S.F. joins counties sharing the data
City’s dashboard is first with ethnicity breakdown
San Francisco released a torrent of demographic data and other details about the city’s coronavirus outbreak on Tuesday, after repeated requests from residents and health care leaders for more complete information about who is being hit hardest by the disease.
Every county health department in the Bay Area except Alameda now publishes similar information, although only San Francisco breaks down cases by race and ethnicity. Alameda County public health officials said they planned to release more data on Wednesday.
While many applauded San Francisco for finally releasing more data, others said the city needs to go even further and disclose more specific
information to help the public understand how the coronavirus is affecting the city: daily COVID19 hospital admissions, the location of disease hot spots, how many health care workers have been infected, and demographic details of not only people who test positive, but those who have died.
“There is so much that is unknown,” said Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who had pushed the Department of Public Health for weeks to release the data. “But as everyone is clamoring for information ... this data will become more significant as we get more testing information.”
Dashboards are online portals meant to help people understand and visualize coronavirus outbreak data for their community. They usually include key numbers, such as case counts and deaths, in an easyaccess format. The California Department of Public Health’s dashboard provides statewide data.
But the level of detail provided by local public health departments differs widely from county to county. And much of the data reflects only confirmed cases, which many experts consider an unreliable indicator of the scope of the problem due to the shortage of tests and inconsistency in who receives them.
Another critique of the data released by the state and most counties has been the lack of demographic details, especially in light of reports that people of color are being infected by and dying of the coronavirus at higher rates than others.
The San Francisco data, though the first in the Bay Area to include breakdowns by race and ethnicity among those infected, has notable gaps. It provides no information for the nine people who have died of COVID19. And for more than a third of all those who have tested positive, the race and ethnicity are not known. Overall, 21% were white, 18% Hispanic, 13% Asian or Pacific Islander, and 4% black.
Contra Costa, Marin, San Mateo, Santa Clara and Sonoma counties release the age and sex of those infected, but no other demographic information; the state provides similar sex and age data. Solano County discloses age but not sex. Contra Costa and Napa are the only Bay Area counties that post case information by city.
Santa Clara County, hit the hardest by COVID19 in the region, posts comprehensive data, including hospitalizations and bed capacity over time, as well as the number of available ventilators and average testing turnaround time.
The San Francisco dashboard on Tuesday showed 622 COVID19 cases and nine deaths. Of those who tested positive, 56% were male and 43% were female. The gender was unknown for 2%. The city has not had cases among transgender residents.
Four Bay Area counties — Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara — provide age data that can be broken broadly into people under 40, people 40 to 59, and people 60 and older. Data from those counties suggest that older people are disproportionately affected by the coronavirus.
In San Francisco, 34% of the cases have been identified in people between 41 and 60, who make up about 26% of the total population, according to census data. The number of confirmed cases for people older than 60 was roughly equal to the population — 22%.
People from age 41 to 60 in Contra Costa, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties also are disproportionately testing positive for the virus. The three counties also had a high infection rate among people older than 60 — roughly 30% of the confirmed cases were in that age group, which makes up from 20% to 23% of the population in those counties.
San Francisco cases tend to skew younger than other places. Statewide, about half of people who test positive are under age 50; in San Francisco, 61% are 50 or younger.
While the San Francisco Department of Public Health has long had the data it finally released to the public Tuesday,
Peskin said officials may have held back from publishing it because they didn't want to cause more panic or give people false hope. Now, he said, this data will allow people to “draw their own conclusions.”
“Our numbers are continuing to rise,” he said. “So anyone who thinks that it is safe to go outside should have their head examined.”
San Francisco reported 39 new cases of COVID19 on Tuesday. The city’s case count has been climbing about 3% to 10% daily over the past week, which is a much slower pace than two or three weeks ago. But public health authorities are still concerned about a potential strain on the city’s health care system as the outbreak continues to grow.
The new dashboard reports that 5,645 people in San Francisco have been tested for the coronavirus. Testing numbers vary widely from day to day — the peak was 435 people on Friday, and 256 people were tested on Monday.
Heather Bollinger, an emergency room nurse at San Francisco General Hospital, said that while having this data is a good start, it would also be helpful to know how many of her colleagues on the front lines have contracted the virus. The Chronicle learned on Tuesday that three employees at the hospital tested positive for the virus — bringing the total to four infected staff members. No other details were provided on what departments the employees worked in.
The California Department of Public Health last week abruptly stopped releasing data on how many health care workers had contracted the virus. A few days later it reversed that decision under pressure from nurses and other providers. As of Monday, 269 health care workers had tested positive statewide.
San Francisco is not including that data in its dashboard, and Bollinger said San Francisco General Hospital is not giving nurses the information either.
“We are not being informed about our own staffing base, and we don’t know how our colleagues are faring,” she said.
Testing shortfalls mean that case counts provide an incomplete picture of how much disease there is in the community, public health experts said. The new dashboard also includes daily hospital counts for San Francisco, which experts said are better tools for measuring the pace of the outbreak.
The number of people hospitalized and in intensive care in San Francisco has been climbing steadily. There were 58 people hospitalized on March 28 and 83 a week later, on April 4, the most recent date on the the San Francisco dashboard. Of those 83 patients, 37 were in intensive care.
Dr. Steven Goodman, a professor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford University, said the newly released information, while “a step forward,” does not provide a clear picture of how the virus is spreading or how it is impacting the health care system.
“They still don’t present the real information we need, which is daily admissions, or new hospitalization,” Goodman said in an email. “We don’t know if an increase in five hospitalizations is 30 admissions and 25 discharges, or five admissions and no discharges, which tell a very different story.”