This week, Orange County came off the state’s coronavirus watchlist while most Bay Area counties — which were among the state’s first to issue restrictive stay-at-home orders — have not. New coronavirus case rates for Orange County and Santa Clara County have converged. So why is Santa Clara County still on it the state monitoring list, while Orange County has been removed? It’s not clear.

A key business organization has charted paths for Silicon Valley to extricate itself from the economic quagmire created by the coronavirus and business shutdowns, according to a report released Wednesday. The wide-ranging report by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group tackles multiple issues, including business recoveries from coronavirus-linked shutdowns, job creation, affordable housing, and protection of vulnerable residents affected by economic dislocations. One huge challenge facing Silicon Valley, according to the report: It’s simply not clear how quickly — and under what restrictions — countless businesses will be able to reopen in Santa Clara, San Mateo, and Alameda counties.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quietly modified its coronavirus testing guidelines this week to exclude people who do not have symptoms of Covid-19 — even if they have been recently exposed to the virus. Prior iterations of the C.D.C.’s testing guidelines struck a markedly different tone, explicitly stating that “testing is recommended for all close contacts” of people infected with the coronavirus, regardless of symptoms. The agency also specifically emphasized “the potential for asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission” as an important factor in the spread of the virus.

Models suggest that about half of transmission events can be traced back to individuals still in this so-called pre-symptomatic stage, before they start to feel ill — if they ever feel sick at all. By the C.D.C.’s own estimates, roughly 40 percent of people infected with the coronavirus may never go on to develop symptoms, remaining asymptomatic for the duration of their tenure with the virus. These numbers are tentative — and ironically can’t be confirmed without more testing of people who appear entirely healthy.

A sudden change in federal guidelines on coronavirus testing came this week as a result of pressure from the upper ranks of the Trump administration, a federal health official close to the process tells CNN. "It's coming from the top down," the official said of the new directive from the CDC. The new guidelines raise the bar on who should get tested, advising that some people without symptoms probably don't need it -- even if they've been in close contact with an infected person.

Obesity increases the risk of death from Covid-19 by nearly 50% and may make vaccines against the disease less effective, according to a comprehensive study using global data. The research from leading global experts warns that the risks for people with obesity are greater than previously thought. The US and the UK have some of the highest obesity rates in the world. US government data shows more than 40% of Americans have obesity.

As the coronavirus pandemic rolls on, an unknown number of seemingly recovered patients are experiencing what is being called post-Covid syndrome — weeks or months of profound fatigue, fevers, problems with concentration and memory, dizzy spells, hair loss, and many other troubling symptoms. Among these “long-haulers,” as they have become known, a significant number face a very specific challenge: convincing others they had Covid-19 in the first place. Because of widespread supply shortages and overwhelmed medical providers, many who sought viral testing in the first months of the pandemic were refused for not meeting strict criteria. Others decided on their own to self-quarantine. Some received negative results from local testing sites despite clinical signs of the disease.

A sweeping study of nearly 800 coronavirus genomes has found that viruses carrying a characteristic mutation infected hundreds of people in the Boston area, as well as victims from Alaska to Senegal to Luxembourg. As of mid-July, the variant had been found in about one-third of the cases sequenced in Massachusetts and 3 percent of all genomes studied thus far in the US.

Most coronavirus vaccine trials are enrolling only adults, so they will provide no evidence on the safety, effectiveness or dosing of the vaccines in children. Without data from children, the FDA is unlikely to approve the vaccines for pediatric use. This possibility is unacceptable.

Because children appear to be at lower risk of developing severe Covid-19 or of dying from the disease than adults, they will not be first in line to receive a vaccine when one is ultimately approved. However, it will be important to move as quickly as possible to vaccinate children for at least three reasons: First, although rare, children can die from the novel coronavirus infection or develop serious complications such as multisystem inflammatory syndrome. Second, children are likely to be important vectors of community spread; recent studies in JAMA Pediatrics and the Journal of Pediatrics suggest higher levels of viral shedding among children compared with adults. Finally, a vaccine that establishes immunity in children might make it possible to successfully hold in-person classes without complex, burdensome and expensive physical distancing and other measures.

Editor's Note: On August 1, 2020, there were 248 patients with confirmed and suspected Covid-19 hospitalized in Alameda County. As of yesterday, the number of these patients was 227. For Contra Costa County there were 107 patients with Covid-19 hospitalized on August 1, 2020. Yesterday, 95 Covid-19 patients were hospitalized.

