A new study found that about 16% of people who died from COVID-19 in the first two years of the pandemic weren’t counted in the official US tally, totalling about 155,000. This is on top of the 840,000 officially reported deaths, as many of these died outside of hospitals.

As the Associated Press and Fox LiveNow report, a new study published in the journal Science Advances has found that COVID-19 deaths in the United States were significantly undercounted in the first two years of the pandemic. The study, which used artificial intelligence to analyze mortality data, suggested about 16% of COVID-19 deaths during that period went unrecognized.

This translates to roughly 155,000 additional deaths beyond the 840,000 that were officially recorded in 2020 and 2021. Over the past six years, the report shows, there have been a total of 1.2 million COVID-19 deaths in the US.

The uncounted deaths disproportionately involved Hispanic people and other communities of color, particularly in states like Alabama, Oklahoma, and South Carolina, as the AP reports, as many died at home and were never counted in hospital death tolls.

In some areas, according to the report, elected coroners handle death investigations rather than medical examiners, but they often lack specialized training, which can affect how causes of death are determined.

Political views may have also influenced whether individuals sought testing, the reports suggests, and some coroners reported receiving pressure from families to keep COVID-19 off their loved ones' death certificates.

"Our antiquated death investigation system is one key reason why we fell short of accurate counts, particularly outside of big metropolitan areas," said Andrew Stokes of Boston University, the senior author on the paper.

Steven Woolf, a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher, told LiveNow that barriers remain for the same people now as they did six years ago.

"People on the margins continue to die at disproportionate rates because they can’t access care," he said.

Image: Ergin Yalcin/Getty Images

• Major food brands are introducing products free of artificial dyes and flavors — including Cheetos and Doritos — alongside their original technicolor-hued varieties, thanks to a push from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but doctors stress that the real danger in processed foods is the salt, sugar, and fat content. [CBS News]
• Jodi Smith, a teacher from Minnesota who recently moved to San Jose for a new job at Oak Grove School District received quite a shock when a mix-up with her background check labeled her as a convict, resulting in the immediate loss of her job. [KGO]

Image: Leanne Maxwell/SFist

A husband and wife who ran a now defunct SF Financial District lunch spot have been indicted by the feds for improperly using pandemic relief funds for personal expenses, and allegedly laundering a large portion of the money through house flips.

Raouf Bouzidi and Marwa Tebassi were the owners of Chez BeeSen at 200 Pine Street, a cafe that specialized organic salads and made-to-order paninis, which has since closed (it seems to have formerly also had the name Chez Fayala). According to a federal indictment obtained by the Chronicle, filed this week, Bouzidi and Tebassi collected over $1.2 million in federal pandemic aid for their business, but used it to buy a car and expensive Marin County homes instead.

Per the indictment, the couple received a $775,000 grant from the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, as well as a $500,000 loan through the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program.

It seems they had a scheme to profit from having all this capital at once, and the feds say that Tebassi very quickly purchased a house in Sausalito for $957,000, turning around and selling it four months later, in March 2022, for $1.4 million, depositing the funds in her personal account.

Soon after that, Tebassi completed another successful flip in Novato, purchasing a home for $1.1 million and selling it in November 2022 for $1.4 million.

As anyone who watches house-flipping shows knows, this likely wasn't all profit, after the cost to add or renovate bathrooms and kitchens. But it likely represents a decent profit.

The couple reportedly received the Restaurant Revitalization grant in May 2021, and soon after Bouzidi bought a $55,000 Mercedes-Benz.

While the indictment is new, the case dates back to November 2022, when the feds swooped in and seized $53,000 from the restaurant's bank account, and $1.2 million from Tebassi's bank account.

If convicted, the couple could be looking at an additional $1.2 million fine, the feds note.

Previously: California Man Gets 11 Years In Federal Clink For $27 Million PPP Loan Fraud Scheme

Y'all are still sitting home, watching Hulu, and feeding your sourdough starters like it's May 2020 — or at least some of you are. And some new data shows that while spending on restaurants and entertainment has fully rebounded from the pandemic in other parts of the country, it still hasn't in SF.

Here's another data point to add to "doom loop" narratives, but one we can actually all do something about: Spending on things like groceries, retail shopping, and healthcare — essentially, "self-care" spending — is basically back to where it was in the before times in our fair city; but spending on going out is still down about 15%.

This is according to TracktheRecovery.org, which has tracked credit and debit card transactions by category so that we can compare, say, May 2023 to January 2020. From their data, we see that Californians as a whole are just barely spending more overall than they were in 2020 — overall consumer spending is up 3% in those three years — while elsewhere, like across the eastern seaboard, spending is up by much larger figures like 24.8% (New York), 33.8% (New Jersey), and 36% (Vermont).

The Chronicle pulled out the San Francisco-specific data today and found that spending by residents here on things like restaurants, hotels, transportation, and entertainment are all still significantly below pre-pandemic levels — between 15% and 20% in recent weeks. While spending on groceries is up about 5%, which indicates that much more staying at home — and/or it just indicates what inflation has done to grocery prices. Spending on retail in general is just about what it was in January 2020 for San Francisco, the data shows.

