Good night. I’m Karen Kaplan and it’s Tuesday, February 7. Here’s the latest news on what’s happening with the coronavirus in California and beyond.
After 3 long years, here are the words I was waiting for: The days of physical emergency are numbered.
As far as the federal government is concerned, the physical emergency that began on January 27, 2020 will end on May 11. That’s in 93 days.
In California, the COVID-19 state of emergency will end on February 28. There are 3 weeks left.
If you lose patience with the pandemic, head to Los Angeles. On Wednesday, the city’s emergency declaration has ended (albeit one for L. A. County). remains in force).
Of course, none of this means the coronavirus is gone. Nationwide, at least 280,911 new infections were reported in the past week and 3,452 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Signing a piece of paper, this total mess would be gone.
It is the epidemic that is ending, however, the public fitness emergencies it has generated. To sense the difference, let’s take a look at what it will replace when those emergencies are over.
COVID-19 vaccines and treatments: They will be available for free, for a while.
“On May 12, you can walk into a pharmacy and get your bivalent vaccine. Free,” Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19 response coordinator, explained in a Twitter thread. “On May 12, if you get COVID, you can get your Paxlovid. Free. “
But in the summer or early fall, this will no longer be the case. Health care providers will get COVID-19 vaccines and drugs the same way they download other pharmaceuticals. Most people with fitness insurance will be able to receive reminders out of pocket. , and Jha promised that Paxlovid would be “accessible and affordable. “
The California Health and Human Services Agency has been more particular about what to expect.
State residents with personal health insurance or Medi-Cal “can access COVID-19 vaccines, tests and remedies from any duly authorized provider without any out-of-pocket costs” through Nov. 11, the firm said. After this date, COVID-19 care will continue to be available at no charge to those seeking care from a network provider. If they leave your network, they may have to pay.
Coronavirus testing: State-run COVID-19 testing sites will be harder to find. The Ministry of Public Health will begin closing “underutilized” testing sites.
“These sites were a component of the state’s COVID-19 testing strategy and response,” the decomponent said. “A definitive plan is being prepared to demobilize the remaining sites. “
Barbara Ferrer, Los Angeles County’s director of public fitness, said county-run testing sites will remain open as long as there is enough convocation for them. There will be adjustments to the way things are paid for, but they haven’t been worked out yet, she said.
Home’s checks will still be available, but you may want to start paying them. The rule requiring fitness insurers to reimburse up to 8 checks per consumer per month will disappear when the public fitness emergency ends. But if you live in California and have a regulated insurance plan through the State Department of Managed Care, you can still receive a refund of up to $12 per check up to 8 checks per covered user per month, according to a law passed in 2021.
Emergency Use Authorizations: Will expire at the end of the federal public fitness emergency. After that, vaccines, antivirals, devices, and other remedies invented to combat COVID-19 will only be available if they have obtained full approval from the U. S. Food Department. The U. S. Department of Health and Drug Administration (Drug Administration).
At the moment, it’s a short list. Remdesivir, the first antiviral developed in particular for COVID-19, is included along with two medications for hospitalized adults requiring supplemental oxygen, mechanical ventilation, or ECMO (tocilizumab and baricitinib). That’s right.
The FDA is reviewing Pfizer’s application to grant full approval to Paxlovid.
The original edition of Comirnaty, the COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech, is fully FDA-approved as the number one immunization series for other people 12 years of age and older. It is governed by emergency use authorizations, as are the updated formulas that target the Omison variant.
The scenario is similar for Spikevax, the original edition of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine. It is fully approved as a number one two-dose series for ages 18 and older. Every other use of this vaccine and its new bivalent sibling is becoming imaginable across the U. S.
Novavax and Johnson COVID-19 Vaccines
Medicaid enrollment: Millions of others enrolled in the fitness insurance program for disabled and low-income Americans are expected to lose coverage.
