Thursday, November 18, 2021

More News From Across The State

Covid-19 Pandemic

NBC News: Hospitalizations Rising Among Fully Vaccinated In U.S., Fauci Says As cases of Covid-19 rise throughout the U.S., health officials warn that an increasing number of fully vaccinated people are being hospitalized or going to the emergency room. The concern about waning immunity against severe Covid infection comes as the Food and Drug Administration is expected to authorize a Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine booster shot for all adults 18 and older. “What we’re starting to see now is an uptick in hospitalizations among people who’ve been vaccinated but not boosted,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, said Tuesday in an interview. “It’s a significant proportion, but not the majority by any means.” (Syal, 11/17)

Los Angeles Daily News: LA County’s 3-Day COVID-19 Memorial Begins Thursday – And You Can Participate Without Leaving Home  As part of a memorial called “Strength + Love,” 26,872 white flags are being placed on the lawn in front of the Griffith Observatory to honor those in Los Angeles County who have died from conditions linked to COVID-19. The three-day event begins on Thursday, Nov. 18, and runs through Saturday, Nov. 20. There will be virtual events that residents can participate in from their homes or businesses: (Crane, 11/16)

The Boston Globe: ‘COVID Positive From Vegas.’ Phish Concerts Leave A Long Trail Of Infections, Fans Say Music fans from Massachusetts to California have been flooding social media with reports on a series of concerts they attended in Las Vegas over Halloween weekend. But instead of raving about the set list and extended jams, many are posting COVID-19 test results and seat numbers in a mass effort at grass-roots contact tracing. “Covid Positive from Vegas” reads one post on Facebook on Nov. 3 that has drawn more than 500 replies, many saying they or their friends tested positive after attending the shows by Phish, a band with deep Vermont roots and a Grateful Dead-like following. The band played four packed shows at the 16,800-seat MGM Grand Garden from Oct. 28 to Oct. 31. (Lazar, 11/17)

The Hill: NFL Revises COVID-19 Protocols Ahead Of Thanksgiving The NFL is revising its COVID-19 protocols for players and team staff ahead of its Thanksgiving slate of games. In a memo sent to teams Tuesday, the league said it would mandate that both vaccinated and unvaccinated team personnel wear masks indoors for a week beginning on Thanksgiving. Team personnel will also be required to undergo two COVID-19 tests on Monday, Nov. 29, and Wednesday, Dec. 1, according to the memo, obtained by The Hill. (Oshin, 11/17)

Bloomberg: Gates Says Covid Deaths May Drop To Flu Levels By Mid-2022 Covid deaths and infection rates may dip below seasonal flu levels by the middle of next year assuming new dangerous variants don’t emerge in the meantime, Bill Gates said. Between natural and vaccine immunity and emerging oral treatments, “the death rate and the disease rate ought to be coming down pretty dramatically,” the billionaire founder of Microsoft Corp. said Thursday at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore. The constraints on vaccinating the world against Covid-19 will shift next year, Gates said, as supply issues are resolved and replaced by questions of how to logistically distribute them all. (Wallbank, 11/18)

Covid Vaccines, Boosters and Treatments

City News Service: LA County Nursing Homes Nearly Finished With Coronavirus Boosters For Residents With the county urging residents to get COVID-19 vaccine booster shots, health officials said on Wednesday, Nov. 17, that skilled nursing facilities have nearly completed administration of boosters to residents. According to the county Department of Public Health, 97% of skilled nursing homes have reported that they will finish administration of booster shots to residents by Friday. County officials said they are working with the remaining facilities to ensure residents have access to the shots. (11/17)

San Diego Union-Tribune: Kid Vaccinations Spike In San Diego, Mirroring National Trend  The pace of vaccination among younger children accelerated in its second week across San Diego County, with some saying a desire for holiday travel and visiting older relatives is driving interest among many families. San Diego County’s weekly COVID-19 update lists 27,723 children age 5 to 11 having received their first doses through Tuesday. That’s more than three times last week’s total of 7,320, which represented the first six days of vaccination in an age group that started rolling up its sleeves on Nov. 3. (Sisson, 11/17)

