San Francisco is Another Portugal

The icon of liberalism, as well as a bastion of “support for science” San Francisco, believes in vaccines. It is over 90% vaccinated. The city is not even reporting the exact percentage vaccinated, possibly out of embarrassment or incompetence.

The graph of Covid cases shows that Covid is well under control in the city, thanks to the safe and effective vaccines and mRNA boosters.

This is, of course, a mirage.

San Francisco, like most other US locales, stopped counting Covid cases after moving to home-based RAT testing around Jan 2022. The tests are done at home and are not reported. The poorer people probably do not even bother testing, they just get sick again and again without a diagnosis.

However, San Francisco also monitors wastewater — the municipal stream of water from showers, toilet flushes, and everything else. The viral RNA that is shed in fecal matter is a reliable indicator of how many San Franciscans are having Covid right now (ignoring that some of them defecate on sidewalks instead of toilets).

The city is actually doing a decent job measuring wastewater virus levels and is measuring concentrations of different segments of viral RNA. This way it can know what variants predominate, without doing any genetic testing of individual residents.

Things look very bad if you look at wastewater measurements. Here’s the concentration of viral RNA in San Francisco wastewater:

We can see that SF is having a record amount of COVID, which follows a record amount of COVID just a month ago, that follows a record amount of COVID in January.

Let’s do simple math comparing Jan 2022 to May 2022:

Based on wastewater levels, the number of cases in May 2022, if measured the same way as Jan 2022, would be estimated as 3,091 cases per day instead of the reported 500 PCR cases. This means that cases are underreported by about 6 times compared to January. This calculation is by its nature quite imprecise, however, you can see that underreporting is very significant and the number of sick people is grossly understated.

San Francisco’s COVID situation is replicated in thousands of highly vaccinated places. I wrote about Portugal, showing how the country with “no one left to vaccinate” is gripped by endless waves of Covid.

Ba.5 is just starting to become predominant in San Francisco, unlike in Portugal where it dominated since a month ago, and that is not a good sign for a beautiful coastal city whose residents keep catching endless cases of Covid.

Do you feel sorry for San Franciscans, who get ill so often? I do.

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