AP: US Won't Make Immigration Arrests At Virus Vaccination Sites
The U.S. government says it won’t be making routine immigration enforcement arrests at COVID-19 vaccination sites. Vaccination sites will be considered “sensitive locations” and generally off limits for enforcement actions, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement Monday. (2/1)

The Hill: DHS Encourages Vaccination Regardless Of Immigration Status 
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Monday said it would not conduct enforcement activities near COVID-19 vaccination sites as a way to encourage immigrants to seek the vaccine regardless of their status. “It is a moral and public health imperative to ensure that all individuals residing in the United States have access to the vaccine,” the agency wrote in a release. “DHS is committed to ensuring that every individual who needs a vaccine can get one, regardless of their immigration status.” (Beitsch, 2/1)

Reuters: New U.S. Transit Mask Rules Ordered By Biden Take Effect 
New rules took effect just before midnight Tuesday requiring millions of travelers in the United States to wear masks on airplanes, trains, buses, ferries, taxis and ride-share vehicles and in airports, stations, ports and other transit hubs. ... American Airlines said customers with disabilities unable to wear a mask must notify the airline 72 hours prior to departure to request an exemption and show proof of a negative COVID-19 test taken within three days of departure or proof of recovery to board. (Shepardson, 2/2)

The Washington Post: Transportation Agencies Wrestle With New Federal Mask Mandate 
A new federal order requiring masks at airports and aboard trains and buses creates a layer of protection for federal safety screeners while putting added pressure on transit drivers and operators on the front lines to enforce the mandate, transit officials say. Across the Washington region, airports and transportation agencies have required passengers to wear face coverings for months, enforcing those rules to varying degrees. The new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention order, effective at 11:59 p.m. Monday, requires a new level of enforcement, telling drivers and operators to act as gatekeepers, denying entry to riders who try to board without their faces shielded. (Lazo, Aratani and George, 2/1)

USA Today: COVID Vaccine And Pregnant Women: Dr. Fauci Sees 'No Red Flags'
Some pregnant women remain unsure about getting the COVID-19 vaccine because safety data is scarce and health agency guidelines are vague and in some cases contradictory. But Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, said Monday that about 10,000 pregnant women in the U.S. have been vaccinated since the Food and Drug Administration authorized two vaccines, and so far there have been “no red flags.” “We had a lot of pregnant women vaccinated. The FDA followed them and will continue to follow them,” he said during a media roundtable at the IAS COVID-19 Conference: Prevention. “Even though we don’t have good data on it, the data that we’re collecting on it so far has no red flags.” (Rodriguez, 2/1)

The Washington Post: Anti-Vaccine Protest At Dodger Stadium Was Organized On Facebook, Including Promotion Of Banned ‘Plandemic’ Video 
The anti-vaccine protest that temporarily cut off access to a mass vaccination site at Dodger Stadium was organized on Facebook through a page that promotes debunked claims about the coronavirus pandemic, masks and immunization. The Facebook page, “Shop Mask Free Los Angeles,” issued a call last week to gather Saturday at the baseball park. Health authorities have been administering shots to as many as 8,000 people a day at the site, one of the largest vaccination centers in the country. Such venues form a critical component of the effort to corral the pandemic, which has lashed Los Angeles County so brutally in recent weeks that oxygen for patients has been in short supply. (Stanley-Becker, 2/1)

KQED and AP: State Sen. Pan Says Vaccine Protesters Must Be Held Accountable After Dodger Stadium Disruption
In response to anti-vaccine protesters briefly shutting down a mass COVID-19 vaccination site at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles this weekend, State Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, says those seeking to prevent the distribution of vaccines must be held accountable. Pan, a long-time vaccine proponent, says the protesters' behavior is part of an escalating pattern. “Even before COVID, anti-vaccine extremists issued death threats, tried to bully legislators, finally ending up with an assault on the streets upon myself, and blood being thrown in the Senate chambers," Pan said Monday. (2/1)

Los Angeles Times: 'Anti-Vax' Protesters May Get Free-Speech Area At Distribution Site 
Los Angeles officials on Monday expressed anger at anti-vaccine protesters who temporarily blocked the vaccine distribution center at Dodger Stadium on Saturday and said they hoped to avoid future disruptions. “I was very upset and disheartened,” L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis said of the disruption to the vaccination efforts. (Smith and Lin II, 2/1)