Modesto Bee: Stanislaus County Increases Vaccine Coverage For COVID-19  Stanislaus County health officials reported some progress in getting residents vaccinated against COVID-19. About 47.5 percent of teenagers 16 to 17 years old are now fully vaccinated and 40.6 percent of those 12 to 15 years old are immunized, according to a staff presentation to county supervisors Tuesday evening. (Carlson, 11/17)

CNBC: White House: 10% Of 5- To 11-Year-Olds In U.S. Already Have First Covid Shots More than 2 million children have already received their first dose of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine, just two weeks after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention authorized distribution of the shots for kids ages 5 to 11. “We estimate by the end of the day today 2.6 million kids ages 5 to 11 will have gotten their first shot; 2.6 million — that’s about 10% of kids,” Jeff Zients, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, told reporters during a briefing Wednesday. (Kimball, 11/17)

NPR: Moderna Joins Pfizer In Bid For COVID Boosters For All Adults People 18 or older who are already considered fully vaccinated could soon be eligible to get a Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccine booster shot. Moderna asked for that authorization on Wednesday, one day after Pfizer made its application.The Food and Drug Administration is expected to announce later this week that it will grant Emergency Use Authorization for all adults to get those extra shots. (Greenhalgh and Campbell, 11/17)

CIDRAP: Monoclonal Antibodies Shown Effective For Breakthrough COVID-19 Cases New research from the Mayo Clinic shows monoclonal antibodies reduce the risk of hospitalization 77% in 1,395 patients who had breakthrough COVID-19 infections. The research was published yesterday in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. To conduct the retrospective study, researchers compared outcomes of confirmed COVID-19 patients who were fully vaccinated treated with either bamlanivimab, bamlanivimab-etesevimab, or casirivimab-imdevimab, as single infusion from January to August 16, 2021, to those who did not receive treatment. (11/17)

Covid Mandates

Bay Area News Group: OSHA Suspends Large Employer COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration has suspended enforcement of its requirement that large employers nationwide ensure their workers are either vaccinated against COVID-19 or tested weekly for the virus by Jan. 4 in light of a court stay, throwing President Biden’s controversial mandate into doubt. The decision followed a stay the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans granted Friday in a lawsuit seeking to block the mandate filed on behalf of various companies, religious groups, private citizens and the states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Utah. (Woolfolk, 11/17)

Politico: Legal Brawl Over Biden's Vaccine Mandate Could Curb Other Workplace Safety Efforts Some of the legal challenges argue, in part, that Congress didn’t give the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — the agency that issued the mandate — the authority to do so, and even if Congress did, then it shouldn’t have. If the Supreme Court were to embrace that line of thinking, it could “have serious implications on the constitutionality” of other OSHA rules and regulations, said Benjamin Noren, associate chair of the Labor and Employment group at the law firm Davidoff Hutcher & Citron. (Rainey, 11/17)

Los Angeles Times: 77 L.A. City Employees Lose Pay Under Vaccine Mandate  Dozens of Los Angeles city employees are now going unpaid after refusing to sign notices that directed them to get COVID-19 vaccines by a December deadline — and the numbers could grow in coming weeks, Mayor Eric Garcetti said Wednesday. Garcetti addressed the issue at an evening briefing on COVID-19, his first since testing positive for the coronavirus himself in recent weeks and having to isolate while in Scotland for a climate change summit. The mayor said that 77 workers were on unpaid leave as of Wednesday and that roughly 700 more employees were vulnerable to joining them in the next two weeks. The city employs more than 50,000 people. (Alpert Reyes, 11/17)

Monterey Herald: Through Tense Debate, Monterey County Officials Suspend Mask Mandate Citing untrustworthy federal health data, the Monterey County Board of Supervisors suspended an ordinance requiring people to wear masks while indoors countywide just ahead of a highly anticipated winter spike in COVID-19 cases. During an often tense Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday evening, officials debated whether it was best to stay with data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control or to suspend the existing indoor mask requirement and rely solely on data from the Monterey County Health Department. (Taylor, 11/18)

