SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — As COVID-19 cases around the country and in Los Angeles County continue to surge, one California city says it’s not too late to turn things around.

“It’s never too late to save lives and there’s nothing about surges that are so baked in that if you don’t begin to turn things around in terms of your actions, you can’t turn the surge around,” said Dr. Bob Wachter, the Chair of Medicine at UCSF.

What You Need To Know

  • SF was the first city in the nation to shut down and it's been among the slowest to reopen

  • Since the pandemic began, SF has had fewer than 150 coronavirus deaths, compared to 7,000+ in Los Angeles County

  • UCSF Medicine Chair Dr. Bob Wachter says that if the U.S. had followed SF's model, it would've had five times fewer deaths

  • As of Thursday, more than 235,000 Americans had died from the coronavirus

San Francisco was the first city in the nation to shut down and it’s been one of the slowest to reopen. Since the beginning of the pandemic, San Francisco has had fewer than 150 coronavirus deaths compared to more than 7,000 in Los Angeles County.

Wachter says if the rest of the country had followed the city’s model, the country’s COVID-19 death toll would be five times less than what it is now.

As of Thursday, more than 235,00 Americans have died from the virus.

While the Bay Area’s tech industry allowed more people to work from home at the start of the pandemic, Wachter says that’s not the main reason San Francisco has had success in keeping their cases and death rate low.

He adds closing early, reopening slowly, and following public health orders all led to fewer cases and a lower mortality rate in San Francisco.

“In San Francisco you don’t hear anything about it’s like the flu, or it’s a hoax, or give me liberty or give me death, or I don’t believe in masks,” Wachter said.

He points out that unlike other parts of the state, the majority of the people in the city took their leaders’ advice on social distancing and wearing a mask seriously.

“What explains what has gone on is good leadership, people doing the right things to prevent infections, to take care of themselves and also their fellow human beings and I think that lesson is completely useful and learnable in every part of the country,” Wachter explained.

Since March, San Francisco has reported 149 deaths from COVID-19. While the city is much smaller than Los Angeles, he doesn’t think SF’s size is the sole factor that led to a significantly lower death rate.

“Los Angeles has had a little more than 7,000, New York has closing in on 30,000, and both are about 10 times bigger than San Francisco, but not 50 times bigger,” Wachter added.

Early on in the pandemic, the San Francisco Public Health Department partnered with UCSF to ramp up testing in areas that saw a spike in coronavirus cases.

“The Mission District in San Francisco is a very heavily Latinx neighborhood with a lot of people living in close quarters, a lot of essential workers, and we in the city went into that neighborhood and set up testing in a way the community was very much engaged,” Wachter said.

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The city also began a robust contact tracing program where they trained people from all over California to track down COVID-19 cases.

Wachter credits this effort as the reason why the city was able to move into the yellow tier, which is the least restrictive in California’s COVID-19 reopening plan.

However, San Francisco isn’t out of the woods yet. Recently, the city put a halt in reopening plans after a slight uptick in cases and hospitalizations. The pause means that indoor capacity will remain at 25% instead of rising to 50% until cases begin to decrease once again.

Still, Wachter feels confident people will continue to be cautious by wearing a mask and following the advice of public health officials.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the location of the more than 7,000 deaths. The deaths were reported in Los Angeles County. The error has been corrected. (November 6, 2020).