest recorded rate was in Seacliff at 1 percent.

The number of Covid-related deaths in July remains 9.

Although most models are still reporting higher numbers, the ensemble estimates the San Francisco R Number at .94 (the first time below 1 since June 16) and the California R Number at 1.17. Don’t start celebrating just yet. Although Covid R Estimation has dropped San Francisco estimate to 1.28, and California at 1.3, that’s still high enough to indicate substantial prevalence and spread.

In July men had 55.6 percent of the cases (2563) and women had 42.9 percent (1976). Only 1 Trans Male case was recorded and 2 Trans Female cases.