Marin COVID Cases Plunge
MARIN COUNTY, CA — An omicron-fueled surge that exploded in Marin last month appears to be losing steam.
Marin’s seven-day rolling average for new COVID-19 cases fell 31 percent from 405.4 on Jan. 8 to 280.6 on Jan. 15, according to the county’s coronavirus dashboard.
Cases in Marin last week fell 20 percent, according to data analysis conducted by The San Francisco Chronicle. Marin’s plunge led all Bay Area counties, which are largely experiencing a drop in new cases.
San Francisco experienced a 16 percent drop, the second most among Bay Area counties, according to the report.
Cases fell 10 percent in San Mateo County, 4 percent in Alameda County, were largely flat in Contra Costa, Solano and Santa Clara counties the report said, and are still rising in Napa and Sonoma counties.
The falling numbers indicate the Bay Area’s surge has likely topped out, according to a UC Berkeley infectious disease expert told The Chronicle, but Dr. John Swartzberg warned that hospitalizations, a lagging indicator, may continue to increase over the next few weeks.
“I think by this Friday, we’ll see clearly we crested in the Bay Area. But hospitalizations are going to take another 10 days or so to come down after we reach the zenith, and the deaths are going to take three to four weeks to peak,” Swartzberg told the news outlet.
“That means we’re going to not be happy campers through the rest of this month.”
But conflicting data in Marin make it difficult to predict how much longer the omicron surge will last, Dr. Matt Willis on Tuesday said in an SFGate interview.
“I think we're looking at a combination of factors. Looking at the case rates themselves, that's a less accurate indicator these days. Now, we we look at hospitalizations and waste water samplings. Waste water offers a real-time look at transmission. What we're seeing from the waste water samples is that in some parts of the county, such as Novato, COVID is starting to plateau, but in some communities it's still rising,” Willis told the news outlet.
“We do samplings twice a week and because things are changing so quickly, we would probably want to them daily. In terms of case rates, we're at similar case rates today as we were one week ago, but it's important to know that when we look at case rates, that's based on PCR testing, which is in limited supply right now and more and more people are using home antigen that are not reported to public health. That's why the waste water samples are increasingly important, because it offers a sense of the collective viral burden upstream, if you will.”
As of Tuesday, 90.6 percent of all Marin residents have completed their vaccine series and 97.6 percent of county residents have received at least one jab, according to the county's vaccination dashboard.
Among Marin's eligible population (ages 5 and over), 94.0 percent of eligible Marin residents have completed their vaccine series and 98.0 percent of county residents have gotten at least one shot.
Marin tops the state with the highest vaccination rate and the North Bay county ranks among the nation's top 10 in that department among all counties (regardless of population), The New York Times reports.
Marin was the nation's most vaccinated county among those with a population over 250,000, according to data compiled earlier this year by The San Francisco Chronicle.
This article originally appeared on the San Rafael Patch
