Latest From California Healthline:
California Healthline Original Stories
Some Ivory Towers Are Ideal For A Pandemic. Most Aren’t.
As reopening decisions approach for the fall semester, colleges and universities are casting about for strategies to keep students safe without bankrupting their institutions. A few have natural advantages. (Mark Kreidler, )
California Assembly Criticizes Newsom’s ‘Devastating’ Budget Cuts: The California Assembly slammed Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget proposal, criticizing his proposed cuts to health care and other programs during a rare meeting that allowed them to question the administration directly. “The cuts to our seniors, our children and our women are devastating,” said Assemblywoman Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, a Democrat from Orinda. “Is that who we are as a state?” Assemblyman Adam Gray, D-Merced, said it was wrong for Newsom to slash health care spending during a pandemic. But Gray was one of the few lawmakers to offer an alternative plan, proposing the Legislature legalize sports betting as a way to generate an extra $2 billion to help eliminate some of the proposed $14 billion in cuts. Newsom’s plan attempts to close a projected $54 billion budget deficit brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, and lawmakers acknowledged they’ll have to make difficult choices. Read more from The Associated Press and Katie Orr of KQED.
As Bay Area Gradually Loosens Stay-At-Home Restrictions, Case Rise Across The Area: Seven of the nine Bay Area counties have reported recent, significant upticks in cases, and the Bay Area as a whole recorded a nearly 40% jump in new cases last week over the week before. Public health and infectious disease experts said it’s not yet clear what’s causing the surges, and the explanations likely vary by county. Health officers said they anticipated some increases as they expanded testing and loosened shelter-in-place restrictions. Anecdotally, they say they’ve seen cases among construction workers — who were allowed to resume working about four weeks ago — and people in essential jobs. The new reports may not be cause for alarm just yet, but authorities say they’re closely investigating new cases to identify potential outbreaks. Read more from Erin Allday of the San Francisco Chronicle.
In related news from the Fresno Bee: COVID-19 Hospitalizations, Deaths Rise In Fresno
Health Experts Warn Of Threat From ‘Silent Spreaders’: Health officials have stressed the importance of creating an army of disease detectives — investigators who can interview newly infected people and find their close contacts, telling them to quarantine themselves for 14 days in hopes of keeping other people from getting infected. But if many people who get the virus don’t show symptoms and yet are infectious, the disease could spread invisibly, beyond the reach of county health officials. Health experts say it can take a few days from the time a person becomes infected, and could infect others, and the point at which they begin to show signs of illness. Read more from Rong-Gong Lin II of the Los Angeles Times.
Below, check out the full round-up of California Healthline original stories, state coverage and the best of the rest of the national news for the day.
More News From Across The State
San Francisco Chronicle:
Checklist For Bay Area To Reopen: See Which Counties Have Backtracked On Coronavirus Cases
With coronavirus cases rising across the Bay Area in recent days, four counties have backtracked on one critical goal in the region’s established checklist for reopening: a flattened case count. The checklist illustrated here is based on the benchmarks that six Bay Area counties — Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara — have set to determine when to fully reopen the region, established at the time they announced an extension of stay-home orders through the end of May. It shows how each county in the Bay Area has progressed against each of these indicators. (5/26)
San Francisco Chronicle:
Cal/OSHA Sees 30% Increase In Complaints About Workplace Safety Due To Pandemic
State workplace safety regulators have received about 30% more complaints against California employers at this time of the year compared to the same period last year, according to data obtained by The Chronicle through a public records request. The surge in complaints stem from coronavirus complaints, said Frank Polizzi, a spokesman for the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health. (Gafni, 5/26)
San Francisco Chronicle:
Barbershops, Hair Salons Get OK To Reopen In Much Of California
Barbershops and hair salons can begin accepting customers again in counties that have been given permission by the state to move faster on loosening coronavirus lockdown measures — a large swath of California that excludes the majority of the Bay Area. Although Gov. Gavin Newsom let much of the state resume commercial haircutting and hairstyling Tuesday, the only Bay Area counties where people could receive those services right away are Napa, Solano and Sonoma. And of the three, only Napa said it would give the go-ahead immediately. (Koseff, 5/26)
Sacramento Bee:
California Hair Salons Can Reopen, Gov Gavin Newsom Says
