SF projects dire COVID figures for worst case scenario, but how accurate are they? - SF Gate

Medical workers at Kaiser Permanente French Campus test a patient for the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, at a drive-thru testing facility in San Francisco, California on March 12, 2020.

- Between 70 to 150 million people in the United States could eventually be infected with the novel coronavirus, according to a projection shared with Congress, a lawmaker said March 12, 2020.

Medical workers at Kaiser Permanente French Campus test a patient for the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, at a drive-thru testing facility in San Francisco, California on March 12, 2020.

Medical workers at Kaiser Permanente French Campus test a patient for the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, at a drive-thru testing facility in San Francisco, California on March 12, 2020.

- Between 70 to 150 million people in the United States could eventually be infected with the novel coronavirus, according to a projection shared with Congress, a lawmaker said March 12, 2020.

Medical workers at Kaiser Permanente French Campus test a patient for the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, at a drive-thru testing facility in San Francisco, California on March 12, 2020.

While the coronavirus surges across San Francisco again, city officials are bracing for the worst possible outcome: mass infections by the fall, potentially overloading the city's health care system, and a sharp uptick in the city's death toll.

If this continues at current rates we estimate on average we will have more than 750 San Franciscans in the hospital by mid-October and more than 600 deaths from COVID-19 in 2020.

George Rutherford, professor of epidemiology at University of California, San Francisco, mostly agrees with the city's assessment and current projections.

On Thursday, Colfax and District 2 Supervisor Catherine Stefani announced a 93 person-capacity low acuity care center for non-COVID patients to free up hospital beds for coronavirus cases.

All this aside, the future scenario that Rutherford is really concerned about isn't strictly about the coronavirus — it's about the flu, too