Health Commission hears DPH COVID-19 update; callers press for more nursing-home testing

San Francisco Department of Public Health Director Grant Colfax on April 21 told the Health Commission that the city had recorded 1,231 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 20 deaths among people who had tested positive, and that the department had performed nearly 12,000 tests with a positivity rate that has ranged about 11 to 15 percent. Colfax said the city has expanded medical-surge capacity, reporting about 1,262 acute care beds and 436 ICU beds available across the city to meet a moderate surge.

Colfax described the department's priorities as flattening the curve, protecting the most vulnerable, safeguarding health-care workers, and building medical surge capacity. He said the public-health laboratory and UCSF had boosted testing throughput but that the limiting factor has been supplies such as swabs and culture media. "We have 1231 total cases," Colfax said, adding that available supply…