Name: Bay Area coronavirus cases keep surging. Are deaths also starting to rise?
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Bay Area coronavirus cases keep surging. Are deaths also starting to rise?

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The Bay Area’s arrived just ahead of the holiday season, and now the waiting begins to see the full impact of Thanksgiving gatherings and travel on case counts.Right around Dec. 7 is when UC Berkeley infectious disease expert John Swartzberg expects the Bay Area to see another rise in cases from Thanksgiving and then roughly two weeks after that, a rise in hospitalizations. If and when that happens, the deadliness of this surge will hinge on the availability of hospital beds.San Francisco went into this wave with the lowest mortality rate of any major U.S. city. As the , what do the latest numbers show for the Bay Area?already are surging across California and the Bay Area, and the majority of counties statewide have regressed to the . to have avoided moving to the purple tier.In California and the Bay Area, hospitalizations now have exceeded the peak numbers seen in the summer, and continue to rise at a frightening rate. Health officials are sounding the alarm on how this . In Santa Clara County, officials said Wednesday that only 12% of hospital beds were available — including just 44 in intensive care. Across the state, , nearly 25% of them with COVID-19 patients. The state is expected to be over capacity by Dec. 24. Some counties in rural Northern California are projected to run out of ICU beds as soon as this week. And the Bay Area could be over capacity by early January, according to state forecasts.Deaths in California have started to rise, as of mid-November. The Bay Area, however, has yet to see the same curve up.That may in part be due to Bay Area counties’ ongoing caution over the past month and throughout the pandemic around restricting activities compared to other parts of California, said UC Berkeley epidemiologist Art Reingold.Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Area’s largest water districts.“Deaths are in part a function of how many people are getting infected and getting severely ill and in part a function of the quality of care they receive,” he said. “The Bay Area certainly in general has very good hospitals (and) very good quality of care.”The age and underlying conditions of infected groups can also play a role, he said. But a big additional factor is timing. Death counts can start to trickle in weeks after hospitalizations rise, often spiking weeks after case counts do. The gap can make the picture look a few weeks behind.“We’re not going to have vaccine-induced immunity at a wide level before certainly early spring to save us, so there’s certainly a concern that the coming holidays could lead in a spike in infections, and if so, that there will be increases in hospitalizations and deaths,” Reingold said.Swartzberg said that if ICU bed shortages occur in December — or the Bay Area is overwhelmed — that could factor into the death toll numbers we’d start to see by New Year’s.More for youJess Shaw and Annie Vainshtein are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: ,Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Area’s largest water districts.

The Bay Area’s arrived just ahead of the holiday season, and now the waiting begins to see the full impact of Thanksgiving gatherings and travel on case counts.Right around Dec. 7 is when UC Berkeley infectious disease expert John Swartzberg expects the Bay Area to see another rise in cases from Thanksgiving and then roughly two weeks after that, a rise in hospitalizations. If and when that happens, the deadliness of this surge will hinge on the availability of hospital beds.San Francisco went into this wave with the lowest mortality rate of any major U.S. city. As the , what do the latest...

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Jess Marmor Shaw

Annie Vainshtein

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Bay Area coronavirus cases keep surging. Are deaths also starting to rise?

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