Good night. I’m Karen Kaplan and it’s Tuesday, March 7. Here’s the latest news on what’s happening with the coronavirus in California and beyond.
No one needs to live in a state of emergency. But when the time runs out for the federal government’s COVID-19 emergency declarations in about two months, some things are very likely to get worse.
Unfortunately, these types of disorders do not affect all Americans equally. While most of us celebrate a fuller return to normal life, others in vulnerable communities will bear most of the dangers inherent in fewer precautions.
Perhaps that seems evident now. It’s no secret that pandemics exacerbate disparities in fitness. Those who only had a general concept before the coronavirus arrived have noticed it with their own eyes for more than 3 years.
For most of that time, other people of color (excluding Asian Americans) contracted COVID-19 at higher rates than their white peers, according to national knowledge from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The picture is largely the same for COVID-19 deaths until vaccines became available and helped guide the gambling field. In California, Latino and black citizens account for a disproportionately high percentage of COVID-19 deaths.
A report last summer through the Kaiser Family Foundation found that, compared to white Americans, the threat of contracting the coronavirus is about 1. 5 times greater for Latinos, American Indians and Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders. Worse, the threat of dying from COVID-19 is twice as high for those team members and for black Americans as for their white counterparts. ethnic teams.
The federal government has helped reduce some of those disparities by making it less difficult for all Americans to access COVID-19 vaccines, tests, and remedies at little or no cost. It also expanded access to overall physical care by providing states with more cash to fund their Medicaid systems for disabled and low-income Americans. In return, states that accepted the money were largely prevented from knocking someone down, a policy that expanded fitness policy to about 20 million more Americans, according to KFF.
But those protections will end on March 31. In April, states will again cancel the registration of Medicaid patients. The U. S. Department of Health and Human ServicesIt predicts that, as a result, about 15 million more people, totaling 5. 3 million young people, will lose their health insurance. .
Of those, 6. 8 million other people will be eligible for Medicare but will lose their policy anyway because they will struggle to complete mandatory documents on time or face other administrative hurdles. and black Americans will account for another 15 percent, according to HHS.
People who lose their fitness policy are less likely to get preventive care and are more likely to seek care in crowded hospital emergency rooms, if they pass somewhere. People with diabetes, disease at the center, or other chronic conditions will have a harder time managing them — and if they see a doctor, they may end up with a bill they can’t pay.
They will also have to start paying for COVID-19 care. Medicines, vaccines and tests might be loose for a while, but once government stocks run out, they will be on their own. These diseases will have a disproportionate impact on undocumented immigrants, as 46% of them are uninsured, according to the KFF.
“This is a tragedy in itself and has the ability to expand racial disparities in COVID-related fitness,” said Wendy Netter Epstein, a professor at DePaul University School of Law, and Daniel Goldberg, a specialist in public fitness ethics at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus. They argue in our opinion pages.
But there are things states can do to counter those inequalities, write Netter Epstein and Goldberg.
For starters, states can make it less difficult for your Medicare policy if they qualify. California, for example, has introduced an effort to tell the state’s 15. 4 million Medi-Cal beneficiaries that they will want to renew their enrollment and inspire them to do so. . The crusade will triumph in other towns in 19 languages. (If you have Medi-Cal, you can sign up for updates on the www. KeepMediCalCoverage. org re-enrollment procedure. )
Arkansas, on the other hand, aims to boost training in some of the time. It’s not exactly conducive to preventing other people from falling into the cracks, fitness policy experts say. For Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, that turns out to be the purpose. Its purpose is to “move other people from government dependency to a life of prosperity,” his spokesperson told Politico.
States can also help citizens who lose Medicaid policy find cheap (or free) policies in the Affordable Care Act market, write Netter Epstein and Goldberg. If Rhode Islanders lose their Medicaid eligibility, the state will enroll them in a new plan. In Maryland, navigators are needed to help citizens find personal insurance they can afford.
A state committed to reducing disparities in fitness will want to look beyond things, Epstein and Goldberg add. Ensuring paid leave for poor fitness, providing food assistance, and implementing universal basic income needs would help counter inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic.
“Emerging from the declared emergency does not mean we deserve the burden of COVID to fall disproportionately on vulnerable communities,” the two men write. now. “
Case and death in California at five o’clock in the afternoon. Tuesday:
Track California’s coronavirus and vaccination efforts, adding the latest numbers and their breakdown, with our charts.
While we’re talking about tactics to prevent diminishing fitness disparities, let’s take a look at what already exists with a program designed to decrease food insecurity.
This month, nearly five million low-income Californians will see a drastic reduction in the amount of government assistance they get to buy food. about $200 consistent with the month.
Delia Priscilla Ortega Darden is one of those people. The 64-year-old suffers from sclerosis and other physical disorders that prevent her from working. So he lives in his car and relies on systems like CalFresh, the state version of the federal program once known as food stamps.