The Hill: Disney Cruises Will Require Vaccines For All Passengers Over 5 Years Old Disney Cruise Line on Wednesday announced a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for all passengers ages 5 and up. The new requirement goes into effect on Jan. 13. Prior to that date, children ages 5 through 11 who aren't vaccinated can instead complete a testing requirement. Starting on Jan. 13, all passengers over 5 must be fully vaccinated to board. Passengers under 5 will need to show proof of negative COVID-19 test results from between three days and 24 hours before the cruise departs. (Polus, 11/17)

Los Angeles Times: L.A. COVID Rules: Mask, Vaccine Guidance For Out-Of-Town Visitors  COVID-19 won’t keep families apart for the holidays this year, but it may still crimp their activities in Southern California. That’s because of the rules that the city and county of Los Angeles have imposed on theaters, restaurants and other venues to slow the spread of COVID-19. The good news is that if you’re fully vaccinated — and can prove it — there’s little you can’t do as a visitor to L.A. County. (Healey, 11/18)

Health Care Industry

Bay Area News Group: At Least 40,000 Kaiser Workers To Walk Out In Solidarity On Thursday With Striking Engineers Tens of thousands of Kaiser Permanente employees will walk out in sympathy on Thursday morning at Northern California medical centers with engineers, who have been striking for about two months over wage disputes. At least 40,000 members of unions SEIU-UHW, OPEIU Local 29 and IFPTE Local 20, representing healthcare workers, optometrists, phlebotomists, X-ray technicians, clinical lab scientists and other employees, are scheduled to participate in the walk-out. Some of them will picket in solidarity at 7 a.m. if Kaiser and Local 39 IUOE, which represents about 600 operating engineers, don’t reach an agreement. According to SEIU-UHW, the sympathy strike will be the largest in the country. (Lin, 11/18)

San Francisco Chronicle: Kaiser Union Employees To Hold Sympathy Strikes Thursday, Friday In Solidarity With Local 39 Tens and thousands of Kaiser Permanente union employees are scheduled to hold a 24-hour sympathy strike starting on Thursday morning in solidarity with the IUOE Stationary Engineers, Local 39, which has been bargaining with the health system for several months, union officials said. Roughly 40,000 union members with SEIU-UHW, OPEIU Local 29, and IFPTE Local 20 in Northern California are scheduled to start their sympathy strike on Thursday, and Kaiser nurses represented by the California Nurses Association will start their 24-hour strike on Friday morning, union officials announced in separate statements. Local 39 represents roughly 600 Kaiser operating engineers, Kaiser officials said. (Hernández, 11/17)

The Wall Street Journal: Nurse Salaries Rise As Demand For Their Services Soars During Covid-19 Pandemic Nurses are winning raises worth thousands of dollars a year from hospitals, the latest employer reckoning with a tight labor market. HCA Healthcare Inc., HCA 0.89% one of the nation’s largest hospital chains, increased nurse pay this year to handle heavy Covid-19 pandemic case loads and keep pace with rivals that are also trying to fill vacancies and hold on to existing staff, the company’s human resources chief said. Raises varied by market; an HCA spokesman declined to say by what amounts. (Evans, 11/17)

San Diego Union-Tribune: VA Opens Double-Sized Clinic In Kearny Mesa  Nearly 250,000 veterans living in San Diego County now have a newly expanded health care option. Late last week, VA San Diego Healthcare System cut the ribbon for its Kearny Mesa Outpatient Center at 8875 Aero Drive, a space estimated to be large enough to serve between 600 and 800 veterans daily. (Sisson, 11/17)

Opioid Crisis

The Sacramento Bee: Biden Administration Aims To Curb CA Opioid, Fentanyl Deaths  California could get some relief for its rising overdose deaths as the Biden administration moves to better control the opioid epidemic. More than 100,000 Americans died of overdoses in the year between April 2020 and 2021, according to the National Center for Health Statistics — the highest year on record and a jump of almost 30% from the prior year. Synthetic opioids — primarily fentanyl — caused two-thirds of those deaths. (Brassil, 11/18)