San Diego Union-Tribune: Questions And Concerns Plague State’s COVID-19 Vaccine Signup System 
San Diego County officials eager to speed and streamline the region’s sluggish COVID-19 vaccine rollout have turned to an online signup system that they hope will be a one-stop-shop for residents looking to get their shot. There’s just one problem — many San Diegans say the site doesn’t work. (Wosen and Sisson, 2/1)

San Bernardino Sun: All 3,500 San Bernardino County Vaccine Appointments Fill In 17 Minutes 
All 3,500 appointments to be vaccinated against COVID-19 at the Auto Club Speedway sped away within 17 minutes of opening Monday morning, Feb. 1.The first coronavirus vaccination supersite in San Bernardino County, the speedway in Fontana plans to vaccinate 3,500 people in their cars Tuesday, Feb. 2. (Hagen, 2/1)

Bay Area News Group: COVID-19: Uneven Vaccine Rollouts Yield Logjams, Cancellations, And Somehow, Vacancies 
Thousands of Bay Area residents ages 65 and up continue to wrestle with congested appointment systems and abrupt cancellations while trying to get COVID-19 vaccines, a critical quest for an age group accounting for over 70% of the state’s 40,000-plus coronavirus deaths. How chaotic is it? Kaiser Permanente acknowledged Monday that it recently had to cancel 750 vaccine appointments for South Bay residents ages 75 and up, and about 4,500 appointments originally scheduled for Jan. 29 through Feb. 5 for those in the 65-to-74 age range, due to unexpected shortages in vaccine supplies. Yet at the same time, about 20% percent of Santa Clara County health system’s vaccine appointments are going unfilled, even as it turns away patients of Kaiser and Sutter-owned Palo Alto Medical Foundation, insisting they get vaccinated by their own health care providers. (Salonga and DeRuy, 2/1)

Los Angeles Times: Kaiser Cancels Vaccine Dates For Thousands Of Seniors 
A vaccine shortage has forced Kaiser Permanente to cancel more than 5,000 appointments in Santa Clara County for seniors who had been set to receive COVID-19 inoculations. In what Kaiser spokesman Marc Brown called “a very unfortunate development,” the hospital failed to receive the vaccines it anticipated when people had booked appointments for late January and early February. (Dolan, 2/1)

The Bakersfield Californian: Leftover Vaccine Is A Hot Find In Bakersfield 
It's an inevitable situation for providers of the COVID-19 vaccine: leftover doses. In some cases, people scheduled for an appointment are no-shows. In others, there's a vial that isn't entirely empty at the end of the day, and throwing away even one dose of the vaccine is unfathomable. "The motto is basically to make sure the vaccine goes into an arm rather than it going to waste," said Bakersfield pharmacist Ramy Ebeid, who works at Express Pharmacy on Calloway Drive. (Shepard, 2/1)

Los Angeles Times: Riverside Opens Mass COVID-19 Vaccination Site In One Of State’s Most-Infected Regions
Riverside city officials on Saturday launched a mass COVID-19 vaccination site, with eventual plans to inoculate about 1,500 people a day in one of the regions hit hardest by the pandemic. It’s the first large-scale site in Riverside, the most populous city in Riverside County, said Phil Pitchford, a spokesman for the city. Mass vaccination sites opened in the last few weeks in Los Angeles County, Long Beach and Orange County, even as officials contend with a scarcity of doses. (Seidman, 2/1)

San Francisco Chronicle: Coronavirus Vaccine Clinic Opens In San Francisco After Deadliest Month In Pandemic
San Francisco opened the first of several neighborhood coronavirus immunization sites in the Mission District on Monday, moving forward with plans to reach communities hit hardest by the pandemic even as vaccine supply remained severely limited. The new clinic was hailed as another hopeful sign of nearing an end to the pandemic, especially welcome after the state and Bay Area emerged from the single deadliest month so far. More than a third of COVID-19 deaths in the Bay Area occurred in January, with 1,677 people losing their lives last month. (Moench and Vaziri, 2/1)

San Diego Union-Tribune: Police Leaders Want The COVID-19 Vaccine Now, But County Points To Low Supply
Law enforcement leaders in San Diego County are calling for the COVID-19 vaccine to be made available within their ranks now, but county officials say officers will have to wait. Police and Sheriff’s Department authorities say officers and deputies are on the front lines of the pandemic, at times responding to medical calls alongside paramedics and emergency medical technicians who have been offered the vaccine. (Hernandez, 2/1)

