Latest From California Healthline:
California Healthline Original Stories
'Into the Covid ICU': A New Doctor Bears Witness to the Isolation, Inequities of Pandemic
Dr. Paloma Marin-Nevarez graduated from medical school during the pandemic. We follow the rookie doctor for her first months working at a hospital in Fresno, California, as she grapples with isolation, anti-mask rallies and an overwhelming number of deaths. (Jenny Gold, )
Becerra Has Long Backed Single-Payer. That Doesn’t Mean It Will Happen if He’s HHS Secretary.
Biden’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services has been on record throughout his career for this type of health care system. But the president doesn’t support it, which is the position that counts. (Victoria Knight, )
For Many Teachers, The Big Day Arrives: Teachers and workers in child care, emergency services and food and agriculture are eligible to receive covid shots in Los Angeles County starting Monday, though officials warn there is a limited supply. Over the weekend, hundreds of San Diego teachers flocked to locations throughout the county to take advantage of their newly eligible status, which kicked in Saturday. Read more from the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union-Tribune.
Bill Seeks To End Marijuana Tests At Work: A new bill in the Legislature aims to end a still-common employment practice five years after Californians voted to legalize recreational cannabis in which private companies require can workers to test for marijuana use. Read more from the Modesto Bee.
Below, check out the roundup of California Healthline’s coverage. For today's national health news, read KHN's Morning Briefing.
More News From Across The State
Bay Area News Group:
Johnson & Johnson Vaccine Is A Game Changer For Hard-To-Reach Communities
“This will be a game-changer,” said Santa Clara County supervisor Otto Lee at Friday’s opening of a new COVID-19 vaccination location at East Valley Clinic in urban East San Jose, which serves a predominantly Latinx community hard hit by the virus. The most immediate advantage, said experts, is expanded supplies. Pfizer and Moderna, alone, can’t make enough vaccines to quickly protect everyone. The recent emergence of variants has heightened the urgency of vaccinating as many people as possible. If the virus can’t multiply, it can’t mutate. Johnson & Johnson has promised to deliver enough doses by the end of March to vaccinate more than 20 million Americans. It expects to deliver 100 million doses by the end of June. (Krieger, 2/26)
Bay Area News Group:
Coronavirus: One In Seven Californians Have Received A Vaccine Dose
About one in seven Californians, 14.8 percent, have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, a positive sign after one of the slowest vaccination rollout starts in the nation. In California, 19.1 percent of residents 18 and older have received at least one vaccine dose, and 6 percent of all residents have received both doses, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. In total, 8,243,711 vaccine doses have been administered in California, 76 percent of the doses delivered, according to the state’s Department of Public Health. (Castaneda, 2/27)
LA Daily News:
LA County, City, School-District Sites Gear Up For Monday’s Massive New Wave Of Vaccine-Seekers
With an estimated 1.2 million more people eligible for coronavirus vaccines on Monday, March 1, Los Angeles County will operate with its largest-ever infrastructure for delivering the sought-after inoculations this week. But health officials said residents will have to be patient while vaccine supplies remain thin and sporadic, and while staff are being trained to tighten up procedures to ensure only eligible people receive shots. County health officials expressed hope that conditions will improve dramatically, however, with Saturday’s federal approval of a single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine. (2/28)
The Bakersfield Californian:
COVID-19 Vaccine Appointments In Kern Open At MyTurn
COVID-19 vaccine appointments have opened for the week on My Turn for the Kern County Fairgrounds' Mass Vaccination Clinic and the state’s sites in Arvin, Rosamond and Wasco, the county announced Saturday. Here are the hours for this week: (2/28)
Los Angeles Times:
Vaccine Rollout Hit-Or-Miss For California Farmworkers
It is a “pivotal time” to inoculate farmworkers against the coronavirus before they return to their perilous work, said UFW Foundation Executive Director Diana Tellefson Torres. But it’s also the moment California is tossing out its existing strategy for vaccine distribution — controlled by local governments — and transferring it to a nonprofit insurance company, Blue Shield. The collision of harvest season with the Blue Shield takeover has left many community organizers and health officials worried that existing plans, though criticized for being inadequate and uneven, will be abandoned for a different set of uncertainties. They say the insurance company has done little to alleviate those fears and has not asked for their help — despite the challenges of working with insular farmworkers, many of whom lack insurance. (Chabria, 3/1)
