There’s no relief for Bay Area counties on the COVID-19 front, as the latest numbers from the state show new cases and hospitalizations driven by subvariants of the coronavirus continuing their steady climb.
The Bay Area reported about 42 new daily cases per 100,000 residents on Tuesday, up from 35 a week ago. Eight of the nine counties in the region are among those that have the highest infection rate in California, with San Francisco reporting 54 daily cases per 100,000 residents. Health officials say the actual number of infections is probably much higher because of people testing at home or not getting tested at all.
The rising count of Bay Area cases came on the same day that the death toll from COVID in the U.S. officially topped 1 million, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
The number of people hospitalized in the city with COVID-19 climbed to 76, up from 61 last week. Across the Bay Area, there were 456 people with COVID in hospitals, a number that has steadily been rising since a lull in mid-April. Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, San Mateo and Marin counties have all seen substantial increases during that time.
San Francisco’s coronavirus positive test rate is now at 11%. That’s more than twice 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 over the low of 2.4% the city sank to after the winter omicron surge.
Dr. Susan Philip, San Francisco’s health officer, told The Chronicle last week that it’s not clear why the Bay Area is experiencing substantially higher case rates than the rest of the state, though officials think it might have to do with more infectious variants or higher levels of testing.
San Francisco public school students and staff reported 320 coronavirus cases last week, including 303 exposures where those infected were on a school site within 48 hours of showing symptoms or testing positive for the coronavirus. That is the highest figure since late January, at the tail end of the midwinter omicron surge. It also marks a 15% increase in cases at schools from the previous week.
On Friday, health officers from around the Bay Area issued a joint statement strongly urging but not requiring that residents once again mask up indoors amid the swell of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.
Since then, public health officials in New York City, Los Angeles County and other parts of the nation have released similar recommendations.
The BA.2 subvariant of the omicron coronavirus variant is being crowded out by its sublineage BA.2.12.1, which accounted for 47.5% of new cases in the U.S. last week, according to genomic sequencing by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. BA.2 made up the other half of last week’s cases, a drop from its nearly 60% proportion the previous week.
The hyper-transmissible BA.2.12.1 is believed to be behind the swell of cases causing a sharp uptick of infections in the Bay Area and other U.S. regions. Each new subvariant is 20% to 30% more infectious than its parent, experts say.
Two other subvariants — BA.4 and BA.5 — are looming 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 Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
“The bunk that cases are not important is preposterous,” Dr. Eric Topol, executive vice president of Scripps Research, wrote in an analysis of virus variants. “They are infections that beget more cases, they beget long COVID, they beget sickness, hospitalizations and deaths.”
More than 90,000 people in California have died from COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, with the state reporting an average of 40 new deaths a day for the past six weeks.
Deaths, a lagging indicator of pandemic trends, have leveled off in the Bay Area since the surge, in part because of increased access to treatments such as the antiviral pill Paxlovid, which is now available at most pharmacies. The figures now are a far cry from the death and devastation documented during the first two years of the pandemic.
Aidin Vaziri (he/him) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: avaziri@sfchronicle.com