One of the nation’s first primary pandemic response laws injected more budget into state Medicaid programs. States that accepted the money were unable to remove other people from their list while the health emergency was in effect. But now they can.
People who moved to a new state during the pandemic or saw their source of income exceed the threshold would likely want to find more expensive insurance. Some states plan to force all Medicaid recipients to re-enroll; People who don’t deal with the paperwork mess on time will lose their coverage.
Researchers at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute estimate that at least 6. 7 million young people are at risk of being removed from Medicaid lists in the first year after the physical emergency ends.
Emergency logistics: The city of Los Angeles has already disabled its emergency operations center, although it may temporarily reactivate if the coronavirus situation worsens.
Ending the state’s fitness emergency will mean the legal basis for dozens of COVID-related executive orders issued through Gov. Gavin Newsom (many of them have already been canceled). Newsom hopes to make two of his executive orders permanent by codifying them into law: one would allow nurses to continue ordering COVID-19 medications for patients, and the other would allow lab staff to conduct coronavirus testing full-time.
What I probably wouldn’t change: The coronavirus will still be here. It will continue to make other people sick and some will die.
“States of emergency: A lot of it is about how to get things done faster, how to lose money faster, but it has nothing to do with what the virus is doing because it’s still circulating,” Dr. Brown said. Sara Cody. . , Santa Clara County Director of Public Health and Health Officer.
“The pandemic is not over,” he added. We can’t claim a day when it’s over, and as you can see, it has a very, very long tail. We don’t know when it’s going to end. “
Case and in California at 4:30 p. m. Tuesday:
Track California’s coronavirus and vaccination efforts, adding the latest numbers and their breakdown, with our charts.
Has the pandemic turned Chinese adults into idlers?
In Chu Fei’s case, this led her to think about her priorities again. The former student of Peking University and Stanford abandoned her not easy task in a giant technology company, sold the maximum of her things and moved to a picturesque town about 800 miles from her old home. in Beijing.
He now spends his days writing, creating videos, and running an ecommerce business. The leisurely speed is a cry of the 12-hour workdays he left in the big city.
“I think COVID gave me a chance to reflect on myself,” Chu told my colleague Stephanie Yang.
Their relentless way of life had taken its toll even before the pandemic led to costly closures and the county’s economy stagnated. But the worse things got, the less motivated she became. He was 30 years old when he wanted to see something different.
“I felt like my plan wasn’t going to work anymore,” he said.
The number of freelancers, part-time staff and other flexible staff in China nearly tripled in 2021, ending the year at two hundred million, according to the country’s National Bureau of Statistics. And others need to sign up: A survey from Last year, staff found that 73% of them were looking for virtual nomads.
Experts say it’s a practical reaction to China’s economic slowdown. Tech corporations once encouraged a work ethic known as “ninenine6” (nine in the morning to nine at night, six days a week), but widespread layoffs and reduced social mobility have made this speed exhausting. much less attractive.
“It’s necessarily an economic problem,” said Terence Chong, an economics professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “Young people are hopeless, housing costs are so high that they simply restrict their work. “
And when they work, they do so on their own terms, with more flexibility in their schedules and workplaces.
Young people are “experimenting with other lifestyles,” said Zhan Yang, a cultural anthropologist at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. “It’s like a little social experiment in China. “
This way of thinking is precisely approved through the Communist Party, which would prefer to see young Chinese adults identify their careers, get married, buy a space and have children.
“Work is the most glorious, our satisfied lives are created through work,” President Xi Jinping said in June on a stopover at a university in Sichuan province.
If you ask Chu, she will tell you that she is satisfied with the unconventional life she has created. His new excavations are in a villa that before the pandemic was a hotel. The neighbors of the village that continues to grow vegetables and tea, and she marvels that the afternoon air smells good.
Between his savings and the money he earns from his entrepreneurial activities, Chu believes he can live like this for a few years while developing a long-term plan. One thing she’s sure of: she’ll go back to the way Beijing lived.
