There’s no relief for Bay Area counties on the COVID-19 front as the state’s latest numbers show new cases and hospitalizations driven by coronavirus subvariants continuing their run. steady ascent.
The Bay Area reported about 42 daily new cases per 100,000 people on Tuesday, up from 35 a week ago. Eight of the region’s nine counties are among those with the highest infection rates in California, with San Francisco reporting 54 daily cases per 100,000 people. Health officials say the true number of infections is likely much higher due to people testing at home or not getting tested at all.
The rising number of cases in the Bay Area came on the same day that the U.S. COVID death toll officially topped 1 million, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
The number of people hospitalized in the city with COVID-19 rose to 76, from 61 last week. Across the Bay Area, there were 456 people with COVID in hospitals, a number that has been rising steadily since a lull in mid-April. Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, San Mateo and Marin counties all saw substantial increases during this period.
San Francisco’s positive coronavirus test rate is now 11%. That’s more than double California’s overall rate of 5%, which is the threshold infectious disease experts consider acceptable for controlling the spread of the virus and represents a dramatic increase from the low of 2.4% at which the city sank after the winter thrust of omicron.
Dr. Susan Philip, San Francisco’s chief health officer, told The Chronicle last week that it’s unclear why the Bay Area is seeing significantly higher case rates than the rest of the state. , although officials think it could have to do with more infectious variants or more levels of testing.
San Francisco public school students and staff reported 320 cases of coronavirus last week, including 303 exposures where those infected were on a school site within 48 hours of showing symptoms or testing positive for the virus. coronavirus. This is the highest figure since late January, when omicron’s mid-winter surge ended. It also marks a 15% increase in cases in schools compared to the previous week.
On Friday, health workers across the Bay Area issued a joint statement strongly urging but not requiring residents to mask up indoors again amid the surge in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.
Since then, public health officials in New York, Los Angeles County and other parts of the country have issued similar recommendations.
The BA.2 subvariant of the omicron coronavirus variant is being ousted by its BA.2.12.1 sublineage, which accounted for 47.5% of new cases in the United States last week, according to genomic sequencing from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. BA.2 accounted for the other half of last week’s cases, down from its proportion of nearly 60% the previous week.
The hypertransmissible BA.2.12.1 is thought to be behind the wave of cases causing a sharp rise in infections in the Bay Area and other parts of the United States. Each new subvariant is 20-30% more contagious than its parent, experts say.
Two more subvariants – BA.4 and BA.5 – are on the horizon, fueling outbreaks in other parts of the world and showing signs of increased ability to evade immunity. They were recently labeled “variants of concern” by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.
“The bunk that the cases are not large is nonsense,” wrote Dr. Eric Topol, executive vice president of Scripps Research, in an analysis of the virus variants. “These are infections that lead to more cases, they lead to long COVIDs, they lead to illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths.”
More than 90,000 people in California have died from COVID-19 since the pandemic began, with the state reporting an average of 40 new deaths per day for the past six weeks.
Deaths, a lagging indicator of pandemic trends, have leveled off in the Bay Area since the outbreak, in part due to increased access to treatments such as the antiviral pill Paxlovid, which is now available in most pharmacies. The numbers are now a far cry from the deaths and devastation documented in the first two years of the pandemic.
Aidin Vaziri (he/him) is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: avaziri@sfchronicle.com