Ortega Darden credits CalFresh for maintaining its new culmination and vegetables. Healthy products have helped her cope with muscle cramps that expand in her legs. “My overall fitness has improved because of this,” he told my colleague Mackenzie Mays.
But soon, you’ll get $95 less a month to spend on groceries. To stretch his budget, he said he will have to allocate more of his cash to reasonable pieces like bologna and rely on food banks to fill the nutritional gap.
This is another disadvantage of ending the various pandemic states of emergency. Congress began pumping more money into the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, in March 2020 to help Americans cope with the economic turmoil caused by the pandemic. Now that the country looks set to return to “normal,” Congress has that its budget for SNAP benefits can also return to normal.
The timing can hardly be worse. The burden of living is increasing, forcing others to spend more on gas, housing and energy expenses, as well as food. to devote to new ongoing expenses.
Some state legislators have other ideas. Sen. Caroline Menjivar (D-Panorama City) introduced a bill that would raise CalFresh’s monthly minimum and gain advantages from $23 to $50. He would charge the state more than a portion of a dollar bill a month, but Menjivar said the bill would pay itself. avoiding more costly problems, such as homelessness.
Mitigating the lack of food confidence “can save you a lot of other things. It’s about making sure our most vulnerable families don’t fall into poverty anymore,” he said.
Officials at the California Department of Human Services saw this crisis coming and warned about it for months. However, without more funding, they were hopeful that food banks would take over.
It’s unlikely, said Stacia Hill Levenfeld, executive director of the California Association of Food Banks. CalFresh benefit relief is only part of the problem. Combined, they make up a 30 percent loss to the food safety net here, Hill Levenfeld said.
“There’s no way food banks can fill the void,” he told Mays.
Discover advances in vaccination in California with our tracker.
Now that California’s state of emergency is over, fitness officials have taken a fresh look at its COVID-19 prevention policies and some adjustments were needed.
For starters, they relax their recommendation on how temporarily other people infected with the coronavirus can end their isolation periods. Currently, the state advises others to let five days pass after their first symptoms of COVID-19 appear or after testing positive for an infection, and then get checked back under control. If the result is negative, they can come out of isolation as long as they wear a mask in public places until day 10. If the effects of the test remain positive, they deserve to continue looking until day 10, when they can sign up for the corporate so that they have not had a fever for at least a day and their other symptoms have improved.
As of Monday, this regime will be greatly simplified. As long as a user has gone a full day without a fever and their other symptoms subside, they can end their isolation on day five without needing to check first, depending on the state. However, if a wearer wishes to avoid wearing a mask in public before day 10, they will need to present negative checks for two consecutive days.
This is just one of many changes. On April 3, the California Department of Public Health will eliminate its COVID-19 vaccination requirement for health care professionals. This applies to other people in hospitals, clinics, long-term care facilities and other classic medical settings, as well as paintings in detention centers and correctional services. Still, the state noted that “most physical care painters” would still be vaccinated through federal vaccination rules.
In addition, indoor mask use will be optional in fitness centers, correctional facilities, emergency shelters, and other high-risk facilities.
Dr. Tomas Aragon, California’s director of public health, thanked Californians for the sacrifices they’ve made and said it’s time to reap the fruits of their patience, perseverance and hard work.
“We have reached a point where we can update some of COVID-19 to continue balancing prevention and life adjustment with COVID-19,” he said in a statement.
Californians have done a pretty smart job to keep their coronavirus going. The CDC reports that California’s maximum has a low point of COVID-19 community. The counties in the “average” category are the Merced, Mariposa, Tuolumne and Stanislaus organization in the central component of the state and seven contiguous counties further north (Lake, Napa, Yolo, Solano, Sacramento, Placer and El Dorado).
In Washington, D. C. , Biden’s tenure is more than $1. 6 billion to help prosecute alleged fraudsters who have appropriated the federal government’s large COVID-19 pandemic relief programs.
Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, signed nearly $6 trillion in relief measures for individuals, businesses and state and local governments. Scammers appropriated this, using false identities to claim unemployment benefits and other benefits. The U. S. Department of Labor The U. S. government said $164 billion was paid improperly.
Biden’s request includes $600 million to develop the Justice Department’s anti-fraud “strike forces” from 3 to at least 13. At least $300 million more would allow inspector general’s offices to hire more investigators. Another investment would improve government systems to save their identity. theft and IdentityTheft. gov, a site run by the Federal Trade Commission that aims to help victims.
Administration officials have stated that Congress has been reluctant to approve pandemic-related spending in recent months, but they hope that their budget will be considered an investment. Last year, the U. S. Secret Service was in the U. S. Secret Service. Business Administration.
“A dollar spent here will go to taxpayers, or save at least $10,” said Gene Sperling, coordinator of the White House bailout.
