Mez Chafe-Powles, 92, receives a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine from John Muir Health physician Kishore Nath at the Viamonte retirement living residence in Walnut Creek on Dec. 30, 2020. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)
If you thought COVID was a thing of the past, this summer’s surge should make you think twice. The whole Bay Area seems to be coming down with the virus these days.
Local data indicates the virus is spreading at high levels in San Jose, and most communities around the Bay Area and California. But despite near record-high COVID levels in wastewater, and spiking positivity rates, other metrics show a lot has changed, and confirm the virus is not nearly as deadly as it once was before vaccines and treatments became widely available.
Wastewater data for San Jose shows the virus nearly reached record high levels in the city’s sewershed this week. It was short by less than one tenth of a percent. The previous record high was set during the first Omicron surge in January of 2022. Santa Clara County’s three other sewersheds — Palo Alto, Sunnyvale and Gilroy — all have high levels of COVID, too, as of the first few days of July.
In the East Bay, COVID levels are also rising as more people contract the virus. Alameda County public health officials said this week wastewater showed an uptick in the virus, and urged people to take precautions.
Statewide, the COVID positivity rate, meaning the portion of COVID tests that come back positive, began spiking in June. On June 1, the positivity rate was 4.1%. It had more than doubled to 10.6% as of July 1, according to data released Friday. The state is now less than one percentage point from the level it was during this winter’s COVID spike, when it reached just over 11%.
The wastewater data shows what doctors and health care professionals are seeing daily.
“We’re clearly in a swell of cases now,” said Dr. John Swartzberg, clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. “Test positivity, that’s going way up, emergency department visits are up, hospitalizations are up. So all of that tells us that there’s an awful lot of COVID going on.”
“This is the most significant time we’ve dealt with COVID since the winter surge, but compared to a year ago, we are in better shape,” he said.
While the threat for most people has become negligible, Swartzberg worries about those most at risk.
“The message that I’d like to get out to the public is there’s an awful lot of COVID circulating,” he said. “If you’re at high risk, you need to take precautions.”
That includes getting vaccinated, if you haven’t had a shot recently.
That tracks with what Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, a UC San Francisco professor of medicine who specializes in infectious diseases, has seen at his hospital recently.
“The data has been consistent for the last year or so… the people in the hospital, generally, are older than 75, or very immune compromised,” he said.
And they have something else in common: “Nobody that I’ve seen got the vaccine since it came out in the fall.”
A newly formulated vaccine was released last fall, and those at high risk can and should get a booster in between the new annual shots, Swartzberg said. It’s not too late to get boosted this summer, if you are high risk, and you will still be eligible for a new shot in the fall.
The now annual re-formulation of the COVID vaccine is expected in August or September, and it will be based on one of the more recent FLiRT variants, after some back and forth between FDA and its vaccine advisory committee.
While those who are at high risk might choose to take precautions during this summer’s surge, there are some reassuring metrics that show COVID now is a different beast than COVID during the early days of the pandemic in 2020.
“If we had seen this amount of COVID wastewater in 2020, our hospitals would be bursting at the seams,” said Chin-Hong. “The fact that we’re seeing so much in the wastewater and just a modest increase in hospitalizations is due to the fact that the population, in general, is much more immune than in previous years.”
And while deaths have increased slightly in the past several weeks, COVID is responsible for only about 1% of deaths in California as of late June, the most recent available data. That is still much lower than the 3.5% in January of this year during the winter surge, and way below January 2021, the first winter surge, when 40% of all deaths in California were due to COVID.
Before this summer surge, the percent of deaths due to COVID had reached new lows, staying well under 1% since March of this year, the lowest it has been consistently since the start of the pandemic.
“I think the thing that people are missing right now is that it’s easy to get COVID,” said Swartzberg, who has started dining outside and using masks indoors more often. “It’s almost a perfect storm of incredibly transmissible variants, a population that isn’t taking precautions and waning immunity.”
Originally published at Harriet Blair Rowan