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: Rohnert Park Coronavirus Clinic Still Plagued By Scheduling Problems
The beleaguered campaign to vaccinate Sonoma County seniors against the coronavirus plunged into deeper chaos Monday when the company managing the immunization effort at a Rohnert Park clinic began canceling thousands of appointments, while failing to fix a flaw on its website that incorrectly allowed people under the age of 75 to schedule 9,000 appointments for shots. (Barber, 2/1)

Los Angeles Times: Only 55% Of L.A. Firefighters Have Received COVID-19 Vaccine
Only 55% of the city’s firefighting force has shown up to receive a coronavirus shot, a lower number than originally announced, Los Angeles Fire Department officials said Monday. Fire Chief Ralph M. Terrazas said in a statement to The Times that the department “reconciled its vaccination numbers across various software platforms” in the last few days and determined that 1,842 of the roughly 3,400 rank-and-file firefighters have volunteered to be inoculated since shots started Dec. 28. The department reported in mid-January that 60% of firefighters have been vaccinated. The doses have been offered each week to firefighters. (Welsh and Smith, 2/1)

San Diego Union-Tribune: San Diego Officials, Health Experts Champion Vaccinations
Several public health experts joined Mayor Todd Gloria and City Council President Jennifer Campbell Monday evening to answer questions and allay frustrations about COVID vaccines and their availability. As thousands receive the COVID-19 vaccine in San Diego, many people still have questions about the vaccines’ safety and others eager to get the vaccine don’t know when they can get it because demand exceeds supply in the state. The speakers addressed availability and difficulty of making appointments at the county’s vaccination sites. (Lopez-Villafana, 2/1)

Bay Area News Group: 105-Year-Old East Bay Woman Who Lived Through Spanish Flu Receives Vaccine, Warns Of Difficult Times To Come 
“That is all I personally know,” she said of the 1918 outbreak, noting she was too young to remember anything else. “But I know it was miserable. Back then there were no vaccines; no one could help it, they just died.” Today, at 105 years old, she sees the parallels of the Spanish Flu that changed her life and infected one-third of the world’s population and the coronavirus pandemic that has already killed more than 2 million worldwide. (Toledo, 2/2)

Fox News: Nearly Half Of US Coronavirus Case, Vaccination Race/Ethnicity Data Is Missing
"These insights from our data are critical for our ability to target and triage our response," [Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, President Biden's COVID-19 Equity Task Force chair] said at the briefing Monday. "Without good data, we are at a disadvantage in terms of equity planning." "We must address these insufficient data points as an urgent priority," she added. The coronavirus pandemic has emphasized deep-rooted and long-standing inequities; racial minorities suffer a heightened risk of hospitalization and death due to the novel virus compared to white individuals, though the rates vary by race/ethnicity. (Rivas, 2/1)

The Washington Post: Race And Ethnicity Data Missing For Nearly Half Of Coronavirus Vaccine Recipients, Federal Study Finds 
Race and ethnicity data was missing for nearly half of all coronavirus vaccine recipients during the first month shots were available, further stymieing efforts to ensure an equitable response to a pandemic that continues to unduly burden communities of color, federal researchers reported Monday. The findings on vaccination data illustrate that a long-standing lack of information on the race and ethnicity of who has been diagnosed with covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, has carried over to who has been inoculated. (Johnson, 2/1)

Politico: New CDC Data Shows Stark Disparities In Coronavirus Shots 
Why it matters: President Joe Biden wants an equitable distribution of the coronavirus vaccine, but preliminary reports showcase just how much ground will need to be made up. (Roubein, 2/1)

Los Angeles Times: U.K. Coronavirus Variant In Southern California Sparks Alarm
The spread of the highly contagious coronavirus variant first identified in Britain is sparking worry about a future surge in Southern California, one of the nation’s two hot spots of the strain. Scientists say it is essential to keep coronavirus transmission low and ramp up vaccinations quickly, and if the variant spins out of control, hospital systems could again become overwhelmed. The variant, known as B.1.1.7, has been identified in 467 people in 32 states. Florida has seen the most cases, with at least 147, followed by California, with at least 113. (Money and Lin II, 2/1)

