Americans can order four more free COVID-19 tests through the mail, starting on Thursday. It's part of the Biden administration's plan to deal with an increase in COVID cases sparked by indoor holiday gatherings. The tests can be ordered on COVIDtests.gov and will start to ship the week of Dec. 19, a senior administration official told reporters on a conference call. The government is urging people to test themselves when they have symptoms, and before visiting with family. NPR Read more

In March 2020, Dr. Jorge Bernett saw his first-ever COVID-19 patient, a young man from Contra Costa County on a ventilator. “He gestures for a piece of paper and pen, and he writes, ‘Am I going to live?’” recalled Bernett, an infectious diseases doctor with John Muir Health. The patient survived. Nowadays, Bernett is much more confident in answering “yes.” Even as COVID cases rise in California and across the country, illness is on average less severe. Young, otherwise healthy patients with no immunity are a rare sight. Some treatments are no longer effective against the newest subvariants, but there is still a toolkit of other available therapeutics inconceivable just 2½ years ago.

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Health Officers from the counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Monterey, Napa, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, San Mateo, Solano, Sonoma, and the city of Berkeley encourage the public to take easy steps to protect themselves and others from missing holiday moments and to ease the burden on local health systems. Across the Bay Area, respiratory viruses impact the most vulnerable, including young children, the immunocompromised, people living in crowded housing or congregate living facilities, and seniors, especially at skilled nursing facilities. SF.gov Read more

Protesters used an unusually merry tactic outside Oakland City Hall last Tuesday to draw attention to their cause: singing Christmas carols with lyrics demanding the city reinstate its mask mandate inside city-owned buildings. The protest was organized by Senior and Disability Action, a Bay Area nonprofit that advocates for seniors and disabled people’s rights, and recently has been protesting to draw attention to traffic safety issues in Oakland. Mayor Libby Schaaf ended the nearly three-year-old mask mandate for city employees and visitors inside municipal buildings, including libraries, on Nov. 28. Oaklandside Read more

John’s Grill, home of long martini lunches and lamb chop dinners in San Francisco, has settled an insurance lawsuit in a very rare victory in the nationwide quest of restaurants seeking to have their insurers cover business losses incurred during COVID-19 lockdowns. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but Joe Cotchett, the attorney who represented John’s Grill, said the payout to the restaurant is “substantial.” The settlement is touted as one of the first victories against a major insurer over business interruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. SF Chronicle Read more

Adults who received the updated coronavirus booster shots are better protected against severe disease than those who haven’t, cutting their risk of having to visit an emergency room or being hospitalized with covid-19 by 50 percent or more, according to new federal data.Two reports released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention give the first detailed look at how well the updated boosters from Pfizer and Moderna protect against serious illness. But uptake of the “bivalent” boosters rolled out in September has been low among vaccine-weary Americans, with only about 14 percent of those eligible — ages 5 and older — having received an updated shot. Washington Post Read more

Less than 50% of nursing home residents, one of the country’s most vulnerable populations to severe illness from COVID-19, have received an Omicron booster ahead of an expected wave of infection this winter. The Biden administration has made increasing booster uptake among nursing home residents a central part of its strategy to prevent a major spike of hospitalizations and death this winter. “We are working very closely with leadership of nursing homes across America, and we have asked them to step up to do more,” Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID taskforce leader, told reporters during a press briefing Thursday. CNBC Read more

Vaccines offer a potent armour against infectious diseases that once carried a heavy toll of mortality and morbidity, particularly among children. Gaps were already forming in that armour in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic. But amid stagnating vaccination rates, the pandemic acted like a shotgun, punching many more holes in humanity’s defences against preventable diseases such as measles. The risks of allowing these infections to flourish are clear. Zimbabwe is currently working to contain a huge measles outbreak that claimed the lives of more than 750 children between April and October. And poliovirus has recently re-emerged in the United States after decades of successful elimination, prompting a state of emergency in New York. Nature Read more

With California staring down the triple threat posed by the coronavirus, RSV and flu, health officials are urging the wider use of anti-COVID drugs to help prevent people from falling seriously ill and keep them out of the hospital. The drugs include pills such as Paxlovid, which can reduce the risk of severe illness or death from COVID-19 by almost 90%, and another oral medication known as molnupiravir. The drugs are free and widely available, but officials say some doctors are not prescribing them as much as they should. LA Times Read more

A recent surge of coronavirus cases and hospitalizations in California is showing early signs of slowing down, state health data show, though health officials are still expressing caution as the winter holidays approach with other respiratory viruses including seasonal influenza also continuing to spread. The California Department of Public Health in a weekly update Thursday reported the daily case rate for COVID-19 at 21.6 per 100,000 residents, up 7% compared to last week. However, California’s statewide test positivity rate dipped to 11.1%, from 11.5% last week, reversing what had been a sharp and steady incline from late October through early December. The state entered November at 4.6% positivity and December at 11.7%. Sacramento Bee Read more