Speaking of large sums of money, a recent survey found that the already huge pay gap between CEOs and their workers has widened further because of the pandemic.
The Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, analyzed the salaries of three hundred corporations that had the lowest median wages in 2020. The gap between those salaries and cash earned through senior executives widened in 2021. On average, the ratio of executive reimbursement to employee pay fell from 604 to 1 in 2020 to 670 to 1 in 2021. In 49 corporations, CEOs earned 1,000 times more cash than their typical employee.
IPS also decided that the average salary of average staff increased from $20,412 in 2020 to $23,968 in 2021. During the same period, the average CEO salary increased from $8. 1 million to $10. 6 million.
My colleague Michael Hiltzik explained that some of this inequity was made conceivable through corporate forums choosing to let executives get away with the terrible currency functionality of the worst days of the pandemic. Chipotle’s board of directors, for example, ignored the restaurant’s track record in the last 3 months of 2020, earning CEO Brian Niccol $38 million. If the 12 months had been counted, he would have made $14. 8 million, less than half.
“If a company has a smart year, it all depends on the control team and the CEO who runs it,” Rosanna Landis Weaver, leader of a new report on toppaid business leaders, told Hiltzik. “When they’re not doing well, it’s ‘external factors. ‘”
And finally, Pfizer and BioNTech petitioned the U. S. Food and Drug Administration for the U. S. Food and Drug Administration. The U. S. Food and Drug Administration authorized a booster dose of its updated COVID-19 vaccine for younger Americans. Currently, children older than 6 months to four years can get the Omicron-targeted vaccine as the last vaccine in the number one series of three vaccines. If the FDA agrees, a fourth vaccine would be distributed to those who finished the initial series, some of whom did so before the new formulas were available.
Today’s comes from readers who need to know: the other people of Los Angeles County. Will they still have to wear masks in fitness services once the county fitness emergency is over?
Yes, but only for a few days. And not for the explanation of why you think.
The mask mandate for health care services comes from the California Department of Public Health, not Los Angeles County. So it’s up to state officials when it’s safe to reverse this rule. And the answer they found was April 3.
As mentioned above, the CRPD announced Friday that it will end its Public Health Officer Order for indoor mask wearing in hospitals, urgent care clinics, doctors’ offices, retirement homes, and other long-term care services so masks are no longer required. The adjustments will take effect 3 days after Los Angeles County’s COVID-19 emergency declaration ends. March 31.
There is no connection between the two dates. There is also no link between April 3 and February 28, the last day of California’s state of emergency. In fact, the CRPD can make whatever adjustments it wants to its public suitability orders, and the state’s emergency (or non-emergency) prestige has nothing to do with it. do with it
That said, giving the public a month’s notice of the next update to mask regulations will give public fitness and medical services departments time to craft new policies for a warrantless future, state officials said.
The fitness branch added that its recommendation on wearing masks for Americans hasn’t changed. wearing a mask in crowded enclosed public places,” the CRPD says. Everyone else “can wear a mask based on their non-public preferences, based on their own non-public risk point. “
State fitness officials also recommend wearing a mask in public if you have symptoms of respiratory illness or if you’ve been exposed to someone who tested positive for coronavirus infection in the past 10 days. If you are on an airplane, bus, or other indoor public transportation, mask wearing will also be considered.
The CRPD adds that if you wear a mask, “a surgical mask or higher-level respirators (e. g. , N95, KN95, KF94) with compatibility is strongly recommended. “
We need to hear from you. Please email us your coronavirus inquiries and we will do our best to answer them. Wondering if your inquiry has already been answered? Check out our archives here.
A step is coming that, in a way, is more than the termination of so many national and local emergency declarations.
On Friday, Johns Hopkins University’s acclaimed COVID-19 dashboard will present its latest coronavirus knowledge update from around the world.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of the dashboard, especially in the early days of the outbreak, when reliable data is hard to come by. In fact, it was this knowledge gap that led infectious disease modeler Lauren Gardner to recommend her graduate student Ensheng Dong create a map. to track the spread of the virus. Dong, who was worried about his relatives in China’s Shanxi province, created the online homepage in one day.
The JHU dashboard was up and running long before agencies like the CDC and the World Health Organization built their own trackers. Gardner said he thought the knowledge gathered and shared through his team would be valuable, “but I guess I didn’t expect to be the only source. “
The COVID-19 dashboard has been viewed more than 2500 million times since it was launched in January 2020, according to Johns Hopkins. infections with home tests. These trends, coupled with the fact that the CDC has created its own comprehensive COVID knowledge tracking tool, persuaded Johns Hopkins that it was time to pull out its dashboard.
All uncooked knowledge collected between January 22, 2020 and March 10, 2023 will be publicly available.
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Karen Kaplan is scientific and medical editor at the Los Angeles Times. Before joining the clinical group, he worked in the Business section. He graduated from MIT and Columbia University.
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