COVID: Latest wave may have peaked in the Bay Area, but still at ‘extraordinarily high’ levels

It looks like our latest COVID surge has peaked.

Case rates in the Bay Area are down about 10% from two weeks ago, suggesting the most recent rise in infections is abating.

But don’t be fooled, said Dr. Bob Wachter, chair of UCSF’s Department of Medicine. We are still experiencing “an extraordinarily high level of cases,” and because so many people are using at-home tests that go unreported, the level of virus circulating in the region is probably four to five times higher than records show.

And that means our current numbers may actually be comparable to this winter’s surge when at-home tests were hard to get and California had its highest case rates since the pandemic began.

Officially, though, this spike on the COVID case chart is less than 25% of the omicron-fueled wave, which crested in early January with a daily average of nearly 250 cases per 100,000 residents. And it’s coming down.

The seven-day average case rate for the nine-county Bay Area reached 50 on May 20 and dropped to 42 over the Memorial Day weekend but rose slightly after that.

“With prior surges, we got used to a quick up, plateau and quick down,” Wachter said. “This surge has been much more slow moving and rumbling.”

Some other important things also have changed.

“We are having an awful lot of cases, but we’re not having a lot of really serious hospitalizations and deaths,” said Dr. John Swartzberg, clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health.

COVID hospitalizations have risen from under 1,000 patients in late April to nearly 2,500 in early June, but that’s just one-sixth of the peak during omicron.

There are reasons for caution in judging current case trends. Swartzberg points out that wastewater measurements, usually the first data to indicate COVID trends, have not yet shown a decline in the prevalence of the virus in the Bay Area.

Wachter also warned that newly emerged sub-variants BA.4 and BA.5 “might complicate the trip down the mountain.”

And even with the recent undercounting of cases, California has seen more COVID cases so far this year in just five months than in all of 2021 or 2020.

As of the first week of June, there have been about 3.5 million COVID cases so far this year, with the vast majority of those people testing positive during the beginning of the year when case rates were at record highs. The state had just over 3 million cases in 2021 and about 2.5 million in 2020.

While public indoor gatherings have returned full-force and masking has diminished over time, the recent high case rates triggered little action compared to the shutdowns early in the pandemic. Last week, Alameda County reinstated an indoor mask mandate, but other counties in the Bay Area have not followed suit.

Though he does worry about people suffering complications from what’s known as long COVID, Swartzberg said, our perspective on living with the virus has dramatically changed.

“We were really used to having a virus that made us all very fearful of serious disease and death,” he said. But this new phase “has changed the calculus for all of us. I’m in my 70s, and I don’t worry about winding up in the hospital and dying.”