"What jumps out at me is that people continue to avoid other people,” says Berkeley economics professor Ross Levine, speaking to the Chronicle. "There has been a shift away from engaging with other people."

There were a couple of good weeks for restaurants in the last six months in SF, the data shows — spending was up around Valentine's Day week, for instance, and again in mid-April. And things appeared to be improving the first week of June from May, but grocery spending was still up almost 13% while restaurant spending was down by almost the same amount.

Local bar and restaurant owners have been lamenting about this fact for at least a year now, saying that business had yet to recover back to what it was. And now we have broad-scale data to prove it.

Ted Egan, the chief economist in San Francisco’s Office of the Controller, wasn't so optimistic about the restaurant recovery, and his prediction was perhaps right that 2023 was probably too optimistic a timeframe for a full rebound.

And another huge reason why consumer spending is down in SF is what has been cited for many months regarding downtown being a ghost town — everyone is working from home. That means a huge swath of downtown businesses aren't seeing the foot traffic they did in 2019, and people generally aren't spending money on lunches or happy hours like they did when they were in an office.

But people are still going out to dinner in decent numbers, especially close to home.

Laurie Thomas, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, told SFGate last spring that the recovery would take much longer than a year. And, she added, "Neighborhood restaurants have a much better chance at survival than our restaurants in the downtown, Union Street, and Moscone quarter... The neighborhood restaurants are doing better [than pre-pandemic], particularly the ones that can take advantage of the shared spaces program."

As far as entertainment goes, we know people aren't going to the movies much — and we just lost two of SF's biggest cineplexes, the 100 Van Ness property and the Century 9 at the Westfield, in the last four months. San Franciscans' spending picture on recreation and entertainment has been a little more erratic over the last year, with some weeks showing 50% upticks over January 2020 — like the week ending March 19 for some reason.

The long and the short of it is, we need to support local businesses! Especially the businesses we don't want to see close!

Remember that they're there. Meet your friends out for coffee or drinks or mocktails, or whatever. It can't be all Zoom book clubs and meal delivery forever. There's a whole city out there!

Photo: Matt Jones

A new data set released by reservation-software company OpenTable suggests that San Francisco has fared worse than other major cities in yet another metric of pandemic recovery, and that's restaurant dining.

With the caveat that OpenTable only has data on restaurants that use its service — and many trendier restaurants in SF have moved over to Resy and Tock — a new report from OpenTable paints yet another grim picture about SF's economic recovery. As the Chronicle reports, OpenTable's analysis finds that in 2022, San Francisco's metric of "seated diners" — which accounts for those with reservations made online or by phone as well as walk-ins — was down 41% from 2019.

"These numbers reflect the culmination of many factors: the loss of business in the downtown core, the city’s population decline and pandemic restaurant closures," says Amy Wei, chief revenue officer at OpenTable, in a statement to the Chronicle.

The report finds that SF fared worse last year than other major cities in seeing restaurants fill back up — though Chicago came in second with a 26% drop since 2019. All major cities besides Miami continued to see lower numbers of diners in restaurants last year than before the pandemic, though all cities have seen steady increases since 2021.

OpenTable's data on the first four months of 2023 are also not encouraging — but this might reflect the severe weather that impacted much of the country this winter, keeping many people home. Except for January, which saw improvements in dining-out numbers from 2022 nationwide (the original Omicron variant, which spread like wildfire in January 2022, is likely to blame for that), the first four months of 2023 have been generally down for OpenTable restaurants compared to last year.

This could be incomplete data though, since the U.S. Census Bureau put out a report that contradicts this. Per the Census data, Americans' spending on food services and drinking places was 12.3% higher in March of 2023 than it was in March 2022.

Laurie Thomas, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, tells the Chronicle that OpenTable's data on San Francisco might largely be reflective of the steep declines in dining across the downtown core.

"Downtown recovery lags, as many workers continue to work remotely either full or part time," Thomas says, but the recovery has been "uneven" and much more favorable for certain neighborhoods, whose restaurants are full every night.

Walking around the Marina or Hayes Valley one can see this any day of the week, and at many restaurants, we are very much back to a world where you won't get a table unless you reserve a week or two out.

We also can't ignore the possibility that for many people, ordering in, cooking, and hunkering at home have just become more of a habit than they were pre-pandemic, for some segment of the population.

And, Thomas says, everyone is optimistic that the summer tourism season will give everyone a boost.

Related: Has the Heyday of San Francisco's Restaurant Scene Passed? Or Is It Just In an Extended Lull? Discuss.

Photo: Nils Stahl

Yet another analysis points out the well-reported state of affairs that downtown San Francisco’s economic recovery from the pandemic is awfully sluggish, but this one purports that we’re in last place among 62 North American cities.

