“Our dangerous winter has arrived.” San Francisco Mayor London Breed warned as she told city residents that more rollbacks could come as early as Wednesday with the state and city preparing new orders to contain the worst surge yet in coronavirus infections.
“It’s not good,” she said at a Tuesday afternoon news conference. “Cases are spiking. Hospitalizations are increasing quickly. Our infection rate is higher than it was at a point during the summer. And this isn’t just about San Francisco. It’s about our entire region, our state, our country. We’ve been worried for months, but now it’s real.”
The number of COVID-19 related hospitalizations in San Francisco more than doubled from 40 on Nov. 18 to 87 on Nov. 28. Four of those patients are from other parts of California. “If this trend continues, we will see a hospital bed shortage around Christmas,” said Dr. Grant Colfax, director of the Department of Public Health said.
One reason: Restrictions recently put in place In San Francisco weren’t enough. “None of these actions during the past two weeks have slowed the rate of the spread of the virus,” he said. “In fact, infections have continued to increase.”
While no orders were issued Tuesday, Colfax said the city is working on several options, and “we will be implementing additional rollbacks and restrictions to temper the virus.”
He said the city plans to further reduce the number of people who can gather, analyze restrictions on indoor shopping and other services and review the Santa Clara County order to force people who travel more than 150 miles to quarantine upon returning. Some of that new guidance will be issued this week, he said.
He reminded everyone that Tuesday’s announcement coincided with World AIDS Day.
“As a gay man, as a physician who trained here in San Francisco during some of the most severe days of the AIDS epidemic, every World AIDS Day I think about the lives we could not save,” Colfax said. “So many of us lost family, friends, neighbors and colleagues. We could not save lives because we did not yet have the tools to treat AIDS. But we came together as a city and worked together to find solutions.”
With this pandemic, he noted, we already have the knowledge. “Please, let’s work together,” he urged. “Let’s come together to protect lives, to protect our communities, and to protect our city.”
