omicron is here. omicron however you say it it s here in the country. and we knew that it would be detected relatively soon. in san francisco, because of our outstanding department of public health and our cooperation with ucsf and most importantly the source the source patient, that person upon return from south africa upon travel developed symptoms, got tested. tested positive, received a text from the health department about the test result, contacted the health department and shared her travel history. that allowed us to collaborate with ucsf to quickly sequence this virus and discover that it indeed is this variant. but this is not unexpected. i think we need to remain vigilant. right. but here in san francisco we have high vaccination rates. 81% of people in san francisco are fully vaccinated at this time. so i think we re locally well
current restrictions or imposing any restrictions on activity in san francisco. we re also following these developments very closely. we will share additional information as we have it and again, get vaccinated, get your booster, wear the mask and for goodness sakes, it s been a long almost 24 months now. please have a great holiday season with your family. and now, i d like to turn it over to dr. chu, our great partner in sequencing the virus and again, his team worked so hard over the night to make sure we got this information as quickly as possible. thank you. good afternoon. so, my laboratory at university of california, san francisco, has been working very closely over the past year with the san francisco department of public
people for a good couple of years now. one of the things i learned is what they are doing at ucsf is taking all the positive tests from san francisco county so they can then genome sequence them, and that s how they were able to identify that this was, in fact, omicron. the main thing here, though, is that the vast majority of the tests there, and they re averaging about 54 positive cases a day, the vast majority are the delta variant. at this point, that s why you heard dr. colfax say the same thing. this is no reason to panic, but to be concerned. i would point out you heard dr. colfax say they have stringent mask rules, you have to wear them indoors. same with l.a. county, we are still wearing these masks. we re seeing the variants, you have a need for people to get vaccinated. information can travel quickly in the small world of ours as the virus can. what they have been able to learn from south africa, they have been able to sequence it here quickly, and also to know
city. dr. koufax. thank you, mayor. good morning, everybody, and thank you, mayor, for your ongoing leadership during this pandemic and i want to thank our partners at ucsf, especially dr. charles chu and his team who worked so quickly to sequence this specimen and i d like to thank our testing partner at color. both are here today. and of course, my partner in our emergency response, dr. mary ellen carroll. all of us have been working furiously for the last 24 hours with our federal and state partners at cdc and at the state department of health to determine whether this is indeed the first case of omicron that has been detected and that has indeed been the result of our work overnight. i want to acknowledge our
health, the california department of public health and color genomics on surveillance of the virus. when we identify positive an attempt to sequence the cases we can identify. this particular example was you have been listening to health officials, also the mayor, london breed in san francisco about the first case come omicron identified in the u.s. cnn s stephanie elam is back with us, along with epidemiologist dr. abdul el-sayed. you have been covering the spread of covid across the state, just how well connected this system is to immediately get a sequencing of this and it was identified overnight. and victor, i actually took the time to call of the epidemiologists from ucsf. i have been talking to these