Editor's Note: See more coverage of this issue in the California news section.

The public health director of San Francisco on Tuesday urged residents to remain vigilant about face coverings and physical distancing, even as the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations and daily count of new cases have dropped. Dr. Grant Colfax, speaking at a virtual news conference, said about 90 new cases are found among residents every day, a number that has dropped “a bit” from a high point two weeks ago. “But it is still very concerning,” the director said. “Anything above 50 cases a day continues to put us in the red zone, on high alert, and we have been there for about the last six weeks.”

State rules allow elementary schools in Contra Costa County to apply for a waiver to conduct in-person classes. However, Contra Costa Health Services will not be supporting elementary school waiver applications because we consider in-person education too risky at this time. Until daily case rates, percent positive test rates and hospitalizations in our county are stable or declining for at least 2 weeks, we won’t be reviewing any waiver requests. We will continue to update the County Office of Education and our other education partners about when local schools may begin submitting waiver applications.  

An interactive map, developed by professors at Georgia Tech, lets people explore the odds that coronavirus will be present at an event anywhere in the U.S., depending on the event’s size and the county in which it’s located. The map calculates the likelihood of whether each gathering would include someone who is currently infectious. A quick browse through the map yields some troubling numbers. If you’re in San Francisco County and decide to attend a gathering of 25 people, there’s a 34% chance that someone who’s coronavirus-positive will be in attendance. In Marin County, the risk is 75%. In Alameda County, it’s 31%.

The FDA is warning Americans that certain hand-sanitizing products sold under a wide range of labels could be dangerous — or even fatal. Drinking them could cause blindness, liver and kidney damage or death. So could slathering it on one’s skin, since it passes quickly through the skin and into tissues beneath. Children are particularly vulnerable to potential harm from the stuff. The culprit is methanol, a poor cousin of isopropyl alcohol or ethyl alcohol, the approved active ingredients in hand sanitizing products. Starting in late July, the FDA began detecting what it called a “sharp increase” in hand sanitizers that claimed to be made with ethyl alcohol but were contaminated by methanol.

Researchers are launching a joint study funded by the California Air Resources Board to examine the link between dirty air and disparate health outcomes at the neighborhood level. “It's already evident that low-income communities of color in California are at disproportionate risk of getting Covid-19, and also at increased risk of hospitalization and death,” said Gina Solomon, the lead researcher on the study. An open question, she says, is the extent to which air pollution is contributing to these health impacts.

Weeks-long glitches plaguing the California infectious disease registry system have led to crippling delays in information filtering back to counties — and a “significant” undercount in Covid-19 cases. Gov. Newsom spoke of “encouraging” and “early good signs” regarding coronavirus infection rates — but officials in multiple California counties told Mission Local they believe this to be a mirage caused by faulty data. At issue is CalREDIE, the state’s disease registry system. Testing data from lab providers is electronically transmitted to CalREDIE, which subsequently transmits information back to the counties.

The extent of the underreporting is not known. In a series of documents obtained by Mission Local, state officials point to July 25 as the date when it began experiencing difficulties routing electronic lab reports to the state system. But Jeff Smith, the county executive for Santa Clara, says problems were being detected there as early as July 15. “We don’t know if there was some fix between the 15th and the 25th. We don’t know what went on before that,” he said. “It’s basically a black box at this point.”

Though the science on the effectiveness of masks for reducing the spread of the coronavirus is more established now than it was early in the pandemic, mandatory masking is still a new and contentious idea. Public health experts and unions are calling for a national mandate to protect the most vulnerable, but President Trump has said he opposes it. Popular support for mask-wearing is growing: A Hill-HarrisX poll conducted from July 26-27 found that 82% of Americans would support a national mask mandate.

In the early days of the coronavirus crisis, President Donald Trump was flanked in the White House briefing room by a team of public health experts in a seeming portrait of unity to confront the disease that was ravaging the globe. But as the crisis has spread to all reaches of the country, a chasm has widened between the president and the experts. The result: daily delivery of a mixed message to the public at a moment when coherence is most needed.

Florida was one of the earliest states to lock down elder-care facilities in the coronavirus pandemic, and the move helped stave off widespread deaths at such centers in the spring. But as the state contends with a surge of new infections, those defenses have faltered, triggering a fresh round of government interventions. Daily fatality counts from elder-care facilities in Florida climbed to their highest level so far in the past week, with the seven-day average reaching 56 on Monday, about triple the average a month ago.

Call it pandemic fatigue; call it the summer poop-out; call it whatever you wish. Any label, at this point, would probably be too trivializing, belying what is in fact a far deeper problem. We are not, as a nation, all right. Last week, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a tracking poll showing that for the first time, a majority of American adults — 53% — believes that the pandemic is taking a toll on their mental health. This number climbs to 68% if you look solely at African-Americans.

Throughout the pandemic, one lodestar of public-health advice has come down to three words: Do things outside. For nearly five months now, the outdoors has served as a vital social release valve, a space where people can still eat, drink, relax, exercise, and worship together in relative safety. When socializing outside gets harder in much of the U.S., daily life will get more dismal, and the virus might spread even further.

A study of LGBTQ people’s experience during the pandemic, by University College London (UCL) and Sussex University, found 69% of respondents suffered depressive symptoms, rising to about 90% of those who had experienced homophobia or transphobia. The study’s co-author, Laia Bécares, deputy director of the centre for innovation and research in wellbeing at Sussex University, said the pandemic was having a “pernicious impact” on the LGBTQ community’s mental health, with younger trans and non-binary people suffering more discrimination and reporting the highest levels of depression.