San Francisco Chronicle: Charts Show Bay Area Coronavirus Deaths Spiked In All Counties In January
The Bay Area is finally exiting a coronavirus surge that smashed records and overwhelmed hospitals — but January data shows the brutal extent of the toll. Cases and hospitalizations fell across the Bay Area as a whole last month, but deaths soared in all nine counties in the region. In December, 608 deaths were reported in the Bay Area’s nine counties. In January, that number shot up to 1,677, an increase of 175.8%. Across the state, one-third of all COVID-19 deaths for the entire pandemic were reported in January alone. San Francisco experienced the biggest jump in deaths in the Bay Area, with 26 reported in December and 138 last month, an increase of 430.8%. (Hwang, 2/2)

Modesto Bee: ‘Major, Major Problem.’ California Isn’t Fully Tracking Workplace COVID Infections, Deaths
A year after the first COVID-19 case hit California, the state agency in charge of policing warehouses, offices, factories and other workplaces is woefully understaffed and significantly undercounting the number of employees who have fallen seriously ill or died as a result of the coronavirus. California employers reported only 1,600 serious worker illnesses or deaths to the Division of Occupational Safety and Health, known as Cal/OSHA, from the start of the pandemic through mid-December, according to data obtained by The Sacramento Bee through a Public Records Act request. The agency’s inspectors determined that only 779 of those serious or deadly infections were actually contracted in the workplace. That represents a tiny fraction of the 3.2 million people who have tested positive for the disease in California, and less than 2% of the more than 41,000 who have died from it. (Pohl, Kasler and Reese, 2/2)

The Bakersfield Californian: Bakersfield College Registered Nursing Students Help With Vaccination Efforts In Tehachapi
In continued collaboration between Bakersfield’s higher-education institutions and local healthcare providers, 14 Registered Nursing students at Bakersfield College helped assist in a vaccine rollout at Adventist Health Tehachapi Valley on Sunday. According to a news release from the college, 400 vaccines were administered during the drive-thru clinic. Other organizations that helped in the effort were the Tehachapi Police Department, Kern County Fire Department, Kern County Fire Explorers and Station Springs CERT. (2/1)

Bay Area News Group: Good Samaritan Hospital To Continue Suspending Coronavirus Vaccine Clinic
Good Samaritan Hospital in San Jose will continue to suspend its coronavirus vaccine clinic operations for now. The hospital, part of HCA Healthcare, notified Santa Clara County of its plans in a Jan. 28 letter that also contains steps it has taken to improve the way the clinic runs. The news comes more than a week after teachers in the Los Gatos Union School District were invited by the hospital to receive a coveted coronavirus vaccine there despite the fact that the county had said appointments should be limited to health care workers and the elderly. In response, the county’s testing and vaccine officer Marty Fenstersheib said that aside from providing enough doses to complete vaccinations the hospital had already started, it would withhold more vaccine until the hospital assured officials it would follow guidelines. (DeRuy, 2/1)

Capital Public Radio/KXJZ: California’s Genomic Sequencing Lab Network Amounts To ‘A Patchwork Of Informal Collaborations’
Individual labs in California have been doing genomic sequencing on a small scale since the start of the pandemic. The sequencing process produces a sort of tracking code to map changes in the virus’ RNA over time; the more it spreads, the more it mutates. As early as June, the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) began developing its statewide lab network, called COVIDNet. The goal was to choreograph the flow of specimen samples, track lab performance and manage communications between partners. The lab network remains fragmented, and there isn’t substantial collaboration facilitated by the state, according to participants and observers. Critics also point out that the state’s new diagnostic laboratory in Valencia is not equipped for genomic sequencing, which they say is a missed opportunity. It also has limited ability to send samples to outside labs for this work. (Rodd, 2/1)

The Bakersfield Californian: Coalition Aims To Spread Word On Safely Surrendering Babies 
Just last year, eight babies were safely surrendered in Kern County. That's according to the Kern County Department of Human Services, which said the Safely Surrendered Baby Coalition plans an awareness campaign through social media during February to bring attention to the Safely Surrendered Baby Law. Eighty-four babies have been safely surrendered in Kern County since the coalition began tracking those babies in 2006, a Human Services news release said. (2/1)

LA Daily News: First Of Several Tiny Homes Villages Brings In Unhoused In San Fernando Valley 
The first a series of villages made up of “tiny homes” officially opened its doors at a North Hollywood park Monday, Feb. 2, welcoming its first people who were coming in from experiencing homelessness along nearby streets. The village sits along Chandler Boulevard, in a half-acre plot the north end of North Hollywood Recreation Center, and has room for up to 75 people. (Chou, 2/1)