BA.5 is currently the most dominant variant showing up in wastewater in the South Bay, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Sacramento and elsewhere — and COVID hospitalizations in the Bay Area are at their highest levels since February.
The good news is that this variant, while more zealous than its predecessors, does not appear to inflict more serious illness, and is unlikely to result in anywhere near the scale of last winter’s surge, when vaccination rates were much lower and fewer antiviral therapies were available.
Below, you can explore automatically updated visualizations showing daily case rate averages over a seven-day period, current hospitalizations and cumulative cases and deaths since the pandemic began for every Bay Area county.
The data, tallied by the LA Times, is reported by the California Department of Public Health, which currently updates its data sets twice a week (on Tuesdays and Fridays). Daily case counts include both confirmed and probable COVID cases, as tracked by CDPH. Find charts showing statewide daily cases and hospitalizations at the bottom.