San Francisco Chronicle:
1,000 Farmworkers To Get COVID-19 Vaccine In Santa Clara County Mobile Clinic
Santa Clara County health officials said 1,000 workers from nearby farms are expected to receive shots Sunday and Wednesday at the Monterey Mushrooms facility. “The people who were doing the hardest work picking the fruit and processing it were the most hard hit by COVID-19, and it continues,” Santa Clara County Supervisor Cindy Chavez told a news conference outside the dusty farm location with large signs announcing the clinic in English and Spanish. “The best way we can honor our frontline workers is what we’re doing today, which is getting them vaccinations.” (Arredondo, 2/28)
Bay Area News Group:
Farmworkers Get Coronavirus Vaccines At On-Site Santa Clara County Clinic
The solution to protecting the farmworkers who feed millions of Americans seemed straightforward for a population that can’t work from home: Bring the COVID-19 vaccine to their places of employment. But in the early months of the vaccination effort, the 3.4 million “essential workers” of the food and agricultural business were overlooked. Now that is changing, with efforts like the collaborative, public-private partnership that on Sunday launched an on-site vaccination center at Monterey Mushrooms, the country’s largest mushroom farm. The two-day mobile clinic has a goal of vaccinating 1,000 employees of the region’s farms as Santa Clara County public health officials increase efforts to ensure all eligible citizens have access to vaccinations. (Almond and Vazquez, 2/28)
Bay Area News Group:
Community College Students Help Spread Vaccine Education To California Farmworkers
It’s a warm, breezy afternoon in the parking lot of Taylor Farms in Gonzales. More than 100 metal folding chairs, socially distanced 6 feet apart, are set up to face a white table where two women in matching scrub sets stand. Hard-hat-wearing workers begin to stream in, filling out the audience. The agricultural workers are listening to a presentation from Hartnell College nursing program students on the COVID-19 vaccine. Since January, students have been traveling from Salinas to San Juan Batista to Soledad to speak with farmworkers in settings much like this and combat the spread of misinformation on the vaccine. (Gasparini, 2/28)
Santa Rosa Press Democrat:
Mendocino County Clarifies That Logging Sector, Not Lodging Industry Eligible For COVID Vaccine
Mendocino County is allowing those who work in the logging industry to receive a coronavirus vaccine, clarifying that those employees are eligible after earlier mistakenly posting to its Facebook page that people in the “lodging” sector could receive such shots. (Swindell, 2/27)
Los Angeles Times:
Families Of Prisoners With COVID-19 Say They're Left In The Dark
As the pandemic has ravaged California prisons, some families say that officials have failed to inform them when their loved ones have been hospitalized with the virus — receiving a call only when it might already be too late to say their goodbyes, act as surrogate decision-makers or provide critical emotional support. State law requires the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to use “all reasonable means” to notify an inmate’s designated contacts in the case of a death, serious illness or serious injury. The law does not say when exactly the prison must alert families — the CDCR’s operations manual says “as soon as possible” — or what’s deemed a serious illness. (Miller, 2/28)
San Francisco Chronicle:
Herd Immunity By June? San Francisco Must Meet This Vaccine Benchmark For It To Happen
But the concept of herd immunity for San Francisco alone doesn’t make much sense, according to George Rutherford, a UCSF infectious disease expert. “San Francisco’s not an island,” he said. “Given that people come and go and that there’s total population mixing, you have to think about it in the whole Bay Area.” Calculating herd immunity for San Francisco, he said, would mean looking at the entire nine-county Bay Area region, plus nearby counties with lots of Bay Area commuters, like San Joaquin and Santa Cruz counties — all of which are vaccinating their residents at different paces and according to slightly differing guidelines. (Neilson, 2/28)
Berkeleyside:
Berkeley Tries Grassroots Methods To Avoid COVID-19 'Vaccine Hunters,' Improve Equity
