SF News Bay Area Wastewater Shows Rising Levels of COVID, Flu, and RSV After Holidays Yet another new COVID variant called JN.1 is fueling yet another surge in COVID transmission according to wastewater data, while flu and RSV cases are also showing a sharp rise in the wake of holiday gatherings.
SF News Day Around the Bay: COVID Swell Appears to Have Peaked In California All signs point to COVID cases declining in the Bay Area and CA; Gov. Newsom announced new sweeping home-insurance regulations; and Justice Elena Kagan is calling for an ethics code for SCOTUS.
SF News Dr. Bob Wachter Recovers From COVID and Gruesome Trash Can Injury, Jokes About It on Podcast After a bout with COVID and a nasty collapse onto a trash can, UCSF COVID sage Dr. Bob Wachter is almost as good as new, and yukking it up over the whole ordeal on a new podcast.
SF News SF's Pandemic Response Praised In New Study Showing Low Number of COVID Deaths The choice was basically more freedom or less death after COVID arrived three years ago. Places like Florida and Texas chose freedom, California chose less death. And San Francisco in particular spared a lot of lives.
SF News Dr. Bob Wachter Contracts COVID, Collapses and Suffers Nasty Head Wound We’re all wishing a speedy recovery to UCSF’s cult-hit COVID sage Dr. Bob Wachter, who contracted the virus himself this week, then collapsed in the shower and suffered bleeding around the brain and a neck fracture.
SF News Dr. Bob Wachter Ends His UCSF 'Grand Rounds' YouTube Forum Stressing COVID Is Not Fully Behind Us Three years and three months after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic emergency, Chair of the Department of Medicine at UCSF Dr. Bob Wachter has done his last "Grand Rounds" forum on YouTube, but he stresses that the novel coronavirus and its variants will remain very much a part of our lives.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Data Shows San Franciscans Still Aren't Going Out as Much as They Did Pre-Pandemic Y'all are still sitting home, watching Hulu, and feeding your sourdough starters like it's May 2020 — or at least some of you are. And some new data shows that while spending on restaurants and entertainment has fully rebounded from the pandemic in other parts of the country, it still hasn't in SF.
Business & Tech Meta Is Abandoning Their COVID-19 Misinformation Policy on Facebook and Instagram Great news for your crazy uncle: Facebook and Instagram will no longer remove posts with COVID misinformation in countries that no longer have a COVID-19 public health emergency declaration, which is basically most of the world.
SF News SF Agrees to Pay Hotel Whitcomb $19.5 Million for Shelter-In-Place Damages, In Largest Hotel Settlement Yet Who says SF hotels can’t make money these days? The still-shuttered mid-Market Hotel Whitcomb was just awarded $19.5 million in a damage settlement over the facility’s use as a shelter-in-place hotel.
SF News New Study Estimates 28 Million Americans Permanently Lost Some Sense of Taste or Smell From COVID It may still be a few years before the clearest picture of the pandemic's impact on our health emerges. But one new study focuses on the not-often-discussed group of people who never regained, or only partially regained their sense of smell and taste after having COVID.
SF News SFO Will Be First In U.S. to Test Planes’ Wastewater For COVID Variants International arriving flights at SFO will have their wastewater tested for the emergence of new COVID-19 variants, the airport announced Tuesday, making it the first U.S. airport that's doing so.
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.
