Berkeleyside: Winter COVID Cases Are Rising In Berkeley. Here's How To Stay Safe
Case rates of COVID-19 are rising in Berkeley and Alameda County, in line with trends from previous pandemic winters. Public health officials are urging the community to approach the holiday season with the same caution they did last year during the omicron surge — by wearing tight-fitting, effective masks when going to indoor places like restaurants, bars, and stores, and by testing and handwashing regularly. Residents are urged to get vaccinated for both COVID-19 and seasonal flu, if they haven’t already. (Yelimeli and Rasilla, 12/15)

Los Angeles Daily News: LA County COVID Cases Begin To Decline, But Deaths Rising 
There are signs that the latest COVID-19 surge may be leveling off, with Los Angeles County’s seven-day average case rate down 21% compared to last week, health officials said on Thursday, Dec. 15 — though that good news was tempered by rising death rates that are ahead of where they were this time last year. (Harter, 12/15)

Times Of San Diego: COVID Boosters Ready For Children 6 Months And Up As Cases Slip After Thanksgiving Spike 
The San Diego County Health and Human Services Agency on Thursday reported 4,821 new COVID-19  cases, as numbers fell after the significant Thanksgiving spike. They also announced the local availability of the bivalent booster for youngsters ages 6 months and up. (12/15)

Oaklandside: Caroling Protesters Call For Oakland Mask Mandate To Be Reinstated
Protesters used an unusually merry tactic outside Oakland City Hall Tuesday to draw attention to their cause: singing Christmas carols with lyrics demanding the city reinstate its mask mandate inside city-owned buildings. (Fermoso, 12/14)

AP: California To End Mandatory Pay For Workers With COVID
California will stop making companies pay employees who can’t work because they caught the coronavirus while on the job. For the past two years, California workplace regulators have tried to slow the spread of the coronavirus by requiring infected workers to stay home while also guaranteeing them they would still be paid. But Thursday, the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board voted to end that rule in 2023 — in part because the rule has become harder to enforce. (Beam, 12/15)

CNN: Covid-19 US Intel Agencies Likely Missed Chances To Investigate Covid Pandemic's Origin, House Democrats' Report Says
Democratic investigators on the House Intelligence Committee have alleged that US intelligence agencies may have lost a critical opportunity to gather useful information on the Covid-19 pandemic’s origins by failing to pivot its collection resources earlier. In a report released on Thursday morning, the Democrats also laid out perhaps the most detailed timeline to date of the litany of warnings the intelligence community offered the Trump administration in the early days of the pandemic. (Lillis, 12/15)

SF Gate: Is It Too Late To Get A Flu Shot? We Asked The Experts.
COVID-19 isn't the only virus spreading rapidly this holiday season. After a quiet flu season last year, influenza is now on the rise in California, and the state is in the "very high" category for virus transmission, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Amid the surge, you may be wondering if it's too late to get a flu shot. (Graff, 12/15)

Los Angeles Times: California Has Plenty Of Anti-COVID Drugs, But Few Prescriptions
With California staring down the triple threat posed by the coronavirus, RSV and flu, health officials are urging the wider use of anti-COVID drugs to help prevent people from falling seriously ill and keep them out of the hospital. The drugs include pills such as Paxlovid, which can reduce the risk of severe illness or death from COVID-19 by almost 90%, and another oral medication known as molnupiravir. (Lin II and Money, 12/15)

Capital & Main: Vaccine Tests, Even The Most Well-Funded, Rarely Look Like The America They Aim To Help
Researchers, epidemiologists and pharmaceutical giants have spent the past couple of years looking for ways to more effectively prevent COVID infection and better treat those who do become infected. With the virus once again surging, that effort is front and center. But there’s a critical flaw in the process — and as obvious as it is, it has evaded correction for decades. Put simply, clinical trials, even the largest and most well-funded ones, seldom come close to representing the diversity of the society meant to benefit from them. (Kreidler, 12/15)

The New York Times: Congress Clears Military Bill Repealing Vaccine Mandate For Troops 
The Senate on Thursday gave final approval to an $858 billion military policy bill that would rescind the Pentagon’s mandate that troops receive the coronavirus vaccine, defying President Biden’s objections and sending to his desk a bill that paved the way for a massive increase in spending on the military. The vote was 83 to 11, an overwhelmingly bipartisan margin that reflected support in both parties for boosting the Pentagon’s budget by $45 billion over Mr. Biden’s request, as lawmakers in both parties argued that the protracted war in Ukraine and an emboldened China had changed the nation’s security posture. (Edmondson, 12/15)