A quiet COVID-19 vaccine rollout at the Ed Roberts campus this week was one of Berkeley’s first forays into an equity-based distribution for community members who can’t easily make appointments online or access local mass vaccination sites. The Center for Independent Living set up the mobile site on Sunday in partnership with the state office of emergency services (CalOES), as well as Alameda County, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and AmeriCorps. It’s located in the back parking lot of the Ed Roberts campus, across from Ashby BART, and was open for the duration of this week through Friday afternoon. It will close and return in the same spot for second doses of the Pfizer vaccine in three weeks. Lisa Warhuus, director of the Berkeley health, housing and community services has been overseeing the city’s vaccine rollout and outreach for this site. It is markedly different from mass vaccination sites at Golden Gate Fields in Albany and the Oakland Coliseum, and local officials have employed multiple methods to keep it that way. (Yelimeli, 2/26)
Los Angeles Times:
Small Crowd Protests Outside Dodger Stadium Vaccination Site
A handful of protesters demonstrated outside the vaccine distribution site at Dodger Stadium on Saturday, but authorities reported no major issues. The protest started around noon and drew 20 to 30 people, said LAPD Officer Sean Murray. No arrests had been reported by 2 p.m., nor were vaccination efforts interrupted, he said. Last month, a demonstration by anti-vaccination and far-right protesters prompted Los Angeles Fire Department officials to briefly close the main entrance to the stadium as a precaution as maskless protesters roamed through the long queues of cars, intimidating people and stalling their entry. (Wigglesworth, 2/27)
Capital Public Radio/KXJZ:
‘I Feel Your Frustration’: In Podcast, State Surgeon General Gets Personal About Pandemic
California’s initial vaccine rollout was “slow — we were last.” The current numbers on vaccine equity “look awful.” The fact that so many children are still not able to attend in-person school is having “a significant impact, developmentally, mentally and emotionally.” California’s first surgeon general, Nadine Burke Harris, didn’t flinch from acknowledging the challenges the state faces as it nears the one-year anniversary of a coronavirus pandemic that upended life as we knew it. And yet, in a revealing interview on the podcast “California State of Mind,” she was upbeat as she outlined the pivots and progress the state has made. (2/27)
San Diego Union-Tribune:
Signs Point To COVID-19 Vaccines Slowing Viral Transmission, Not Just Disease
After countless hours spent searching for a COVID-19 vaccine appointment, Elizabeth Kostas is days away from getting her second and final shot. And like many San Diegans, she’s wondering what she’ll be able to do next. “I just look back longingly and with such good memories of hanging out with friends and doing fun things,” said the 69-year-old Carmel Valley resident. “I want to get back to that. ”But Kostas plans to keep playing it safe for now, and will continue to wear a mask, stay at home and avoid traveling. She’s worried about unwittingly spreading the virus to family, friends and neighbors who haven’t gotten their shot yet. (Wosen, 2/27)
San Diego Union-Tribune:
Active Outbreaks Continue Falling In San Diego County Skilled Nursing Homes
This week, the number of active outbreaks in the county’s skilled nursing facilities continued falling for the fourth week in a row as the rate of new cases continued to decrease. County public health officials reported Wednesday that there are 45 active outbreaks among skilled nursing facilities out of the 157 that have occurred since the pandemic began. That includes two new outbreaks since last week’s report. (Mapp, 2/27)
Southern California News Group:
Wanted: Patients To Help Investigate Treatments To Crush COVID
The tricky part of finding a drug that works early in the infection cycle has been finding enough people with fresh COVID-19 diagnoses — long before there’s a need for hospitalization — to participate in well-designed studies of drugs that might forestall the virus’s progression. “Our study mantra is, ‘Rise above COVID,’ ” said Judith S. Currier, chief of UCLA’s Division of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine. “We encourage people to think about how they can help advance science — it’s something they can do.” Those who have very recently been diagnosed can find a study to participate in at www.riseabovecovid.org/en. In Northern California, studies are underway at UC San Francisco, Stanford University, VA Northern California Health Care System, UC Davis and several other sites. (Sforza, 2/28)
Santa Rosa Press Democrat:
These Volunteers With Sonoma County’s COVID-19 Response Are Indispensable
It could fairly be said that volunteer doctors and nurses and other medical professionals, as well as legions of good Samaritans who don’t work in a medical profession, are giving local efforts to protect people from COVID-19 an indispensable shot in the arm. (Smith, 2/28)
