Weekly coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - week of May 23

Coronavirus cases in California rising fast, with some regions seeing infections double (LA Times)

Weekly coronavirus cases roughly doubled across wide swaths of California, including Riverside and Santa Barbara counties, as well as the Central Valley and Silicon Valley. They rose by roughly 85% in Orange, San Bernardino and Ventura counties.

Statewide, the increase was 63%, bringing the case rate to 231 for every 100,000 residents. A rate of 100 and above is considered a high rate of transmission.

Hospitalization rates, while increasing for the last four weeks, remain low. Hospitals in two of California’s most populous regions, L.A. County and the San Francisco Bay Area, are not under strain, and the rate of new weekly coronavirus-positive hospitalizations has remained at only a fraction of the number seen in New York and some other East Coast cities.

California officials remain hopeful that a relatively robust effort to get residents to take booster shots plus suggestions to wear masks and get tested frequently can help the state avoid the kind of intense surge those cities have experienced.

[...]

The San Francisco Bay Area is currently home to California’s worst coronavirus case rate. The region is likely being hit hard with new infections now because of the “latest supercharged transmissible variant,” whose contagiousness is approaching that of measles, one of the most readily transmitted diseases for humans, Chin-Hong [UC San Francisco] said in a briefing he gave to campus staff Friday.

Another factor behind the soaring case rates could be that a relatively large number of people in the Bay Area have not been exposed to the coronavirus until this point of the pandemic because of the region’s intensive efforts to keep the virus at bay.

Dr. Robert Kosnik, director of UC San Francisco’s occupational health program, said at the briefing that he expects coronavirus cases to continue going up for at least the next couple of weeks.

[...]

The latest surge has been so disruptive that the Berkeley public school system has “only been able to fill about 50% of our teacher absences with substitute teachers,” the school district said in a statement. That has forced administrators to help out in classrooms.

Berkeley schools announced Friday a new order to reinstate an indoor mask mandate for students and staff for the remainder of the school year, effective Monday, including indoor graduations.

UC San Francisco is beginning to require universal masking at all large events with 100 or more attendees.

San Francisco had the highest case rate this past week of any California county: 460 for every 100,000 residents. The Bay Area overall is reporting 369 cases per 100,000.

Note: that is per week, which makes it seems 7x higher than the 7-day averages I normally post. We aren't seeing Omicron levels of infections in the official numbers. (On the other hand, keep in mind that estimates of covid infections are far higher - a lot of people are taking home tests, which aren't counted.)

Here's another look at this week's US statistics. (I skipped last week because I thought Your Local Epidemiologist covered it, and because I'm getting increasingly wary of official statistics.)

Cases

Looking at the Washington Post (John Hopkins) statistics, US Cases are up another 21% to 33 per 100k. It's been a steady rise for a month and a half, in which time cases about tripled from the low point. (However, estimates of case counts are much higher. These numbers don't include home tests.)

At the "state" level, the four places listed as having the highest case rate have an island theme: Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Rhode Island, and Hawaii. The places that jump out as increasing a lot are Hawaii, New Hampshire, Washington State, Virginia, and California, which went up 70% to 37 per 100k. (See the LA Times story I posted separately.)

Hospitalizations

US up 4% to 7.4 per 100k. This looks about doubled from the low point in early April. East coast states (and Puerto Rico) at the top of the list. New York State down 26% to 11 per 100k. (NYC is rising though.) California +19% to 5.5 per 100k.

Deaths

US +4% to 0.093, or 309 per day. It's been pretty steady for more than a month now.