More than 1,000 unhoused people in Alameda County have been living in hotel rooms converted into Covid-19 shelters, but the future of this program is in question. Leases are expiring and there may not be enough money to extend the contracts for all of the hotels currently in use. The possibility that the program will be scaled back comes just as the weather is getting colder and virus cases are surging.

Officials are scrambling to move hotel residents into permanent housing, including brand-new complexes opening up with state relief money. But advocates fear that the progress made by the hotel program could be reversed if funding runs out before the more than 1,200 people currently living in hotels get placed in housing.

As of November 23, 2020, 149 patients with confirmed or suspected cases of Covid-19 are hospitalized in Alameda County, including 26 patients in ICU. The low point of hospitalizations in Alameda County in the Fall occurred on October 16, 2020. On that date, 95 patients were hospitalized with confirmed or suspected Covid-19 in the county. The peak number of hospitalizations in Alameda County occurred on July 23, 2020, when 283 patients with confirmed and suspected Covid-19 were hospitalized.

A new, free community testing center operated by La Familia has opened at the Eden United Church of Christ, 21455 Birch Street, Hayward. Covid-19 testing is offered on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. La Familia has also expanded the hours of testing at its Cherryland testing center located at 20095 Mission Boulevard in Hayward. Testing will be provided from 9 a.m to 3:00 p.m. Monday through Friday. The center welcomes walk-in visits. Both centers will be closed for Thanksgiving. Further information can be found on Alameda County's Covid-19 testing webpage.

San Francisco did not move into the most restrictive purple tier of California’s economic reopening plan as expected on Tuesday. But public health officials said coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are climbing dramatically and they expect to land there later in the week.

Panic buying, that relic from the early days of pandemic anxiety, has returned for its second round, and department and grocery stores in the Bay Area are feeling it most. They say the phenomenon set in a few weeks ago, as the Bay Area started to see a new surge in coronavirus cases, and has intensified with California’s new overnight curfew for counties in the purple reopening tier.

In some ways, the impulse to panic buy in March made sense, said Utpal Dholakia, a professor of marketing at Rice University. In a piece he wrote for Psychology Today, he made the argument that it could even be viewed as rational consumer behavior. People weren’t prepared for anything like the pandemic, and it was a tangible way to exert control over their anxieties. Many were also concerned that stores wouldn’t be able to keep up with the demand for essential items.

The CDC may soon shorten the length of time it recommends that a person self-quarantine after potential exposure to the coronavirus, hoping that such a step will encourage more people to comply, a top agency official said. CDC officials are finalizing recommendations for a new quarantine period that would likely be between seven and 10 days and include a test to ensure a person is negative for Covid-19, said Henry Walke, the agency’s incident manager for Covid-19 response.

Top officials from Operation Warp Speed, the government's program to fast-track the development and delivery of COVID-19 vaccines, announced they've allocated 6.4 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to states based on their total populations.

Once a COVID-19 vaccine is authorized by the Food and Drug Administration, allocations will be made based on the total number of adults in the state. "We wanted to keep this simple," Alex Azar, secretary of Health and Human Services, said at a media briefing Tuesday. "We thought it would be the fairest approach, and the most consistent."

The allocation-by-population policy is a departure from earlier distribution plans, and it downplays the role of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The independent vaccine advisory group for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has proposed allocations based on high-risk groups. The CDC advisory committee had previously been central to the government's vaccine distribution plans.

AstraZeneca and Oxford reported on 22 November in separate press releases that an interim analysis of trials in the United Kingdom and Brazil found an “average efficacy” of 70%. Both studies gave volunteers a “prime” first dose and a booster shot at least 1 month later.

For months, scientists have been fiercely debating why. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory argued in May that the variant had probably evolved the ability to infect people more efficiently. Many were skeptical, arguing that the variant may have been simply lucky, appearing more often by chance in large epidemics, like Northern Italy’s, that seeded outbreaks elsewhere.

On Tuesday, county health departments combined to report 16,730 new cases of the virus — more than any other day prior to Monday, when the state reported a record 20,000-plus new cases — plus an additional 110 lives lost due to Covid-19, according to data compiled by this news organization.

