COVID-19
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UCSF’s Bob Wachter Was Traveling With His Wife When She Tested Positive For COVID. Here’s How They Handled It
After more than two years of diligently following COVID-19 safety measures, avoiding high-risk situations, and sharing pointers with his legion of social media followers, Dr. Bob Wachter, UCSF’s chair of medicine, found the pandemic hitting close to home over the weekend. His wife, journalist and author Katie Hafner, tested positive for the coronavirus on Sunday morning, Wachter said. She had recently returned from a teaching at a weeklong writers’ workshop with about 50 other people. The couple — both 64 years old, double vaccinated and double boosted — had then flown to Palm Springs to visit with some older friends when she started feeling ill. SF Chronicle Read more
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Marin Schools Hit With COVID-19 Surge
About 20 Marin schools are experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks, the county’s public health officer said Monday. “We are seeing increased virus activity countywide,” said Dr. Matt Willis, Marin public health officer. “The current surge in cases is related to our behavior, and the behavior of the virus.” The BA.2 subvariant of the virus “is dominant now — and it’s even more infectious than the omicron strain that fueled the winter surge,” Willis said. Marin Independent Journal Read more
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Where Bay Area Cities Rank In Workers Returning To The Office
As many across the country gradually return to the office after pandemic shutdowns, office workers in Bay Area cities are lagging their counterparts in other cities. Only about one-third of workers in the San Jose and San Francisco metro areas have keyed into their office buildings, according to a study by Kastle. The company operates app, keycard and fob systems in 41,000 businesses in 47 states and crunched numbers from the top 10 U.S. metro areas. The San Jose metro area averaged 34.2 percent average office occupancy in the last week of April, and the San Francisco metro area averaged 35.4 percent. Both cities were at the bottom of the list of cities studied. Mercury News Read more
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Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) Vaccination Rate Surges To 90% As Holdouts Face Possible Pink Slip
The chances of hopping on a VTA bus with an unvaccinated driver are increasingly slim as the agency reports a 90% COVID vaccination rate after threatening to fire employees who didn’t get the jab by the end of April. Still, nearly 100 holdouts have yet to report their vaccine status or receive an exemption and could soon face pink slips. In total 1,937 employees are fully vaccinated – a 272-person increase from early April, when only 78% of the agency’s employees had reported at least two shots – according to data shared at a VTA board meeting. The flood of newly reported vaccinations came ahead of an April 29 deadline requiring staff to get inoculated against COVID-19 or face possible termination. Mercury News Read more
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COVID Vaccine/Treatment News |
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COVID Vaccine Makers Shift Focus To Boosters
COVID-19 vaccine makers are shifting gears and planning for a smaller, more competitive booster shot market after delivering as many doses as fast as they could over the last 18 months. Executives at the biggest COVID vaccine makers including Pfizer Inc. and Moderna Inc. said they believe most people who wanted to get vaccinated against COVID have already done so - more than 5 billion people worldwide. In the coming year, most COVID vaccinations will be booster shots, or first inoculations for children, which are still gaining regulatory approvals around the world, they said. Reuters Read more
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Why COVID-19 Vaccine Boosters May Be More Important Than Ever
With waning immunity and a coronavirus that seems to become more infectious with each new variant, the Biden administration predicts that up to 100 million more people could get COVID-19 in the fall and winter. That estimate makes it crucial that as many people as possible get booster shots of COVID-19 vaccine, experts say. And if you’re eligible, it’s a good time to get a second booster. Less than half of eligible Americans – only about a third of the total US population – have gotten a first booster dose, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Only about 10 million people have received a second booster, which is authorized for people 50 and older, along with those who are 12 and older who are moderately to severely immunocompromised. CNN Read more
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Vaccine To Stop COVID Transmission Should Now Be Top Priority, Says Leading UK Scientist
It is questionable how much longer current COVID-19 vaccines will be used as they have largely done their job in preventing mass deaths, and scientists should focus on developing a vaccine that stops transmission of the virus, according to leading scientist Sir John Bell. The huge success of COVID vaccines in countries able to get them has led to sharp declines in deaths and severe disease from the virus, even though the latest COVID variant, Omicron, has spread rapidly. “We need a new vaccine to stop transmissions and there are lots of interesting ideas,” said Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University and a former member of the UK vaccine taskforce who has worked on the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID jab. The Guardian Read more
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Emergent BioSolutions Discarded Ingredients For 400 Million COVID-19 Vaccines, Probe Finds
Between March 2020 and February 2022, vaccine-maker Emergent BioSolutions was forced to discard or destroy up to 400 million coronavirus vaccine doses due to quality-control issues, according to a congressional report published Tuesday - a figure that reflects more than five times what was previously disclosed by the beleaguered firm. Problems included the contamination of vaccine ingredients, as well as equipment failures and employee errors, the report said. ABC News Read more
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State/National/International News |
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Hospital Admission Totals Tick Up After Weeks Of Rising COVID-19 Cases