KQED: 'The Difference Between Life And Death': How Some California Emergency Rooms Are Working To Stem The Overdose Crisis  Black drug users in San Francisco are nearly six times more likely than average to die of accidental overdoses, according to data recently compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle. That discrepancy can be directly attributed to structural racism, according to the city’s Department of Public Health. “Among the effects of structural racism are years of unjust drug policies that punish rather than offer care, unaffordable housing, poverty, inequitable access to effective treatments for opioid use disorder, and discriminatory practices in the healthcare system,” a department spokesperson said in an email. (McClurg, 11/17)

AP: US Overdose Deaths Topped 100,000 In One Year, Officials Say An estimated 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in one year, a never-before-seen milestone that health officials say is tied to the COVID-19 pandemic and a more dangerous drug supply. Overdose deaths have been rising for more than two decades, accelerated in the past two years and, according to new data posted Wednesday, jumped nearly 30% in the latest year. President Joe Biden called it “a tragic milestone” in a statement, as administration officials pressed Congress to devote billions of dollars more to address the problem. (Stobbe, 11/18)

National News

Modern Healthcare: Feds Require Health Plans To Report Drug, Coverage Costs Under New Rule Health insurers, employers and other group health plan sponsors must report prescription drug and health coverage costs for consumers under a federal regulation published Wednesday. The interim finale rule is the fourth regulation to date implementing the No Surprises Act. The Health and Human Services Department, Labor Department, Treasury Department and Office of Personnel Management promulgated the regulation. (Goldman, 11/17)

Modern Healthcare: CMS Officially Delays Drugmakers' Best Price Requirement The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on Wednesday gave drugmakers six more months to comply with the Trump-era regulation requiring them to calculate the "best price" for drugs under Medicaid's drug rebate program using discounts they offer patients. The new final rule will officially delay best prices reporting from Jan. 1, 2022, to July 1, 2022. (Devereaux, 11/17)

Stat: Moderate Dems Still Seek Changes To The Party’s Drug Pricing Package Rep. Kurt Schrader, the Oregon Democrat who has played an outsized role in shaping his party’s new drug pricing compromise, is still pushing for changes to the proposal ahead of a key vote on the legislation expected as soon as this week. Schrader and a number of other Democrats are meeting Wednesday to discuss their proposed changes to the ultimate package, he said, hinting that moderates like Reps. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) and Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.) could be in attendance. He declined to lay out the full list of meeting attendees. (Florko, 11/17)

California Healthline: Perspective: Public Opinion Is Unified On Lowering Drug Prices. Why Are Leaders Settling For Less? Politicians and many health experts have done their best to see the glass half-full in the plan put forward by congressional Democrats and the president. But it’s “a far cry” from what other nations do to rein in drug prices, and polls show most voters demand more protection. (Rosenthal, 11/18)

Schools and Universities

CalMatters: Cal State Requires Students To Be Vaccinated For COVID-19 — But It’s Not Evenly Enforced In July, with the Delta variant of the coronavirus on the rise, California State University announced that all students and employees going to campus would need to prove they were vaccinated against the virus, or apply for a religious or medical exemption, no later than Sept. 30. The move by the nation’s largest four-year public university was driven by “the overarching goal of achieving population-level immunity throughout the CSU,” Cal State Chancellor Joseph Castro wrote. (Huck, Shaikh and Mendoza, 11/18)

Modesto Bee: Turlock CA Trustees Tell Students To Leave School Board Meeting  Turlock Unified School District trustees asked students to leave their board meeting on Tuesday evening because some adults refused to wear masks. Stanislaus County health officials ended the county’s mask mandate on Monday, but the California Department of Public Health requires all adults to wear masks inside school buildings when students are present. (Isaacman, 11/18)

Theranos Trial

Bay Area News Group: Elizabeth Holmes Trial: Theranos Patient's False Result Pointing To HIV A woman who sought out Theranos blood testing because of its purportedly less-invasive and lower-cost services received a test result incorrectly showing antibodies for HIV, she testified Wednesday in company founder Elizabeth Holmes’ criminal fraud trial. Erin Tompkins of Phoenix testified in U.S. District Court in San Jose that she had read about Theranos in a magazine and had seen a promotion on Facebook, and asked her doctor to refer her for the company’s blood testing. In 2015, she had her blood drawn at a Theranos outlet in a Walgreens drug store, she testified. Three days later Theranos sent out a result sheet, displayed in Holmes’ trial to jurors, that showed HIV antibodies. (Baron, 11/17)

