COVID-19
breaking news & updates
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“(If you have) anything going on in your head, nose or throat, you should absolutely suspect COVID. It’s so freaking infectious, even if you’ve been boosted and vaccinated.”
Paula Cannon, Virology Professor at the USC Keck School of Medicine
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COVID Test Resources
Food Pantries
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Eden Health District In The Community
Eden Health District Director Mariellen Faria (third from left) recently joined in with Spectrum Community Services to provide meal service at the San Leandro Senior Center as part of the March for Meals Champions Week celebration. This annual celebration commemorates the historic day in March of 1972 when President Nixon signed into law a measure that amended the Older Americans Act of 1965 to include a national nutrition program for seniors 60 years and older. This March, Meals on Wheels programs, like Spectrum Community Services, are joining forces to celebrate more than 50 years of success and garner the support needed to ensure these critical programs can continue to address food insecurity and malnutrition, combat social isolation, enable independence, and improve health for years to come.
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Following Landlord Protest, Oakland’s Eviction Moratorium Will
"Ramp Down”
Following intense protests by property owners against the city’s pandemic-era ban on evictions, officials on Thursday introduced plans to ramp down the moratorium. An ordinance to possibly end the tenant protections that prohibit most evictions will likely be heard by the City Council next month, following a discussion by a council committee on April 11. But at the same time, councilmembers will also have the option of strengthening the city’s “just cause” policies that make it tougher for landlords to evict tenants who pay rent for the first 12 months. Most of the Bay Area adopted moratoriums on evictions in the early days of the pandemic, but Oakland has held onto its ban for much longer than other cities. San Francisco, Berkeley and San Leandro similarly have yet to bring protections to an end. Mercury News Read more
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Local Health Experts Warn Of Mosquitoes In Standing Water Following Recent Storms
As we just hit spring, experts say mosquitoes are already multiplying, taking advantage of all the recent flooding. In Belmont, families can still see and smell the flood waters that have been inundating them all year. The conditions and all the standing water found around the Bay Area are a concern for The San Mateo County Vector Control Department who said, they’ve had more mosquito related requests than usual in the past few months. In a statement they wrote they anticipate water will continue to stand in many locations into the warmer month, so their acting now, regularly checking 40,000 sites throughout the county to prevent a large mosquito population and the viruses that come with them. Alameda County already detected the first mosquito with the West Nile Virus, a usual case for this time of year. NBC Bay Area Read more
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Vaccine/Testing/Treatment News |
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Senators Press Moderna CEO On COVID-19 Vaccine Price Hike
Moderna’s CEO on Wednesday defended a plan to more than quadruple the company’s COVID-19 vaccine price, but he also said the drugmaker will work to ensure patients continue paying nothing at drugstores or clinics. Stephane Bancel told the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions that the drugmaker will charge a list price of around $130 per dose for the vaccine in the U.S. That price is expected to go into effect later this year. Until now, the federal government had been Moderna’s lone U.S. customer, buying doses in bulk to make sure that people weren’t charged anything. AP Read more
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Court Blocks COVID Vaccine Mandate For U.S. Government Workers
President Joe Biden’s order that federal employees get vaccinated against COVID was blocked Thursday by a federal appeals court. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans rejected arguments that Biden, as the nation’s chief executive, has the same authority as the CEO of a private corporation to require that employees be vaccinated. The ruling maintains the status quo for federal employee vaccines. It upholds a preliminary injunction blocking the mandate issued by a federal judge in January 2022. At that point, the administration said nearly 98% of covered employees had been vaccinated. NBC News Read more
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State/National/International News |
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White House Disbanding Its COVID-19 Team In May
The White House will shut down its COVID response team after the public health emergency ends in May, with some staffers already departing and national coordinator Ashish Jha likely to leave the administration once his team is disbanded, according to multiple current and former officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal operations. The move to disband the White House COVID team, created in February 2020 and expanded to about three dozen staffers under President Biden, comes as the pandemic has receded from U.S. hospitals and in voters’ minds. Washington Post Read more
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Wealthy? Educated? You’re Primed To Live Through COVID-19
Remember being thrust into that Salvador Dali painting? Aisle after aisle of empty store shelves melting into bleak oblivion … finger paintings cracking in abandoned classrooms … blue industrial gloves in the supermarket … We knew squat about the new virus sweeping the planet three years ago. Our hopes for normalcy — nay, for survival! — hung on the development of new vaccines to keep the beast at bay. In a stunning triumph, science delivered. But millions, to this day, refuse the needle — a refusal that researchers say has resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the California Department of Public Health reveal a disturbing, if predictable, pattern: Vaccination status goes hand-in-hand with education and income, in near lock-step. Mercury News Read more
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Tuberculosis Cases Nearly Back To Pre-Pandemic Levels, Data Show
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, new diagnoses of tuberculosis dropped like a stone in the United States. Data released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest the pandemic effect has pretty much worn off; TB is nearly back to pre-2020 levels. “We’re getting … close to where we were pre-pandemic; not quite back yet with increases in cases in the last two years,” Philip LoBue, director of the CDC’s division of tuberculosis elimination, told STAT in an interview. “Everything looks like we’re going to end up maybe next year or the year after basically back to the situation we were in pre-pandemic.” STAT Read more
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Long COVID Comes Into the Light
Even before 2020’s first horrific wave of COVID-19 deaths subsided, reports surfaced warning of a brutal second punch: Instead of recovering quickly after a mild infection, some people were suffering from symptoms that lingered or even intensified in the weeks and months that followed. The condition came to be called long COVID. In those early days, everything about it was uncertain, from what symptoms it caused to how long they’d last and how hard they would hit. Some speculated that the effects might be effectively incurable, and that a large percentage of those infected with SARS-CoV-2 would wind up succumbing to this life-altering condition. “Months of illness could turn into years of disability,” warned the Atlantic’s Ed Yong. Given the bodies piling up in makeshift morgues, it seemed reasonable to assume the worst. Slate Read more
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COVID's Education Crisis: A Lost Generation?
