$1.2 billion to bolster testing, including expanding clinic hours and capacity and sending rapid tests to local health departments and schools. (However, as of Friday, 17 of 58 counties still had not received rapid tests that Newsom on Dec. 22 promised would be made available to California’s 6 million public school students before they returned to campus from winter break.) $614 million to boost staffing at vaccination sites and health care facilities, which are so short on workers that the California Department of Public Health is evaluating whether to order hospitals to suspend elective surgeries in cases in which patients wouldn’t be immediately harmed, CalMatters’ Barbara Feder Ostrov reports .$583 million to continue vaccine education campaigns, including “combating misinformation” in partnership with 250 ethnic media outlets. $200 million to increase staffing and tech capacity at state emergency response and public health agencies. $110 million to expand contact tracing and offer vaccines, testing, and isolation and quarantine services to migrants at the Mexico border.
Newsom deployed more than 200 members of the California National Guard to increase capacity at 50 state-funded COVID testing sites, with another deployment scheduled this week. He signed an executive order that generally prohibits sellers from raising prices on COVID at-home test kits by more than 10%. (Meanwhile, counties from San Francisco to San Diego are warning about a proliferation in fake COVID testing sites.) The state Department of Public Health issued controversial guidance allowing asymptomatic COVID-positive or exposed workers at hospitals and skilled nursing facilities to immediately return to work without isolation or additional testing — another indication of critically low staffing levels. Health care workers immediately decried the move .
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Less than 25% of students took state standardized tests in 2021 — though that’s an improvement from 2020, when the tests were cancelled altogether. Of the students who participated, just 49% met or exceeded English standards, a number that dropped to 34% in math. (In 2019, about 51% of students met English standards and 40% met math standards.) Graduation rates decreased to 83.6% from 84.2% the previous year — and Black students suffered the largest drop, falling more than 4 percentage points to 72.5%. Meanwhile, chronic absenteeism rose from 12% to 14%. The data also suggest that younger students struggled with remote learning much more than older students. Finally, experts say the data may underestimate learning loss among vulnerable populations, since students who were chronically absent or lacked stable internet access likely didn’t take standardized tests.
O’Donnell :It’s “gonna have an impact on policy. People are probably going to be more cautious of the big bills that seek to do Herculean changes.”
Gonzalez :“Maybe an individual fast food franchisee or restaurant says, ‘You know what, I’d rather have a conversation with my workers in my workplace, allow them if they so want to unionize, and provide them not what these people at the state level are bargaining for but what the workers in my workplace actually want.’ That would be a great solution.”