It’s pretty common these days for some pro-business Bay Area think tank to put out a study about the death of downtown San Francisco since pandemic restrictions have largely been lifted, and a hundred thinkpieces have been penned on the topic. Every single one of these thinkpieces and analyses fails to take into account that San Francisco also had the lowest COVID-19 death rate of any U.S. city, and by a substantial margin at that. So if we’re suffering hundreds or thousands fewer deaths than other same-size cities, but having a slower economic recovery, call me crazy but that’s a trade-off I would take any day.

But the Chronicle reports one of these new analyses ranks San Francisco dead last among the 62 largest North American cities in terms of downtown activity since COVID-19 restrictions were lifted. That comes from a UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies analysis that studied the largest U.S. (and Canadian) cities’ mobile phone-ping data — measuring cellphone activity in SF's downtown quadrant in 2019 vs. 2022 — and found that there’s only 31% as much human activity in downtown SF compared to pre-pandemic.    

“In this research, we examine visits over time to 62 downtown areas using mobile phone data, comparing the most recent activity (as of November 30, 2022) to pre-pandemic levels (in 2019),” the study says. “We find wide variation in the extent of recovery, with activity ranging from a low of 31% of pre-pandemic levels in San Francisco to a high of 135% in Salt Lake City.”

In contrast to other studies which use data from public-transit exits or car traffic, this study specifically isolates the number of cellphones in an area at a given time.

You can see the data represented in their graph above (“RQ” means “Recovery Quotient”). And a small number of mid-sized cities, like the aforementioned Salt Lake City, plus Bakersfield and Fresno, actually have more bustling downtowns now than they did pre-pandemic.

There are a few reasons SF is in last place, but the big one is our very large tech sector that is still often working from home. “In general, places with a higher share of employment in knowledge-based industries and occupations and/or more highly paid workers, are likely to shift towards remote work," the study says. “Surveys suggest that shift will be permanent for up to half of the workforce in cities that are large and congested (e.g., New York), or powered by the tech sector (e.g., San Francisco).”

The study’s lead author, UC Berkeley professor Karen Chapple, tells KRON4 that "San Francisco suffers from an economy that isn’t very diverse. It does great when there is a tech boom, but right now it’s really hurting the city’s resilience."

Certainly the tech office vacancy rate is dire, as we learned this week that there are currently 15 Salesforce Towers worth of empty offices in San Francisco. Commercial real estate brokerage CBRE quotes the city’s office vacancy rate hitting a record high 27% at the end of last year.

“San Francisco set itself up for this,” Chapple explains to KRON4. “It zoned out residential and doubled down on commercial offices in the downtown zip code. That’s what it decided this area of the city should be and it was the wrong bet.”

She’s probably correct on that, and we ought to be moving faster on converting offices to housing. But there are more figures to consider. The Chamber of Commerce and business lobby set also fail to take into account that San Francisco unemployment is currently at a fabulously low rate of 2.3%, which by the way is lower than it was pre-pandemic. So maybe those people working in downtown cafes, bánh mì shops, and Financial District bars have found other work?

Or sure, maybe they moved to Fresno or Bakersfield, whose downtowns are more bustling than the Before Times. But Bakersfield currently has 6.8% unemployment (nearly triple that of SF!), while Fresno has 6.6% unemployment. So that may be some important context when the big-business think tanks tell San Francisco that it supposedly has the worst downtown economy in the nation.

Related: ​​State of SF Economy: Tech Booming, Unemployment Low, But Tourism and Hospitality Still Screwed [SFist]

Image: Clay Elliot via Unsplash

As has been covered in the media pretty much non-stop for two years, the combination of the pandemic and better communication tools has changed the way Americans view office work. And by the time companies decided they wanted their employees showing back up at work in-person, it began to look like workers had the upper hand and weren't going to be drawn back to their commutes so easily.

The Pew Research Center found in a February survey that 66% of workers who have jobs they’ve discovered they can complete from home would like to continue working remotely. When that statistic is limited to those who are currently working from home at least most of the time, 78% said they’d like to continue doing so.

With numbers like that, employers across the country — but especially in the tech-centric Bay Area — are in an uphill battle trying to convince people they need to come back to the office. The consulting firm Gartner found in its own survey that in early 2021, executives anticipated 48% of their workers would be back in the office five days a week sometime soon. That number is down to 20%.

Brian Kropp, the vice president of Gartner’s human resources practice, tells the New York Times this week that employers are starting to realize they may not get what they want.

“What is abundantly clear is that there are fewer and fewer companies expecting their employees to be in the office five days a week,” said Kropp. “Even some of the major companies that came out and said we want our employees in the office five days a week are starting to backtrack.”

The Times points to Apple, whose employees have been notably cranky about the company's prescriptive return-to-office directives, and to companies like McKinsey and Alphabet that have had to be more flexible with their plans in order not to lose employees.

But when an individual works from home, it has ripple effects outside of that person’s place of employment. When people go to work at an office, they might go to a restaurant nearby the building to get lunch, or they may stop by a bar close by after work to grab a drink with friends. If they aren’t in the office, they aren’t spending any of that money in the place where they work.