AP: Senate Passes Defense Bill Rescinding COVID Vaccine Mandate 
To win GOP support for the 4,408-page bill, Democrats agreed to Republican demands to scrap the requirement for service members to get a COVID-19 vaccination. The bill directs Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to rescind his August 2021 memorandum imposing the mandate. (Freking, 12/16)

San Francisco Chronicle: SF's Only Trauma Center In General Hospital Severely Understaffed
Megan Green gets nervous when people drive recklessly or bike without a helmet in San Francisco. As a nurse at city-run Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, she worries about what happens if they get hurt and come to the city’s only trauma center, which is understaffed. (Moench, 12/15)

San Gabriel Valley Tribune: Nurses At Burbank Hospital Picket Over Staffing, Safety Issues
Nurses at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank picketed the hospital Thursday, Dec. 15, claiming they’re understaffed and seeing incidents of workplace violence due to lapses in security. (Smith, 12/15)

Los Angeles Daily News: Developers Aim To Transform LA County’s Long-Idled, But Still Iconic, General Hospital To House Homeless
The shuttered, 19-story, Art Deco structure, completed in December 1933, hasn’t seen a patient in about two decades. Most of the 1.2 million square feet of interior space lies vacant, but its presence from atop a hill in Boyle Heights is a monument to medicine firsts, to days gone by, and if the county gets its way, a glimpse into the next chapter of the near 90-year-old building’s story. (Scauzillo, 12/16)

The New York Times: E.R. Doctors Misdiagnose Patients With Unusual Symptoms 
As many as 250,000 people die every year because they are misdiagnosed in the emergency room, with doctors failing to identify serious medical conditions like stroke, sepsis and pneumonia, according to a new analysis from the federal government. The study, released Thursday by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, estimates roughly 7.4 million people are inaccurately diagnosed of the 130 million annual visits to hospital emergency departments in the United States. Some 370,000 patients may suffer serious harm as a result. (Abelson, 12/15)

Los Angeles Times: Woman Wins Lawsuit Against Health Insurer Over Opioid Dependency 
A Los Angeles County jury awarded more than $14 million this week to a woman who sued her health insurance provider alleging that the company’s long delay in approving surgery for a painful condition led to her opioid dependency. (Martinez, 12/15)

KPCC: How The Breakdown In US-Mexico Relations Exacerbated The Fentanyl Crisis
Fentanyl was responsible for two-thirds of U.S. drug overdoses in 2021. On average, the drug kills one person in the U.S. every seven minutes, according to a seven-part investigation by the Washington Post. With Mexican cartels seeking to meet increased U.S. demand, seizures of the synthetic opioid at the southern border have continued to reach record numbers. As Fentanyl trafficking escalates, the deterioration of U.S.-Mexico cooperation worsens an already difficult crisis. Today on AirTalk, we discuss the breakdown in the U.S.-Mexico drug response with Nick Miroff, immigration reporter with the Washington Post, and John Feeley, former career diplomat and U.S. ambassador who served as the second in command at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico from 2009 to 2012. (12/15)

USA Today: Common Process By Which People Get Pregnant Is In Legal Jeopardy. Some Democrats Want To Legally Protect IVF
Democratic senators are trying to legally protect the right to use in vitro fertilization after the fall of Roe v. Wade not only ended the constitutional right to abortion but also threw into question the fate of IVF. Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Patty Murray, along with Rep. Susan Wild, are introducing the new legislation, called the Right to Build Families Act of 2022. (Hughes and Fernando, 12/15)

CBS News: Senators Move To Protect IVF Treatments
The new legislation, according to its authors, would prohibit limitations for individuals to access reproductive technologies, protect healthcare providers who administer them, instruct the Justice Department to take action against states in violation and create a "private right of action" for patients and health care providers in states where reproductive technologies are limited. (Huey-Burns, 12/15)

The Mercury News: Harry And Meghan's Claim About Miscarriage Pushes Common Misperception
In one of the explosive claims Prince Harry and Meghan Markle make in the final three episodes of their Netflix docuseries, Harry says she suffered a miscarriage in July 2020 due to stress from her protracted legal battle against the company that publishes the Daily Mail. ... Harry admitted he could not substantiate his claim about the tabloid causing his wife to lose her second pregnancy. Still, he gives voice to what experts in reproductive health say is “a common misperception” about the causes of miscarriage — that stress can cause women to lose their pregnancies.(Ross, 12/15)

