I continue to check my little dashboard of #SanFrancisco COVID numbers each morning to figure out whether brunching at a neighborhood crêperie is a fine way to occasionally take a break from my own cooking or a foolish boost to future dementia risk. Lately, some good news and some bad news. As you may remember (depending on whether you read my posts and/or your current dementia state), I track three SF COVID numbers. Lately, the PCR test positivity % has been low. That's good! Also lately, the COVID-in-wastewater numbers have been high. That's bad!
There's an old joke from the age of mechanical timepieces: Someone with a watch always knows what time it is. Someone with two watches is never quite sure. To figure out whether I'm willing to swap inside air with my fellow San Franciscans, I let the dashboard multiply together the numbers I track and look at the overall product. Overall, I'm still happy to go places (he wrote, licking omelet juice from his lips). There were a few days about a month and a half ago in which I avoided going indoors…but as more data came in, I looked back and thought that I prrrrobably would have been willing to go out those days, too.
Some good news for data nerds: The Cal-SuWers dashboard, where I get SF COVID-in-wastewater data, now also has data (and graphs and such) for flu and RSV. They used to mostly post new data weekly (confusingly, with some data coming in at other times), but now post data every weekday. According to them, overall California COVID levels are falling and are now "low". (For the past few weeks, they were plateau-ed at "high".) They also say that SF Bay Area levels are low, though they used to be high. Here's hoping that SF's recent bump is just an aberration and we'll catch up with the rest of the Bay Area soon.