Mental Health

Los Angeles Times: LAPD Shootings Reveal Broken Mental Health System, Officials Say  Grisha Alaverdyan’s case, like several other police shootings in recent months, highlighted a troubling trend of LAPD officers opening fire on suspects with mental illnesses, but also a broader failure of the mental health system to get people the care they need when they repeatedly fall into crisis on the street or come into contact with police in less serious encounters. Instead, in L.A. and around the region, people with mental illnesses are cycled through what police, mental health officials and advocates agree is a dizzying, revolving door of temporary psychiatric units and jail wards, never getting the long-term care they need before they are pushed back onto the street until they eventually wind up dead or in police custody on a serious enough charge to keep them incarcerated for good. (Rector, 11/18)

Homeless Crisis

Orange County Register: Homeless Winter Shelter Program Will Return To Armory In Santa Ana  The California National Guard Armory in Santa Ana will serve as an overnight emergency shelter for homeless people when the weather turns wet and cold during the winter, resuming a long-running role that was disrupted last year because of the pandemic. The Orange County Board of Supervisors approved a $625,000 contract with Volunteers of America of Los Angeles to operate armory shelter services from Nov. 22 to March 31, and a property agreement with the California Military Department for use of its facility on Warner Avenue. (Walker, 11/17)

Fresno Bee: Affordable Housing For Formerly Homeless In Fresno Unveiled  A new supportive services housing apartment complex for formerly homeless residents with mental health needs was unveiled in Fresno on Wednesday. Created in partnership between Fresno Housing and the Fresno County Department of Behavioral Health, the 25-unit Village at Paragon will offer on-site services, such as case management and mental health services. This is the fourth Fresno Housing development that is run in partnership with DBH. (Garibay, 11/17)

CapRadio:  Food Banks Prepare To Provide Aid During Holidays And Beyond  Next Thursday is Thanksgiving, and many social service agencies are gearing up to provide meals for people who are in need. According to the USDA, 10.5% of U.S. households were food insecure at some point during 2020. In California, it was 20%. Nicole Lamboley, president and CEO of the Food Bank of Northern Nevada, said her organization’s territory ranges from very rural to urban communities, including parts of the Eastern slope of the Sierra in California. That’s a 90,000 square mile area. (11/17)

Public Health

Los Angeles Times: California Has A New Battle Plan For Confronting Environmental Injustice. The Nation Is Watching Residents in this economically stressed patch of the San Joaquin Valley gripped by respiratory sickness were not surprised to learn local officials had exempted all four area fuel refineries from fully complying with a new state air quality rule. “This is a low-income, Hispanic community where a lot of the people are foreign laborers who are not going to say anything,” said Jose Mireles, 59, who lives down the road from a Kern Oil & Refining Co. facility that processes 25,000 barrels of crude oil daily. “Sometimes you are inside your house, the doors are closed, the windows are closed, and you can still smell it.” What did surprise Mireles was what happened after the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District ignored the pleas of community members and activists by exempting that refinery and three others in the valley from some of the new rules requiring high-tech air monitoring equipment. (Halper, Phillips and Luna, 11/18)

California Healthline: Schools, Pediatricians Look To Make Up Lost Ground On Non-Covid Vaccinations Health officials hope the rollout of covid shots for young children and other initiatives will boost routine vaccine rates that dropped during the pandemic and narrow socioeconomic disparities. (Ruder, 11/18)

The Hill: More Than 100 Democrats Sign Onto Bill Ensuring Access To Birth Control More than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate signed onto a bill aimed at ensuring access to birth control and preventing pharmacies from refusing to provide contraceptives. Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday reintroduced the bicameral legislation designed to protect people’s ability to get Food and Drug Administration-approved birth control, including emergency contraception and medication, from pharmacies. (Coleman, 11/17)