It may look like the pandemic is over; stadiums are open again, crowds are everywhere, and hardly a mask in sight. But COVID hurt a lot of things you can't easily see, especially in schools. "I feel like I just need to stand on a mountaintop and just yell, 'Take this seriously! Everything is at stake right now!'" said Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children's Zone in Manhattan. He said that when it comes to how the pandemic affected education, the news was surprising, and definitely not in a good way. "We've got the data now, and things are bad; they're actually worse than most of us thought," said Canada.
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Work From Home Endures, Defying Pushback From Bosses
The shift to remote work is gaining momentum in some of America’s largest metro areas, despite increasing pressure from corporate chiefs for employees to return to the office, according to new data from an international team of economists. In some major US cities, the number of job postings for remote-friendly roles is hitting record levels — and trending up. That’s the latest finding of researchers including Stanford University’s Nicholas Bloom who’ve been gathering data on remote work since the early days of the pandemic. Bloomberg Read more
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California Tribes And Mental Health Professionals Look To Improve Crisis Hotline Experience For Native Americans
The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (formerly known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline) has seen an increase in contacts since it was rebranded as the easy-to-remember 988 number in July 2022. According to the state’s largest crisis care provider, Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services, total calls answered in California increased by 22% in the six months following the change, compared to the six months before. However, Didi Hirsch Services estimates that less than 1% of the 264,000 calls state crisis centers received last year were from Native American people. Data from the California Department of Public Health shows that Native people have the highest rates of substance involved deaths, and serious mental illness, and the second highest rates of suicide in the state. Native American people account for 1-2% of California’s population. CapRadio Read more
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Suicide Can Be Contagious For Teens, Research Shows. Here’s How Parents Can Help
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Fentanyl Crisis/Drug Trends |
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Homeland Security Launches "Operation Blue Lotus" To Target Fentanyl
The Department of Homeland Security said last Tuesday it has intensified efforts to stop fentanyl trafficking across the country’s southern border, launching “Operation Blue Lotus” with hundreds of U.S. agents and officers. The campaign will use new scanning technology, more drug-sniffing dogs and other detection tools to ramp up interdiction efforts and build criminal cases, officials said. Much of the effort will focus on ports of entry, the land border crossings where more than 90 percent of U.S. fentanyl seizures along the southern border have occurred since the start of the 2023 fiscal year on Oct. 1. Washington Post Read more
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What Makes Fentanyl So Dangerous And How Can People Prevent Overdoses?
The United States is facing a crisis of overdose deaths. In 2021, more than 106,000 Americans lost their lives to drug-involved overdoses — including more than 1,100 teens that year alone. Synthetic opioids, primarily involving the powerful drug fentanyl, are the main driver of overdose deaths, with nearly a 7.5-fold increase overall from 2015 to 2021, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overdoses and poisoning are the third leading cause of death in kids and adolescents age 19 and younger. Many people may not know about fentanyl and its legitimate uses, but it’s helpful — and potentially lifesaving — to know what makes it so dangerous and what can be used to reverse its effects. CNN Read more
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Latinos Had Been Spared The Worst Of The Opioid Crisis, But Now Overdose Deaths Are Skyrocketing
While the face of the opioid crisis has predominantly been considered white and rural, overdose deaths among Latinos have skyrocketed in recent years, with experts attributing the growing numbers to the rise of fentanyl, especially mixed with other drugs.
Overdose deaths among Latinos have nearly tripled since 2011, according to a report published this month in the American Journal of Epidemiology. Fatalities from overdoses have risen dramatically when fentanyl is mixed with other drugs, like cocaine and methamphetamine, which are more prevalent among Latinos than are heroin or prescription painkillers, according to study co-author Magdalena Cerdá, professor and director at the Center for Opioid Epidemiology and Policy at NYU Langone. NBC News Read more
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Rick Steves’s Advice for Vacationers In Europe This Summer
When the Washington State–based travel guide and TV host Rick Steves decided to return to Europe in early 2022, he wasn’t sure how many of his favorite local spots had survived two years of pandemic life. Steves, who has hosted Rick Steves’ Europe for the past two decades and operates tours aimed at introducing American travelers to the continent, was pleasantly surprised by what he found: Many of his beloved places — the kind of mom-and-pop places that have been owned by the same families for generations — had made it through, and the streets were alive anew. “They’re kissing cheeks with a vengeance in Paris right now,” he told me. “And I’m really thankful for that.” The Atlantic 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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About Eden Health District |
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The Eden Health District Board of Directors are Chair Pam Russo, Vice Chair Ed Hernandez, Secretary/Treasurer Roxann Lewis, Mariellen Faria and Surlene Grant. 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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