The result has had a massive effect on the economy of business districts, especially in places like downtown San Francisco, with economists predicting that workers won’t be returning to their offices there more than half the time in the coming years. The Chronicle has gone so far as to suggest that the area is now on the brink of collapse, citing a report from the city Controller’s Office that estimates that office work accounts for 72% of San Francisco’s gross domestic product. Now, with people spending less time in bars, restaurants, shops, and even on public transit, the city and its small businesses are still struggling.

BART, for instance, isn't expecting to recover until the 2029-2030 fiscal year from a deficit that arose during the pandemic.

A consequent problem from struggling and closing businesses is an overall loss of activity in a whole neighborhood of the city. If there are too many shuttered shops, tourists won’t be interested in visiting there either.

Coworking spaces could prove helpful in the long run. As more people work from home — and as more of us get sick of it — flexible office spaces may benefit, though that probably mostly pertains to people who live far from their companies' headquarters, or those who work for themselves.

Meanwhile, downtown SF has a lot of empty space to fill — the Chronicle estimates that there is 14 million square feet more vacant office space downtown than there was pre-pandemic — and that could take quite some time.

Photo: Christian on Unsplash

As if we needed anything else to put on our poo-poo platter of general anxieties, San Francisco reported its first suspected case of monkeypox Friday after a resident began displaying symptoms associated with the contagious disease; they are currently self-isolating and have noted they've been in no close contact with anyone in SF during their potentially infectious state.

As of publishing, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has identified 21 monkeypox confirmed cases in 11 states — "the numbers are expected to rise" — in an official report published yesterday. Characterized by its painful, red, raised, skin lesions, the current global strain of monkeypox has been observed to produce fever, chills, headaches, and general malaise. Compared to other strains, the one currently in widespread circulation is less lethal, with an expected fatality rate of between 1% and 3.6% and most deaths have been linked to an inability to access proper resources that could otherwise prevent death.

Nonetheless: The notion of going through our day-to-day lives pondering and worrying about and growing anxious around a second virus outbreak is enough to shake anyone to their core.

For San Francisco residents, that idea inched closer to a reality when the San Francisco Health Department of Public Health (SFDPH) said the city is observing its first potential case of viral disease.

According to KRON4, SFDPH officials said Friday that the infected individual had traveled to an undisclosed location where an outbreak of monkeypox cases had been reported. While initial test results of the "probable" monkeypox case were done in a state lab, these results are now awaiting confirmation from the CDC; should the suspected monkeypox case, indeed, prove positive, it will become at least the 22nd reported infection in the United States at this current juncture

On Thursday, Los Angeles County City health officials reported its first suspected monkeypox case. Sacramento County has now both reported and confirmed one case, with another two suspected cases still waiting for CDC confirmation; the latter two probable cases were noted to be in close contact with the first confirmed case, per the Los Angeles Times.

However, SFDPH has reiterated that the risk to the general public is low, mostly in part because of how monkeypox spreads — it requires physical contact, usually involving exposure to a ruptured skin lesion containing the virus — and is nowhere near as contagious as COVID-19, which spreads primarily through airborne respiratory droplets.

Los Angeles County public health director Barbara Ferrer said to the newspaper Thursday that there is "no sign people should worry about a massive outbreak of monkeypox locally," but we should be prepared and ready for an increase in cases.

It's a similar opinion shared by UCSF Infectious Disease Specialist Dr. Peter Chin-Hong who was in an interview with KRON4 earlier this week and is far more "curious" about this growing monkeypox outbreak, rather than being outright “panicked."

Related: First CA Monkeypox Case Likely In Sacramento

COVID Hospitalizations in California Up 100% From Mid-April Low; Bay Area Returns to Early March Levels

Photo: Getty Images/MarioGuti

As promised earlier this year, the first round of grants from SF's Music and Entertainment Venue Recovery Fund is about to beginning taking applications.

The fund, spearheaded by Supervisor Matt Haney and given its initial $3 million in funding from the city's $24.8 million surprise surplus, will be administered by the city's Office of Small Business, in partnership with the Controller, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development and the Entertainment Commission. And music and nightlife venues can apply for grants of $10,000 or more — with priority given to venues in "imminent danger" of closing, and those over 15 years old.

The Recovery Fund begins accepting applications on Wednesday, and the amount of individual grants will vary and will depend on how many qualified venue apply, as the SF Business Times reports.

"These music and entertainment venues are part of what makes San Francisco such a special place to live and visit,” Mayor London Breed said in a statement. "This past year has been devastating for the entertainment sector, and these local funds will help these businesses hang on until they can start operating again."

Sharky Laguana, president of the San Francisco Small Business Commission and himself a musician, said in a statement, "Live music venues have not been able to be open for even a single day, at any capacity, for over a year. They have been among the hardest hit businesses in San Francisco, and as a result are hanging on by a thread. Many have been forced to permanently close."

Laguana added, "Music is a central part of San Francisco’s identity and history, and speaking as a musician, I don’t want to even think about our city without our beloved venues. This aid will make a big difference, and help keep music alive in San Francisco."

