Latest From California Healthline:
California Healthline Original Stories
The Demise of Single-Payer in California Trips Up Efforts in Other States
The failure of single-payer health care legislation in California casts doubt on the ability of other states to pass government-run, universal health care. But activists in New York, Washington state, and elsewhere say they are taking lessons from California and changing their tactics. (Angela Hart, )
Changes to Medi-Cal’s Troubled Drug Program Reduce Backlog, but Problems Persist
After a troubled start to the new Medi-Cal prescription drug program, the state’s contractor has hired staffers to reduce wait times for medication approvals and patients seeking help. But some doctors and clinics report that patients continue to face delays. (Samantha Young, )
Majority In Favor Of School Mandates: Nearly two-thirds of California voters, including a majority of parents, support mask and vaccine mandates in K-12 schools, according to a poll conducted this month by the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley and co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times. Read more at Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Tribune.
Scroll down for more coverage of mask requirements and CDC guidance.
Police Search For California Man Who Stole Covid Tests: Santa Ana police are asking for the public’s help in finding a man suspected of rerouting more than $1 million worth of covid-19 tests from a warehouse where he worked to his home. Read more at Los Angeles Times and Mercury News.
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
AP:
CDC To Significantly Ease Pandemic Mask Guidelines Friday
The Biden administration will significantly loosen federal mask-wearing guidelines to protect against COVID-19 transmission on Friday, according to two people familiar with the matter, meaning most Americans will no longer be advised to wear masks in indoor public settings. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday will announce a change to the metrics it uses to determine whether to recommend face coverings, shifting from looking at COVID-19 case counts to a more holistic view of risk from the coronavirus to a community. Under current guidelines, masks are recommended for people residing in communities of substantial or high transmission — roughly 95% of U.S. counties, according to the latest data. (Miller, 2/25)
Orange County Register:
‘Stealth Omicron’ Is On Its Way. How Nervous Should We Be?
Mighty omicron has morphed into distinct subvariants — including “stealth omicron,” which might be even more infectious. Omicron-specific vaccines are in the works, but may not offer any more protection than what we have now. And there has been talk of a fourth shot, at least for those who are most vulnerable to illness. But before you erupt in a primal scream, take a deep breath: Experts say there’s no need to worry just yet. (Sforza, 2/24)
Los Angeles Daily News:
COVID-19 Cases Continue Downward Trend As LA County Prepares For Indoor Mask Mandate To Ease
COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations across LA County are still on the decline — though transmission rates have still not dropped below pre-omicron surge levels, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported on the eve of indoor masking rules being eased for the fully vaccinated. There were 1,985 new cases of the virus reported Thursday, Feb. 24, along with an additional 74 COVID-19 deaths. Hospitalizations also declined again Thursday, the county said, dipping to 1,150. (Hutchings, 2/24)
CalMatters:
COVID-19 Has Turned Deadlier For Black Californians
California’s African Americans are dying from COVID at a higher rate now. And they make up a disproportionate and growing share of the death toll for middle-aged Californians. (Hwang, 2/25)
San Francisco Chronicle:
COVID Paid Sick Leave Is Back In California. Here’s How It Works And How To Claim It
Many California workers can once again apply for COVID-related sick pay under legislation approved by lawmakers and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom this month. As of Feb. 19, people who work for public or private companies tha t have 26 or more employees are entitled to up to 80 hours of COVID-related paid sick leave retroactive to Jan. 1 and extending through Sept. 30. (Flores, 2/24)
Los Angeles Times:
Masking Rules Are Easing In California. But It's Complicated
As Omicron fades, communities across California are continuing to ease masking rules. But that does not mean face coverings will suddenly disappear in public indoor spaces. Moreover, many health officials say it still makes sense to wear masks inside, even when there is no longer a mandate, because they offer strong protection. (Money and Lin II, 2/24)
Los Angeles Times:
Silicon Valley Nears Goal To Lift Local Indoor Mask Mandate
Santa Clara County, Northern California’s most populous, could lift its local indoor mask mandate as soon as next week, as coronavirus transmission continues to tumble across the region. The home to Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County is one of several local governments in California that opted to retain a universal indoor mask mandate even after the expiration of a statewide order. Others include Los Angeles and Mendocino counties and the city of Palm Springs. (Lin II and Money, 2/24)
Bay Area News Group:
Santa Clara County Plans To End Indoor Mask Mandate In One Week
One more week and the masks can come off inside restaurants, stores and other indoor places in Santa Clara County, which has been the last bastion in the Bay Area and one of the last in California to lift the mandate. And if the San Jose City Council follows the recommendation of its mayor on Tuesday, visitors of city-owned venues such as the SAP Center won’t have to show proof that they’ve had booster shots to enter. (Greschler, 2/24)
San Francisco Chronicle:
Here’s When Santa Clara County Plans To Lift Its Indoor Coronavirus Mask Mandate
Santa Clara County is preparing to eliminate its indoor mask mandate in one week, assuming COVID cases and hospitalizations remain stable or continue falling as expected, health officials said Thursday. Ten days after the state dropped its universal mask mandate, Santa Clara County remains the only place in the Bay Area still requiring that everyone, regardless of vaccination status, wear face coverings in indoor public spaces. The county decided to stick with a local mandate until cases had fallen to a more acceptable level and hospitalizations were stable, health officials said. (Allday, 2/24)
KQED:
What's Your Bay Area County's New Mask Mandate?
