Has Bay Area’s summer COVID-19 infection wave crested? Several experts say they feel ‘optimistic’ as new cases decline
The summer spike of COVID-19 infections driven by the highly contagious delta variant may have hit its peak in the Bay Area and even California as a whole.
Average daily reported new cases in the Bay Area and Los Angeles region appear to be leveling off, and a closely watched model at the University of Washington indicates the state is turning the corner away from a July
surge in cases that spurred renewed mask mandates and vaccine requirements across the state.
“I think for California, it really does look like we’re hitting the crest,” said Dr. John Swartzberg, clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. “Right now, I’m feeling really optimistic.”
The hopeful news comes at a significant turning point in the battle against the virus, with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granting its first full approval of a vaccine for the Pfizer shot in people ages 16 and older, a longawaited step expected to convince more people the shots are safe.
In the Bay Area, several of the most populous counties are indicating a leveling off or even slight decline of new infections, including San Francisco, Contra Costa, Alameda and Marin. There are similar positive signs in Los Angeles County.
Several Bay Area health officials were cautiously optimistic Monday.
“I do think it’s real,” Marin County Public Health Officer Dr. Matt Willis said. “I think we are seeing a plateau in our cases.”
Alameda County Public Health Department information manager Neetu Balram said they are seeing a similar pattern.
“We are not seeing increases in our average daily reported case numbers,” Balram said, adding that hospitalizations too have decreased.
In Contra Costa County, health services spokesman Will Harper said, “There are indications that the latest surge is leveling off — case rates are down slightly, for instance.”
County health department data provided to this news organization show the 14-day rate of daily new cases per 100,000 people among the nine Bay Area counties reached a low this year of 0.13 on July 4, then rose sharply to 25.25 by Aug. 14, a rate not seen since the deadly winter surge in early February. But it hasn’t been that high since and was 21.2 Monday.
Statewide, the 14-day average rate of daily new cases per 100,000 also hit its lowest mark this year on July 4 at 1.77, then quickly climbed as delta infections spread to a high of 32.37 by Aug. 14, also not seen since early February. The statewide rate too hasn’t returned to that level and was 29.11 Monday.
Even so, not every Bay Area county is seeing firm indications of a turnaround.
“I like to try and see it, because I really want it to be so,” said Santa Clara County Health Officer Dr. Sara Cody. “I can’t tell you we are there yet.”
Cody, Balram and Harper all cited concerns about reporting issues with one of the larger testing labs — Cody said it has to do with uploading COVID-19 test data from Kaiser Permanente to the state’s database — that may be keeping a number of new infections from showing up in the data. Harper said more people also are doing unreported at-home testing, which may skew the case numbers. And Balram added that “we do not know the full impact of school reopening yet.”
But there are other signals the region and the state as a whole have seen the worst of the delta variant.
A widely followed model at the University of Washington projecting the course of the pandemic indicates California is among several states that have seen their summer case spikes peak. Ali Mokdad, professor at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which developed the model, said it showed California reaching its most recent peak of projected daily cases Monday. Assuming another highly transmissible and vaccineresistant variant doesn’t emerge, cases should decline through November, he said.
The reason behind the leveling off of the summer surge is that a combination of people have either been vaccinated or recovered from COVID-19, which is leaving fewer people for the virus to infect, Mokdad said.
“It’s like a fire running out of wood,” he said.
Nationally, some states that had been hit hard by the delta wave over the summer, including Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana, appear to have peaked as well, as the University of Washington model had predicted two weeks ago. Many states and the country as a whole should see reported cases peak in the next two to three weeks.
But President Joe Biden continued to urge caution on Monday.
“While we’re starting to see initial signs that cases may be declining in a few places, nationwide cases are still rising, especially among the unvaccinated,” Biden said.
Willis said data show that California counties with higher vaccination rates are seeing more encouraging case numbers than counties with lower vaccination rates.
If the region and state have truly turned the corner, will it be for good this time?
“The nature of this pandemic is that it does rise and fall. It’s not like it just goes up and stays up,” Swartzberg said. “The problem we’ve had is that as we’ve watched it fall, we’ve let go of our precautions too soon. Now if we can just sustain our care, by using non-pharmaceutical interventions and getting more people vaccinated, we can bring these numbers way down again, and can control it better.”