In announcing the funding last month, Supervisor Haney said, "Our nightlife and entertainment venues are an important cornerstone of our city’s economy, and a vital part of our history and culture. Our venues need this money, they need it now, and we need our venues."

Still, this $3 million will only cover a fraction of the need that's out there, given that most venues remain closed and are slipping deeper into debt each month. Haney has expressed the hope that private donors line up to bolster the fund as well.

A $16 billion portion of the December COVID relief package is allocated to nightlife and culture venues and is called the Save Our Stages Act — but the Small Business Administration still has not opened up the application process for those grants, nearly four months into the year. As KQED reports, the Small Business Administration announced that an application portal would go live April 8, but typical for government work, it crashed without taking any applications and has been dark ever since.

Venues are permitted to open at limited capacity with masks required in San Francisco, however most venues say they are waiting until they can operate at full capacity, because otherwise they will be losing more money by being open.

Previously: San Francisco Commits $3 Million to Nightlife Recovery Fund

Photo: gamh/Twitter

As the city and its small neighborhood businesses attempt to crawl back toward normalcy in the waning months of this pandemic, San Francisco's Mayor London Breed is challenging residents to put themselves on a diet from chain retail, and patronize local businesses only in the month of May.

Noting that the city has given some relief to small businesses through $75 million in grants, loans, and fee waivers, Breed tells the Chronicle Wednesday, "We’ve done a lot, but of course it’s not nearly enough to keep everyone in business."

She says that she's been trying to lead by example since the early days of the pandemic. "I’ve made more of an effort to go to local businesses, to go to my local hardware store, to go to Gus’s Market," she says. But today she'll announce San Francisco’s Small Business 30-Day Challenge, to encourage all city residents to take a pause from the conveniences of Amazon, Safeway, and big-box retailers, and spend their money locally starting on May 1.

This may be a challenge when it comes to some things — who can claim to still have a local, mom-and-pop pharmacy in their neighborhood? (I know there are a handful, and you should go to them, including Reliable Rexall Sunset Pharmacy, and Parnassus Heights Pharmacy.)

But small businesses nationwide have reportedly seen their revenue sink by a third since January 2020, according to the Opportunity Insights Economic Tracker — a joint project of Harvard and Brown universities along with the Gates Foundation. And this trickles down to impact low-wage workers who have been laid off as a result.

The tracker also found that San Francisco was among the worst of all American cities in terms of the state of small businesses, with some 50% either temporarily or permanently shuttered since early 2020.

Newly named SFMTA Board member and Mission business owner Manny Yekutiel of Manny's fame is credited with the idea for the 30-day challenge. As he tells the Chronicle, his business has lost about 80% of its revenue over the last year, and he says, "I think San Franciscans realize that if they want these small businesses to survive, we have to support them financially."

In addition to choosing your local corner store or a locally based grocer for your everyday needs — as opposed to Safeway or Amazon-owned Whole Foods — you should think about the way you're consuming other products and food as well. Supporting local small business means being a little more conscious of you spend all your money, and it often means spending a little more for things as well.

Consumer laziness is also a small business killer. As SFist has noted multiple times in the last year, ordering delivery from local restaurants isn't helping them out as much as calling in an order and picking it up yourself would — cutting out the middle-man fees charged by delivery apps like DoorDash. And unless you know exactly who you're ordering from, you could be giving money to former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick's CloudKitchens or some other ghost-kitchen startup, and thereby taking revenue away from a neighborhood restaurant that has spent a year struggling to stay alive.

So the next time you need a tool or a lightbulb, go to Cliff's Variety or Cole Hardware, and stop giving Jeff Bezos more of your dollars. Use the website Shop & Dine in the 49, which was launched by the city before the holiday season, to find local businesses to patronize. And extend this challenge longer than the month of May if you can — look at it as a great reason to get back out in the world once you're vaccinated.

Once the pandemic is over, you'll be glad that you did a little something to keep your neighborhood from turning into a total ghost town.

(Also, you can help spread the word by using the hashtag #SmallBizChallenge on social media, and apparently there will be some prizes given for people tagging their favorite businesses. Learn more about the 30-day Challenge here.)

Now that over 40% of San Franciscans have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, some of the city's most popular parks were inundated with warm bodies Saturday — sparking mild concern from some local medical experts.

San Francisco has been a national model in handling the pandemic ever since the city, along with five other Bay Area counties, enacted its historic shelter-in-place order on March 17 of last year. Had the rest of the nation followed suit in our handling of the pandemic, some 364,000 more Americans could well be alive today "if the U.S. mirrored SF’s Covid mortality rate," according to Dr. Bob Wachter, chairman of the UCSF Department of Medicine.

All things considered: This weekend's clear skies and springtime weather lead to city parks, like Mission Dolores, becoming inundated with denizens of the city. While mask-wearing was still entirely on display at SF beaches and green spaces Saturday, relaxed social distancing practices were also visible — surprising epidemiologist Jessica Malty-Rivera.