Sacramento and most other California counties can begin reopening hair salons and barbershops, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday. The new guidance will apply in the 47 California counties that have “self-attested” that they have adequate supplies and protocols to reopen more quickly than the rest of the state while still mitigating spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, Newsom said. The guidelines posted on the state’s COVID-19 website direct hair salon employees and customers to wear face coverings. They also lay out other recommendations for temperature checks and sanitation. (Bollag, Bizjak and Kasler, 5/26)
Los Angeles Times:
L.A. County Opens Churches, Stores, Pools, Drive-In Theaters
Los Angeles County announced Tuesday that it will align with California’s latest guidelines and allow the resumption of faith-based services, in-store shopping at low-risk retail stores, drive-in movies and other recreational activities with restrictions. The new order from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, released Tuesday evening, sets the stage for the county to request a variance from the state to permit faster reopening in some areas. L.A. County has been the California epicenter of coronavirus, with more than 2,100 deaths. (Parvini, 5/26)
Los Angeles Times:
Reopening Schools: More Complex Than Distance Learning
Sixteen students to a class. One-way hallways. Students lunch at their desks. Children could get one ball to play with — alone. Masks are required. A staggered school day brings on new schedules to juggle. These campus scenarios could play out based on new Los Angeles County school reopening guidelines released Wednesday. This planning document will affect 2 million students and their families as educators undertake a challenge forced on them by the coronavirus crisis: fundamentally redesigning the traditional school day. (Blume and Kohli, 5/27)
Sacramento Bee:
Why CA Senior Homes Can’t Escape Visitor Bans During COVID-19
Marilee Flannery has only seen her husband, Steve, twice in the past two months. Both times were fleeting conversations over video on her phone... Some fear it may be years before Flannery along with the 400,000 other Californians in long-term care homes are able to visit with their loved ones in person. They must watch on TV as the rest of California comes out of lockdown and gathers again in parks, restaurants and family homes. (Sabalow and Pohl, 5/26)
Sacramento Bee:
Placer County Urges Newsom To Allow Phase 3 Reopening
Saying they have coronavirus infections largely under control, Placer County leaders on Tuesday sent a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom asking to be allowed to go full throttle into the next phase of reopenings, including higher-risk businesses such as nail salons, movie theaters and fitness centers. The county Board of Supervisors on Tuesday unanimously passed a resolution telling state health officials to make them one of the first counties to move fully into Newsom’s Phase 3 of economic and social reopenings, less than three months after the contagious virus swept through California. (Bizjak and Yoon-Hendricks, 5/26)
San Francisco Chronicle:
Trump Pushes Aggressive GOP Campaign Against California Mail Voting
President Trump on Tuesday slammed Gov. Gavin Newsom’s order to send mail ballots to every registered voter in California this November, ramping up a Republican campaign to brand an increasingly common method of voting as a guarantee of election fraud. “The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one,” Trump tweeted. “This will be a Rigged Election. No way!” (Wildermuth, 5/26)
Sacramento Bee:
CA Jail Population Plummets During Coronavirus Pandemic
California’s long history of altering its criminal justice system — from requiring life in prison for third-strike offenders to reducing the punishment for hundreds of crimes — is having another moment that could dramatically alter how the state locks people up. In a seismic, almost overnight shift, California has jailed 21,700 fewer people — nearly one-third of its daily population — in county lockups since the new coronavirus hit the state. Prisons are holding about 5,500 fewer inmates than they did in late March. (Pohl, 5/27)
San Francisco Chronicle:
This Is How They Died: Santa Clara County Releases Information On Every COVID-19 Death
Health officials in Santa Clara County released detailed information Tuesday on every confirmed death from COVID-19, providing a thorough accounting of the human toll the disease has taken on the South Bay community. The data, the most comprehensive to be published by a public health department in the Bay Area, provides the age, race, gender, residential ZIP code, cause of death and underlying health condition for all 139 people who have perished from the disease since the first documented casualty on Feb. 6. (Palomino, Gafni and Allday, 5/26)
Bay Area News Group:
Santa Clara County Struggling To Hire Contact Tracing Staff, Executive Says
Santa Clara County has struggled to find staff to build out a 1,000-person workforce to perform contact tracing, a key indicator for reopening more parts of the economy. By this point, the county had aimed to have about 700 tracers in place to track down the close contacts of people who test positive for COVID-19. But three weeks after the county executive voiced that goal, the health department has just 50 contact tracers, amounting to about 2.6 tracers per 100,000 residents, with the capability to go through about 25 cases a day. (Kelliher, 5/26)
