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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.” |
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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. |
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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 |
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