Good Morning, Mission! Welcome to Virus Village, your daily Covid-19 data dump.
Even with today’s reported jump in Covid related deaths, the overall numbers in the City remain low in comparison to other locations in the state, the nation, and the world. But as Europe, including such previous Covid stars as Germany and the Czech Republic show, this is no time for complacency.
Without a competent Test-Trace-Isolate regime or vaccine, we are dependent on maintaining our distance from one another, wearing a mask and washing our hands. That, my friends, is the plan.
With more than 200,000 SF residents filing for unemployment, and no federal stimulus of consequence insight, the announced expansion of the City’s JobsNOW program is urgently needed.
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.
Between September 25 and October 24, the Mission logged 141 cases. Over that period, no other neighborhood in the City had more than 100 and only one, Bayview Hunters Point, had more than 50. DPH has yet to open a full-time low barrier testing site near the Mission, organize local wellness teams, or devise a neighborhood plan. And yet, DPH has known for months that the Mission needed more testing.
For the week ending October 19, the Citywide average remained 32 or or 3.6 cases per 100,000 residents.
Although DPH has been reporting 140 deaths for the last few days, new figures show the death toll hasn’t been that low since October 10. The death count has been rising and now DPH said it first reached 145 over a week ago. No comment, explanation, or demographic breakdown has been provided. That said, SF continues to have one of the lowest death rates per 100,000 residents in the country.
It seems three of the five new deaths were Latinx, and two were Asian. Because DPH death reports are delayed by over a week, and are expressed in percentages so I can’t be more precise.
While the model we use has raised its estimate of the San Francisco R number to 1.05, the ensemble of other models pegs the R number at .97. California’s R number, depending on the model you choose, ranges from .93 to 1.21. All models suggest the transmission rate has been increasing locally and statewide over the past month. That is not a good sign.
While the Covid Tracking Project estimates a 46 percent spike in Covid hospitalizations over the past month in the country, the number of confirmed and suspected Covid patients in SF hospitals remains relatively low. However, the rate of increase for confirmed cases jumped 21 percent over the past week which should be a cause for concern.