As of October 13, elementary schools may open for in-person learning, according to the announcement, once district officials complete a COVID-19 health and safety reopening plan, file it with the county’s Office of Education and notify the county’s Health Care Services Agency, linking to their plan on a public Web site. The county may consider middle- and high-school in-person classes after four- to twelve-week phases, depending on ongoing Covid-19 assessments.

“[T]o be clear, this would not be normal school. It would be some kind of blended/hybrid learning model which meets all health and safety requirements,” Johnson-Trammell said in part, adding that the district expects to continue its distance learning through the end of December and that any reopening issues beyond small-education hubs for special education students would require union-negotiation accords.

Making flu shots available at Covid testing sites is part of the County's larger effort to get more people vaccinated before flu season arrives. Contra Costa Health Services will also be hosting a series of free one-day flu vaccination clinics in October.

Since its closure, Chabot has been offering events like the virtual telescope viewing every Saturday. Another popular event is “The Sky This Month,” where Chabot astronomers Gerald McKeegan and Don Saito host a gathering and answer questions about constellations, the moon, and other objects in the night sky. For October’s installment, The Oaklandside will join McKeegan, and the Q&A will be live-streamed simultaneously on Chabot’s and The Oaklandside’s Facebook pages on Oct. 16 at 8 p.m.

San Francisco restaurants are now allowed to have indoor dining at 25% capacity for up to 100 diners. A recent CDC report cites dining out as a significant Covid-19 risk that applies to both indoor and outdoor dining, due to the inability to wear masks while eating. Current CDC guidelines still recommend drive-through, delivery, takeout or curbside pickup as the safest and lowest risk methods for restaurant food. With a predicted spike of cases in conjunction with flu season, guidelines also strongly recommend getting flu vaccines for workers.

President Donald Trump, who has frequently dismissed the significance of the Covid-19 pandemic and rarely wears masks in public, has contracted the coronavirus and is now in quarantine, he announced early Friday morning on Twitter. Melania Trump has also tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the president said. The first lady also took to Twitter, suggesting she and the president both felt well, but that she was cancelling all upcoming engagements. “Please be sure you are staying safe & we will all get through this together,” she wrote.

Trump, who is 74 and is considered overweight, is at higher risk of having a serious bout of the illness than his wife, who is 50. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a person aged 65 to 74 is five times as likely to be hospitalized with Covid-19 as someone aged 18 to 29, and 90 times more likely to die from the illness. A memo from Trump’s physician, issued Friday morning, said both the president and his wife “are well at this time.”

With several coronavirus vaccines barreling through late-stage trials, adults could receive an approved vaccine in months. But even then, we likely won't know whether any of these vaccines work in children. Only a handful of coronavirus vaccine trials currently include children as participants — an Oxford-AstraZeneca trial being one of them, Stat News reported. Vaccines typically get tested in adults before children to allow their safety profiles to be fully assessed, and their potential risks minimized, before they're given to kids. 

In the past two weeks, leading epidemiologists from many respected institutions have, through different methods, reached the same conclusion: About 85 to 90 percent of the American population is still susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing the current pandemic.

The evidence — both from antibody testing and from epidemiological modeling — runs strongly counter to a theory being promoted in influential circles that the United States has either already achieved herd immunity or is close to doing so, and that the pandemic is all but over. That conclusion would imply that businesses, schools and restaurants could safely reopen, and that masks and other distancing measures could be abandoned.

The measure is designed to ensure that test positivity rates in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods do not significantly exceed a county’s overall rate, a disparity that has been widespread during the pandemic.

President Donald Trump's coronavirus diagnosis exposes the Capitol's laissez-faire approach to testing for the deadly disease, particularly for congressional leaders and Republicans who interact regularly with the president or his top aides. The president regularly hosts Republican senators at the White House, including for the introduction of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. At these events, these lawmakers and much of the crowd are maskless.

Editor's Note: Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, announced Friday he tested positive for Covid-19.