"It's not the point yet where we should be having large, unmasked gatherings, even in public settings," she said to NBC Bay Area. "There was just no physical distancing I could see insight." (This tweet basically proves just that.)

As the news outlet noted, social distancing circles were once painted atop the grass at Mission Dolores Park, giving people a visual representation of what proper space is needed between other park goers. Alas, those are no longer there.

However, Malty-Rivera did note that many people out yesterday wore and kept their masks on.

This weekend's crowds come after Bay Area medical experts warned that the pandemic’s end isn't anywhere yet in the – and now's not the time to let our guards down. Especially if we're still in the "honeymoon" phase of our region’s recovery.

“I think, certainly in California, there’s a very good chance that we’re going to have a brief honeymoon, and then it will get worse again,” said Dr. Stefano Bertozzi, a professor of health policy and management and dean emeritus of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, to the SF Examiner. “I’m worried as we increase vaccination that we will be applying selective pressure to the virus to develop vaccine-escape mutants, and so there is a future in which this goes on for much longer than we hope."

Bertozzi's concerns were also echoed by Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiology and biostatistics professor and the director of UCSF’s Prevention and Public Health Group.

“We’re getting there,” Rutherford said to the newspaper in regards to herd immunity.

Rutherford previously mentioned that even though some 40 percent of the state’s population has some semblance of immunity, there's going to be a cost to pay if we become too relaxed with social distancing measures — especially as emerging new strains continue to find footing in the Bay Area.

“The variants are of concern and ongoing transmission is of concern and the more that there’s ongoing transmission around the country, the more there’s going to be pressure here," he added. "I think we’re maybe at the 25-yard line."

Yes, there's reason to wax in our collective optimism, but it's no reason to let up the very practices that helped bend the curve to get to this place. And with virtually all Calfirnian's becoming available to relieve a COVID-19 vaccine in less than three weeks, here's hoping we'll at least be at the 50-yard line by the end of April.

Related: San Francisco, Marin, and Santa Clara Counties Move to 'Orange' Tier Allowing Gyms, Restaurants, and Bars to More Fully Reopen

All Three Major COVID Variants Now Present In Bay Area As Santa Clara County Confirms First 'P.1' Case

Two Bay Area Counties Have Expanded Vaccine Eligibility to 50+ Set

Image: In an aerial view by drone, new social distancing circles are shown at Dolores Park on May 20, 2020 in San Francisco, California. The move follows similar efforts by other parks in cities around the world in an effort to get back to some semblance of normalcy. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

A state application portal went live Monday for tenants and landlords seeking rental relief grants relating to pandemic hardship — part of a $2.6 billion federally funded aid program in California to help address lost income from the last year, and protect tenants in danger of homelessness.

Landlords can apply for back rent owed to them, or tenants who experienced financial hardship in the last 12 months and who owe back rent can apply themselves — but it behooves landlords to do this to get the maximum grant. Under the program, landlords can receive 80% of back rent owed since April 1, 2020, providing that they agree to forgive the other 20%. Tenants, on the other hand, can only receive 25% of rent owed, which is the minimum to avoid eviction under the current state moratorium, which expires in July.

"Whether it’s a health-related event or a significant financial hardship, COVID-19 has affected us all," the state says on its website. "As our state continues to recover, we are committed to keeping families housed and recognize that California renters and landlords have enough to worry about. We want to make sure that past due rent isn’t one of them."

The California state portal is here, and it prompts applicants who live in any of a list of cities and counties to use their specific portals, if they are administering their own programs. In the Bay Area, the counties of Alameda, Marin, and Sonoma are administering the rental relief funds themselves.

As KQED reports, it's not known how much back rent may be owed by tenants across the state, but it's estimated to be between $400 million and $2 billion. And the $2.6 billion in funding comes as a result of Senate Bill 91, which passed by the legislature and signed by Governor Newsom in January.

The program requires tenants to submit proof of their financial hardship — including unemployment claims, proof of job termination, etc. — and to prove that they make less than 80% of area median income (AMI). Grants will reportedly be prioritized for those making less than 50% AMI.

Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis and are not first-come, first-served, as NBC Bay Area reports.

Photo: Parker Gibbons

Marin County-based epidemiologist Dr. Larry Brilliant, who offered some prescient warnings last April about not letting up the Bay Area's strict lockdowns for fear of subsequent COVID surges, is back with some dour predictions and words of caution.

"What we say in epidemiology, it's not a very nice thing, but when the virus is in decline, you have to put your foot on the neck," Dr. Brilliant said last year, speaking to KQED's Michael Krasny early on in the pandemic, just as the earliest surge in cases appeared to be on the wane locally. "That's not a nice way to describe it, but it's true."

At the time he was warning the public not to get complacent and advising government leaders not to let up on the economically devastating public health measures which at that point were only several weeks old. Also at the time, the Bay Area had just begun discussing transmission mitigation efforts, versus early containment strategies like forced quarantines for infected people, and he was advising against the change.