David Barnett was a bartender in March 2020 when he contracted COVID-19. At first, Barnett could barely walk and had trouble breathing. As he recovered and quarantined, he felt like he was starting to get better. After about a week of progress, "I stood up from my couch and I collapsed ... it was the weirdest feeling I've ever felt in my life. I felt like I was dying," he told ABC News. It was the start of what Barnett calls a nightmare. He is one of millions of Americans experiencing long COVID-19 symptoms across the country. ABC News Read more

Like a zombie in a horror film, the coronavirus can persist in the bodies of infected patients well after death, even spreading to others, according to two startling studies. The risk of contagion is mainly to those who handle cadavers, like pathologists, medical examiners and health care workers, and in settings like hospitals and nursing homes, where many deaths may occur. While transmission from corpses is not likely to be a major factor in the pandemic, bereaved family members should exercise caution, experts said. NY Times Read more

Landlords in Los Angeles can resume evicting tenants for unpaid rent and other reasons come Feb. 1, the City Council confirmed in a vote last week. The decision will end some of the longest-lasting tenant protections in the nation, first passed in March 2020 as part of the emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, landlords have not been allowed to evict their tenants for most reasons, including if the owners wanted to move into their own homes. The emergency rules have also prohibited landlords from raising the rent in more than 650,000 rent-controlled units in the city, nearly three-quarters of L.A.’s apartment stock. Rent increases in such units will continue to be barred until February 2024. LA Times Read more

Flu activity and hospitalizations are soaring to levels not seen since before the COVID-19 pandemic, spurring public health officials and emergency room doctors to issue public pleas this week to Californians to get vaccinated. That’s a major change from the last two years, when stay-home orders and mask mandates suppressed transmission of the flu so low in the Sacramento region that UC Davis Medical Center didn’t admit one patient with the disease in the 2020-21 influenza season. We’ve benefited the past two years from all the masking and distancing that we’ve had,” said Dr. Dean Blumberg, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at UC Davis Health. “There’s normally between 100 and 200 US pediatric deaths every influenza season. In 2020-21, there was one pediatric death in the U.S.” Sacramento Bee Read more

The U.S. has been pummeled by respiratory illness, including a harsher flu season than we've seen in years. But new data indicates the outbreak may be peaking. However, experts predict the outbreak will morph into regional waves of illness into early spring that could stress health systems and collide with COVID. "The concern is, the viruses have been so weird this year, we don’t know," Sarah Ash Combs, an emergency department physician at Children's National Hospital, told Axios. "Whereas we can typically predictively say, 'OK that was the peak, we’re now on the down spike. We don’t know: 'Is there going to be a second spike? A January, a February, a March spike?" Axios Read more

COVID-19 isn't the only virus spreading rapidly this holiday season. After a quiet flu season last year, influenza is now on the rise in California, and the state is in the "very high" category for virus transmission, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Amid the surge, you may be wondering if it's too late to get a flu shot. "The short answer is absolutely not," Dr. Dean Winslow, a professor of medicine at Stanford and an infectious disease expert, told SFGATE on the phone. "It takes about 10 to 14 days to form antibodies in response to any type of a vaccine, and the flu shot is consistent with that. We’re still more than 10 days away from Christmas. A lot of us are going to get together with our family and friends, and it’s really a perfect time to get vaccinated." SFGate Read more

A needs assessment of LGBTQ families conducted by a San Francisco-based nonprofit found that many are struggling with mental health issues and feel socially isolated. It also spotlighted that addressing the needs of LGBTQ students and parents in school environments is an ongoing concern, even in the Bay Area. Our Family Coalition, which provides services to local LGBTQ parents and their children, partnered with Kali-Ahset Amen, Ph.D., a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, on the family needs assessment. It included a formal survey people could fill out as well as holding focus groups with a total of 10 parents. Bay Area Reporter Read more

The holiday season often brings unwelcome guests — stress and depression. And it's no wonder. The holidays often present a dizzying array of demands — cooking meals, shopping, baking, cleaning and entertaining, to name just a few. And if coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is spreading in your community, you may be feeling additional stress, or you may be worrying about your and your loved ones' health. You may also feel stressed, sad or anxious because your holiday plans may look different during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mayo Clinic Read more

Imagine if you called your local doctor, say a radiation oncologist, interventional nephrologist, or vascular specialist, and there was no one to take your call because they abruptly closed their doors. That scenario may become more and more common unless Congress acts to stop the latest round of devastating Medicare reimbursement cuts. It's not just an inconvenience for patients - the cuts will undermine access to healthcare as well as the quality of care. Healthcare organizations, providers, and patient advocates are ringing alarm bells about the severe cuts to office-based specialty care providers that have been proposed in the 2023 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule. MedPage Today Read more

Up to 254,000 Medicare beneficiaries’ personal information may have been compromised in an online ransomware attack at a government subcontractor, officials warned this week. Letters are being sent to the beneficiaries who were impacted by the potential data breach, said the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Those affected — who represent less than 0.4% of Medicare’s 64.5 million beneficiaries — will also receive a replacement Medicare card with a new identification number in the next few weeks. CNBC Read more

Sources: Johns Hopkins University, SF Chronicle, and dashboards for California and Alameda and Contra Costa counties.