Close to home ... I try to grasp what the data means

Parts of the Mission neighborhood, my home, have just become one of the more thoroughly coronavirus-tested spots in the country. The full results aren't published yet, but UC San Francisco has summarized initial results from two days work to test a little over 4000 residents. The Chron has the story here. Mission Local has what I find the clearest account.

Of the people tested, 1.8 percent (73 individuals) showed the markers of a current infection with the virus; over half of those, 53 percent, had no symptoms of disease -- and very likely didn't know they had it and might be spreading it. Ninety-five percent of those with the infection were Latinx, though Latinx people were only 44 percent of the tested population. No whites or Blacks tested positive though these groups together amounted to 40 percent of the sample. The remaining 5 percent of positive cases are called "Asian" -- perhaps Filipinos?

Starkly, seventy-five percent of those currently infected were male.

It seems pretty clear: at present in San Francisco, those getting COVID-19 are men going out of necessity every day to earn a living. The Mission has many old multi-flat buildings within which rooms are rented out to single laborers, sometimes several guys jammed together. These rooms come with padlocks for each door and shared bathrooms, minimal kitchen facilities. These facilities are just a small step above living on the street; they house people who do the dirtiest work of the city. And these folks are getting infected.

What about families? Are less women currently infected because they've been needed to stop work outside the home to care for children no longer in school, leaving the bread-winning to the men? I don't know.

At the moment, San Francisco seems a largely safe harbor from the virus if you don't have to go out to encounter significant numbers of other residents every day.

There's so much we don't know yet about the patterns of life that underlie the infection data. We may learn more later this month when the information derived from blood taken in the testing has been analyzed. Maybe even more significant numbers of Mission residents will show antibodies that reveal they were infected six weeks ago and have passed through and out of the infection storm. Not terribly likely, but possible. That's what shelter-in-place is all about.

And someday, soon-ish, more people will start going out again. We aren't going to stay away from each other forever. We just won't. Trump's protesting goons are fools tempting Darwinian retribution, but a broader community life will resume. And then there will be more opportunities for everyone who emerges from sheltering to encounter the virus. In history, societies have restored themselves after plagues when most people had developed some immunity the hard way. I sure hope we get a vaccine, and soon. But it is sinking in that this is just one phase and we have a long way, and very likely a lot more sickness, to go.