Now Brilliant has given another rare interview, this time to the Chronicle, in which he expresses some cautious optimism about the vaccine rollout but still doesn't have anything especially encouraging to say. (You can stop reading now if you're not in an emotionally stable or strong place today.)

"I think there’s a lot of good happening," he said. "I would prefer to think that things will get better, but the scientist in me worries we’re too perilously close to things going the other way."

He goes on to explain that without mass-vaccination efforts like we are seeing locally going on at a global scale, in rich countries and poor, and quickly, we will be stuck in ongoing cycles of this pandemic with potentially worse and vaccine-resistant variants.

"Until everybody in the world is safe, no one is safe," Brilliant tells the Chronicle. And, most disturbingly, he says, regarding the last three surges we've seen across the country, "There’s a nonzero probability that we’ll look back and all those three bumps will all together just be the first wave, and what’s coming next could be worse. I think the future is really complicated."

There's a growing public perception that once a lot of us have both our vaccine shots, there will be a familiar degree of normalcy returning to everyday life. And Dr. Brilliant suggests that if public health officials allow this, it will be to our detriment, especially when we don't know whether vaccinated people can still spread the virus and allow it to keep mutating.

"Today’s vaccines are good enough to stop today’s variants," Brilliant says. "The problem is tomorrow’s variants. We’re just on the cusp."

Brilliant knows what he's talking about, so he's probably someone we should listen to. He spent a good part of his career bringing an end to smallpox on the planet — something he talked about in a 15-year-old TED talk — and he served as a consultant on the 2011 film Contagion that many of us rewatched last March in a fit of panic and doom-wallowing. In the film, he correctly foresaw that a new global pandemic would lead to panic-buying in stores, epidemiologists becoming TV stars, and stadiums (in the case of the film, Candlestick Park) becoming mass-vaccination sites. (The Chronicle also spoke to some people who worked on the film last week just as stadiums across the state were being put to use for this purpose.)

And his thoughts are echoed in a New York Times opinion piece today penned by a trio of experts who were part of President Biden's advisory committee on COVID — in short, they say beware of even the tiniest rise in case numbers, and remember that this virus "is not done with us," no matter how much we might feel done with it.

So, we need to keep wearing two masks, keep distancing ourselves and staying home more than not, and not assume that it's all going to be a great big party by spring or summer. Likely, as many experts like Brilliant have been quietly trying to say, it's going to be a very long and slow road back to "normal," and we need to brace ourselves for things to take at least another bad turn before it's all good news.

Related: Infectious Disease Expert Says Bay Area Should Go Back to Containment and Contact-Tracing

Photo by Paul Zimmerman/Getty Images for HBO

You're not the only one who's noticed empty toilet paper aisles and woefully long grocery store lines in San Francisco (and elsewhere in the Bay Area).

With COVID-19 cases spiking and shutdowns on the horizon, denizens of the Bay Area have, again, picked up one of March's bemoaned consumer habits — panic shopping. Despite the fact there's no sign of supply shortages that could validate stocking up on essential goods in this manner, it hasn't stopped long lines forming outside Costco stores and other supermarkets and grocery stores across the Bay Area.

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KRON4 reported on the recent uptick of panic shopping that's led to empty shelves and long lines at grocery stores and supermarkets in San Francisco. (I, too, noticed unusually sparse — or flat-out empty — shelves at Marin County Safeway this past Friday. It appears the past few months have also confirmed that toilet paper stocks serve as a litmus test for a population's collective anxiety level.)

Ironically enough: All this impromptu hoarding does is put unneeded pressure on both suppliers and shipping centers to contend with inflated consumer demands — oftentimes leaving them unable to meet those orders. This not only strains already understaffed businesses selling those in-demand goods, but panic shopping disproportionately hurts individuals in our communities who, more often than not, are the hardest hit by the pandemic – the elderly, immigrant labor workers, and first-responders contending with long hours and less time to purchase essential goods. (It's this very reason why supermarkets like Safeway, Trader Joe's, and Whole Foods, as well as some larger retailers, continue to open their doors an hour early for certain members of the public a few days a week.)

At its core, panic shopping exists as a proxy to our feelings around material deficiencies and the irrational fears we harbor. As the Chronicle pointed out in a piece on the buying trend last month, "negative emotions" and unrealistic perceptions — especially those around food stability — tend to create feelings of overwhelming despair and despondency, which have only ballooned as the pandemic’s gotten progressively worse.

2020's proven to be an out-of-control year; human beings, though, tend to always make a beeline toward certain; panic shopping — which is simply a popularized term for hoarding — gives us some semblance of assurance that we're ready to deal with prophesied hardships that may or may not come to fruition.

So, no: Don't go out and clear the shelves... even if the people six feet to your left or right are doing just that. In the end, panic shopping only makes matters worse for the rest of us — and like we said earlier, primarily for those most affected by COVID-19.

