Bay Area medical experts explain why COVID cases are on the rise and who is most at risk

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — COVID-19 is on the rise across the country and in the Bay Area.

“We are entering the summer surge period, and we are seeing an increase in the number of COVID patients coming into our emergency department seeking treatment,” said Dr. Nida DeGesis, associate medical director of UCSF Parnassus Adult Emergency Department.

Hospitalizations in the Bay Area began rising in June, according to data from the California Department of Public Health, and while numbers are still rising, they’re not as high as they were during the winter surge in infections in January.

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The increase was also reflected in wastewater samples taken from three Bay Area water treatment plants, which showed a higher rate of increase than hospitalizations.

“We’re still trending up. We don’t know how high it will go,” said Alexandria Bohm, a professor of environmental studies in Stanford University’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “We’re at roughly the same levels we saw during the Omicron Surge in 2022.”

Nationwide, hospitalizations for COVID-19 are increasing, but at a much lower rate than past surges and similar to hospitalization trends in the Bay Area.

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Dr. DeGesis said COVID-19 cases are on the rise, but patients are not as severely ill as they were earlier in the pandemic.

“They’re fully vaccinated, so we’re very fortunate that the majority of our patients are fully vaccinated,” DeGessis said, “Their symptoms are less severe, they recover within a few days, and they don’t require the advanced respiratory care that they did during previous surges when there was no vaccine.”

Those most affected are those over 65 and those with weakened immune systems.

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“They have a weaker immune response to the vaccine and therefore less protection after the booster shot,” said Nadia Roan, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco and a senior scholar at the Gladstone Institutes. “So it’s these older people and those with weakened immune systems that are hospitalizing a lot of the time.”

Dr. Roan urges people to get vaccinated.

“Older people and people with weakened immune systems can get severe COVID-19, end up in hospital and even die from COVID-19,” Dr. Roan said, “but for people who are younger and generally immune healthy, I think it’s still important to boost their immunity.”