Marina shows city’s highest virus case rate

For most of San Francisco’s pandemic lifespan, coronavirus has most deeply impacted the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods — poorer communities with higher numbers of essential workers, and the most Black and Latino people. But December’s omicron surge has turned this trend on its head, infecting whiter, relatively young and more affluent neighborhoods at far higher rates.

The Chronicle analyzed data from the San Francisco Department of Public Health to look at how different neighborhoods’ case rates compared over the pandemic, up to Dec. 24, the most recent day with robust data available. As of that day, the Marina, Hayes Valley and Rus

“What omicron is gonna do is infect everybody who’s not vaccinated.”

George Rutherford, pediatrician and epidemiologist at UCSF

sian Hill neighborhoods had the highest case rates of any neighborhood in the city. The Marina and Russian Hill experienced 20% of their confirmed coronavirus cases in the last month alone. For the analysis, we used the neighborhood definitions created by the San Francisco Planning Commission.

All three of the neighborhoods with the highest case rates as of Dec. 24 are majority non-Hispanic white, and the Marina, with an estimated 74% of its residents listed as white, is the city’s whitest neighborhood — San Francisco’s overall white share of 39%. This represents a fundamental shift away from the neighborhoods that have historically borne the weight of COVID-19 in the city — the Bayview, Visitacion Valley and the Mission.

George Rutherford, a pediatrician and epidemiologist at UCSF, said the omicron-driven shift in coronavirus’ infection patterns is not surprising in the least.

In San Francisco, Rutherford noted, white residents have the lowest vaccination rate of any racial group (an estimated 70.5% of residents are fully inoculated, just a bit behind Black residents’ full vaccination rate of 71.1%). And 25-to-45-year-olds have the lowest vaccination rate of any age group, save 5-to-11-yearolds. San Franciscans who fit both of these demographic descriptions are clustered in affluent neighborhoods with lots of nightlife, like the Marina, Russian Hill and Hayes Valley. In all three of these neighborhoods, residents aged 25-44 made up over 50% of the estimated neighborhood population.

“What omicron is gonna do is infect everybody who’s not vaccinated,” Rutherford said. “It’s also gonna infect people around them. When you go to places that don’t have (vaccine) coverage, that’s where it’s gonna be.”

Sure enough, there is a strong relationship between a neighborhood’s share of white residents and its recent coronavirus case rates.

The relationship between a neighborhood’s share of residents aged 25-44 and its coronavirus case rate was similarly strong.

In addition to likely having lower vaccination rates than other neighborhoods, it’s possible that because neighborhoods like the Marina had lower case rates early in the pandemic, they have less acquired immunity to omicron now than neighborhoods with higher case rates early on, like the Bayview. That being said, omicron has done a better job evading peoples’ immunity from previous coronavirus infections than prior variants, according to recent research.

And while residents in affluent neighborhoods likely have greater access to coronavirus tests, which could potentially skew case rate comparisons, Rutherford said it probably isn’t. That’s because he believes many young people are testing themselves at home using rapid tests, whose results don’t get reported to the Department of Public Health. If a person doesn’t follow up their rapid test with a PCR test at a lab, he said, the department won’t count their case.

“If anything, you’re going to have underestimates in that population,” he said.

Still, omicron’s surge in affluent neighborhoods hasn’t yet fundamentally shifted the gravity of the pandemic’s impact overall. While neighborhoods like the Marina and Hayes Valley have had much higher case rates recently, Bayview Hunters Point, the neighborhood with the highest share of Black residents in the city, still has the highest case rate of any neighborhood overall.

The Bayview is followed by Visitacion Valley and the Mission. The Bayview (9% white) and Visitacion Valley (5%) have lower shares of white residents compared to S.F. as a whole. The Mission is 39% white, on par with the 39% overall San Francisco share.