The average number of new daily cases each day is at an all-time high — 13,338 per day over the past week — and more Californians have perished from Covid-19 in the past week — 519, or an average of about 77 per day — than any other since the end of September. Compared to two weeks ago, California’s average daily case count has soared by 110%, and its daily death toll has increased by 64%.

In another worrisome trend, more Californians are hospitalized with Covid-19 than at any point since Aug. 6, and the state added more new patients in the past 24 hours than any previous day of the pandemic, according to the latest data from the California Department of Public Health. Total active hospitalizations had increased by 385 — 7% in a single day — to 5,844, as of Monday — a 90% increase in patients from two weeks ago.

More than 2,100 Covid-19 deaths were reported in the US on Tuesday -- making it the highest one-day coronavirus death toll the country has reported since early May.

When cases and hospitalizations began to surge weeks ago, officials predicted deaths would soon follow. Daily new cases haven't dipped below 100,000 in three weeks. And for the 15th consecutive day, the US beat its own hospitalization record, with now more than 88,000 Covid-19 patients in hospitals nationwide on Tuesday, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

Doctors and nurses say that they feel better prepared to deal with the coronavirus than in the spring, when so little was known about it. Because it was hit so hard in the first wave, New Jersey’s per capita death rate remains the highest in the country.

On Sunday, New Jersey reported 3,968 new cases of the coronavirus, more than double the 1,743 new cases reported on Nov. 1. And the state’s hospitalization rates have tripled in the past month, from 732 on Oct. 17 to 2,446 on Nov. 17. While they are far short of the 8,000 who were hospitalized in April, as the days shorten, the temperature drops, flu season deepens, and the holidays loom, many depleted frontline workers are preparing for another season of difficulty.

Some 12 million people are expected to lose unemployment benefits the day after Christmas, and moratoriums on evictions and student debt payments are set to expire at the end of the year. Yet Congress has been unable to reach a compromise that would alleviate that economic hardship. Despite months of on-and-off negotiations, Republicans and Democrats haven't agreed on the terms of another Covid-19 relief bill. A question for Biden and his team is whether they should be encouraging Democrats to move quickly, to deliver aid faster, even if that means accepting a smaller deal.

Nearly a third of the nurses who've died of coronavirus in the US are Filipino, even though Filipino nurses make up just 4% of the nursing population nationwide. A recent report from the largest nurses' union in the country revealed the disproportionate number of deaths. It's a jarring statistic researchers are working to understand and a tragedy families across the US and around the world are living with.

One possible factor: the places where Filipino nurses are more likely to work. "The major finding...was that Philippine-trained nurses were disproportionately in the ICUs, the emergency rooms, in long-term care facilities such as nursing homes, compared to White, US-trained nurses. They were therefore much more exposed to Covid-19," says Jennifer Nazareno, the co-founder and co-director of the Philippine Health Initiative for Research, Service, and Training at Brown University's School of Public Health.

'No end in sight': hunger surges in America amid a spiraling pandemic 

Millions of Americans must rely on charity to put Thanksgiving dinner on the table this year, as hunger surges amid a devastating spiraling of the Covid-19 pandemic which the Trump administration has failed to get under control.

In what is traditionally a season of celebration, less than half of US households with children feel “very confident” about having enough money to afford the food needed over the next month, according to the US Census Bureau’s latest pandemic survey. A staggering 5.6m households struggled to put enough food on the table in the past week. Families of color are suffering disproportionately with 27% of black and 23% of Latino respondents with children reported not having enough to eat sometimes or often over the past week – compared with 12% of white people.

Mexico was graded particularly poorly for its Covid-19 fatality rate over the past month (8.6 deaths per 100 cases, according to Bloomberg), positivity rate (62.3%) and “lockdown severity” (the federal government never enforced a strict lockdown).

We’ve already demonstrated that we can flatten the curve by sheltering. This fall, Europe showed again that the strategy works. Now — as cases, infection rates and deaths are all rising quickly, and hospitals are starting to fill — is the time to get ahead of this. The longer we wait, the bigger the problem will become, the harder it will be to control the virus.

Face masks have become a potent symbol of the political polarization over the coronavirus in the United States. The division shows up in polling. Gallup found that while a clear majority of Americans say they're "highly likely" to wear masks in public indoor spaces, Republicans are less likely to do so. As the president-elect prepares to take office in January, he's already talking to governors about trying to implement a national mask mandate, or as close to it as possible.