In reports issued to governors on Sept. 20, the White House Coronavirus Task Force recommended statewide mask mandates in Iowa, Missouri and Oklahoma. The weekly memos, some of which have been made public by the Center for Public Integrity, advocate mask usage for other states and have even encouraged doling out fines in Alaska, Idaho and, recently, Montana.

Masks, a political flashpoint since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, are considered by public health officials to be a top safeguard against spreading the Covid-19 virus as the country awaits a vaccine. During the presidential debate Tuesday, the president said masks were “OK” and then mocked Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s mask-wearing habits. In the audience, some Trump family members and staffers were not wearing masks, despite the rules set by the Cleveland Clinic, which hosted the debate.

Thousands of minks at Utah fur farms have died because of the coronavirus in the past 10 days, forcing nine sites in three counties to quarantine, but the state veterinarian said people don’t appear to be at risk from the outbreak.

The Covid-19 infections likely were spread from workers at the mink ranches to the animals, with no sign so far that the animals are spreading it to humans, said Dr. Dean Taylor, the state veterinarian, who is investigating the outbreak. “We genuinely don’t feel like there is much of a risk going from the mink to the people,” he said Thursday.

The Covid-19 pandemic has ravaged Latin America, killing more than 300,000 people, erasing years of social and economic gains and plunging millions back into poverty. But from Mexico to Brazil, a recent slowdown in new cases and fatalities is raising cautious hopes that the hard-hit region might be turning a corner.

While the U.S. has struggled with an increase in new Covid-19 cases over the past two weeks, Brazil has seen a reduction of more than 40% since July. Brazil’s daily death toll, though still one of the world’s highest at more than 700 people, has also fallen almost 40% over the same period. Mexico has reported fewer than 600 deaths a day for the past six weeks, down from 800 at a June peak. New cases in the region’s third most populous country, Colombia, have fallen about 40% since August, while the daily number of fatalities has halved.

“Across the region we’ve seen a high level of deaths and cases since the end of May but these numbers are now slowly starting to fall,” said Eliseu Waldman, an epidemiologist at the University of São Paulo

The French government could place Paris on maximum alert as soon as Monday amid a rise in Covid-19 infections, Health Minister Olivier Véran said Thursday, a move that would likely force the closure of restaurants and bars, and tighten other restrictions on public life. France reported nearly 14,000 new confirmed coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours, close to the record levels seen last week.

The 25th Amendment to the Constitution ensures the nation has a chief executive when the president is incapacitated. Section 3 addresses the simplest scenario: when a president determines he is incapacitated, and later determines he is able to return to the duties of the office. The president, in writing, informs the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate of his incapacity, and informs them again in writing when ready to resume. The vice president during the interregnum serves as acting president.

By now many people have heard about R0—the basic reproductive number of a pathogen, a measure of its contagiousness on average. But unless you’ve been reading scientific journals, you’re less likely to have encountered k, the measure of its dispersion. The definition of k is a mouthful, but it’s simply a way of asking whether a virus spreads in a steady manner or in big bursts, whereby one person infects many, all at once. After nine months of collecting epidemiological data, we know that this is an overdispersed pathogen, meaning that it tends to spread in clusters, but this knowledge has not yet fully entered our way of thinking about the pandemic—or our preventive practices.

Covid-19 has torn through Black America, with the virus taking the lives of Black people in the US at twice the rate of white Americans. All of America’s minorities, with the exception of Asian Americans, have seen worse outcomes than white people during the coronavirus pandemic. But Black Americans have fared worst of all, with about 1 in every 1,000 Black Americans dying from Covid-19 since February. That is about 40,000 people who have lost their lives. For their share of the US population, Black people are dying in the pandemic at twice the rate of white Americans, of whom about 1 in every 2,150 people has died.

Indigenous Americans (1 death for every 1,220 people, per APM Research Lab), Pacific Islander Americans (1 in 1,400), and Latino Americans (1 in 1,540) are also dying at highly disproportionate rates compared to the white majority. Asian Americans have seen slightly fewer deaths per person than whites, with a 1 in 2,470 death rate.