Two
weeks after San Francisco issued the country's first shelter-in-place order for residents to prevent spread of the novel coronavirus, hospital emergency rooms throughout the region appear to be seeing the early effects. "The surge we have been anticipating has not yet come," Dr. Jahan Fahimi, an emergency physician and medical director at the University of California, San Francisco, told CNN. "We're all kind of together holding our breaths."
As of Monday morning, the city reported a total of 374 confirmed infections and six deaths from the coronavirus. While the availability of testing is still much lower than officials would like, the modest daily count compared to other major urban centers may be an encouraging sign that the early aggressive action in the country's second most densely populated city is having its intended effect.
"We have already made a difference in saving lives," San Francisco Mayor London Breed said during a news conference Monday, though she and other officials repeatedly cautioned that US communities are still in the early stages of the battle against the virus.
