California is reporting that the Bay Area region ICU capacity stands at 12.9%. As a result, the state's regional stay at home order will go into effect for the Bay Area region on Dec. 17 at 11:59 p.m. The order will primarily impact the counties in the Bay Area region, including San Mateo County, that had not previously adopted the stay at home order.

Researchers have yet to begin clinical trials in children under 12; trials in teens have just recently started. It’s not unusual in drug development to test adults first: New drugs and vaccines are often tested on adults before children, whose bodies are still developing and can have different responses to medication. In the case of Covid, adults are also generally more at risk for severe complications.

The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday issued an emergency authorization for the country’s first coronavirus test that can run from start to finish at home without the need for a prescription. People as young as 2 years old are cleared to use the test, which takes just 15 to 20 minutes to deliver a result. The test is authorized for people with or without symptoms. Each kit, which tests a single swab sample, is expected to cost about $30 or less, said Bella Zabinofsky, a spokeswoman for the company.

Just in the past two weeks, since the calendar turned to December, California’s average daily infections have more than doubled: from about 14,000 per day to more than 32,000, a 130% increase. Santa Clara and Alameda county on Tuesday each recorded another day of a thousand new cases apiece. 

NPR, December 16, 2020

In the 5 years before the pandemic, low-income Californians had begun to see substantial wage gains, chipping away at the income inequality gap between California’s haves and have-nots that has widened over the past 40 years. But the coronavirus pandemic is “likely stripping away many of these gains,” researchers at the Public Policy Institute of California found in a new report.

Since April 1, under the federal law, employees working at private firms with fewer than 500 workers (but more than 50) have been eligible for up to 10 days of paid sick leave if they are quarantined because of a government order or medical professional, or are experiencing Covid-19 symptoms. Millions of workers in the state stand to lose two weeks of paid sick leave and additional weeks of paid family leave by the end of the year.

Should an agreement be struck, it could at least partially remedy a looming shortage that the administration itself arguably helped create by not pre-ordering more doses of the vaccine Pfizer developed with its German partner, BioNTech. Pfizer agreed this summer to provide the United States with 100 million doses by the end of March, enough to inoculate 50 million people since its vaccine requires two shots.

Dodge City, KS, Mayor Joyce Warshaw submitted her letter of resignation Tuesday. It was effective immediately and it cited concerns for her safety. The Dodge City commission voted in favor of a mask mandate on November 16 following a spike in coronavirus cases in the western Kansas city which has a population of nearly 30,000 people.

Today, amid the pandemic, a third of U.S. adults say they are having difficulty covering everyday costs such as food, rent or car payments. While people with the lowest incomes face the biggest challenges, even some households making above $200,000 are straining to pay basic expenses.

For many families, walking the tightrope of financial stress, with little to no savings, is hardly a pandemic-specific condition. Over a year ago, more than a third of Americans said they could not cover an unexpected $400 home repair or hospital bill without going into debt — or at all.

As wealthy governments race to lock in supplies of Covid-19 vaccines, nearly a quarter of the world’s population — mostly in low and middle-income countries — will not have access to a shot until 2022, according to a new analysis.

The advice covers a variety of issues relating to winter recreation and holidays, including whether to take a skiing break and seasonal celebrations. It comes amid soul-searching across Europe over how to celebrate the holidays, including whether to continue with loosened restrictions in the UK’s devolved areas – against the recommendation of some scientists – or to introduce stricter lockdowns, as some countries are contemplating.

New Zealand’s response to the virus has been among the most successful, together with actions taken by China, Taiwan and Thailand early on in the pandemic. The country of 5 million has counted just 25 deaths and managed to stamp out the spread of Covid-19, allowing people to return to workplaces, schools and packed sports stadiums without restrictions.

When the virus began hitting Europe early in the year, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said, the only two options countries were considering were herd immunity or flattening the curve. She opted for the latter. Ardern said she didn’t worry that elimination might prove impossible, because even if New Zealand didn’t get there, the approach still would have saved lives.

Asia has led the world in controlling the spread of Covid-19, but that very success has set the region behind the US and Europe in the race to vaccinate against the disease. In countries with limited coronavirus outbreaks, regulators have been happy to let westerners act as guinea pigs for quickly approved jabs, while in others, the low level of Covid-19 cases means that locally developed vaccines have struggled to complete clinical trials.

Asia’s vaccine caution contrasts with fervent enthusiasm in the US and Europe, where coronavirus infection is raging and authorities have made it a point of pride to grant approvals quickly. The differing approaches raise the prospect of a world where some nations are vaccinated and others are not, which could affect the speed of economic recovery and hinder international travel.

With ski lifts, restaurants and bars all remaining open, Sweden’s tougher restrictions pale in comparison to the rest of Europe and there are mounting concerns that not enough is being done. Intensive-care beds in hospitals in the Stockholm region are all currently occupied. Infection numbers and deaths have been rising steadily since October. By Tuesday, Sweden had reached a total of 320,098 cases since the beginning of the pandemic, while its neighbor Finland, with a population about half of Sweden’s, has 31,110 cases, less than 10% of Sweden’s.

By mid-December, five in every 100 Americans — more than 16 million — had been infected by Covid-19. Those numbers testify to a historic tragedy. But they don’t fully capture the multitude of ways, large and small, that the virus has upended and reconfigured everyday life in the U.S.

For all its eventfulness, 2020 has for many been a lost year, in several senses of the word: On top of an enormous loss of human lives, the pandemic paused many people’s progress on long-plotted family and career goals. It forced countless celebrations and holiday gatherings either onto Zoom or out of existence. And it warped many people’s sense of time, causing months-long stretches to seem interminable in the moment but like they passed in a blip in retrospect.

By Daniel Funke and Katie Sanders, Kaiser Health News, December 16, 2020      

Lies infected America in 2020. The very worst were not just damaging, but deadly.  President Trump fueled confusion and conspiracies from the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic. He embraced theories that Covid-19 accounted for only a small fraction of the thousands upon thousands of deaths. He undermined public health guidance for wearing masks and cast Dr. Anthony Fauci as an unreliable flip-flopper. 

But the infodemic was not the work of a single person. Anonymous bad actors offered up junk science. Online skeptics made bogus accusations that hospitals padded their coronavirus case numbers to generate bonus payments. Influential TV and radio opinion hosts told millions of viewers that physical distancing was a joke and that states had all of the personal protective equipment they needed (when they didn’t). It was a symphony of counter-narrative, and Trump was the conductor, if not the composer.