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July 30, 2021 SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — San Francisco could be the next Bay Area city to issue an indoor mask mandate amid a COVID case surge that has included over 200 vaccinated health care professionals at hospitals.

At San Francisco General Hospital, 35 staff members were out sick after testing positive for the coronavirus. According to the hospital’s chief medical officer and the San Francisco Chronicle, three-quarters of them were fully vaccinated.


UCSF released a statement regarding COVID infections among staff members across both the health system and the university campus early Friday evening. The statement said 92% of the hospital’s frontline health workers have been vaccinated and more than 90% across the UCSF health, campus employee and trainee population have been vaccinated overall.

In the past month, UCSF has had 183 employees or learners test positive for COVID-19 out of a total UCSF population of approximately 35,000. ...
Of those, 153 had been vaccinated and 30 had not. Officials said only two of the vaccinated cases required hospitalization.

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Two major San Francisco hospitals - Zuckerberg San Francisco General and UCSF - are reporting more than 230 staff members infected with COVID - most of them breakthrough cases.

"More staff are getting COVID than we saw before, and it's mostly vaccinated staff. And that's just because of the easing of restrictions," said Dr. Lukejohn Day, the Chief Medical Officer of San Francisco General Hospital. "We are seeing it among physicians, nurses, ancillary staff, we sort of are seeing that across the board."

According to Dr. Day, at SFGH:

In July, more than 50 staff members tested positive for COVID
75-80% of them were fully vaccinated
None of them have been hospitalized

The 50 cases are out of 7,500 total hospital staff. It's a small portion, but how they got COVID is important.

"I think close to over 99% of those cases, almost 100%, we have been able to trace back to community spread," explained Dr. Day. "We have so far not detected any patient to staff or staff to patient transmission right now. But we still have some active investigations that are going on."

A source tells ABC7 news reporter, Kate Larsen, that three of the cases at San Francisco General were emergency department staff, who tested positive after they all gathered together at an event outside of work.

"In some ways it's a little bit surprising and disappointing that we're here talking seriously about COVID after all this time," said Dr. Josh Adler, UCSF's chief clinical officer.

According to UCSF:

In July, 183 UCSF employees or learners tested positive for COVID out of 35,000 people.
84% were fully vaccinated.
2 vaccinated people were hospitalized


"We were expecting and planning for breakthroughs, that said the rate of breakthroughs is a little bit higher than we had originally predicted," said Dr. Adler. But that's because those predictions were based on data from the original variant, not the Delta - which is twice as infectious.