SF News Friday Morning Constitutional: WHO Declares COVID Emergency Over Three years and two months in, the WHO has declared the global COVID emergency over; the body of an Oakland man missing since Dec. 2021 was found in a barrel outside the city; and we can expect some more rain tonight into Saturday.
SF News Shady COVID Street Testing Sites, Offering $5 Cash Per Test, Appear Unlicensed A slew of very informal-looking COVID-19 testing sites, paying people $5 a pop to take tests, is drawing another round of scrutiny for their lack of licensed staff and apparent flouting of public health protocols.
SF News Some Bay Area Counties Ending Mask Requirements In Healthcare Settings, Unclear Whether SF Will Too Today’s the day that California is ending its mask and vaccine requirements for healthcare workers, but Alameda and Contra Costa counties will continue requiring masks, while SF public health officials have not made an announcement.
SF News It’s the Three-Year Anniversary of Our COVID-19 Lockdown, San Francisco On the three-year anniversary of the Bay Area’s stunning shelter-in-place announcement, which would be duplicated within days around much of the country, we look back on these three bad years, and the order that was originally only supposed to last for three weeks.
SF News Today, SFist Is Retiring Its COVID Data Update Page This has been a long time coming. And yes, COVID is still with us, but the daily and weekly case counts we've been tracking for nearly three years are no longer that useful, so it's time to move on.
SF News City's Bill For Shelter-In-Place Hotel Damages Rises With $2.9M Settlement For Hotel Tilden While the City of San Francisco continues to negotiate with hotel owners over what the costs of turning their hotels into ersatz homeless shelters during the pandemic turned out to be, one more hotel has just walked away with a considerable damage settlement.
SF News Day Around the Bay: SF Is Ending The COVID-19 Public Health Emergency On February 28 The new street drug “tranq” has been found in the blood streams of SF overdose victims, Depeche Mode announced they’re playing the Chase Center in December, and SF’s COVID-19 public health emergency declaration will end on February 28.
SF News New Study Suggests Updated Booster Shots Protect Against XBB.1.5 Infection There is now good evidence to suggest that the new, bivalent boosters from Moderna and Pfizer cut infection risk by half from the so-called "Kraken variant" of Omicron, XBB.1.5.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Struggling SF Bar Owners Say People Aren't Drinking Like They Did Pre-COVID Is it true that people are going out to bars less often now than they did three years ago? That may not be true in many parts of the country, or even in parts of San Francisco, but for some neighborhood and after-work bars, things still haven't gotten back to normal.
SF News SF Emergency Room Physician Opens Up About Leaving Twitter Over Rampant COVID Misinformation A local doctor dedicated to debunking COVID-19 conspiracy theories is giving up that fight, on Twitter at least, claiming that misinformation is running wild on that platform. And the data backs up that claim.
SF News Wastewater Shows COVID Cases Spiking In SF as Hospitalizations Continue Ticking Up The triple-demic that experts were warning of months ago is taking shape in hospitals across California as it is elsewhere, with a COVID surge and new variants coinciding with a spike in influenza and RSV.
SF News In Possible Harbinger, Zuni Cafe Has Closed Temporarily Amidst Staff COVID Outbreak Uh-oh, we may be seeing more of this kind of news again — Zuni Cafe has temporarily closed until Wednesday, December 7 as the restaurant’s staff is largely sidelined by a COVID-19 outbreak.
SF News COVID-Restriction-Flouting San Jose Church Wins Appeal for Flouting COVID Restrictions San Jose’s Calvary Chapel gained notoriety for defying COVID-19 restrictions throughout the pandemic, and the California Supreme Court just shot down $217,500 in fines the church had racked up.
Business & Tech Musk Drops Twitter's COVID Misinformation Policy, Because Of Course He Did In another stellar move celebrating unfettered free speech in the Twitterverse, Elon Musk has jettisoned another redeeming guardrail that was keeping the rabid anti-vaxxers in check.
SF News Experts Cautiously Optimistic About Weak Winter COVID Wave As Hospitalizations Begin to Tick Up It may be too soon to tell what the holiday season has in store when it comes to the tail end of this three-year pandemic. But there is reason to hope that we won't have a very severe winter surge of new COVID infections, especially if more people get their updated boosters.
SF News Next Omicron Subvariant Arrives In Bay Area; Not Enough People Are Getting Updated Boosters It is high time for people to get their bivalent COVID booster shots, with widespread availability and a looming potential winter surge of a new Omicron subvariant.
SF News SF's COVID Numbers Didn't Drop That Low This Month After All, DPH Says Some sort of data snafu at the California Department of Public Health — the latest of many since the pandemic began — meant that San Francisco's COVID case count was looking a whole lot lower than it actually was in September.
SF News Friday Morning Constitutional: Bay Area Officially In CDC's 'Low' Tier For COVID BART had similar Transbay Tube electrical problems this morning as it had on Sunday, a noted SF stalker/creeper is back and harassing women, and the Bay Area is now in the CDC's "low" tier for COVID transmission once again and finally.
SF News Dr. Wachter Is Going Back Inside Restaurants, Which Maybe Means the Pandemic Is Finally Over? Barring further, unforeseen variants, COVID-19 may finally be relegated to still-sometimes-deadly seasonal nuisance — now that President Biden proclaimed that "the pandemic is over," and now that our own UCSF soothsayer Dr. Bob Wachter is ready to go back to indoor dining.
SF News San Francisco Marks 1000th COVID Death, 29 Months In While San Francisco has had it relatively good when it comes to COVID mortality in this pandemic, we were hardly spared. And on Saturday, San Francisco marked its 1000th death from COVID-19.
SF News Friday Morning Constitutional: Moderna Now Suing Pfizer and BioNTech For Copying Vaccine Technology New and updated COVID vaccine boosters are coming in September, Moderna is now suing Pfizer for stealing its mRNA vaccine technology, and protesters continue to fight a plan to cull 100 geese from a flock in Foster City.
SF News San Jose Church That Defied Pandemic Public Health Orders Wins Appeal Based on Supreme Court's Rightward Shift The evangelical Calvary Chapel in San Jose was ordered to pay over $200K in contempt-of-court fines over its defiance of county public health orders in 2020, but a state appeals court has just overturned that and ruled in favor of the church, because of Amy Coney Barrett.
SF News Napa Quack Set to Be Sentenced In Case Involving Phony COVID Pills and Vax Cards, But First She Tried to Vacate Her Plea Napa-based naturopathic doctor Juli A. Mazi, the loon who was nabbed by the feds last year for prescribing bogus COVID-19 immunization pills and handing out fraudulent vaccination cards, just tried to vacate her plea agreement after firing her lawyers. But the judge wasn't having it.
SF News UC Berkeley Researchers Think They May Have Developed a Nasal Spray Thats Stops COVID There could be a miracle COVID-19 treatment coming out of the labs of a UC Berkeley toxicology department, as Bay Area researchers may have developed a nasal spray that prevents the spread of COVID-19.
SF News COVID Cases In This Summer's BA.5 Surge Most Concentrated In San Francisco's Southern Neighborhoods According to data from the San Francisco Department of Public Health (DPH), Bayview/Hunters Point continued to be a hot spot of COVID infection — and re-infection — in this summer's surge, and the highest concentrations of cases were in the southern part of the city overall.