Eight Bay Area counties — Alameda (including the City of Berkeley), Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Solano and Sonoma — lifted indoor mask requirements for most public spaces on Feb. 16. Santa Clara County is still the only Bay Area county that hasn't lifted its indoor mask mandate for vaccinated people. But on Feb. 24, county health officials issued a mask mandate update, announcing a road map — and a potential date — for lifting its indoor mask mandate as early as March 2 based on the county achieving certain COVID-19 numbers. For now, the county continues to enforce its indoor mask rules. Read more about Santa Clara's mask mandate. (Cabrera-Lomelí and Severn, 2/24)
Sacramento Bee:
Rocklin Unified Schools Relax Mask Enforcement For Students
Another Northern California school district moved this week to relax its enforcement of the state’s COVID-19 mandate requiring students to wear masks in class. The Rocklin Unified School District decided in a special board meeting Wednesday to make masks optional for its students. (Sullivan, 2/25)
Sacramento Bee:
Teachers At California School Sit Out Over Mask Rule Change
Grass Valley’s Nevada Union High School canceled classes Thursday as teachers refused to report to class to protest its district’s decision to relax state-imposed campus mask mandates. (Smith, 2/24)
AP:
Google Will No Longer Require Workers To Be Vaccinated
Google will no longer enforce vaccine requirements as a condition of employment for US-based workers. (2/24)
Marin Independent Journal:
Marin Rally Backs First Responders Resisting Vaccine Mandate
Demonstrators staged a rally Thursday in support of Marin County first responders who object to a new mandate that they be fully vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19. Under an order from the county’s public health office, law enforcement officers, firefighters, paramedics and probation officers must be immunized by April 15 or risk losing their jobs. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two shots spaced over several weeks, so first responders who have yet to be vaccinated need to get their first shot by March 1. (Halstead, 2/25)
San Diego Union-Tribune:
'What We Saw This Morning Was A Humanitarian Crisis.' Homeless Count Reveals Depth Of Problem
More than 1,400 volunteers canvassed San Diego County on the coldest morning of the year Thursday to count and speak with homeless people. They found them huddled together in tents and under blankets on downtown San Diego sidewalks. (Warth, Diehl, and Murga, 2/24)
San Francisco Chronicle:
How Many Homeless People Are In S.F.? A Night Counting The Unsheltered In The Tenderloin Will Help Answer That Question
As Tina Collins and her little crew roamed through the Tenderloin and downtown Wednesday night counting unsheltered people, one thing stood out almost immediately: The landscape of homelessness in the area has changed markedly in the past few years. The crew was part of the first one-night homeless count throughout San Francisco since 2019, and in the areas where gleaming storefronts and financial buildings towered, there appeared to be fewer people than three years ago sleeping on the street. In the tattier Tenderloin, there were more unhoused folks than in the Union Square area — but notably fewer tents than in 2019, or even people bedding down on the sidewalks. (Fagan, 2/24)
Los Angeles Times:
L.A. Must Move Quickly To Rezone The City, Officials Say
Los Angeles must rezone to accommodate an additional quarter-million new homes by mid-October after state housing regulators rejected the city’s long-term plan for growth. The likelihood that L.A. will be able to accomplish in months a task that would normally take several years is very low, but the cost of failure could be high, experts say. (Dillon and Zahniser, 2/24)
City News Service:
$600K Per Unit Is Too Much For Homeless Housing, Says LA Controller
Proposition HHH, a bond program approved by city voters in 2016 to build 10,000 housing units for people experiencing homelessness, cost an average of nearly $600,000 per unit last year, up from $530,000 in 2020, according to a report released Wednesday by Los Angeles City Controller Ron Galperin. Galperin’s report, The Problems and Progress of Prop. HHH, is his third review of the $1.2 billion program since it was passed as a ballot measure five years ago. (2/23)
Southern California News Group:
In Hospice Care But Not Dying: $4.2 Million Billing Scheme Alleged By California AG
