COVID Tracker: Delta down but not out

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

Hospitalizations show continued stability as new cases and positivity rates continue to decline, but the numbers suggest there’s a lot of the highly contagious virus still circulating.

When it comes to the Delta (and cold mornings), San Francisco looks right up there with Iceland.

Remind me again why we’re all supposed to get boosters. As The Vaccine appears to be holding up under the weight of the Delta, we are reading more of criticism to the new booster policy which appears to be based mainly on political-economic considerations more than scientific data. Watch out if the Biden Administration begins suggesting UV light treatment or injections of Clorox.

Here are some thoughts on why viruses change over time and what we might, or might not, see later on.

Nursing homes have been ground zero for the worst Covid outcomes. New regulations have been introduced, but will they be enforced? Nursing homes (many of which are run by hedge funds) are already resisting the mandate to vaccinate all staff.

And if you haven’t already, you can dump your plexiglass shield (though not on the sidewalk please — either call Recology or dump them in front of DPW).

Scroll down for today’s Covid numbers.

The CDC data used for the chart lags behind the data supplied from SFDPH. Though vaccination rates are improving across the country, vaccinations contiunue to crawl forward in SF. As of August 18, DPH reports over 77 percent of all San Francisco residents have received one dose, and over 71 percent  are completely vaccinated. On August 18, the seven-day rolling average of shots per day to new recipients was 612. 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 16, DPH reports there were 117 hospitalizations, 80 in Acute Care, 37 in ICU. The latest update from DPH says 45 fully vaccinated San Franciscans have been hospitalized (a rate of 10.9 per 1000 compared to 79.3 per 1000 for those not fully vaccinated) . According to the CDC , for the 7 days ending August 17, there were 86 new admissions to SF hospitals, a 6.17 percent increase over the prior seven days. Again, relying on CDC data (as SFDPH no longer bothers), for the week ending August 17 Covid patients accounted for 6.03 percent of hospital beds (no change) and 13.84 percent of ICU beds (up 1.23 percent).

The latest report from the federal Department of Health and Human Services shows SFGH with 17 Covid patients and 76 percent ICU occupancy, while across the Mission, CPMC had 14 Covid patients and 71 percent ICU occupancy. Of 110 reported Covid patients, 55 were at either SFGH or UCSF.

Between June 16 and August 15, DPH reported 608 new cases among Mission residents (or 103 new cases per 10,000 residents) and 659 new cases in Bayview Hunters Point (174 new cases per 10,000 residents). During this period only the Mission and Bayview Hunters Point had more than 600 new cases. The next highest neighborhoods were Sunset/Parkside with 372, the Castro with 350 and SOMA with 316 new cases. The Castro also had the second highest rate at 156 new cases per 10,000 residents.

For the week ending August 12, the seven-day rolling average of daily new cases in the City was 181 new cases, or approximately 20.2 new cases per day per 100,000 residents (based on 896,000 population).

So far in August, White San Franciscans had 1045 new cases, Latinx 664, Asians 474, Blacks 325, Multi-racials 48, Pacific Islanders 39, and Native Americans had 8 new cases.

So far in August, DPH reports a 5.7 percent positivity rate in the Mission. Bayview Hunters Point has 7.5 percent posititivity, Castro 6.6 percent, lightly vaccinated Lakeshore has 6.1 percent positivity and the Inner Sunset, home to UCSF, has a 2.3 percent positivity rate.

Deaths in San Francisco are always difficult to ascertain. Now DPH reports 2 more Covid-related deaths in July and 2 more in August, bringing the total Covid-related death toll to 571 .

If you’ve followed Covid Tracker, you know there’s a lot of fluctuation in the numbers, reflecting a great deal of uncertainty. Covid R Estimation has raised its San Francisco R Number again over 1 to 1.12 and its estimate for the California R number at 1.27. Meanwhile all models in the ensemble estimate the San Francisco R Number below 1 with an average of .83, while the average California R Number is 1.05.

So far in August San Franciscans aged 0-4 had 84 new cases, 5-10 131, 11-13 46, 14-17 57, 18-20 69, 21-24 268, 25-29 479, 30-39 744, 40-49 437, 50-59 317, 60-69 185, 70-79 88, and for those of us aged 80 and above there have been 38 new cases.