COVID

Cases of COVID-19 are on the decline in San Francisco, but as the country enters its fourth year of living with the virus, a local health expert says people shouldn't get complacent.

• Bob Wachter, chair of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told Axios that federal discussions on annual COVID-19 vaccinations could help with increasing vaccination rates here and elsewhere.

Positive test rates for asymptomatic COVID-19 cases have more than doubled at University of California, San Francisco in the past month, hitting 5%, the hospital's chair of medicine, Bob Wachter, tweeted Friday.

Why it matters: The implication, according to Wachter, is that about 1 in 20 people in SF who feel well would currently test positive for COVID.

Rates of COVID-19 in San Francisco have been low recently, and while the emergence of new variants could bring an uptick in cases this winter, local experts don't expect a massive spike.

Flashback: Last winter, the city, like the rest of the country, was rocked by the BA.5 Omicron variant, causing cases and hospitalizations to skyrocket in December and January.

Dreamforce, Salesforce's takeover of downtown San Francisco, did its part in bringing tourists to the city.

Driving the news: Hotel occupancy in downtown San Francisco was 95.1% for the first two days of the tech conference, according to a report from data analytics firm STR.

Nearly 46% of people in San Francisco primarily worked from home in 2021 — up from 7% in 2019, according to data released Wednesday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

By the numbers: San Francisco had the third-highest percentage of residents working from home among major U.S. cities.

Restaurant reservations made in San Francisco via OpenTable are down 34% this month compared to July 2019, recent data shows.

The big picture: A variety of data points indicate San Francisco has yet to rebound from the pandemic, despite the city lifting many of its COVID-19-related restrictions.

An effort to keep bars open later in San Francisco, and other cities, was defeated in the state Assembly on Wednesday.

Context: The bill, written by state Sen. Scott Wiener and Assemblymember Matt Haney, would have allowed watering holes in San Francisco, Palm Springs and West Hollywood to serve drinks until 4am on weekends and 3am on weekdays.

About 71% of kids in California between the ages of 6 months and 17 years have been infected with COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, compared to about 80% of kids nationwide, according to recent estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Why it matters: The latest BA.5 subvariant of Omicron is now the dominant strain of the coronavirus in the U.S., and it's the most transmissible we've seen since the start of the pandemic, Axios' Tina Reed writes.