COVID-19
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Why Experts Hope This Is The Last Big Gasp Of COVID In The Bay Area
No one thinks COVID is disappearing any time soon, but the last few months of this year could be the last big gasp of the pandemic in the Bay Area. By early 2022, when children as young as 2 may be eligible for vaccination, community-wide immunity may crest well over 90% in much of the region, and the dizzying roller coaster of surges and troughs may finally wind down, even if COVID lingers for years yet. SF Chronicle Read more
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Bay Area Woman Who Survived 1918 Flu, World War Succumbs To COVID-19
She lived a life of adventure that spanned two continents. She fell in love with a World War II fighter pilot, barely escaped Europe ahead of Benito Mussolini’s fascists, ground steel for the U.S. war effort and advocated for her disabled daughter in a far less enlightened time. She was, her daughter said, someone who didn’t make a habit of giving up. And then this month, at age 105, Primetta Giacopini’s life ended the way it began - in a pandemic. “I think my mother would have been around quite a bit longer” if she hadn’t contracted COVID,” her 61-year-old daughter, Dorene Giacopini, said. “She was a fighter. She had a hard life and her attitude always was … basically, all Americans who were not around for World War II were basically spoiled brats.” Mercury News
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Remote Work's Downside: Empty Offices Mean S.F. Could Lose Millions In Tax Revenue
In its early days, the pandemic seemed like it might displace our way of life for a few weeks. But as weeks turned into months, and more, many workers realized a return to the office wasn’t on the horizon and began cramming desks into living spaces and bedrooms as proof that the virus had changed working life - maybe for good. More than a year-and-a-half later and many of us are still waiting for the return to our offices. In COVID-conscious San Francisco, things may never go back to the way they were as companies are reducing their office spaces with more workers preferring to continue working from home. But while remote work has kept people safe, it’s having an ill effect on the city’s tax revenue - with losses that could reach into the millions.
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Tesla Is Launching A Lottery With A $10,000 Prize To Encourage Workers To Be Vaccinated Against COVID-19
To encourage its workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19, Tesla Inc. has reportedly decided to go with a carrot rather than a stick. Instead of requiring employees to be inoculated, the electric vehicle maker is setting up a monthly lottery for vaccinated workers, Electrek reported last Tuesday. The Palo Alto-based company is offering prizes each month ranging from a $50 credit for use in its store to $10,000 in cash, according to the report. It will hold the lottery from October through December, Electrek said.
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Bay Area And California Public Workers Finding Religion To Avoid COVID-19 Shots
With the clock ticking, thousands of public employees - many of them police and firefighters - are claiming and receiving religious exemptions from the COVID-19 vaccine requirements that state and local governments have adopted in an effort to reduce the spread of the virus.
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How Some Bay Area Businesses Are Trying To Entice Workers To Return
Fast Water Heater in San Jose is offering $1,000 referral bonuses to anyone who can help them find new workers. Bloom Energy is touting mental health counseling benefits and up to a $1,200 signing bonus for new hires as it looks to expand. And in Danville, restaurant owner Darren Matte has eked out a small hourly pay boost to attract workers. East Bay Times Read more
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U.S. Administers Nearly 394.7 Million Doses Of COVID-19 Vaccines
The United States had administered 394,690,283 doses of COVID-19 vaccines in the country as of Saturday and distributed 478,362,045 doses, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. Those figures are up from the 393,756,866 vaccine doses that the C.D.C. said had gone into arms by Friday out of 477,069,555 doses delivered.