Related: Breed Announces New Stay-At-Home Orders for SF Ahead of State Mandate; Outdoor Dining to Cease Until January

Photos: The Mission District on the Eve of Sheltering in Place

Image: Empty aisle shelf at a California grocery store. (Courtesy of Getty Images via stellalevi)

Way back in April, when we were all relative newbs to this pandemic business, SFist published a post about anti-maskers — specifically, the fools in San Francisco in 1918 whom we could look back upon and scoff at because they quickly grew tired of wearing masks in public to stop the spread of that 102-year-old influenza pandemic.

Now as we're at least ankle-deep in a growing surge of cases — California is knee-deep with a record 20,654 new cases added on Monday, and much of the rest of the country is in more dire straights — it's time to revisit the story of the 1918 pandemic here in the Bay Area, in case you missed it. San Franciscans feeling pandemic fatigue and getting lackadaisical about mask-wearing as they invite people over for dinner and gather with friends across tables at outdoor bars, etc., need to understand: You are the problem.

SF Public Health officials noted via the Chronicle on Monday that between October 21 and November 10, the demographics of new cases took a notable turn — with more people between ages 18 and 30 and more people living in affluent parts of the city — becoming infected than at any point since March. Some of that may be from social gatherings, some of that may be from travel — I'm seeing a lot of people bouncing to and from Mexico in Instagram Stories — and some of that may be from dining indoors with masks off. And yes, essential workers are still getting infected.

So let's look back at 1918 again. SF had a Fauci-esque man of science in the role of Director of Public Health, Dr. William C. Hassler, and he got the Board of Supervisors to institute a mask-wearing ordinance in October 1918 just as influenza cases began surging in the city for the first time — the city had mostly avoided the first wave of the pandemic the previous winter, but it traveled from east to west.

Local case counts went down by mid-November, and around Thanksgiving, on November 21, the mask order was lifted, prompting much jubilation around the city after only a month of mandatory masking, with masks being tossed out into the streets.

As the Chronicle put it at the time, "After four weeks of muzzled misery, San Francisco unmasked at noon yesterday and ventured to draw its breath. Despite the published prayers of the Health Department for conservation of gauze, the sidewalks and runnels were strewn with the relics of a torturous month."

But it was just a matter of weeks before the flu came steamrolling back through the city, quickly overwhelming hospitals by Christmas and New Year's.

"The dollar sign is exalted above the health sign," Dr. Hassler lamented at the time, regarding the lifting of the mask order — which the Board of Supervisors didn't re-institute until January 10, when the city was seeing 600 new cases per day. "When the masks were removed [in November], only 10 cases a day were being reported," Hassler said in a report to the public. "Nine days later the daily total was reaching 75. And it has increased ever since until now we have had well over 200 [per day] for several days."

San Francisco's death toll from 1918 pandemic nearly doubled in January 1919, and still there was an "Anti-Mask League" that hosted a rally in mid-January that reportedly drew 2,000 attendees.

Mayor James “Sunny Jim” Rolph was among the mask-averse, and was himself fined $50 for flouting the mask order and showing up at a boxing match unmasked. And when the flu resurged in December and January, Rolph was on the record blaming "persons coming here from other cities" for bringing the virus back to San Francisco after the city had "successfully stamped it out."

Because of attitudes like this, and perhaps because of San Francisco's longstanding reputation as a boozy party town, it was one of the hardest-hit American cities in the 1918/1919 pandemic. By one estimate cited by local historian Gary Kamiya, 45,000 San Franciscans were infected and over 3,000 died — a mortality rate of 7%, well above the national average of 2.5%. Another estimate suggests 3,500 died of the flu in San Francisco, many of them in the winter months following the December surge.

Thankfully, San Francisco's politics — and the unfortunate politicization of mask-wearing — has swung the other direction, and people aren't so publicly derisive of mask mandates here during this pandemic. But people are getting lazy — and a quick walk through Civic Center or the Tenderloin will provide you with plenty of evidence that not everyone is listening or concerned about getting infected, and plenty of people are gathering unmasked at all hours.

A half-million Americans died of the flu between 1918 and 1920, before the virus mysteriously lost its potency and mutated into the less severe flu we typically see every year.

With over 258,000 Americans now dead from COVID-19, this pandemic is likely to top the 1918 one in total deaths — especially since we are only about three weeks into an exponential surge across the country.

Here in the Bay Area, unless something shifts and people stay home more in the next few weeks, we'll be looking at a repeat of January 1919, with overwhelmed hospitals and a mortality rate that's no longer among the lowest in the country. The number of people in Bay Area hospitals with severe COVID cases was 667 as of Monday, more than double the number that were hospitalized when the last surge began in late June, and almost double the number from one month ago.

Stay vigilant!! Don't throw little dinner parties!! Keep your Thanksgivings small and preferably outdoors!! And quarantine yourself for two weeks if you've been out doing things you shouldn't be doing!!

Previously: History Lesson: SF Had an Anti-Mask League During the 1918 Flu Pandemic Who Rallied Against Face Masks

Top image: San Franciscans lining up for masks. Photo: California State Library via the California Sun