As the fight against COVID-19 continues, the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) is urging Californians to get vaccinated against the flu now to protect yourself and your loved ones. "In the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic, a severe flu season could be devastating for California," said Dr. Tomás J. Aragón, Director of the California Department of Public Health and State Public Health Officer. "Getting a flu shot is a safe and simple thing we can all do to keep people out of the hospital and reduce the strain on our health care system." California Department of Public Health Read more

All BART employees would be required to be fully vaccinated by mid-December under a proposal by the regional rail agency’s Board of Directors. Under the measure introduced by BART board Vice President Rebecca Saltzman, all of the agency’s employees and board directors would be required to get fully vaccinated by Dec. 13, “with exceptions made only for those who qualify for a reasonable accommodation or a religious exemption.” The criteria for a “reasonable accommodation” is unclear. SF Chronicle Read more

In-person classes resumed Wednesday at a small school district serving students in Santa Clara County and semi-rural areas along the Santa Cruz Mountains after two campuses were shut down Friday due to a COVID-19 outbreak. Loma Prieta Joint Union School District decided to cancel in-person classes Friday after officials were notified of several cases in both vaccinated and unvaccinated staff and students, according to a message from the district superintendent. NBC Bay Area Read more

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday announced the launch of a pilot testing program to identify new COVID variants at the San Francisco International Airport. For now, the program is limited to passengers on certain international flights coming into San Francisco, as well as JFK and Newark International. The program is part of an effort to get a head start on any new COVID variant entering the United States. The CDC will be conducting the SFO monitoring program in collaboration with the XpresCheck COVID-19 testing company and Ginkgo Bioworks. KPIX5 Read more

The Solano County Public Health Department will be reopening its mass COVID-19 vaccination clinic in Vallejo to provide booster shots and to encourage more people get their first or second dose of the vaccine. According to the county numbers, 67% of residents have been fully vaccinated, and 78% have received at least the first dose. By comparison, 82% of Contra Costa County residents are fully vaccinated and 87% received one shot; and in Alameda County, 79% of residents have had both shots, and 92% one shot. NBC Bay Area Read more

The federal government is expected to take a significant step this week toward offering booster doses to a much wider range of Americans as advisers to the Food and Drug Administration meet on Thursday and Friday to discuss recipients of the Johnson & Johnson and Moderna coronavirus vaccines. So far, regulators have authorized booster shots only for certain adults who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine - a source of some frustration to the government’s medical advisers, who questioned at a meeting last month whether recipients of the other shots were being left out. NY Times Read more

The Food and Drug Administration is wrestling with whether and when to offer a booster of the single-shot Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine - at six months or as early as two months. And a new study raises the prospect that using a different vaccine might give a better boost. In an online review posted Wednesday, FDA scientists didn’t reach a firm conclusion about whether there’s enough evidence for J&J boosters, citing shortcomings with the company’s data and little information on protection against the extra-contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus. AP Read more

The U.S. government will rely heavily on pediatricians and family doctors in its COVID-19 vaccine rollout for kids ages 5 to 11, starting as early as next month, White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients said Wednesday. The White House has asked governors to enroll pediatricians and other providers in vaccination programs so they can begin administering shots as soon as the doses are authorized by U.S. regulators for use in young kids, Zients told reporters. Federal health officials have also asked states to plan to implement outreach and education campaigns, Zients said, and ensure COVID vaccination sites are available in areas of “high social vulnerability” and in rural areas. CNBC Read more

Worries that the COVID-19 vaccine could cause infertility are among the reasons people give for avoiding vaccination. While there’s no evidence any of the COVID vaccines cause problems with fertility, becoming severely ill from the disease has the potential to do so, reproduction experts say, making vaccination all the more important. “There is evidence to suggest that infection with SARS-CoV-2 has the potential to impact both male fertility, female fertility, and certainly the health of a pregnancy of someone infected,” said Dr. Jennifer Kawwass, a reproductive endocrinologist and associate professor at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. “And there is simultaneously no evidence that the vaccine has any negative impact on male or female fertility.”  NBC News Read more

When COVID-19 hit close to home, infecting her two brothers and sending an acquaintance to the hospital, Gabriela Aguilar made up her mind to finally get a vaccine to protect herself against the virus. She first attended a vaccine drive hosted by Sacramento nonprofit and rolled up her sleeve in late September, almost six months after vaccines became widely available to California adults. Looking back, Aguilar said she hesitated because she worried about how rapidly the government and industry developed the vaccine and how quickly it received approval for emergency use by the Federal Drug Administration. Sacramento Bee Read more

Even as the rate of new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations continues trending downward in California, health experts on Tuesday cautioned that the hard times may not be over. The state’s coronavirus death toll is more than 70,000 - nearly 1 in 500 Californians. Despite having the lowest rate of new cases among all states, the seven-day average is hovering at 14 per 100,000 residents and vaccination uptake has stalled with a little over 70% of the eligible population fully vaccinated. “We are becoming numb to these numbers,” state epidemiologist Dr. Erica Pan said during a roundtable with other medical experts Tuesday. But she said that if California was still using the color-coded reopening blueprint it retired in June, most counties would fall into the worst tier: “We are in what would have been deep purple in the past.” SF Chronicle Read more

Front-line farm, grocery-store and meatpacking workers in California could see financial relief through a federal program designed to alleviate pandemic-related costs. The Farm and Food Workers Relief Program, offered through the United States Department of Agriculture, promises $700 million in grants for those workers across the U.S. The Biden administration has not said when it plans to release the money. Many workers in the food and farming industries were unable to work from home, which put them at risk of contracting the coronavirus - and sometimes meant personally paying for protective equipment, care for loved ones and COVID-19 testing and quarantining expenses. Modesto Bee Read more

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday issued an executive order banning all state entities, including private employers, from enforcing vaccine mandates, the latest escalation in the Republican's resistance to public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. The order states that "no entity in Texas" can enforce vaccination against anyone in the state who objects "for any reason of personal conscience, based on a religious belief, or for medical reasons, including prior recovery from COVID-19," according to a news release from the governor's office. "The COVID-19 vaccine is safe, effective, and our best defense against the virus, but should remain voluntary and never forced," Abbott said in a statement. CNN Read more

There is no memorial to the estimated 675,000 people killed in the U.S. in the 1918 Influenza pandemic on the National Mall. But if there were, some think, the country would have done a better job handling COVID-19. Many now intend to make sure this pandemic doesn't get lost to history like the last one. While it will most likely be years before anyone builds a COVID memorial in Washington, architects, artists and people touched by the pandemic from around the world are already thinking about ways to remember it, which might require reinventing the idea of memorials. NBC Bay Area Read more

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

Doctors in the United States are bracing for a “twindemic” of flu and coronavirus spikes. Germany bought extra flu vaccine doses. Tens of thousands of people in Britain are looking up “worst cold ever” on search engines. In countries with relatively high vaccination rates such as the United States and in Europe, it could get tricky for the immunized to tell a nasty cold from a breakthrough case of COVID-19. It’s also hard to predict how bad this flu season will be after last year’s historically low flu rates during lockdowns. Washington Post Read more