Business & Tech Google Tells Workers It's Back-to-the-Office Time Starting April 4 There have been some false alarms and variant-related surprises in the past, but it could be that Spring 2022 will usher in a new late-pandemic phase of workers grudgingly returning to cubicles and conference rooms in SF and Silicon Valley.
SF News New Study: COVID Can Infect Men's Genitals, Cause Infertility and Erectile Dysfunction It's been some months since Nicki Minaj and others amplified the falsehood that COVID vaccines made men's testicles swell up. And now some researchers have found that the COVID-19 virus gets into the penis, prostate, and testicles.
SF News California to Lift School Mask Mandate In Two Weeks; Unvaccinated People Can Go Maskless Indoors This Week The long-awaited lifting of the state's mask mandate for schoolchildren arrives in two weeks — though individual school districts may still decide to keep it in place longer.
SF News Oakland Woman Who Spent PPP Loans On Louis Vuitton Bags and Private Jets Gets Three Years In Federal Prison A 32-year-old Oakland woman who was arrested and charged last year in a scheme to defraud the federal government out of $4.5 million in pandemic relief funds has just been sentenced to three years in prison and will have to pay over $1 million in restitution.
SF News Santa Clara County Will Follow Rest of Region and Lift Mask Order Next Week Two weeks behind San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area, Santa Clara County will be lifting its indoor public mask mandate next week — though, like the rest of the region, unvaccinated people are still on the honor system and supposed to be masking up.
SF News SF COVID Cases Continue Downward Slide, But Still Not In 'Safe' Territory The masks have come off in many places around the Bay Area, and daily COVID case numbers continue their downward trajectory — but they haven't hit the rock-bottom levels of the early summer or late fall yet.
SF News East Bay Assemblymember Proposes Mandatory Vaccination For All California Employees Nobody tell the truckers, but Oakland state assemblymember Buffy Wicks just unveiled a bill that would require every single employee in the state of California to be fully vaccinated.
SF News San Francisco and Seven Other Bay Area Counties Will Drop Indoor Mask Rules Next Week The masks come off on February 16 in Bay Area grocery stores, bars, restaurants, museums, and everywhere else whether you like it or not — but Santa Clara County will still be playing it safer.
SF News Omicron Has Killed 12% More Bay Area Residents Per Week Than Delta Here in the highly vaccinated Bay Area, the infectiousness of the variant still managed to take a bigger toll than the more severe Delta variant did last summer and fall.
SF News Mystery COVID 'Lineages' Found In Viral Fragments In Wastewater In California and New York Not that the pandemic-anxious need anything to add to their arsenal of anxiety sources, but the New York Times has a story today about an ongoing mystery happening in wastewater surveillance of COVID-19 that researchers can't pin down.
SF News Masks Come Off at SF Gyms Again as COVID Cases Decline; Wachter Suggests We'll Hit 'Regionally Endemic' In Feb. The Omicron surge has shown signs of peaking and/or declining in multiple parts of the country, and in the Bay Area it is definitely receding, along with hospitalizations.
SF News Parents Who Hate California's School Mask Mandates Jump All Over Newsom's Masklessness at 49ers Game Governor Gavin Newsom's legion of Twitter critics have come out with their virtual pitchforks again after he was photographed maskless at SoFi Stadium on Sunday.
SF News Mask Mandate Exceptions for Offices and Gyms Return Next Week In SF As Omicron Surge Dissipates There still seems to be plenty of Omicron to go around, but starting February 1, San Franciscans will again be able to take their face masks off at the gym and in vaccinated and boosted offices.
SF News Health Officials Say Don't Worry, But There's a New Omicron Subvariant In the Bay Area A new and special variant of COVID, which is being called BA.2 Omicron for now, or "stealth" Omicron, has been detected in the Bay Area and across California, but word among experts is that it's not likely to behave much differently than regular Omicron.
SF News SF Unemployment Rate Dips to Just 3%, But More Still Unemployed Than Before Pandemic The latest unemployment numbers are encouraging — though the figures are from before the Omicron variant hit — with the unemployment rate hitting just 3% in SF, and even lower in Marin, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties.
SF News COVID Hospitalizations In California Show First One-Day Drop Since Christmas; SF Hospitalizations May Be Peaking Hospitalizations of COVID patients in the state of California just declined slightly on Thursday in the first one-day decline since the Omicron surge began, and signs point to hospitalizations peaking this week in San Francisco.
SF News Friday Morning Constitutional: 49ers Watch Parties Could Spread Omicron There are COVID concerns as bars gear up for big football crowds tomorrow, a Tenderloin addict followed by a Chronicle columnist has died, and CA might let kids as young as 12 get vaccines with parental consent.
SF News Omicron Might Be 'Like the Flu' For the Vaccinated Bay Area, But It Is Killing 3 Times As Many as the Flu Elsewhere The Omicron variant has been variously touted by pundits and experts alike as a possible key out of the pandemic and into an endemic stage of COVID, and talk of being able to "live with COVID like the flu" is everywhere right now.
SF News Biden’s Free At-Home COVID Test Website Is Live, and Now Taking Orders COVIDtests.gov launched a day early, and has not yet experienced any Obamacare-style technical glitches, but many are finding that the free tests are not available to them.
SF News We May Be Masking Up Indoors Again Next Winter, and the Next As signs point to the Omicron peak already having passed in San Francisco — with case counts falling, as predicted, after a post-holiday surge — we look to the endemic phase of COVID with some trepidation about future variants.
SF News California Mulls Bringing Back Extended COVID Sick Pay, But Feds Won’t Reimburse A law allowing employees up to 80 hours of paid leave for COVID-19 expired at the end of September, but with unprecedented numbers out sick, California lawmakers may bring it back.
SF News San Francisco's Average Daily COVID Case Rate Just Eclipsed All Other Bay Area Counties for the First Time Things may have peaked, but San Francisco's daily average case rate per 100,000 residents has risen above that of Santa Clara and Alameda counties — and above any other in Northern California — for the first time in the pandemic.
SF News SF Testing Sites Reopen; Buf If You Can't Find a Test, 'Assume It's COVID,' Says Local Expert Omicron is everywhere, and a local infectious disease expert is advising all of us to assume we have COVID if we have had a known exposure, or been anywhere in public really — and especially if we have any of an array of symptoms.
SF News Another COVID Outbreak Hits San Quentin, Despite High Vaccination Rate Among Inmates A somewhat low vaccination rate among prison guards has produced a predictable result, as San Quentin State Prison, and all California state prisons, are in full lockdown.
SF News Real-World Study By UCSF Finds BinaxNOW Rapid Test Picks Up 95% of Highly Infectious Omicron Cases A fresh study by UCSF researchers based on data from a walk-up test site in San Francisco found that Abbott's popular BinaxNOW rapid antigen test picked up nearly all of the most highly infectious cases of the Omicron variant, indicating it is a highly useful test for preventing spread of the virus.
