As of today, public and private elementary schools (TK – 6th grade) can submit applications online to local health and education officials to allow in-person instruction at their campuses.

 

Schools in counties such as Contra Costa that are on the state monitoring list can’t reopen unless granted a waiver by local and state health officials. Schools must show how they would safely conduct in-person classes to prevent the transmission of COVID-19 before being allowed to reopen. CCHS and the County Office of Education have developed a checklist with safety measures schools must take.

These measures include:

Reminder: Community Testing This Weekend at Oakland's Eastmont Mall

Oakland residents are invited to Eastmont Mall August 22-23, 2020, to attend the largest Covid-19 testing event ever staged in the East Bay. It is anticipated that more than 1,000 people per day will be tested via drive-thru or walk-up at 7200 Bancroft Ave.

From 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., testing will be available, and free lunch and free PPE will be distributed to participants.

Has the coronavirus mutated in any significant way?

This fall, the U.S. will need to vaccinate huge numbers of Americans in the middle of a public-health crisis. It will also be a valuable dry run should a coronavirus shot arrive months later. The annual U.S. flu vaccine campaign has been cast into disarray by Covid-19, with people staying away from pharmacies, schools, offices, hospitals and other places where they typically get their shots. But with fears of a flu surge colliding with the coronavirus pandemic, health authorities are looking at how one vaccine effort can inform the other.

Tens of thousands of people who have been pummeled by unrelenting and unpredictable symptoms for months after becoming infected with Covid-19 are know as "long-haulers." Without understanding the lingering illness that some patients experience, we can’t understand the pandemic.

“It’s like every day, you reach your hand into a bucket of symptoms, throw some on the table, and say, ‘This is you for today,’” says David Putrino, a neuroscientist and a rehabilitation specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital who has cared for many long-haulers. Of the long-haulers Putrino has surveyed, most are women. Their average age is 44. Most were formerly fit and healthy. They look very different from the typical portrait of a Covid-19 patient, an elderly person with preexisting health problems. “It’s scary because in the states that are surging, we have all these young people going out thinking they’re invincible, and this could easily knock them out for months,” Putrino told me. And for some, months of illness could turn into years of disability.

Pressure is building on Gov. Gavin Newsom to figure out a reopening plan after San Diego, California’s second-largest county, fell off the state’s coronavirus watch list Tuesday and hospitalizations, case rates and deaths continue to decline statewide.

The news came a few days after Santa Cruz was also removed from the watch list, though outbreaks continue to flare in the Central Valley and in some rural counties — including five added to the watch list Monday. The state doesn’t currently allow indoor businesses to reopen in counties no longer on the watch list, though Newsom said Tuesday new guidelines are “very shortly forthcoming.”

Mortuaries that serve Latino communities have been overwhelmed by families in need of help since March, with bodies in some cases stacking up as operators tried to improvise funerals that previously might have drawn extended family and mourners from far and wide. In California, Latinos make up 39% of the state’s population but account for its 59% of Covid-19 infections and 47% of deaths, according to the state Department of Public Health. Immigrants have been particularly hard-hit economically amid the pandemic, with many losing their jobs and facing financial collapse.

Colleges, still, have felt the impact of the virus on the start of the new school year. The University of Notre Dame moved in-person classes online for at least two weeks after seeing an increase in coronavirus cases.

Public schools in several states, including Indiana, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Georgia, closed to in-person learning this month after students and staffers tested positive for Covid-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus, sending thousands into quarantine and remote learning. Several superintendents working to reopen schools also tested positive, and at least one died.

NY Times, August 19, 2020

New York City on Tuesday released more than 1.46 million coronavirus antibody test results, the largest number to date, providing more evidence of how the virus penetrated deeply into some lower-income communities while passing more lightly across affluent parts of the city. Across the city, more than 27 percent of those tested had positive antibody results.

Las Vegas casinos reopened June 4, and they have become a likely hotbed for the spread of the novel coronavirus, public health experts said. An analysis of smartphone data shows how interconnected the country is with visitors to Las Vegas. During the four-day period, about 26,000 devices were identified on the Las Vegas Strip. Some of those same smartphones also showed up in every state on the mainland except Maine in those same four days. About 3,700 of the devices were spotted in Southern California in the same four days; about 2,700 in Arizona, with 740 in Phoenix; around 1,000 in Texas; more than 800 in Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago and Cleveland; and more than 100 in the New York area.

Coronavirus infections are surging again across much of Europe and governments are racing to prevent a full-fledged second wave of the pandemic —without resorting to the kind of broad lockdowns that devastated their economies in the spring.

The alarm was sounded Saturday, when Italy registered 629 new cases in 24 hours, up from 500 on the previous two days. Such numbers recorded in a row had not been seen since May, when Italy cautiously emerged from one of the longest lockdowns in the world after more than 30,000 Covid-related deaths.

The World Health Organization warned Tuesday that young people are becoming the primary drivers of the spread of the novel coronavirus in many countries — a worrisome trend experts fear may grow in the United States as many colleges and schools begin to reopen. Many nations in Asia, which had previously pushed infections to enviably low rates, have experienced surges in recent weeks at the same time that the age of those infected skewed younger. “People in their 20s, 30s and 40s are increasingly driving the spread,” Takeshi Kasai, the WHO’s Western Pacific regional director, said on Tuesday. “The epidemic is changing.”

In April, I predicted that summer would not bring relief from the virus, and that we would experience not a second wave but continuous swells, depending on how well we complied with public health measures. Unfortunately too many states eased up too early or did little or nothing to control the virus. I also warned of not simply swells but a viral hurricane-like storm surge if the country does not act aggressively and the public fails to comply. I stand by that prediction. Tens of thousands more will die on top of the more than 170,000 already lost in the U.S., and millions will suffer economic devastation.

Governments around the world are taking advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to justify — or to divert attention from —crackdowns on press freedom. In some cases, regimes have moved to curb to alleged misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic that doesn’t align with official proclamations about its spread or severity. In others, the pandemic serves as a distraction by directing national attention away from these incidents.