California health officials are alarmed that Latinos continue to get sick and die from Covid-19 at far higher rates than other groups. Latinos make up 39% of California's population but account for almost 60% of all Coronavirus infections and almost half of all deaths. Efforts to battle Covid-19 mirror the challenges faced nationally in communities like the Canal District in San Rafael: fear of jeopardizing legal status, underlying health conditions and long-standing disparities in wealth and health care access.

For months, U.S. islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific avoided much of the agony unleashed by the coronavirus across parts of the mainland, due in part to their early mitigation efforts and relative ease in sealing off borders. But now the state of Hawaii and U.S. territories are emerging as some of the most alarming virus hot spots in the United States, revealing how the coronavirus can spike and then rapidly spread in places with relaxed restrictions, sluggish contact tracing and widespread pressure to end the economic pain that comes with lockdowns. “People are infecting each other in crowded apartments while hotels sit empty,” Dr. Jonathan Dworkin, an infectious-diseases doctor who lives on Hawaii’s Big Island, wrote in a scathing assessment of Hawaii’s pandemic responses in The Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

Even amid a pandemic, life expectancy among White people in the United States far exceeds what Black people have experienced every year, according to new research. Research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday used national life expectancy data and demographic models to estimate how many White deaths from Covid-19 would be needed for the White death rate in 2020 to reach the levels of the year with the lowest Black death rate ever recorded, which was in 2014.

With more than 16 million people in the U.S. out of work, Americans are having to stretch financially to keep the roof over their heads. According to the Census Bureau, about a third of renters said in July that they had no confidence or slight confidence in their ability to pay for housing in August. With Republicans and Democrats in a stalemate over whether to extend an eviction moratorium and supplemental unemployment benefits, experts are warning that the country is poised for an eviction crisis of historic proportions.

About 30 million Americans are “at risk” of being evicted in coming months because they can’t pay rent, according to a review of the Census survey data by the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program and the Covid-19 Eviction Defense Project, a coalition of researchers. 

More than 8 months after Covid-19 emerged in the industrial hub of 11 million, Wuhan is, perhaps more emphatically than anywhere else, moving into a post-virus future. Social life has resumed in all its varieties, with lineups at popular breakfast joints and cinemas and karaoke lounges open for business. Factories and offices are operating normally, although China’s vast surveillance state, partly re-tasked to monitoring public health, has a long reach. A national-ID number is required to purchase fever medicine, and anyone with a high temperature is theoretically required to report it to the authorities. Nightspots aside, people generally wear masks in public, and a system of check-ins has been implemented at most buildings, allowing rapid contact tracing should a case be detected.

The most revealing aspects of life after the coronavirus in Wuhan, however, go beyond the pathogen itself. As President Xi Jinping intensifies repression at home and aggressively pursues Beijing’s claims abroad amid the pandemic, the city is becoming something like a template for the new China, a place with relative economic freedom but intense controls on speech, socially vibrant but isolated from and suspicious of outsiders.

Publicly questioning how the government handled the virus is almost impossible, since that would weaken the central rhetorical foundation of Xi’s expanding power: that China’s mighty state conquered a disease that left the U.S., with its raucous democracy and competing centers of power, on its knees. Controlling the narrative, in other words, is just as important as controlling Covid-19.

“It’s getting worse,” said Ana Piquer, executive director of Amnesty International Chile. “More people are out of work, more people are protesting, so there is more repression. It’s a very direct relation.” Chile has one of the highest global death rates from Covid-19, with 58.28 deaths per 100,000 population, higher than Brazil’s 55.05 deaths. It has more than 400,000 cases and nearly 11,000 deaths.

On Sunday, the Food and Drug Administration issued an “emergency use authorization” for blood plasma to treat COVID-19. The decision was well within the agency’s authority but nevertheless generated instant controversy. President Donald Trump had just attacked the “deep state” at the FDA for holding up COVID-19 treatments; the next day, the normally staid and careful agency was cheerleading plasma as “another achievement in administration’s fight against pandemic.” The FDA commissioner, Stephen Hahn, boasted that plasma could save 35 out of 100 treated COVID-19 patients if the data held up—a claim so grossly misleading, he had to recant it.