Latest Bay Area COVID-19 surge comes as fewer report test results
BURLINGAME – The Bay Area is in the midst of another COVID-19 surge. But since most people are testing at home and don't report results, a case count may no longer be the best way to measure how much of the virus is in the community anymore.
"This is a major surge we're in right now," said Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at UCSF. "We have a lot of cases, a lot of transmission, not a great lock on what the numbers are in reality."
Self-test kits primarily have upsides, said Rutherford, but there is one downside now: it's tough to get a true look at case counts.
"It's not as high as it was in January and December earlier this year and last year, but I think it's close to that high. It may be 65%, 70% of that height," he said. "I think we have to really look at the wastewater surveillance to get a real understanding of the magnitude of this current surge."
Marin County and Sonoma County have online portals for people to report their home-test results. But across the Bay Area, most people don't report the results to their county or the state.
"It's big, there's no two ways about that. I can't tell you exactly what it is, but it's big," Rutherford said. "We have wastewater surveillance, we have hospitalizations, we have all sorts of other stuff we can look at."
Andy Helgesen, from Burlingame, just got over a bout with COVID-19.
"It's been a little over two weeks now. I'm mostly better, but my lungs still are a bit tight," he said.
Helgesen doesn't know for sure where he picked it up.
"The only places I was around people, around the window of when I would have gotten it, were outside," he said, noting he recently attended an outdoor concert and a rally.
Some infectious disease experts, like Rutherford, said the new BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants are more transmissible and immune evasive than prior variants – so they recommend people wear masks indoors and in crowded outdoor settings.
"Think of a large outdoor concert where everyone is on top of each other, something like that, I think the better part of valor especially if you have risk factors for more severe disease, would be to wear a mask," Rutherford said. "This disease is very prevalent right now. There's a lot of it around. When you walk into a room with 100 people in it, there's bound to be a couple people right then in that room who are infectious."
"Even though it feels a little frustrating, I can see why wearing a mask outside right now wouldn't be a terrible idea," Helgesen said.