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Los Angeles vs San Francisco-A Tale Of Two Coronavirus Realities


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2021 Jan 11, 9:13am   326 views  4 comments

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#losangelescoronavirusproblems California Times
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By Thomas Fuller and James Wagner

The numbers jump off the page. In the first week of this year, Los Angeles County recorded 950 deaths from the coronavirus — four times as many deaths as San Francisco has had during the entire pandemic.

As my colleagues and I write in an article about the winter surge, California is having two distinct pandemics, north and south. By nearly every metric — hospitalizations, cases per capita and deaths — the pandemic is much worse in Southern California.

This was not always the case.

Dr. Bob Wachter, a professor and chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said the summer surge saw the first divergence and the winter surge had brought an even greater dichotomy, a trend that he said was puzzling.

“It’s the same state government, the same basic weather,” Dr. Wachter said. “But you see wildly divergent outcomes.”

There are only theories about what lies behind the divergence. San Francisco has higher average household incomes than Los Angeles, giving people more resources to protect themselves. The tech industry allows more people to work from home. But Dr. Wachter said those differences alone did not provide a full explanation.

“I think it’s more in the overarching cultures of the places, the willingness of people to buy the science and to do what they are being told is the right thing to do,” Dr. Wachter said.

Rosie Cornwell, a science teacher who moved from San Francisco to Koreatown in Los Angeles in October, said she immediately noticed differences in the way the pandemic was being handled.

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In San Francisco, she said, she saw multilingual information posted everywhere advising residents to protect themselves from the virus and information about free testing sites.

“There was a lot of information not just online but printed on the street,” Ms. Cornwell said. “I haven’t seen that to nearly the same degree in L.A.”

Mask wearing is also more prevalent in the Bay Area, she said.

“I would say on your average walk out in San Francisco in the street 90 to 95 percent of people are wearing masks,” she said. “I just went out on a walk the other day in L.A., and about 30 or 40 percent of people weren’t wearing masks.”




Joey Nygaard, a musician, lived in Los Angeles, moved back to San Francisco for the spring quarantine and then went back to Mid City, in Los Angeles.

“There are a lot less people who are able to work from home here,” he said of Los Angeles. “A lot of people commute to their jobs.”

He said the vast size of Los Angeles forced people to circulate more, and farther from their homes.

“When I first got here I would drive really far to my day job, then drive really far to my night job,” he said.




Tenzin Seldon, 31, a San Francisco resident who works for a tech start-up, said he felt a sense of “psychological safety” in San Francisco because of the mask wearing and social distancing.

“It’s a pretty homogeneous group here, socially and educationally, and also politically,” he said. “We’re sometimes in our own bubble here.” — Thomas Fuller, San Francisco Bureau Chief

Comments 1 - 4 of 4        Search these comments

1   MisdemeanorRebel   2021 Jan 11, 9:20am  

Wait, San Fran with all it's homeless junkies and HIV+ people only had ~250 deaths in all 2020 from COVID?

Give me a break, that's nothing, not a horrible plague pandemic.
2   RWSGFY   2021 Jan 11, 9:20am  

# of illegal aliens here and there, duh.

No need for a wall of text - this shit is obvious.
3   Ceffer   2021 Jan 11, 10:29am  

LA is a balkanized nightmare. We used to talk about this around here years ago: that LA was a festering boil of mass, culturally bizarre humanity that would burst someday. You can still have blissful days close to the ocean, but between Communist takeover and oppression and the sweltering piles of people on spread out concrete and logjam freeways, i wouldn't want to be down there anywhere, even the enclaves. I lived in Venice as a student, and it was great, but now it's a calamity becoming a worse calamity.

SF area at least has some geographic barriers with the bay and the mountain ranges. That, and less raw population, make it a better area for defensible retreat.
4   NuttBoxer   2021 Jan 11, 11:00am  

There are no overflowing hospitals in SD and LA. This has already been stated to you by residents in your previous thread. You might want to start looking for more accurate reporting sources.

In fact, we ate at a restaurant this past weekend that offers indoor seating, and doesn't require masks. Was really refreshing to see people being given a choice about their personal health! Some still wore masks, but most did not. It's time to stop all the fear-porn, and start letting people be personally responsible for their lives. Because regardless of what Big Brother tells you, reality is, your health is your responsibility. Not the doctors, not the states, just you.

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