According to the latest public health update, San Diego County’s seven-day test positivity rate hit 20.5 percent last week, technically the second-highest number recorded since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and a sure sign that coronavirus is hitting the community hard this summer.
San Diego County, it seems, is running a little hotter than the state and nation in this leading indicator of viral activity.
The region’s latest test positivity results are one week more recent than comparable numbers for the state and nation. But looking back to two weeks ago, San Diego County’s rate was 19.3 percent, compared to the state rate of 13.8 percent and the nationwide rate of 14.3 percent.
San Diego County’s highest-reported weekly test positivity rate was 29 percent on Jan. 8, 2021, though the advent of widespread home testing in 2022 skews such a comparison.
Unreported home test results, both positive and negative, mean that today’s true rate is very likely higher or lower than 20.5 percent.
Local wastewater results, updated Thursday afternoon, show elevated levels of coronavirus genetic material, though at levels nowhere near as high as were observed in early 2022, when the coronavirus Omicron variant arrived. Today, its descendants — KP.2 and KP.3 — are driving the latest round of infections and will be the targets on the next booster vaccine due in the fall.
Why is San Diego County ahead of state and national averages?
Dr. Erik Berg, interim medical director of the county’s epidemiology and immunization services branch, said Thursday that it is difficult to cite a single answer, especially in an environment where not all results are always reported.
“It’s hard to interpret because of the testing landscape, where the proportion of people being tested is going to change from location to location,” Berg said. “But, that being said, being over 20 percent is pretty high.”
The jump, he added, does not appear to be challenging local hospital capacity. Some of the region’s largest medical providers agreed.
Scripps Health reported that its hospitals have gone from 30 itted COVID-19 patients on July 1 to 60 as of Tuesday. Sharp HealthCare had 73 hospitalized COVID-19 patients across its multiple medical campuses Tuesday. Both health systems said that while the current numbers are elevated, they remain manageable.
But, with so much virus circulating, Berg cautioned that the risk does not fall evenly on residents. COVID-19 complications increase with age and with the presence of chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.
This can be particularly dangerous in multi-generational households where young and resilient people are living with parents and grandparents.
“We really need to think about the vulnerable people in the community and how we can protect our loved ones, our family , our neighbors, as much as we can,” Berg said. “That means staying up-to-date on vaccinations and staying away from people who are sick as much as we can.”
Anecdotally, many feel like everybody they know has recently picked up a set of COVID-19 symptoms, whether or not they have bothered to get tested.
Jill Morgan of Poway said 11 of her family who live in various different counties have recently tested positive as have she and her husband. Both, she said, made it through the entire pandemic and the following years of relative calm without getting sick.
Having just undergone lung surgery, and having been careful about where she went during the current surge, she said getting sick was very frustrating.
“The only place that we had been to in public was a Kaiser facility,” she said. “We had not even been to a grocery store.”
Given the current increase in coronavirus activity, she said she does not understand the relatively relaxed approach to masking that currently holds sway among most of the region’s medical providers.
“If you’re going in, say, for lab tests, you have to wait, you know, right next to someone else and nobody’s wearing masks, not the staff, not the patients,” Morgan said.
Scripps Health, Sharp HealthCare, UC San Diego Health and Kaiser Permanente San Diego all strongly recommend masking for staff and patients. However, UCSD is the only one currently requiring its employees to wear masks when providing face-to-face care to patients.
Surveyed Thursday, Scripps, Sharp and Kaiser representatives all said that while the current surge of coronavirus infections has increased their volume and issions somewhat, the rise has not yet been enough to return to a masking mandate.
Morgan said she believes that her own experience of getting sick despite visiting only medical providers proves that a more aggressive approach to masking makes sense in places where patients mix.
San Diego County’s public health officer does have the power to mandate that medical providers universally increase masking requirements. Asked whether Dr. Ankita Kadakia, San Diego County’s interim public health officer, might take such an action, the county’s public health office said: “The County is following CDPH guidance and leveraging its strong relationship with our health care partners on voluntary masking.”