“There’s a kind of feeling, like, what have I been doing all these years?I lost so much time,” he said. I can say I’ve been to smart universities and worked in big companies, but it’s not something you need to write on your tombstone, you know?
Discover advances in vaccination in California with our tracker.
California’s public fitness emergency is in place for 3 weeks, but some of the state’s anti-COVID policies are already crumbling.
Health officials in Sacramento said last week that they had quietly abandoned the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for K-12 students. The policy update was so stealthy that California Department of Public Health officials probably didn’t even say when the decision was made.
“The CRPD is lately exploring the progression of emergency regulations to load COVID-19 vaccines on the list of required school vaccines,” the branch said in a statement.
The policy was considered revolutionary when Newsom announced it in October 2021. The governor projected that when students of all ages had COVID-19 vaccines, the mandate would apply to 6. 7 million young people attending public or private schools. The policy initially takes effect on July 1, 2022, but with a one-year delay so the FDA has time to grant full approval for pediatric vaccine doses.
Given that the policy has been on hold for months, the resolution to abandon it will have little practical effect. Moreover, the order would have been accompanied by such a large loophole, an exemption from a lenient non-public conviction, that it would have been misleading. to enforce. Only the state legislature may have closed that loophole, however, a bill was withdrawn to do so last year.
The city of Los Angeles is also relaxing a vaccination mandate, this one for city employees. The mandate is still in effect, however, thousands of employees who have implemented medical or medical exemptions will approve them, no questions asked.
The replacement was detailed in a memo from Dana Brown, general manager of the city department’s workforce. It applies to approximately 4,900 waiver requests submitted before January 31. Applications submitted after that date will be reviewed “on an individual basis and processed in accordance with vaccine exemption procedures,” according to the memo. This was the popular one that in the past implemented all exemption applications, allowing the municipality make sure they are valid.
To give you a concept of the effect of this change, this: Only nine of the 335 waiver programs submitted through Los Angeles Fire Department employees were granted before the policy was modified. (Firefighters and police challenged the vaccine order in court but lost it. )
The policy update was approved in late January by a four-member city council committee plus Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. The full board, which approved the vaccine mandate in 2021, had no say.
Another flashback came with the kind of permission from a federal ruling in California that temporarily blocked enforcement of a moot law meant to prevent doctors from providing patients with false data about COVID-19.
The law, known as AB 2098, is in effect for a few weeks but has already been the subject of legal challenges. Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit that sells erroneous fitness data founded by vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , is among the plaintiffs suing to block the law. The same goes for a Newport Beach doctor who promoted the discredited COVID-19 remedies ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
AB 2098 is also challenged by some pro-vaccine doctors, such as the ACLU of Northern California.
“We can all agree that if doctors intentionally spread incorrect information about COVID, that’s a problem,” said Hannah Kieschnick, an attorney with the civil liberties organization. But he said AB 2098 “is unconstitutional, unnecessary and has the danger of serious accidental consequences. “
The law empowers the Medical Board of California to sanction doctors who disseminate false data about COVID-19 on the grounds that it amounts to “unprofessional conduct. “Its original edition gave express examples of the kind of conduct that would be described as unprofessional, but the latest edition is vague. This makes it difficult for doctors to know what they can say without breaking the law, wrote U. S. District Court Judge William Shubb. U. S. District for the Eastern District of California by granting the initial court order.
Dr. Donaldo M. Hernandez, president of the California Medical Association, said he was “disappointed” by the decision.
“AB 2098 only applies when a physician deliberately misleads a patient in their care or deviates from proper popular care,” Hernandez said in a statement. “This does not stifle legitimate and proper clinical and medical debate. We cannot allow the toxicity of the moment blinds us to the ethical and ethical obligations that doctors have to their patients. “
Meanwhile, the CDC’s most recent COVID-19 community map shows signs of regression in California.