The agency said 214,870,696 people had received at least one dose while 185,143,698 people had been fully vaccinated as of 6:00 a.m. ET on Saturday. Reuters Read more
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Most California Health Workers Got Vaccinated, But Holdouts Could Be Fired
California’s aggressive push to vaccinate millions of healthcare workers against COVID-19 appears to have been mostly successful, with many hospitals and other healthcare facilities reporting overwhelmingly high rates of inoculated employees by the Thursday deadline. Thousands of workers remain unvaccinated, either in defiance of the state's order or through approved exemptions for medical or religious reasons. But the number of holdouts seems to represent a small fraction of the Golden State’s approximately 2.4 million healthcare workers. LA Times Read more
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Portugal, With A World-Leading Vaccination Rate, Still Can't Reach Herd Immunity
Portugal’s vaccination campaign is almost over now, and it has exceeded even the wildest goals. Nearly an entire nation trusted in the science, officials say. At mass immunization centers, just the last trickle of teenagers is passing through. Some 85 percent of Portugal’s population is fully vaccinated - aside from tiny Gibraltar, the highest rate in the world. “We have actually run out of adults to give shots to,” said Lurdes Costa e Silva, the chief nurse at a Lisbon vaccine center that is already half-shuttered. Portugal’s feat has turned the country into a cutting-edge pandemic laboratory - a place where otherwise-hypothetical questions about the coronavirus endgame can begin to play out. Chief among them is how fully a nation can bring the virus under control when vaccination rates are about as high as they can go. Washington Post Read more
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Why People Who Don’t Trust Vaccines Are Embracing Unproven Drugs
Some Americans who are reluctant to get vaccinated believe they are living through a very different pandemic - one where the approved COVID-19 vaccines are ineffective and dangerous, and where a long list of “miracle cures,” ivermectin among them, are critical to patients’ health and safety. From the outside, these positions can seem not just dangerous but incoherent. What would lead a person to say they won’t take a vaccine approved by federal regulators, then take an off-label medication because they read about it online? VOX Read more
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Why It’s Not Possible For The COVID Vaccines To Contain A Magnetic Tracking Chip That Connects To 5G
Among the conspiracy theories circulating about the coronavirus pandemic, one claim is that COVID-19 vaccines contain microchips that the government or global elites like Bill Gates would use to track citizens. Despite viral videos claiming a chip in the vaccines makes people’s arms magnetic, the conspiracy is false. “That’s just not possible as far as the size that would be required for that microchip,” said Dr. Matt Laurens, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who also serves as a co-investigator on the phase three trials of the Moderna and Novavax COVID vaccines. “Second, that microchip would have to have an associated power source, and then in addition, that power source would have to transmit a signal through at least an inch of muscle and fat and skin to a remote device, which again, just doesn’t make sense.” CNBC Read more
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They Had An Appointment To Get The Vaccine, But Died From COVID-19
She was an animal lover in Kentucky who was a "bright ray of sunshine" to all who knew her. He was a father of two and "young soul" in Florida who could often be found out on the water on his boat. They were excited about the next chapters in their lives - for her, a wedding; for him, his first grandchild. Samantha Wendell and Shane O'Neal both also resisted getting vaccinated against COVID-19 for months, stemming from feelings of either fear or fearlessness, before deciding to make an appointment to get the shot. But before they could, they contracted COVID-19 and, following weeks of severe illness, died last month after doctors exhausted all options, their families said. ABC News Read more
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The C.D.C. Escalates Its Pleas For Pregnant And Breastfeeding Americans To Get Vaccinated Against COVID
In an urgent plea, federal health officials are asking that any American who is pregnant, planning to become pregnant or currently breastfeeding get vaccinated against the coronavirus as soon as possible.
COVID-19 poses a severe risk during pregnancy, when a person’s immune system is tamped down, and raises the risk of stillbirth or another poor outcome, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Twenty-two pregnant people in the United States died of COVID in August, the highest number in a single month since the pandemic started. NY Times Read more
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State/National/International News
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U.S. Coronavirus Death Toll Surpasses 700,000 Despite Wide Availability of Vaccines
The United States surpassed 700,000 deaths from the coronavirus on Friday, a milestone that few experts had anticipated months ago when vaccines became widely available to the American public. An overwhelming majority of Americans who have died in recent months, a period in which the country has offered broad access to shots, were unvaccinated. The United States has had one of the highest recent death rates of any country with an ample supply of vaccines. NY Times Read more
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COVID-19 Is Killing Rural Americans At Twice The Rate Of Urbanites
Rural Americans are dying of COVID at more than twice the rate of their urban counterparts - a divide that health experts say is likely to widen as access to medical care shrinks for a population that tends to be older, sicker, heavier, poorer and less vaccinated. While the initial surge of COVID-19 deaths skipped over much of rural America, where roughly 15% of Americans live, nonmetropolitan mortality rates quickly started to outpace those of metropolitan areas as the virus spread nationwide before vaccinations became available, according to data from the Rural Policy Research Institute. Mercury News Read more