Fresno Bee:
Watch Fresno Bee’s Q&A Event On School Reopenings In COVID-19
Schools in Fresno County are starting to reopen. Some middle school and high school students have already returned on a hybrid model, while other students continue distance learning. Join us March 9 at 3 p.m. as The Fresno Bee’s Education Lab presents “Back to School: Q&A on COVID Safety” — a discussion with teachers and a physician with the county public health department on what parents should know about school reopenings, as well as continued distance learning. (2/28)
San Diego Union-Tribune:
Young Athletes Are Eager To Get Back On The Field After COVID 'Blew Everything Up'
Vanessa Peña has three boys who play baseball in the Allied Gardens Little League. A year ago, the coronavirus pandemic arrived right after opening day. Almost all the games got canceled. “It was so sad to watch this thing they love get ripped from them,” Peña said. Now it’s back, almost. (Wilkens, 2/28)
Sacramento Bee:
UC Davis Health To Expand CA Hospital In $3.75 Billion Plan
To meet California’s seismic standards by a 2030 deadline, UC Davis Health System is proposing to replace its current Sacramento hospital buildings as part of a $3.75 billion project that would boast an expanded 16-story tower and five-floor pavilion. “While there is an overall reduction in the need for hospital beds across the region, we are uniquely planning for more beds,” said Dr. David Lubarsky, the chief executive officer of UC Davis Health, in a prepared statement. In the preliminary proposal, UC Davis is recommending an increase in the number of licensed beds, growing to 700 from the 625 it has today. Because there will be more private rooms, the proposed structure will be double the square footage of the current hospital in Oak Park, UC Davis officials said. A number of studies have shown that private rooms cut down on patients’ stress, making it easier for them to sleep and reducing the time needed for recovery. (Anderson, 2/27)
Capital Public Radio/KXJZ:
New California Law Makes It Easier To Get Care For Mental Health And Substance Abuse
In making coverage decisions about mental health and addiction treatment, insurers frequently use “their own kind of black box criteria, not knowable to enrollees and not consistent with standards of care,” says Julie Snyder, director of government affairs at the Steinberg Institute, a Sacramento-based mental health policy and advocacy group. A California law that took effect Jan. 1, SB-855, should make it much harder for state-regulated commercial health plans to do so. It requires them to use nationally recognized clinical standards established by nonprofit associations of clinical specialists to determine which mental health and addiction treatments they’ll cover — and for how long. (Wolfson, 2/28)
Santa Rosa Press Democrat:
Sonoma County Set To Approve 'Guiding Document’ For Five Years
Confronting homelessness, bolstering mental health treatment, improving racial equity and hardening the county's infrastructure against climate disasters will dominate the Sonoma County government’s agenda for the next five years, according to a nearly complete plan. (Graham, 2/28)
San Diego Union-Tribune:
San Diego Startup DTx Pharma Raises $100M For Platform To Treat Rare Diseases
DTx Pharma, a 15-employee San Diego biotechnology company pursuing a platform for creating RNA-based therapies to treat genetic drivers of rare diseases, said Monday that it has raised $100 million in Series B round of financing. The early stage company, which previously raised $10.6 million in a Series A round in January 2020, is pursuing potential treatments in ophthalmology and for neuromuscular diseases initially. According to DTx Pharma’s website, its most advanced program in the eye arena targets a disease called retinitis pigmentosa, which is often inherited. It anticipates initiating clinical work on this treatment in 2022. (Freeman, 3/1)
San Francisco Chronicle:
Bay Area Cities Want To End Single-Family Home Zoning, But Will It Create More Housing?
Last week, the city councils in Berkeley and South San Francisco took steps to end single-family zoning, with Berkeley promising to get rid of it within a year and South City initiating a study as part of its general plan update. After the Berkeley vote, Council Member Terry Taplin, one of the authors of the resolution, called it a “historical moment for us in Berkeley.” But while the movement to allow multifamily buildings in zones previously limited to single-family homes is being embraced as a correction of past discriminatory policies — Sacramento, Oregon and Minneapolis have passed such laws — the question of whether it will actually increase housing production is a lot more complicated, according to builders and architects. (Dineen, 2/28)