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Dec 18, 2020 8:15 PM |
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Charts show how COVID surge has hit L.A. much harder than San Francisco
Kellie Hwang Dec. 17, 2020 Updated: Dec. 17, 2020 1:43 p.m.
Los Angeles marked one of its worst days of the pandemic on Wednesday, reporting over 22,000 new cases in what is likely a single-day record for any county in the state. The grim milestone underscores the area’s ongoing struggles to curb the virus’s spread.
Until recently, the Bay Area had mostly avoided a similar fate. San Francisco, in particular, was cited as having the lowest mortality rate of any major U.S. metropolitan area. Now, the current surge is sparing few regions across California, yet the latest numbers for the two regions underscore that the pandemic continues to impact different areas of the state in very different ways . . . .
The Bay Area’s average case rate over the past seven days is 49 cases per 100,000 people as of Wednesday, according to the Chronicle’s Coronavirus Tracker. Case rates across the counties range from 61 in Santa Clara to 30 in San Francisco. Los Angeles County’s 7-day case rate is 111.
The recent daily hospitalization rate in Los Angeles County is more than twice that of San Francisco. And, as of Dec. 16, the county is down to 26 available ICU beds, while the Southern California region dropped to 0% ICU capacity on Thursday.
San Francisco’s COVID-19 hospitalizations in recent days are also at an all-time high. Yet ICU capacity in San Francisco remains above the city’s 20% target. Across the Bay Area region, capacity dropped to 12.9% on Wednesday.
Los Angeles County’s rate of deaths has overall been significantly higher than the Bay Area’s, and that difference has become even more striking in the current surge.
In particular, San Francisco has had one of the lowest mortality rates of all urban centers in the U.S. . . . . Current projections estimate that San Francisco will finish the month with a rate of 2.7 deaths per 100,000 people, and Los Angeles will reach a rate of 15 for December.
Los Angeles is, of course, a bigger metropolis than the Bay Area. Jeffrey Martin, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UCSF, said that really matters when health officials are faced with messaging safety precautions to millions more people.
Los Angeles also is surrounded by huge counties that have high case rates, and have had varying responses to health orders. Next door in Orange County, Huntington Beach has made headlines as a gathering place for locals to demonstrate their resistance to mask orders and other pandemic restriction-enforcement measures. Orange County’s case rate currently is 55.2 per 100,000 people, and its test positivity rate is 13.2%.
Neighboring San Bernardino’s case rate is 120.3 per 100,000 people, with a 20.1% test positivity rate. Riverside has a 92.2 case rate and 18.5% positive test rate.
The high rates across Southern California likely are contributing to spread not just within the region, but the entire state . . . .
. . . Southern California’s demographics mean there’s a larger percentage of the population who are at high risk for getting the virus.
According to 2019 estimates from the U.S. Census, about 10% of San Francisco residents were living in poverty, and 5% of individuals under 65 were without health insurance. In Los Angeles County, 13% of residents were living in poverty, and 10% of people younger than 65 didn’t have health insurance.
Racial disparities in who is most likely to get the virus have existed across the country since the beginning of the pandemic, with Black and Latino communities being harmed by the virus at higher rates.
In Los Angeles, 49% of the population are Latino. Los Angeles reports that 42% of total cases have been in the Latino community, but the county also reports about 32% of cases where ethnicity is unknown.
In late summer, Los Angeles began making progress in reversing racial disparity among communities of color. However, recent data shows backtracking on that progress: Cases in the Latino community are now twice that of cases in the white population, and Latino residents are hospitalized at three times the rate of white residents. On Tuesday, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti sent mobile testing teams to predominantly Latino and Black neighborhoods that have seen explosive infection growth in recent weeks.
The Bay Area’s Latino community also has been disproportionately impacted by the virus. The Latino community here makes up about 19.4% of the population, but has accounted for 48% of coronavirus cases since the outset of the pandemic. San Francisco’s Latino community is 15% of the population, but 44.5% of cases.
Yet counties in the Bay Area appear to have had more success as the pandemic progressed in targeting testing to those communities.
The state’s health equity metric tracks the test positivity rate in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods to ensure they don’t lag behind a county’s overall positive test rate. San Francisco’s metric is currently 5% vs. its overall test positivity rate of 3%. Santa Clara County has the highest health equity metric in the Bay Area at 12.8%, vs. its overall rate of 7.3%. Los Angeles County’s is 17%, vs. 11.4% overall . . . .
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