The time is now to talk to your family about your concerns about Covid-19 and not just how to prevent infection or slowing the spread of the coronavirus, says Dr. Nicholas Moss, Alameda County’s interim Public Health Officer. “It’s great when family members can talk with each other about Covid-19 because the actions that people take are protecting themselves, but they are also protecting their families, their neighbors, and their communities,” Dr. Moss told The Forum.

The health advice for everyone continues to include wearing face coverings, keeping social distances from each other, washing hands, and staying home if you are sick. But in a phone interview, Dr. Moss adds that talking about all facets of the pandemic is important with families because the infection rates are now higher in younger people in their 30s, twice the amount of those infected compared to those in their 50s and older.

For those families suffering financially, County Supervisors approved measures last week to support someone diagnosed with Covid-19. The Supervisors unanimously approved a $10 million pilot program that will pay 7,500 people a flat fee of $1,250 but only if they stay home and self-isolate. The recipients must also not be receiving unemployment benefits or paid sick leave. They must also be referred to the program by a community clinic in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, the northern areas of San Leandro, or hot spots in the Hayward. Earlier this summer, County Supervisors extended moratoriums on evictions until the end of the year.

Robert Redfield said in an interview with WebMD that if Americans don't follow public health guidance, the country could be facing "the worst fall, from a public health perspective, we've ever had."

The CDC updated its guidance recently to suggest that people who have recovered from the virus can safely mingle with others for three months. The guidance says: “People who have tested positive for COVID-19 do not need to quarantine or get tested again for up to three months as long as they do not develop symptoms again.”

If the U.S. allowed coronavirus infections to run rampant to achieve possible herd immunity, the death toll would be massive especially among vulnerable people, the nation's top infectious doctor said. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, explained the risks during a live Instagram session with actor Matthew McConaughey.

The collateral damage from the pandemic continues: Young adults, as well as Black and Latino people of all ages, describe rising levels of anxiety, depression and even suicidal thoughts, and increased substance abuse, according to findings reported by the CDC. In a research survey, U.S. residents reported signs of eroding mental health in reaction to the toll of coronavirus illnesses and deaths, and to the life-altering restrictions imposed by lockdowns.

In our database of 167 confirmed front-line worker deaths, 21 medical staffers, or 13% of the total, were under 40, and eight (5%) fatalities were under 30. The median age of a Covid-19 death in the general population is 78, while the median age of health care worker deaths in the database is 57. This is in part because we are, by definition, including only people of working age who were treating patients during the pandemic — but it is also because, as health workers, they are far more exposed to the virus.

Anosmia, the technical term for the once relatively unfamiliar loss of one’s ability to smell, is now all too common. It has become a critical diagnostic marker of Covid-19. As we have come to learn, asymptomatic carriers — people infected with the novel coronavirus who don’t show visible symptoms — can still infect others. One telltale sign of otherwise asymptomatic carriers is that they often experience sudden-onset anosmia.

California has become the first state in the nation to surpass 600,000 confirmed coronavirus cases.

Yet despite the grim numbers, there is growing evidence that the surge in infections and fatalities that began when California reopened its economy in May is beginning to slow. Statewide, an ensemble computer model known as the California COVID Assessment Tool, estimates California’s overall transmission rate is about 0.96, meaning that every one infected person passes the virus to an average of 0.96 other people.

Hospitalizations are also falling in many regions of California. Statewide, the average number of people who were hospitalized seemed to peak in late July, when an average of nearly 7,000 people were in hospitals with confirmed coronavirus infections over a seven-day period; by Wednesday, that number had fallen to 5,710.

Across the U.S., at least 200,000 more people have died than usual since March, according to a New York Times analysis of estimates from the CDC. This is about 60,000 higher than the number of deaths that have been directly linked to the coronavirus.

As the pandemic has moved south and west from its epicenter in New York City, so have the unusual patterns in deaths from all causes. That suggests that the official death counts may be substantially underestimating the overall effects of the virus, as people die from the virus as well as by other causes linked to the pandemic.

Among the last states to institute a shelter-in-place order and the first to reopen businesses, Georgia is now seeing a rising number of Covid-19-related deaths, according to the state's department of health.

An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll finds that more than a third of Americans (35%) say they won't get vaccinated when a vaccine comes available; 60% say they will. There are huge splits by education and party on this. Those with college degrees are 19 points more likely to get vaccinated than those without (72% to 53%), and Democrats are 23 points more likely than Republicans (71% to 48%).

Latinos are more likely than white, Black and Asian Americans to be worried about economic issues related to coronavirus as the nation continues to deal with the ongoing pandemic, according to a new survey.

The concerns aren't unfounded: Latinos are more likely than all other racial groups to have a spouse lose their job in the last year or have had a drop in household income in the last year, according to a survey from the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape Project. A combined 77% of Hispanic Americans say they have been very or somewhat worried about their personal finances in the last six months, the survey showed. That is a more than 10 percentage point disparity from white Americans (62%), Black Americans (65%), and Asian and Pacific Islander Americans (67%), according to the Nationscape Insights analysis.

Joe Biden and his running mate Sen. Kamala Harris called on Thursday for every governor to mandate mask-wearing in public for at least the next three months, citing studies that say it would save more than 40,000 lives and speed the nation’s economic recovery.

Latin America and the Caribbean have become a new global epicenter of the pandemic, and the United Nations warned several countries in the region are “now among those with the highest per capita infection rates worldwide.”

European countries are pushing ahead with reopening schools with in-person learning despite an uptick in Covid-19 cases and new studies suggesting children could be more susceptible to the disease than originally thought. Authorities in France, Germany, the U.K. and Italy are looking to avoid another blanket closure of schools this autumn, relying instead on steps such as social distancing and mask-wearing to contain infections. In case of outbreaks, they plan to shut down only individual classes or schools. While Europe as a whole is now reporting about 12,000 cases a day, that is well below the 32,000 a day recorded at the peak in April. It also is far lower than the 53,000-a-day seven-day average recently in the U.S.

The coronavirus is raging through the White Mountain Apache tribe. Spread across a large reservation in eastern Arizona, the Apaches have been infected at more than 10 times the rate of people in the state as a whole.

Epidemiologists have a hopeful theory about what led to this startling result: Intensive contact tracing on the reservation likely enabled teams that included doctors to find and treat gravely ill people before it was too late to save them. A crucial tool has been a simple, inexpensive medical device: an oximeter that, clipped to a finger, detected dangerously low blood oxygen levels in people who often didn’t even realize they were seriously ill. The coronavirus can impair the lungs in quiet, almost unnoticeable ways. People may not be gasping for breath, one of the classic signs of low oxygen levels, but the contact tracers often found their levels were perilously low. Without supplemental oxygen, these people risked permanent organ damage and death.

This approach, which doctors at the Indian Health Service laid out recently in the New England Journal of Medicine, may offer a new strategy for reducing Covid-19 deaths in some of the hardest-hit communities, Dr. Monto and other experts suggested — especially among people of color who more often live in housing where multiple generations share space.