Following weeks of increasing infection rates, a growing number of Americans are heading into the hospital in need of care. On average, nearly 2,400 virus-positive Americans are being admitted to the hospital each day, up by 17% in the last week, according to federal data. Forty-one states and territories have reported increases of 10% or more in their daily number of COVID-19-related hospital admissions. In the U.S., there continues to be an uptick in the overall number of patients requiring care for COVID-19, with now about 19,100 patients hospitalized across the country. ABC News Read more
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As Testing Plunges, Tracking COVID Gets Much More Difficult
Testing for COVID-19 has plummeted across the globe, making it much tougher for scientists to track the course of the pandemic and spot new, worrisome viral mutants as they emerge and spread. Experts say testing has dropped by 70 to 90% worldwide from the first to the second quarter of this year — the opposite of what they say should be happening with new Omicron variants on the rise in places such as the United States and South Africa. “We’re not testing anywhere near where we might need to,” said Dr. Krishna Udayakumar, who directs the Duke Global Health Innovation Center at Duke University. “We need the ability to ramp up testing as we’re seeing the emergence of new waves or surges to track what’s happening” and respond. Mercury News
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The Common Places BA.2 And Other Omicron Subvariants Are Spreading
Earlier in the pandemic, contact tracing data showed us where COVID-19 was predominantly spreading. Unfortunately, because our contact tracing efforts have slowed down, we don’t have as clear of a picture regarding where people are mostly likely to contract omicron and its subvariants. What we do know is that, while the virus has evolved to be much more transmissible than previous variants, the way COVID-19 spreads hasn’t changed. “Nothing has changed in terms of how any individual right now, regardless of their day-to-day activity, can pick this virus up,” Mark Cameron, infectious disease researcher at Case Western Reserve University, told HuffPost. HuffPost
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Here's Why Some People Still Get COVID Even After Being Vaccinated And Double-Boosted
The highly contagious Omicron subvariant BA.2.12.1 accounts for roughly 37% of new COVID cases nationwide. "This is now the most transmissible subvariant we have of all," said Dr. Monica Gandhi, MD, MPH, UCSF Infectious Disease expert and added, "it now looks like it's 30% more transmissible than BA.2 alone." Dr. Gandhi says that even if you are vaccinated, double boosted and doing everything right this subvariant can still infect you. "You got a vaccine that looks like the old strain of the virus and there are 32 mutations across the spike protein that Omicron has. So, the antibodies which is this defense up here (nasal cavities) don't work as well, but your deep defense down in the lungs and your ability to still protect yourself from severe disease the vaccine still works," said Dr. Gandhi. ABC7 News Read more
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Surviving The Pandemic Is Only Half The Battle: "Long COVID" Could Affect A Billion In Just A Few Years
The COVID death rate is a shadow of its former self, and more than two years into the pandemic, Americans seem to be breathing a sigh of relief. Thanks to vaccines, their risk of death or hospitalization from the virus is greatly diminished. But there’s more to take into account before ditching your mask, experts say: long COVID, a new chronic condition defined by an array of symptoms that endure long after the initial COVID infection has cleared. Long COVID may already affect between 7 million and 23 million Americans who previously had the virus, or up to 7% of the U.S. population, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Fortune Read more
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What Will COVID-19 Look Like This Summer? Health Experts Say The Virus Won't Be Endemic, Yet
The past two pandemic summers saw a spike in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and death, but this season may be different. Though health experts expect cases to rise, they said the wave won't be as devastating as the previous two summers or the surge of the omicron variant of the coronavirus. Unlike the previous summers, most of the U.S. population has some immunity against the coronavirus from vaccines, boosters and previous infections. People have access to antivirals that can prevent hospitalizations in the unvaccinated. However, immunity wanes and new variants could evade what protection remains. USA Today Read more
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Travel Nurses Raced To Help During COVID - Now They're Facing Abrupt Cuts
Tiffanie Jones was a few tanks of gas into her drive from Tampa, Florida, to Cheyenne, Wyoming, when she found out her travel nurse contract had been canceled. Jones, who has been a nurse for 17 years, caught up with a Facebook group for travel nurses and saw she wasn’t alone. Nurses had reported abruptly losing jobs and seeing their rates slashed as much as 50 percent midcontract. NBC News Read more
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How The COVID-19 Pandemic Led To Parental Burnout
According to new research from The Ohio State University (OSU), many parents are experiencing ‘burnout’ due to stress induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The new study finds that 66 percent of working parents during the pandemic met the criteria for parental burnout, which happens when chronic stress and exhaustion overwhelm a parent’s ability to function or cope with stress. Healthline Read more
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Dogs Can Sniff Out COVID-19 Infections With High Success Rates
In a study published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases, researchers showed canine olfaction—or dog sniffing—was both highly sensitive and specific when it came to identifying patients with COVID-19, even those who were asymptomatic or presymptomatic. The researchers, based in Hawaii, exposed dogs to sweat samples from 584 participants (ages 6 to 97 years; 24% positive SARS CoV-2 samples and 76% negative SARS CoV-2 samples). Samples were collected from cotton pads runs cross the necks of participants, and the dogs had no prior history of scent training. CIDRAP Read more
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Do Masks Work Against COVID In A Classroom Where Not All Kids Are Wearing Them?