Sixteen people, including two doctors, have been charged with felonies after the state Attorney General’s Office said it uncovered a scheme in which people who were not terminally ill were enrolled in expensive hospice care without their knowledge by two Inland Empire treatment facilities that fraudulently billed Medicare for millions of dollars. New Hope Hospice and Sterling Hospice Care have been shut down, Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a news conference on Thursday, Feb. 24, outside San Bernardino County Superior Court in Rancho Cucamonga. (Rokos, 2/25)
Los Angeles Times:
Doctors, Nurses Charged In Medicare Hospice Fraud Scheme
They were supposed to be near death and in desperate need of end-of-life care to ease their pain. Authorities, however, allege that many of the patients were not dying but merely unwitting pawns in a sophisticated Medicare fraud scheme engineered by two Inland Empire couples who took in more than $4.2 million in federal reimbursements. (Christensen and Poston, 2/24)
California Healthline:
Plan To Fix Postal Service Shifts New Retirees To Medicare — Along With Billions In Costs
After a years-long bitter partisan fight over reforming the U.S. Postal Service’s finances and service, congressional leaders say they have a compromise. The bill, which has won endorsements from both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, would force future Postal Service retirees to use Medicare as their primary source of health coverage. (McAuliff, 2/25)
Bloomberg Law:
Health-Care Worker Job Status Proposal Scuttled In California
A proposed California ballot initiative that would have cleared the way for health-care workers to be independent contractors under the state’s rigid worker classification law has been withdrawn. The proposal would have benefited the burgeoning industry of app-based companies offering flexible options for nurses and home health aides who don’t fall into the traditional employment model for the staffing agencies. The group Californians for Equitable Health Care Access proposed the initiative amid labor shortages and burnout from Covid-19 in the health-care industry. (Mulvaney, 2/24)
The Washington Post:
Black Women Overrepresented In Health Care’s Toughest Jobs, Study Says
Mills Jones’s union, SEIU Local 2015, is leading a campaign to bump California caregivers’ salaries up to $20 an hour. For Mills Jones, that increase would be transformative, she said: “$20 [an hour] would make me a member of society. … I literally live from check to check.” A spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services said the agency “cannot release any personal information as to whether or not she is a provider.” (The Washington Post reviewed Mills Jones’s pay stubs from the state.) (McShane, 2/24)
Los Angeles Daily News:
Children’s Hospital LA Gets $25 Million From Anonymous Donor — And It’s All For Nursing
Children’s Hospital Los Angeles announced a “landmark” $25 million gift Wednesday from an anonymous donor that will be used to enhance nursing education, development and research programs. The hospital called the gift “one of the largest charitable investments ever made in a pediatric hospital nursing program.” “Nurses are the indispensable foundation of our hospital — a key component of the compassionate, family-centered care for which Children’s Hospital Los Angeles is known,” Paul S. Viviano, CHLA’s president and CEO, said in a statement. (Rosenberg, 2/23)
The Verge:
Telemedicine Leaves Behind Non-English Speakers, Study Shows
People who speak limited English struggled to access telehealth services in the US during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new analysis, affecting their ability to connect with medical care. It’s something experts worried about as soon as health organizations made the switch from in-person to virtual care. “That was really a concern of ours — who is getting left out?” says Denise Payán, an assistant professor of health, society, and behavior at the University of California, Irvine, who worked on the study. Payán and her colleagues interviewed staff and patients at two community health centers in California about their experiences with telehealth between December 2020 and April 2021. One of the clinics serves a primarily Spanish-speaking population, and the second serves a primarily Chinese-speaking population. Neither had offered video or phone visits before the pandemic started. Both started to them available soon after the California stay-at-home orders in March 2020 — first with phone calls, then with video. The researchers spoke with 15 clinic workers and nine patients. (Wetsman, 2/24)
San Francisco Chronicle:
Maternal Deaths Rose 14% In First Year Of Pandemic
The number of women in the United States who died during pregnancy or shortly after the end of pregnancy rose during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2020, 861 women died of maternal causes, a 14% increase from the 754 deaths reported in 2019 — and a 30% jump from the 658 deaths that occurred in 2018. The report also found disparities based on race and ethnicity, with three times as many Black women as white women dying. Deaths among pregnant Black women rose 26% over the previous year. (Fracassa, Vaziri and Reinhardt, 2/25)