The 19th: How Movies And TV Shows Have Portrayed Abortion After Dobbs
For the past five years, researcher Steph Herold has studied portrayals of abortion in television and film as part of the Abortion Onscreen initiative. The latest study by Herold, a research analyst at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) at the University of California-San Francisco’s Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health spans this year. It found 60 abortion plotlines or mentions from 52 distinct television shows, well outnumbering the 47 abortion plotlines in 42 shows seen in 2021. (Gerson, 12/15)

Capital & Main: Union Health Plan Provides Much-Needed Safety Net
For Maria Zavala’s family, there are no easy years. But last year brought the family to the edge of disaster. Zavala, a lettuce worker, is diabetic, and in addition to two other medicines she has to take regularly to control diabetes, she carries an insulin pen. Her 17-year-old son has attention deficit disorder, and she says his doctor told them his depression is one reason why his weight grew dangerously. (Bacon, 12/15)

San Francisco Chronicle: Here's Where Homelessness In SF Increased And Decreased The Most
Earlier this year, San Francisco touted new data that showed homelessness overall had dropped in the city. Even in the Tenderloin, the neighborhood where homelessness is most concentrated and visible, the data indicated a decline in the number of unhoused people since 2019. But detailed geographic data on homelessness shows that while some parts of the neighborhood have seen a decline, one corner saw a large jump in the number of unsheltered people. Unsheltered homelessness is defined as people living in vehicles, tents or on the sidewalk. (Rezal, 12/15)

San Francisco Chronicle: Why Are Our COVID Vaccine And Treatment Policies Backward?
Regarding, “COVID admissions rise in U.S. hospitals” (Nation & World, Dec. 12): I found it disheartening to read that the government plans to stop paying for treatment with the antiviral Paxlovid in the coming months as the drug moves to the private market, where it will cost even more. Public health leaders are dismayed at the abysmal uptake of the new bivalent vaccine, which hovers around 14%. However, the government’s plan for 2023 is to stop paying for Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, which is expected to quadruple in price. New variants are already on the rise. (Stuart Flashman, 12/14)

Zocalo Public Square: My Rehabilitation In Prison Keeps Getting Setback By COVID Outbreaks
I watched the debates over people’s rights during the COVID emergency from behind California prison walls. Here inside Ironwood State Prison, prisoners are afforded a narrow range of “rights,” which can be suspended to preserve institutional security. (David Medina, 12/16)

Los Angeles Daily News: Healthy Cities Matter – And Not Just To Urbanites 
Progressives love cities, yet refuse to address the degree to which their policies have made urban life a bigger chore than needed. Conservatives depict cities as dystopian hellholes. They delight in highlighting the crime problems, poorly functional school systems, homeless encampments and other urban problems that seem unsolvable. (Steven Greenhut, 12/11)

Orange County Register: Newsom’s Homelessness Plan: Money For Nothing
When it comes to homelessness in California, Governor Gavin Newsom has shown time and again that he is more than willing to throw taxpayer dollars at the problem, but despite the billions of dollars spent, the nation’s largest homelessness crisis has only grown. Rather than seriously grapple with why the current strategy is not working, Governor Newsom is doubling down on his failed policies. (Jillian Ludwig and Joshua Rauh, 12/10)

San Francisco Chronicle: Can SF Involuntarily Hospitalize More Homeless People Like New York?
New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams recently announced an “aggressive plan” to involuntarily hospitalize people experiencing homelessness who are deemed too ill to care for themselves. The plan has made headlines here in California, where our dysfunctional system of care for the homeless and seriously mentally ill shares similarities with New York. In San Francisco, one of the epicenters of California’s crisis, many would undoubtedly like to see Mayor London Breed take similar action as Adams. But Californians would be wise to avoid viewing the New York mayor’s proposal as an innovation. (Maria Raven, 12/16)

San Diego Union-Tribune: Volunteering With Operation Smile To Help Children With Speech Has Been A Gift 
Because of Operation Smile’s four decades of leadership in performing safe surgery in resource-limited environments, it understands that a single surgical procedure is a small part of a larger, multitiered process that’s focused on the entire well-being of the patient. (Liana Yee, 12/13)