New COVID Cases Among State's Highest As San Francisco Slowly Returns To Normal
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) -- Workers are returning to offices, restaurants are crowded and tourists once again are flocking to Fisherman's Wharf and other popular destinations, life in San Francisco is beginning to feel normal again after two years of pandemic.
But as mandatory mask requirements have expired, health officials are still monitoring new COVID cases.
While still far below the numbers of the darkest days of the pandemic and its delta and omicron surges, San Francisco's new case numbers remain among the highest in the state. San Francisco's 17-day average is 14 new cases per 100,000 residents, but medical experts say perspective is important.
"If you walk around San Francisco like I have, there are tons of people from all over the country and the world," said UCSF Infectious Disease Specialist Dr. Peter Chin-Hong. "It's like it's back in 2019. So I think that's part of the reason. We were 18,000 cases a day in the Bay Area, and now we're down to 200. So that really is where we are. And if cases are going up, they're going up very very slowly, if at all."
After more than two months of steep decline, daily average case rates across the Bay Area have leveled out, but a more important metric -- hospitalizations -- is still encouraging.
"Zero people in the hospital at my hospital where I work and 5 up at UCSF with three called incidental," UCSF Professor of Medicine Dr. Monica Gandhi. "They're there with COVID, but not for COVID. So were keeping the rates of disease very low in the city."
Two new variants of the coronavirus have emerged over the last few months. Omicron subvariant BA.2 is now the most dominant cause of new infections across the country. A new variant -- XE -- was identified in the United Kingdom this week.
A Public Policy Institute of California poll recently revealed that most Californians believe the worst of the pandemic is over, but a majority of those asked think some controls may still be needed to keep the virus at bay.