Bay Area is close to herd immunity. But we may never get there
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The Bay Area has among the best COVID-19 vaccination rates in the United States and several counties are approaching the threshold of herd immunity, where the virus eventually dies out because it can no longer find people to infect.
If the region was in a bubble, that could eliminate nearly all coronavirus infections. But with vaccine uptake already waning across California and the U.S. and vaccines still unavailable to large swaths of the world the level of global immunity required to squash the pandemic is almost certainly unattainable, at least for a long time to come, infectious disease experts say.
There has been a bloodbath in the United States in the past few months.
From 2003 to 2020, there had been no federal executions, and only four going all the way back to my birth in 1959. In the 230 years since records began in 1790, we had averaged only marginally more than one federal execution a year.
However, in the last months of his tenure, President Donald Trump presided over the deaths of 13 prisoners, with six conducted after he lost the election. Typically for a president prone to excess, Trump broke various records, though none was particularly salutary: the most federal executions in seven months in history, and the first time a president had ever set executions after losing an election.
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Anyone who’s ever dabbled in genealogy knows that certain forebears call louder than others – even when they’re not your own. While researching Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson – better known as musical megastar, philanthropist, and activist Katy Perry – I climbed all the branches of her family tree, but became enchanted with Hannah Mulhare, one of her Irish immigrant ancestors.
Perry describes herself as a “singer-songwriter masquerading as a pop star.” As one of the best-selling artists of all time (more than 100 million records to date) with sold-out world tours, she’s nailing that charade, but Hannah’s story makes it clear that Katy’s not the first in the family to pull off such a convincing deception.
State workplace safety agency fines multiple California state prisons for COVID violations
By Lisa Fernandez
FILE ART (Photo by Giles Clarke/Getty Images)
BLYTHE, Calif. - The state agency that oversees workplace safety has fined a total of eight prisons in California for COVID violations, resulting in a maximum citation total of nearly $700,000, a review of Cal-OSHA records show.
The most recent prisons cited are Chuckawalla Valley State Prison for $39,100; Ironwood State Prison for $57,800, both of which are in Blythe, Calif.; and the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, Calif. for $100,750. All the institutions are in Riverside County.
OSHA issued the fines on Feb. 26, for alleged violations that occurred roughly six months prior. The first two investigations were accident-initiated. The final citation was issued after a death occurred at the Norco prison.
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By the time Santos Ruiz heard from the prison doctor last July, his father had been at St. Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco for two weeks and on a ventilator.
“We don’t think he’s going to make it,” he recalled her saying.
This was the first time Ruiz had heard that his father, a 61-year-old inmate at San Quentin State Prison, even had the virus.
“It wasn’t right,” Ruiz said. “They waited to a point where a person can’t talk, a person can’t communicate with his family that loved him.”
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As the pandemic has ravaged California prisons, some families say that officials have failed to inform them when their loved ones have been hospitalized with the virus receiving a call only when it might already be too late to say their goodbyes, act as surrogate decision-makers or provide critical emotional support.