Counties across the Bay Area continue to see the number of people in hospitals with COVID-19 creeping upward.
All nine local counties are back in the CDC's high-risk category for COVID-19 community levels, and the highly-transmissible BA.5 subvariant of the virus that causes COVID-19 is quickly taking over.
Santa Clara County says the highly transmissible new BA.5 subvariant now makes up more than half of the virus present in local wastewater. BA.5 and its predecessor BA.4 are now dominant in San Mateo County, health officials say. Alameda County told NBC Bay Area it cannot say what proportion of its current cases are BA.5, but it did say "ongoing high rates of infection may be driven, in part, by the emergence of BA.5."
"What we have tended to see as we’ve seen each of these variants, one kind of takes over the other with a greater degree of infectiousness," San Mateo County Director of Public Health Marc Meulman said.
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Hospitalization rates for people with COVID-19 have stayed elevated for the past few weeks.
"While it's concerning, it has not reached the levels of hospitalizations that we’ve seen in other surges," Meulman said, noting that the daily numbers of people hospitalized with COVID are not as high now as they were during the January surge.
"Alameda County continues to experience high COVID-19 case rates as people increasingly resume pre-pandemic activities," said Alameda County Health Officer Nicholas Moss in a statement. "Hospitalizations are elevated at levels like what we have seen since mid-June but remain below what we have seen in previous waves, and ICU burden remains low."
"We’re just continuing to see a continued high level of transmission in the community," Santa Clara County Public Health Department Deputy Director Michael Balliet said.
"We have seen a pretty stable volume of patients in and out of the hospital, not necessarily for COVID, but with COVID -- they might be in for another procedure and test positive through routine testing," Balliet continued.
The good news is health leaders say widespread vaccinations and treatments seem to be keeping the hospitalization numbers manageable. The bad news is with such infectious new variants, health officials really can't say when the uptick will end.
Both Santa Clara and San Mateo counties say they are not considering a return to mask mandates at this time. But they are strongly urging the public to wear high-quality masks in public settings to help stop the spread and keep more people out of the hospitals.
"We continue to really encourage people to wear tight-fitting face coverings especially when they are indoors and to hold their events or gatherings outdoors where there is good ventilation," Balliet said.
The California Department of Public Health told NBC Bay Area Wednesday that at this time it is not aware of any difference in symptoms and cases with BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants as compared to previous variants and subvariants. The department says it is currently investigating the risk of people who previously had COVID-19 getting infected with BA.4 or BA.5. CDPH noted that lab studies show BA.4 and BA.5 "can partially evade immunity from vaccination or previous infection" including previous infections from the previous forms or the omicron variant we saw this year.
