SF Restaurants, Food & Drink French Laundry Received $2.4M in PPP Loans, 17 Times What Most Bay Area Restaurants Got In another revelation from recently released data on the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) from the Small Business Administration, the French Laundry received $2.4 million in two separate loans last spring, ostensibly to retain over 160 employees.
SF News San Francisco Wants 'Worried Wealthy' to Stop Using Free COVID Testing Sites, Will Make Appointment Lead Times Shorter The San Francisco Department of Public Health is changing the way appointments are made at its two free COVID testing sites on the Embarcadero and at the Alemany farmers' market site, in an effort to make it less convenient for people who are at the lowest risk.
SF News Doctor at SF General Who Has Treated Scores of Critically Ill COVID Patients Is First in City to Receive Vaccine After receiving 2,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine on Monday, SF General became the first hospital in the city to begin administering it Tuesday morning, with one critical-care doctor who has treated the most severely ill COVID patients being the first to receive a dose.
SF News San Francisco Adds Over 3,100 New COVID Cases In Two Weeks; Bay Area Total Rises By 39,000 The monotonous parade of numbers can be numbing, but the Bay Area and SF have seen some staggering COVID case metrics in the first two weeks of December that foretell a grim hospital picture before Christmas. And the curve is not flattening yet.
SF News SF Updates Stay-at-Home Order to Allow People to 'Meet With One Other Person' Outside Their Household San Francisco's original stay-at-home order was lambasted by residents and some local government officials for being over-restrictive. Before the weekend, it was loosened slightly to allow for meeting one person outside of your immediate household — but only for outdoor activities.
SF News Bay Area Frontline Workers Could Receive Initial Pfizer Vaccine Doses on Monday Friday night, the FDA greenlit the "emergency use" of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine — the first in the country to get this kind of authorization for battling the pandemic — and, simultaneously, setting up California to receive 327,600 units of it.
SF News San Mateo, Napa, and Solano Counties Likely to Get Stay-at-Home Orders From State Next Week While five Bay Area counties got a head start with shutting down businesses and outdoor dining earlier this week, and Sonoma issued its order effective Saturday, the three remaining holdout counties in the Bay Area are likely get new shutdown orders from the governor next week.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink SF Restaurant Workers to Rally at City Hall In Protest of Stay-At-Home Order In an about-face from April and May, when San Franciscans seemed largely in agreement that lockdown orders were necessary — if economically painful — SF restaurant workers are planning an afternoon rally at City Hall over the latest shutdown.
Business & Tech Uber Wants Its Non-Employee Drivers to Get Early Vaccines Industry trade organizations are lining up to lobby the CDC and states to get their workers high up in the queue of Americans waiting to receive the coronavirus vaccine, and Uber is lining up too.
SF News California's New COVID Contact-Alert App Will Only Work If Pretty Much Everyone Downloads and Uses It A contact-tracing "beacon" app that's been in development since the spring is now rolling out for all Californians, but what does it really do and will it really help anyone find out if they've been exposed to the coronavirus?
SF News San Francisco Hits Record High In COVID Hospitalizations; Bay Area Adds 72 Seriously Ill Patients Overnight The Bay Area saw a single-day jump of COVID hospitalizations of 6.1% on Tuesday, and San Francisco is seeing more seriously ill COVID patients in hospitals at one time than at any other time during this pandemic.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Backlash Grows Over Bay Area Restaurant and Business Closures, In Spite of COVID Surge Concerns Anger, sadness, and lots of financial pain and resentment are going around in San Francisco and several neighboring counties after new health orders that took effect Sunday night.
SF News Maverick San Mateo County Health Officer Tells Residents There Won't Be a New Lockdown Unless State Insists One of the consistently intriguing figures in this pandemic has been Dr. Scott Morrow, the longtime health officer of San Mateo County, who has made a habit of telling it like it is when it comes to public health orders and not reverting to talking points or bureaucratic obfuscation.
SF News San Francisco Has Biggest Three-Day COVID Case Count to Date as City Enters New Lockdown San Francisco added 316 new COVID-19 cases on Monday morning, and over 540 between Saturday and Sunday, marking the biggest three-day jump in new cases the city has seen since the pandemic began.
SF News Contact Tracing Program in San Francisco Might Become Overwhelmed by Winter Surge San Francisco's contact tracing program has proven to be an effective tool in thwarting COVID-19 infections — but this winter's surge could push the initiative to its limits as staff might struggle to contend with a rush of new cases.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Breed Announces New Stay-At-Home Orders for SF Ahead of State Mandate; Outdoor Dining to Cease Until January Starting Sunday night and extending until at least January 4, San Francisco restaurants will need to cease outdoor dining, personal services and indoor gyms will need to shut down, and retail businesses will need to enact stricter capacity limits.
SF News Why the Bay Area's Next Lockdown May Depend on Monterey, Santa Clara, and Sonoma Counties The state's new methodology for deciding when the new stay-at-home order will be triggered groups Santa Cruz and Monterey counties into the Bay Area, so we are now all in this together as a region.
SF News Gov. Gavin Newsom Imposes Three-Week Stay-at-Home Order For Most of California Citing the fact that ICU capacity is expected to drop below 15 percent in most regions of the state, California Governor Gavin Newsom said that he was once again pulling the "emergency brake" this week and he's instituting a three-week stay-at-home order.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Breed Says the 'Criticism Is Fair' Over Her French Laundry Dinner Mayor London Breed responded Thursday to an outcry this week over news that she had dined with a group of unrelated people at the French Laundry four weeks ago, and says, "I need to hold myself to a higher standard."
SF News Couple Flies From SFO to Hawaii While Knowingly COVID-Positive, Gets Arrested A married couple who live on the Hawaiian island of Kaua'i recently flew home from San Francisco despite both having tested positive for COVID-19, and they were promptly arrested and charged with endangering other passengers on the plane.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Chain Restaurants Like TGI Fridays and P.F. Chang's Got $10 Million PPP Loans While Majority Got $150K or Less Data show that huge chain restaurants and prominent law firms enjoyed more than a quarter of the loan monies made available, while small businesses and independent restaurants shared the rest of the pot and received far smaller sums.
SF Politics SF Mayor Called Out for French Laundry Dinner; San Jose Mayor Apologizes for Thanksgiving Gathering We all know that not everyone is following pandemic isolation recommendations to the T these days. But when the leaders who daily try to drill the rules into us violate the rules themselves, it's a recipe for a whole lot of exasperation and outrage in the media and on social media.
SF News Breed and Colfax Hint at Further Health Orders But Are Shy on Specifics While they did not announce any further restrictions on activities and businesses in the city, they hinted that these would be coming tomorrow or later in the week.
SF News Second COVID Surge Takes Shape In CA Prisons Amid Revelations About Lax Mask-Wearing Among Staff There have now been over 3,300 new cases in California prisons in the last 14 days, and a new report suggests that mask-wearing and other safety protocols have been lax or non-existent at some prisons during the pandemic.
SF News Newsom: 'Red Flags Are Flying' With COVID Hospitalizations, Stricter Stay-at-Home Order Could Be Coming With 75 percent of ICU beds now occupied across the state and 72 percent occupied in the Bay Area, Governor Gavin Newsom warned of a stricter stay-at-home order possibly to come within days for the 51 "Purple" tier counties in California.