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In Alaska’s COVID Crisis, Doctors Must Decide Who Lives And Who Dies
There was one bed coming available in the intensive care unit in Alaska’s largest hospital. It was the middle of the night, and the hospital, Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage, had been hit with a deluge of coronavirus patients. Doctors now had a choice to make: Several more patients at the hospital, most of them with COVID-19, were in line to take that last I.C.U. spot. But there was also someone from one of the state’s isolated rural communities who needed to be flown in for emergency surgery. Who should get the final bed? Dr. Steven Floerchinger gathered with his colleagues for an agonizing discussion. They had a better chance of saving one of the patients in the emergency room, they determined. The other person would have to wait. That patient died. NY Times Read more
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Endemic COVID-19 doesn’t mean it boils at a low level everywhere, filling a predictable 10% of hospital beds and generating lots of opportunities to send bedside balloons that could be appreciated by patients in between visits from comfort dogs. Endemic COVID-19 would behave exactly the same as epidemic COVID-19: in surges, waves, or spikes - pick your descriptor. Every single locality in the nation would be subject to a possible overrun of the local healthcare system at any time. What happens when the healthcare system fails to accommodate the latest surge/spike/wave is clear enough: The case fatality rate rises. In the worst-hit localities, case fatality rate has at times approached the rate of those needing ICU-level treatment, leading to death rates of 13% or higher in some communities over the short term. Daily Kos Read more
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School Board Group Asks U.S. For Protection From Threats
A group representing school board members around the country asked President Joe Biden on Thursday for federal assistance to investigate and stop threats made over policies including mask mandates, likening the vitriol to a form of domestic terrorism. Parents and community members have been disrupting meetings and threatening board members in person, online and through the mail in a trend that merits attention from federal law enforcement agencies, the National School Boards Association said in a letter to Biden. Mercury News Read more
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Disney Theatrical Productions announced that “Aladdin,” which had resumed performances on Broadway this week for the first time since the pandemic hit, was canceling all of its shows starting Friday night through Oct. 10 after “breakthrough COVID-19 cases were detected within the company.” NY Times Read more
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New Air Travel Restrictions Proposed Just Before Holiday Season
Air travelers may face new COVID-19 restrictions on domestic flights, just in time for the holiday travel season. “Movement of people leads to an increase in COVID - we’ve seen it so many times in the last year where there is a holiday,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong of UCSF. NBC Bay Area
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Confirmed Cases
Bay Area: 578,638
California: 4,732,419
U.S.: 43,689,601
Alameda County
Vaccines Administered: 2,344,676
Cases: 115,200
Deaths: 1,349
Test Positivity: 1.6%
Hospitalized Patients: 150
ICU Beds Available: 102
Cases have decreased recently but are still high. The number of hospitalized COVID patients has also fallen the Alameda County area. Deaths have increased. The test positivity rate in Alameda County is relatively low, suggesting that testing capacity is adequate for evaluating COVID spread in the area. NY Times
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Reported Deaths
Bay Area: 6,386
California: 69,256
U.S.: 701,234
Contra Costa County
Vaccines Administered: 1,665,769
Cases: 96,197
Deaths: 934
Test Positivity: 2.5%
Hospitalized Patients: 79
ICU Beds Available: 40
Cases have decreased recently but are still very high. The numbers of hospitalized COVID patients and deaths has also fallen in the Contra Costa County area. The test positivity rate in Contra Costa County is relatively low, suggesting that testing capacity is adequate for evaluating COVID-19 spread in the area. NY Times
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Yes, You Can Have COVID-19 And The Flu At The Same Time
Dr. Adrian Burrowes has seen hundreds of COVID-19 patients. But he’s especially worried about what will happen this flu season - even more so than last year. This fall and winter could mark the first surge of patients infected with both the flu and the Delta variant - the most contagious strain of coronavirus to hit the U.S. “You can certainly get both the flu and COVID-19 at the same time, which could be catastrophic to your immune system,” said Burrowes, a family medicine physician and assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Central Florida. With more people out and about - and millions of Americans not vaccinated against the flu nor COVID-19 - “I do believe you’re going to see a rise in flu cases,” Burrowes said. Mercury News 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 past week, Alameda County has averaged 170 new cases and 2.7 new deaths per day.
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Over the past week, Contra Costa County has averaged 150 new cases and 1.3 new death per day.
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Top 10 Locations of Cases in
Alameda County, as of 10/4/21
Oakland: 36,556
Hayward: 16,752
Fremont: 10,143
Eden MAC: 7,328
San Leandro: 7,174
Livermore: 6,198
Union City: 4,935
Berkeley: 4,902
Castro Valley: 3,558
Newark: 3,399
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Top 10 Locations of Cases in
Contra Costa County, as of 10/4/21
Richmond: 14,679
Antioch: 14,090
Concord: 10,843
Pittsburg: 9,231
San Pablo: 6,395
Brentwood: 5,976
Oakley: 5,073
Walnut Creek: 4,128
Bay Point: 3,693
San Ramon: 3,078
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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 Varsha Chauhan. 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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