Coronavirus infections trended up in the Bay Area for the week ending Friday, with the average number of daily new cases at 475, up 8.7% from the prior week ending March 26.
The data could indicate that California is beginning to fall in line with the rest of the United States, where coronavirus infections have steadily plateaued or increased due to more infectious variants.
“On the West Coast, we see a leveling off,” which is not a bad thing, said Dr. George Rutherford, an infectious disease expert at UCSF. “We may go back up a little bit. We may hit bottom and bounce up a little bit.”
This is the fourth straight week of rising cases nationwide, according to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We know that these increases are due, in part, to more highly transmissible variants, which we are very closely monitoring,” Walensky said at a White House news briefing on Monday.
She said young people are driving the latest uptick in infections, as the increasing rate of vaccination in older Americans is preventing the most serious cases among that group.
Walensky said the agency is watching several outbreaks tied to youth sports and extracurriculars, and urged caution in resuming high-risk activities too soon.
“I understand that people are tired and that they are ready for this pandemic to be over, as am I,” she said. “Please, continue to hang in there, and to continue to do things that we know prevent the spread of the virus.”
In the first week of this year, before a steady downturn began, an average of 4,500 cases was reported in the Bay Area each day. Weekly COVID-19 deaths averaged 78 for the week ending April 4, down from 113 reported the previous week.
But as the region has moved closer to another tragic milestone of 6,000 deaths linked to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, some public health experts worry that new cases could pause positive trends in hospitalizations and deaths. Again, the high numbers of older people who now are vaccinated conceivably could keep those numbers from rising as steeply as in pre-vaccine times.
The average number of virus-related deaths reported across California fell from 200 per day on March 28 to 120 on Sunday. And hospitalizations for COVID-19 are at their lowest level in more than a year: about 2,000 COVID-19 patients and 500 in intensive care, a huge drop from early January when those numbers were approaching 22,000 and 4,900, respectively.
As of Monday midday, the cumulative death toll in the Bay Area stood at 5,957, data reviewed by The Chronicle showed. Across California, the pandemic has taken 59,293 lives. Nationally, 555,000 have died from COVID-19, according to tracking by Johns Hopkins University.
“It’s fair to say that we are having a surge in parts of the United States right now,” said John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. “Call it a swell if we want, but it’s a marked uptick in cases, with Michigan being the poster child. The real variable is going to be how much immunity we have in different parts of the country to withstand the spillover from states that have a problem.”
He said he feels optimistic about California’s ability to evade a serious national surge, based in part on large swaths of the state likely having a high degree of immunity from previous infection or vaccination.
“I’m not sure which direction California is going to go, but we are in very good shape right now,” Swartzberg said.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said on Friday it is preparing to retire the state’s color-coded, tiered reopening system as vaccination rates improve and coronavirus cases continue to drop.
Swartzberg said he would prefer that public health officials in California delay further reopening for another month.
The state plans to open vaccine access to everyone 16 and older in less than two weeks as supply improves.
“My policy for this month would not be opening up like we’re doing. I think we’re making a terrible mistake,” he said. “Just for this month, if we drag our feet, we can keep California in a very good place in the pandemic. But maybe the public policy folks are right and we can get away with it.”
California announced a plan in early March tying the number of vaccinations in low-income communities to an accelerated reopening system. The tier assignments already were loosened once, when the state reached 2 million vaccinations in those communities. They will be further loosened when the state hits 4 million vaccinations.
As of Monday afternoon, the state was at 3.96 million vaccinations in low-income communities. Once it hits the 4 million target, Bay Area counties could quickly resume activities like indoor dining, concerts, gatherings, professional sports and other activities that were considered too high-risk for the past year.
“We have to be mindful of what might have happened yesterday at Easter, with family gatherings. And we have to be mindful of what’s going on with rapid reopenings,” Rutherford said. “I’m still fairly confident we’ll avoid another surge in the West. People by and large have gotten the message. And we’re vaccinating at a pretty rapid clip.”
There is also concern that variants could also have an impact on reversing the Bay Area’s progress.
On Sunday, the Stanford Clinical Virology Lab identified and confirmed one case of an emerging variant that originated in India, said Lisa Kim, a spokesperson for Stanford Health Care.
The variant is dubbed the “double mutant” because it carries two mutations in the virus that help it latch onto cells. It could be responsible for the troubling new surge in cases in India, with the nation on Monday reporting its biggest single-day spike, more than 103,000 confirmed cases, since the pandemic began. That topped the previous daily peak of nearly 98,000 cases recorded in late September. India’s death toll is 165,101.
Kim said it is not yet known if the variant is more infectious or resistant to vaccine antibodies than the initial coronavirus. Stanford is screening seven other presumptive cases; the location of the confirmed variant-infected person was not disclosed.
The latest discovery adds to the list of worrisome variants that have made their way to the U.S., including the widely spreading B.1.1.7 variant, which is 50% more infectious. The P.1 strain that originated in Brazil and a variant from South Africa have both been found in the Bay Area, and both are believed to be somewhat resistant to vaccines.
Chronicle staff writer Michael Massa contributed to this report.
Aidin Vaziri and Erin Allday are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: avaziri@sfchronicle.com, eallday@sfchronicle.com
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