Los Angeles Times:
He Was Part Of Amazon's Coronavirus Hiring Spree. Two Weeks Later He Was Dead
When Harry Sentoso got called back to work at an Amazon delivery center in Irvine in late March, he was excited. He had been working in Amazon warehouses on and off for two years, always hoping to get a full-time position but always laid off after seasonal demand died down. Just a few weeks earlier, at the beginning of March, his bosses had told him they didn’t need him anymore. He had spent most of the month cooped up at home in Walnut, looking for other work. (Dean, 5/27)
Bay Area News Group:
Kaiser Coronavirus Patients Needed More Intense Care Than Ones In China, Study Finds
As health experts in the U.S. planned for a surge in coronavirus patients earlier this spring, they relied on data from China and elsewhere to estimate everything from how many hospital beds would be needed to demands for protective gear for doctors and nurses. But new research out of Kaiser Permanente and UC Berkeley suggests the pandemic is playing out very differently, at least in California and Washington. A study of 9.6 million Kaiser patients across the two states found that the more than 1,200 people hospitalized with the coronavirus by early April stayed longer on average than Chinese patients and were more likely to need intensive care. (Deruy, 5/26)
Bay Area News Group:
Coronavirus Outbreak Hits Morgan Hill Fish Packing Plant
A coronavirus outbreak with nearly 40 confirmed cases so far has been traced to a fish-packing plant in Morgan Hill, according to health officials. The previously unknown cluster of cases began at Lusamerica Foods Inc., a wholesale fish distributor, Santa Clara County Health Officer Dr. Sara Cody said in a committee meeting Tuesday. (Kelliher and Woolfolk, 5/26)
San Francisco Chronicle:
San Francisco Homeless Deaths Soar — And Officials Say It’s Not Directly Due To COVID-19
The number of homeless people in San Francisco who died over a recent eight-week period spiked compared to the same time last year, an increase that officials say was likely driven by drug overdoses, underlying medical conditions and a disruption to shelter and services due to the coronavirus pandemic. None appear to be directly related to the coronavirus that is spreading throughout the city, according to preliminary Department of Public Health data obtained by The Chronicle. It is not clear how many people were posthumously tested for the virus. (Thadani, 5/26)
San Francisco Chronicle:
Newsom Proposes Sidestepping CEQA To Speed Up Converting Hotels Into Homeless Housing
Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing that state environmental regulations be waived for cities and counties that want to convert hotels into homeless housing using federal coronavirus relief funding. His plan was sent to the California Legislature on Friday to be added to the state budget negotiations, and if it remains intact it would eliminate a key tool opponents use to fight projects they don’t want in their neighborhoods. By law, the budget is supposed to be passed by June 15. (Fagan, 5/26)
San Francisco Chronicle:
SF Ordered Downtown Office Buildings Shut. Now It Worries About Safety Of The Water Within Them
Before San Francisco office workers start streaming back to downtown high-rises again, property owners and managers need to make sure those buildings are safe. Not just from the threat of coronavirus circulating among cubicles, but from medical problems that can be caused when water in buildings sits stagnant for months. Plumbing systems — the vast network of pipes that connect the city’s water system to cooling towers, showers, sinks, toilets and urinals — require a consistent water flow in order for water to stay safe. When there are no workers around to flush toilets or wash their hands, water stagnates in pipes. (Dineen, 5/27)
Fresno Bee:
Fresno Churches Say Services Safe To Open After Covid 19
Leaders from a couple of Fresno’s largest churches on Tuesday asked for special permission to allow large gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic, but they failed to get the support of the Fresno County Board of Supervisors. The board voted 3-2 to adopt the state standards for reopening churches, which requires social distancing, masks and shortened services. The standards also require the churches to allow only 25% of the church’s capacity or 100 people, whichever is smaller. (Miller, 5/26)
Bay Area News Group:
San Jose Makes Last-Second Decision To Open Cooling Centers
With temperatures climbing around the Bay Area on Tuesday, the city of San Jose’s Parks, Recreation and Neighborhood Services Department made a last-second decision to open five cooling centers this week. Cooling centers opened starting Tuesday evening at Mayfair Community Center, Camden Community Center, Seven Trees Community Center, Roosevelt Community Center and Cypress Community Center “to provide residents with a cool place to beat the heat,” according to a city press release. (Crowley, 5/26)