BA.5 is currently the most prominent variant appearing in wastewater in the South Bay, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Sacramento and elsewhere – and COVID hospitalizations in the Bay Area are at their highest level since February.
The good news is that this variant, while more buoyant than its predecessors, does not appear to provoke more severe disease, and is unlikely to result anywhere close to the scale of last winter’s increase, when vaccination rates There was very little and there were few antiviral treatments available.
Below, you can find automatically updated visualizations that show daily case rate averages over a seven-day period, current hospitalizations and cumulative cases and deaths since the pandemic began for each Bay Area county.
The data, matched by the LA Times, is reported by the California Department of Public Health, which currently updates its data set twice a week (on Tuesdays and Fridays). The daily case count includes both confirmed and probable COVID cases, as tracked by the CDPH. Find statewide daily cases and hospitalizations charts below.