Low-income communities of color — especially Latinos — are increasingly bearing the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic in California, where spreading infections among poor service workers living in crowded conditions has highlighted widening racial and economic inequities. These disparities are particularly stark in idyllic Marin, where a surge of new COVID-19 cases concentrated in one crowded Latin American neighborhood in San Rafael has helped land the county on the state’s pandemic watchlist.

Two days after California prison officials in late May shipped busloads of prisoners from a coronavirus hot spot in Chino to San Quentin State Prison, Marin County’s top public health officer issued urgent guidance to the prison’s leadership. Dr. Matthew Willis had learned that the 122 prisoners weren’t tested for weeks before they were transferred on May 30. Unless they were “radically sequestered” from the native population, Willis warned, the prison was setting the stage for a major outbreak.

Pre-pandemic, 25 percent of San Franciscans said they were at risk for hunger due to low income or physical inaccessibility to food, said Executive Director of the Department of Disability and Aging Services Shireen McSpadden at a press conference. This only worsened during shelter-in-place. Though undocumented and gig-workers were especially vulnerable, financial burdens escaped few. San Francisco-Marin Food Bank added 28,000 more households to its pre-existing count, bringing its total to 60,000 weekly clients. 

Data from the real-estate listing site Zumper found that Oakland was one of the very few cities in the Bay Area where one-bedroom rents were higher this June than they were a year prior. In San Francisco and some expensive South Bay cities, rents dropped by double-digit percentage points compared to the previous year. In July, Oakland rents dropped a bit for one-bedrooms too, but still rose for two-bedrooms. “There has been a migration away from the Bay Area overall, and a micro-trend of people leaving San Francisco and moving to neighboring areas like Oakland and even Sacramento,” said Zumper’s Crystal Chen, who compiles the rent statistics.

San Francisco Was Uniquely Prepared for Covid-19 

That bandanna might make you look like a cool outlaw from an old Western movie but it’s largely ineffective in slowing the spread of the coronavirus, according to a new study. A group of researchers at Duke University tested 14 different types of common face masks to determine which work best to stop the transmission of respiratory droplets during regular speech — and which are practically useless.

Fitted N95 masks, usually reserved for health care professionals, came out on top of the rankings, while three-layer surgical masks and homemade cotton masks also performed well. But the study, published Friday, found that folded bandannas and knitted masks offered inadequate viral control, while neck fleece — which are often used by runners — do more harm than good and “might be counterproductive.”

Skeptics of the notion that the coronavirus spreads through the air — including many expert advisers to the World Health Organization — have held out for one missing piece of evidence: proof that floating respiratory droplets called aerosols contain live virus, and not just fragments of genetic material. Now a team of virologists and aerosol scientists has produced exactly that: confirmation of infectious virus in the air. “This is what people have been clamoring for,” said Linsey Marr, an expert in airborne spread of viruses who was not involved in the work. “It’s unambiguous evidence that there is infectious virus in aerosols.”

Covid-19 spread unchecked across California’s oldest prison in ways that stunned public health experts, despite efforts to control the disease. As of Monday, there had been more than 2,200 cases and 25 deaths, among a population of more than 3,260 people. On Sunday, a guard became one of the latest to die.

That means more than two-thirds of the prison’s population has been infected, said Dr. George Rutherford, epidemiologist and infectious diseases expert at UC San Francisco. And though new cases have slowed, they are still occurring, with 60 reported in the last two weeks, suggesting herd immunity has not yet been achieved. San Quentin’s death toll translates to a mortality rate of about 767 people dying out of every 100,000 persons. If that same rate occurred across California, that would translate to a staggering 300,000 deaths statewide, many times larger than California’s cumulative death toll of more than 10,400.

On Tuesday, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine published a study which may confirm the fears of parents and doctors across the nation. Vaping is not just a small risk for coronavirus. Among teens and young adults who were tested, those who had used e-cigs were five to seven times more likely to be infected than non-users. “We were surprised,” said Dr. Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, professor of pediatrics at Stanford University and the study’s senior author. “We expected to maybe see some relationship .... but certainly not at the odds ratios and the significance that we're seeing it here.”

Even as deaths have risen, however, hospitalizations across California have dropped dramatically over the past several weeks, with notable Bay Area decreases in San Francisco and Alameda counties. Across the state, just 5,596 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 as of Monday, down from a peak of 7,170 people on July 21st, the biggest spike since the start of the pandemic. A total of 693 coronavirus patients are hospitalized across the 10-county Bay Area, with Alameda and San Francisco shedding about 17% and 26% of their COVID-19 patients over the past week, respectively.

More than 1,600 California households have been evicted since Gov. Newsom declared a statewide state of emergency March 4, according to data CalMatters obtained via public record requests from more than 40 California sheriffs’ departments. Nearly a third of those evictions took place after Newsom’s March 19 shelter-in-place order, and more than 400 since Newsom issued a self-described March 27 “eviction moratorium.” The 1,600 evictions are likely a significant undercount as both court-sanctioned and informal evictions often do not show up on the sheriffs’ lockout lists.

Public release of hospital data about the coronavirus pandemic has slowed to a crawl, one month after the federal government ordered states to report it directly to the Department of Health and Human Services and bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Key indicators, such as estimates of the portion of inpatient beds occupied by Covid-19 patients, are lagging by a week or more, making it harder for citizens and local officials to get a handle on how the pandemic is progressing and for agencies to allocate supplies of antiviral drugs and personal protective equipment, public-health experts say.

Texas has been at the center of a summer surge in coronavirus cases along with California and Florida, which are both reporting thousands of new daily cases. Texas' case spike in July came after people let their guards down as the state reopened, Beaumont Mayor Becky Ames said in the news conference with Abbott. And rising positivity rates now could be the result of the same thing, Abbott said. Infection and hospitalization metrics are improving in the state, but are "still too high," he said. To get businesses running more regularly, Texans need to lower the state's test-positivity rate below 10% and stick to safety precautions, he said. The state's test positivity has averaged over 20% the past week, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Australia suffered its deadliest day of the pandemic so far, with 21 deaths in the state of Victoria. On Wednesday, Victorian authorities said the deaths were all among people over 70, with 16 linked to outbreaks in aged care facilities. Australia’s rate of death in residential aged care is the second highest in the world, behind only Canada, said Professor Joseph Ibrahim, the head of health law and ageing research unit at Monash University at an inquiry into the aged care sector.

Even as coronavirus cases in Mexico climb enough to earn the country the grim title of having the third most deadly breakout in the world, as of Monday businesses like select bars, cinemas, public swimming pools and museums in Mexico City have been permitted to reopen to partial capacity in a bid for a much-needed boost to the economy. It’s in hopes that partial reopenings will help prevent further layoffs in Mexicans bars, nightclubs and similar venues that have been shuttered for months, as nightlife worldwide has been decimated by stay-at-home orders and people practicing social distancing.