New data revealed Friday that the COVID-19 positivity rate in San Francisco is now 5%, which experts say is “too high,” according to Johns Hopkins University.
This means that 5% of the people taking coronavirus tests at any medical provider in the city have tested positive for coronavirus.
Researchers said that the World Health Organization caps the rate at 5% before advising the government to pull back health measures to lower the spread of COVID.
The last time San Francisco saw an over 5% positivity rate was after the holiday surge in January when it peaked at 18.9%, according to city data. That number went down to 2.4% in March before going back up in April.
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Despite the new numbers, the San Francisco Department of Public Health said they are not alarmed, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
“While case rates have been a key measure of the virus’s spread, we also look to indicators of severe disease such as hospitalizations and deaths to inform public health decisions and to make decisions on how to best deploy resources to meet the needs of highly impacted communities,” the department said in a statement to the Chronicle.
California’s statewide positivity rate is 3.1%, up from 1.3% on April 1.