San Francisco Chronicle:
S.F. Police In The Tenderloin Will Now Help Get Drug Users Off The Streets — And May Arrest Those Who Refuse
San Francisco Mayor London Breed plans to intensify police intervention into open-air drug use in the Tenderloin, with a top official saying Thursday that officers will now join outreach workers seeking to get people doing drugs off of sidewalks and into a new linkage center where they can access housing, addiction treatment and other services. If people continue illegal behavior and don’t comply, the official said, they could be arrested. The new approach signals the desire by officials to see significant change in the Tenderloin, and is likely to reignite criticism from some city supervisors, District Attorney Chesa Boudin and community groups who say criminalizing addiction is counterproductive. (Moench, 2/24)
CalMatters:
Climate Change Upends California's Water Supply Projections
Packed onto the slopes of the Sierra Nevada is a precious source of water for California — a frozen reservoir that climate change is already transforming. As the planet warms, the spring snowpack is dwindling. The snow is creeping up mountainsides to higher elevations, melting earlier in the year and seeping into dry soils rather than washing into rivers and streams that feed reservoirs. (Becker, 2/24)
California Healthline:
The Stress Of Restaurant Work Is Reaching A Boiling Point. Could A Staff Therapist Help?
A Denver restaurant chain has a novel approach to address employees’ stress. It has hired a full-time mental health professional to help with group and one-on-one counseling. (Daley, 2/25)
California Healthline:
‘What The Health?’: Contemplating A Post-‘Roe’ World
In anticipation of the Supreme Court rolling back abortion rights this year, both Democrats and Republicans are arguing among themselves over how best to proceed to either protect or restrict the procedure. Meanwhile, millions of Americans are at risk of losing their health insurance when the federal government declares an end to the current “public health emergency.” Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico, Shefali Luthra of The 19th, and Rachana Pradhan of KHN join Julie Rovner to discuss these issues and more. Also this week, Rovner interviews KHN’s Jay Hancock, who wrote the latest KHN-NPR “Bill of the Month” episode about a couple whose insurance company deemed their twins’ stay in intensive care not an emergency. (2/24)
Long Beach Press-Telegram:
California Restaurant Owner Ordered To Pay City, Perform Community Service For Disobeying COVID Orders
The owner of the Restauration restaurant, who was criminally charged last year after keeping her business open while defying Long Beach’s coronavirus mandates, has been ordered to pay restitution to the city and perform community service. Dana Tanner, 42, was charged last year with 20 misdemeanors in connection with coronavirus mandates and for allegedly tampering with a neighbor’s gas line after her restaurant’s line was shut off by the city. Tanner kept her restaurant open for business while coronavirus cases were spiking in January 2021, despite warnings from the city. (Rasmussen, 2/25)
Modesto Bee:
Turlock Unified Wants Restraining Order For School Board Member
Turlock Unified School District this week requested a temporary restraining order against school board member Jeffrey Cortinas, whom the district is suing for his refusal to wear a mask at meetings or instead participate remotely. The district also requested a preliminary injunction. Lawyers for the district appeared in court virtually on Wednesday, court documents show. The matter was pushed to a hearing March 8. (Isaacman, 2/24)
Sacramento Bee:
Sacramento Threatens Code Violations Over Community Fridges
The city of Sacramento earlier this month sent a notice to an Oak Park homeowner asking her to get rid of an outdoor community fridge that provides free food to those in need. The refrigerators and pantries, installed by organization Sacramento Community Fridges, allow people to take food for free that is left by their neighbors. The idea is similar to the “take a book, leave a book” little libraries scattered across the city on sidewalks and front yards. (Clift, 2/25)
The New Yorker:
What Returning To Work Means In The Nail Salons Of Orange County
Tens of thousands of people work in nail salons in Southern California. After two, often devastating, years, many of their customers still haven’t returned. (Whang, 2/23)