It sure looks like omicron has come to town: COVID case rates in Piedmont as reported by Alameda County jumped up by 22, moving from 298 on Friday to 320 on Tuesday. This is the single largest jump we’ve recorded since tracking local cases in 2020. For the first time, there were lines at the city’s Sunday – Monday COVID testing site in front of City Hall as families and returning college students took advantage of the free testing site.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported on Tuesday that:
About 71% of covid samples at one Bay Area lab are now omicron: At Stanford’s Virology lab, around 71% of COVID samples are those with the omicron variant, the lab’s director Dr. Ben Pinsky said Tuesday. That figure is from over the weekend, and marks a rapid rise from the 56% it was the prior week. Those percentages are based on initial PCR screening of the samples, not full genome sequencing. “It really picked up over the course of the last week,” Pinsky said. “We went from very few to basically the majority being omicron.” He predicted that “nearly all of the cases will be omicron soon.” The 71% tracks with the CDC’s estimate that 73% of U.S. cases are now omicron.
SF Chronicle, Dec. 21