Once Thursday's numbers were in, the San Francisco Department of Public Health (DPH) reported a jump in confirmed COVID-19 cases in the city of 171 — a 4-percent uptick and two and a half times higher than the average daily new case count of the last two weeks.
The new cumulative total of confirmed cases in San Francisco as of Friday is 4,316, up from 4,145 a day earlier — and according to DPH reports, today's figure represents all known cases as of Tuesday, July 7, due to reporting delays. The city has added 531 new cases since Monday, and 916 cases over the last 14 days, which puts us dangerously close to being on the state's watch list — this equates to an average of 103.7 cases per 100,000 residents, in the state's accounting, and the threshold for the watch list is 100 cases per 100,000 residents.
The state has been stressing different criteria for different counties, and landing on the watch list may mean different things depending on how much of the economy has reopened. In Sonoma County, for example, which lands on the watch list starting today, state health officials are focusing on the rise in hospitalizations over the last two weeks, as the Press Democrat reports. And because the county reopened bars and indoor dining last month, all of those businesses will have to close or revert back to being outdoor-only for at least three weeks.
In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed and Public Health Director Dr. Grant Colfax already made the decision to pause all reopenings early last week, and no indoor dining restaurants or nail/hair salons have been allowed open yet.
"We need to get these numbers down," Breed said on Tuesday, and she and SF Supervisor Shamann Walton were subsequently exposed to a COVID-positive person and underwent testing for the virus on Wednesday. Their results were negative but Breed said she would be tested again next week.
On Monday, following a weekend backlog with little data reporting, San Francisco added 207 new cases, representing one of the city's biggest one-day increases to date of 5.5 percent.
Across the Bay Area, cases have been on the rise, with over 10,000 new cases reported in the last 14 days. Hospitalizations appeared to be spiking as of last week since the middle of June, as they have been across California, but the average daily increase across the Bay Area has steadied to near 2 percent since July 2.
The state's threshold for monitoring when it comes to hospitalizations is a greater-than-10-percent increase in the three-day average number of hospitalized patients.
On the positive side, San Francisco has not seen a new death from COVID-19 since June 28. 50 people in the city have died from complications from the disease since the pandemic began, compared to nearly 3,700 in Los Angeles, and over 22,700 in New York City.
Related: COVID Hospitalization Rates Consistently Rising Across The Bay Area
