The San Francisco Bay Area is experiencing a spike in coronavirus cases despite doing everything “by the book,” according to the policies that experts say they would like to impose nationwide.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that while the Bay Area kept cases low initially, and adhered to “social distancing,” mask-wearing, and other preventative policies, the fate of the nine counties in the region is a “cautionary tale.”
“Even though leaders here tried to do everything cautiously and by the book,” the Chronicle reported Sunday evening, “cases still eventually spiked over a month and a half, to an average of 877 cases a day at the end of July from 217 a day in mid-June.”
The Chronicle added:
It was one of the first metro areas in the United States to fully shut down to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. Nearly everyone wears masks, in stores and on streets. Its progressive residents generally have been inclined to follow the rules, and there’s a high level of trust in public health officials, local governments and the fast-changing science.
But now, more than four months after the region put some of the nation’s first shelter-in-place orders in effect, the Bay Area is experiencing a surge in cases and counties are rolling back reopening plans.
The Bay Area is still faring better than many other metro areas. But while the Southern California is seeing a drop in hospitalizations, signaling the possibility that it may be overcoming the recent spike in cases, the Bay Area is struggling.
One reason is that people are simply tired of “a hermitlike existence … for months on end.”
The turning point in San Francisco, as elsewhere, appears to have been Memorial Day weekend — traditionally a time of gathering for friends and family, and also the day George Floyd was killed in the custody of police in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
That triggered protests across the nation, cheered on by Democrats and the mainstream media, in which social distancing rules were quickly forgotten and large crowd gathered to protest — or to riot.
The images of large crowds shattered social discipline in many places.
Meanwhile, separately, the Chronicle reported Sunday that car sales are rising in the green-friendly Bay Area, as public transportation is seen as increasingly risky.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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