up, S. F. freezes reopening
Hospitalizations from coronavirus also on the rise as signs of nation’s surge start to show in Bay Area
San Francisco is pausing its reopening plans due to increasing coronavirus cases and hospitalizations, early signs that the surge that has swept over most of the United States is starting to spill into the Bay Area.
Almost all activities that were scheduled to reopen or expand capacity on Tuesday are now delayed, city and public health officials said Friday. That includes indoor swimming pools, bowling alleys and gym locker rooms. Restaurants and places of worship must remain at 25% capacity instead of bumping up to 50%, as previously planned.
Schools are not affected by the pause and will be allowed to reopen with approval from the Public Health Department.
San Francisco Unified has not set a date to reopen or applied for approval.
San Francisco’s case and hospitalization numbers are still very low, but they have ticked up over the past two weeks. Average daily new cases climbed from about 3 cases per 100,000 residents to 4 per 100,000. The number of people hospitalized for CO Cases
VID19 increased from a low of 21 on Oct. 15 to 37 as of Wednesday.
With cases spiking in parts of California and given the massive wave of infections and hospitalizations swelling in most other states, city officials said they need to be careful about lifting more local restrictions and leaving San Francisco vulnerable to a local surge that could overwhelm hospitals.
“San Francisco is fortunate that our numbers are low, but we can’t wait until our numbers are so high that we can’t slow the spread,” said Dr. Grant Colfax, director of the San Francisco Department of Public Health. “By the time you get high numbers the systems are overwhelmed, as we saw in New York in the spring, in Arizona this summer and the Midwest right now.
“There’s not cause for undue alarm at this point, but we are concerned about the increase. Given what we’re seeing in the rest of the country and our local data, we think that the right thing to do is take a pause,” he said.
San Francisco has fared better than almost any county in the state in almost all metrics of the pandemic. It was the first large county in the state to move into the least restrictive yellow tier, on Oct. 20. But San Francisco continued to reopen at a slow pace. Cities can choose to reopen more slowly than state guidelines allow.
Colfax said he and other city officials will reevaluate the local numbers in a couple of weeks and consider then if it’s safe to reopen or expand activities.
Striking a balance between keeping transmission of the virus under control while allowing for economic recovery is a constant source of tension for public health and city and economic leaders. Thousands of businesses already have closed permanently, and residents are suffering from job losses and financial setbacks.
But city officials have maintained that getting the economy back on track requires keeping the pandemic at bay as much as possible. The worstcase scenario, they say, would be to allow cases to spike to such a degree that the city was forced to reverse course and largely shut down all over again.
“We know that the more we open, the more people are moving around, the more possibility there could be spread,” Mayor London Breed said in a Friday news conference. “The last thing we want to do is go backwards. The last thing we want to do is tell a business or school that they can open and then tell them they have to close.”
Indeed, a few places in the U. S. and other parts of the world have reinstituted lockdowns and other protective measures when local cases spiked. El Paso County in Texas issued a new, twoweek shelterinplace order last week, and on Friday, Chicago abruptly halted indoor dining. France and Germany this week ordered new shutdowns.
The United States reported a record 91,000 new coronavirus cases on Thursday and most states, but particularly those in the Midwest, are reporting explosive growth in local outbreaks. California cases have started to climb, too, particularly in several Southern California counties including Los Angeles.
Statewide, average daily cases have increased about 38% since Oct. 15, from about 8 cases per 100,000 residents to 11 per 100,000. Hospitalizations topped 2,400 on Thursday, the most since Sept. 24.
“We’re seeing hot spots literally throughout the entire country,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Friday at a virtual forum hosted by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. “We’re breaking records.”
Fauci said the country may soon hit 100,000 new cases a day — a concern he previously voiced to a Senate committee during the summer. “I was blasted for that because they were saying I was being too alarmist. We’re getting close to that right now,” he said.
The Bay Area also is trending up in new cases, and hospitalizations have started to tick up, as well. Two counties — Solano and Napa — are at risk of moving to more restrictive tiers in the state’s reopening plan after reporting troubling rates of new cases this week, mostly due to unauthorized social gatherings.
Raising added concern are Halloween and election day — two events that could tempt people to come together and flout socialdistancing recommendations. Breed and Colfax on Friday advised San Francisco residents to stay home and avoid gettogethers over the next few days and for other upcoming occasions, including Thanksgiving and other holidays.
“We can celebrate in person safely and hug our loved ones next year,” Colfax said.
San Francisco’s metrics remain much lower than most of the state’s. Hospitals are all well below capacity, and people with COVID19 make up only about 3% of all intensive care patients. San Francisco has the lowest fatality rate and the lowest positive test rate of any large city in the U. S. Currently about .89% of all tests are coming back positive, Colfax said.
The decision to pause reopening follows a pattern — San Francisco did the same in July, when it halted plans to allow restaurants to open indoors as cases and hospitalizations surged. The goal is to slow down transmission and prevent an outbreak from spiraling out of control, city officials said.
San Francisco restaurant owners are “disappointed” at the delay in expanding capacity, said Laurie Thomas, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association. But they understand the need to pause now and hopefully prevent new lockdowns, she said.
“Anybody who’s been watching Germany and Paris and Chicago is not surprised by this. This is why I was supportive” of the reopening pause in San Francisco, she said. “We don’t want to go backwards. We don’t want to blindly move forward and then get to a point where they say we have to close the restaurants now. That would be devastating.”
The city had hoped to allow bars that do not serve food to open in outdoor settings in midNovember, but Colfax said that tentative plan has been paused, too.
“The next couple of weeks will be really important to watch,” he said.