Last week, the two counties along the Mexican border, San Diego and Imperial, were in the “average” category. They were joined this week by Merced, Stanislaus, Tuolumne and Mariposa counties in the central component of the state, as well as Placer, El Dorado, Sacramento, Yolo, Solano, Napa and Lake counties to the north.
Los Angeles County remains in the “weak” category. The number of coronavirus cases here has decreased by 10% week over week, while deaths have decreased by 16%. Orange, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino counties also maintained their “low” status. , although the number of cases is higher throughout San Bernardino, according to the CDC.
And finally, the California Department of Health Care Services’ knowledge that prescriptions for life-saving hepatitis C drugs were drastically reduced after the pandemic began.
Hepatitis C is a liver infection that can cause liver cancer, cirrhosis, and even death. It can be cured by taking antiviral drugs for a few months, and the state has worked to make it less difficult for patients to get the pills through Medi-Cal. , the state’s Medicaid program.
Despite this, the number of other people receiving treatment dropped by 40% statewide between 2018-19, the last full fiscal year before the pandemic, and 2020-21. It held steady the following year before showing signs of improvement in the current fiscal year. .
In Los Angeles County, prescriptions for hepatitis C drugs dropped nearly 58 percent between 2019 and 2021, according to research by researchers at USC and the county Department of Public Health. well below pre-pandemic levels.
“There are now many other people in the last 3 years of the pandemic who have dropped out of treatment, and no one is treating them,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, an infectious disease expert at USC who worked on the study. .
Today’s query comes from readers who need to know: When do I get my bivalent reminder for now?
Several readers have asked this and I would like to congratulate them for being among the 15. 7% of Americans who gained a first dose of the new booster. Real-world knowledge shows that other people who won the vaccine targeting Omicron were less likely to contract COVID-19 and less likely to be hospitalized if they get sick.
These images are available in September, so for some people, it’s been five months since they rolled up their sleeves. In the past, the FDA and CDC have treated Americans on certain high-risk equipment because of age or another physical condition. disorders after that time. But at this time, there is no express plan to offer a momentary dose of the bivalent booster.
The FDA recently proposed offering a COVID-19 vaccine that adjusts to fit the most prevalent edition (or editions) of the coronavirus. Most Americans will want to spice up once a year, which means it will be some time before people who are already animated get another dose.
Some people, such as adults with weakened immune systems and very young children, may benefit from more common boostering. Experts are largely tracking knowledge about COVID-19 hospitalization and other measures to determine who might fall into this category and when they deserve more shots. be offered. We don’t know how soon they’ll realize this, but we promise to let you know when they do.
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.
This week’s photo is a little different from our previous rate. It’s a graph that highlights an unknown trend from the pandemic: More and more Californians are choosing to die at home than in a hospital or nursing home.
The blue line represents other people who died in California, and its slope obviously shows that the percentage of deaths recorded in homes has increased since the early 2000s. This long-term trend accelerated after the coronavirus hit the scene, our friends report. in KHN.
Initially, this would possibly have been attributed to the worry of going to hospitals full of COVID-19 patients. Another thing, the strict ban on visiting relatives in nursing homes, which led some families to bring their loved ones home.
But the rise in deaths at home lasted longer than the lockdown era and continued long after COVID-19 vaccines made others less afraid of the virus. Nearly 40 percent of Californians who died between January and October 2022 did so at home, compared to 36 percent for all of 2019. That’s an 11% increase. (Available knowledge suggests that the trend has been similar across the country, to a lesser extent. )
People who provide end-of-life care say they’re not surprised to see more people embrace the concept of spending their final days in a familiar and welcoming environment.
“Every time I ask, Array, I need to be in the hospital” or “I need to be in a qualified nursing facility,” said John Tastad, who coordinates the early care plan program at Sharp HealthCare in San Diego. “All of them say, ‘I need to be home. ‘”
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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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