Parents are understandably worried about community transmission of COVID in classrooms. After all, we have a fifth swell of cases in the Bay Area, and a more infectious (though not necessarily more severe) subvariant of Omicron on our hands. While kids formerly had to wear masks in Bay Area and California public schools, it’s been optional since early March for most. And it's unlikely that mask mandates will return anytime soon. If your child is wearing a mask, even if others are not, they will still have some protection from respiratory particles carrying the coronavirus. SF Chronicle Read more
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Total Confirmed Cases
Bay Area: 1,355,814
California: 9,320,872
U.S.: 82,194,557
Alameda County
Primary Vaccine Series Completed: 86.0%
Total Cases: 270,525
Total Deaths: 1,865
Test Positivity (7-day rate): 5.9%
Hospitalized Patients (as of 5/11): 50
ICU Beds Available (as of 5/11): 101
The community level of COVID-19 in Alameda County is low based on cases and hospitalizations, according to the most recent update from the C.D.C.. The number of hospitalized COVID patients has risen in the Alameda County area. Deaths have decreased. NY Times
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Total Reported Deaths
Bay Area: 8,387
California: 90,615
U.S.: 998,592
Contra Costa County
Primary Vaccine Series Completed: 86.5%
Total Cases: 198,403
Total Deaths: 1,301
Test Positivity (7-day rate): 7.9%
Hospitalized Patients (as of 5/11): 60
ICU Beds Available (as of 5/11): 47
The community level of COVID-19 in Contra Costa County is low based on cases and hospitalizations, according to the most recent update from the C.D.C.. The number of hospitalized COVID patients has risen in the Contra Costa area. Deaths have remained at about the same level.
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COVID-19 May Increase Your Risk For Shingles
Adults age 50 and older infected with COVID-19 are 15 percent more likely to develop shingles within six months of the diagnosis compared to people who weren’t infected, according to a large observational study published in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases. The risk rises to 21 percent if you’ve been hospitalized with COVID-19, according to the study. AARP Read more
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- COVID-19 testing is a good idea, but keep in mind, people who test negative can still harbor the virus if they are early in their infection.
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A viral test tells you if you have a current infection.
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An antibody test might tell you if you had a past infection.
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Over the past week, Alameda County has averaged 607 new cases and 0.7 new deaths per day.
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Over the past week, Contra Costa County has averaged 283 new cases and 0 new deaths per day.
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Top 10 Locations of Cases in
Alameda County, cumulative
as of 5/11/2022
Oakland: 79,156
Hayward: 34,479
Fremont: 27,921
San Leandro: 16,417
Berkeley: 15,214
Eden MAC: 15,151
Livermore: 13,432
Union City: 11,838
Alameda: 9,516
Castro Valley: 9,294
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Top 10 Locations of Cases in
Contra Costa County, cumulative
as of 5/11/2022
Richmond: 28,858
Antioch: 26,153
Concord: 21,412
Pittsburg: 16,995
San Pablo: 12,262
Brentwood: 11,921
Walnut Creek: 10,169
Oakley: 9,883
San Ramon: 8,906
Martinez: 6,637
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About Eden Health District |
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The Eden Health District Board of Directors are Chair Mariellen Faria, Vice Chair Pam Russo, Secretary/Treasurer Roxann Lewis, Gordon Galvan and Ed Hernandez. The Chief Executive Officer is Mark Friedman.
The Eden Health District is committed to ensuring that policy makers and community members receive accurate and timely information to help make the best policy and personal choices to meet and overcome the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
We welcome your feedback on our bulletin. Please contact editor Lisa Mahoney.
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