COVID-19 cases have declined in San Francisco for more than a week, and while experts are highly encouraged by the decrease, they're hesitant to say the recent surge driven by the highly contagious delta variant has hit its peak.
The city's seven-day rolling average fell from a high of 282 cases per day Aug. 1 to 203 per day Aug. 10, according to the city's COVID dashboard. The city hasn't calculated the average for the past week as they're still processing and validating test results.
This graphic from the San Francisco Department of Public Health shows the seven-day rolling average new cases per day in S.F.
SFDPHDr. Grant Colfax, San Francisco's director of health, called the numbers a hopeful sign and said the decrease may be a result of increased precautions, including limiting higher risk activities and mandating indoor masking in most situations.
"While the decreased rates are a hopeful sign, it [is] too early to conclude that the fourth surge has peaked or plateaued, and hospitalizations generally peak two weeks after the cases," Colfax said in an email statement to SFGATE. "Into the foreseeable future, we need to take common sense measures around vaccinations, masking and testing to slow the spread of COVID because we know we will be living with this virus for a long time."
The number of COVID patients hospitalized in San Francisco is still climbing, though the upward trend appears to be slowing, according to the dashboard. Hospitalizations lag behind cases. The total number of COVID patients in S.F. hospitals was 115 on Aug. 14, compared with 97 on Aug. 1 and 11 on July 1.
This graphic from the San Francisco Department of Public Health shows the total hospitalized COVID-19 cases in S.F.
SFDPHDr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at UCSF, pointed to the state data tracking San Francisco's positivity rate — the percentage of people who test positive for the virus of all of individuals who are tested — as another silver lining in a long, gruelling pandemic.
"The state’s dashboard shows a drop in the proportion of tests positive from a high of 5.6% in this surge to 4.0% today," Rutherford wrote in an email Monday night. "Per the state website, hospitalizations may be leveling too (based on a one-day trend!), and first-time vaccinations are increasing. I’d say that’s all good news. Bottom line, things are going in the right direction but it’s a little too early to call it."
(The seven-day positivity rate was 3.9% on Tuesday, according to state data.)
In San Francisco, 79% of eligible residents have completed a vaccine series and the city issued an indoor mask mandate early this month, and experts said both are helping fight the surge.
"I think that the combination of having a large percentage of the city vaccinated as well as re-introduction of indoor masking — which we know is likely to have a much bigger effect than outdoor masking — means that we can expect cases to start going down once more," Dr. Abraar Karan, a fellow in the division of infectious diseases and geographic medicine at Stanford, wrote in an email. "What will determine what comes next is how quickly we can close the remaining vaccine gap here while we keep up other measures like masks."
Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at UCSF, sees hope in what recently unfolded in the United Kingdom, where a delta surge peaked earlier this summer before cases plummeted. India also saw a similar pattern in its delta surge.
"This could be an early sign that our delta wave is abating as predicted by several models watching decreasing cases in the UK," Gandhi shared in an email. "Of note, delta does lead to a lot of immunity in both vaccinated (boost) and unvaccinated which can bring down cases."
While the delta surges have been fast-on and fast-off in some other countries, Dr. Anne Liu, an infectious disease expert with Stanford, wrote in an email, "I don't really know why it has been fast-off in some places, except that maybe it scares people into returning to the precautions they were taking before (masking, etc.). I don't have a good reason to think it will be fast-off in the U.S., unless delta gets people to go get vaccinated and put masks back on. "
Liu said many factors are at play impacting the course of the pandemic, including "the vagaries of human behavior and how much more tolerance folks have for masking and reducing their contacts, how much delta has already worked its way through unvaccinated groups, and how much vaccinated people have the capacity to transmit with breakthrough infections."
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