We've come to another one of those rule-change days in the pandemic, at least in San Francisco and Marin, and it's a change that again raises the question of how these specific public-health decisions are being made.

We're getting back near the late-pandemic territory we were in back in June, though San Francisco isn't quite there yet — with hospitalizations coming down but still well above where they were in mid-June and early July.

After leading the nation three weeks ago in becoming one of only three states to move out of the CDC's red tier indicating high overall COVID transmission, California is now the only state in the yellow or "moderate" tier.

In this summer's Delta variant surge, California has succeeded in being one of just three states to no longer be in the "high" transmission category for COVID-19, along with Vermont and Connecticut.

57-year-old Patricia Dowd, whose early February 2020 was later determined to have been caused by an undiagnosed COVID-19 infection, becoming the first recorded American death in the pandemic, was actually not the first COVID death in the U.S. after all.