Centers For Disease Control And Prevention

Another month, another COVID surge. As the highly contagious omicron subvariant BA.5 spreads across California and the country — pushing the Golden State’s seven-day test positivity rate to 16.7% as of Thursday — all levels of government seem to be sending mixed messages about how we should respond. Case in point: U.S. Health and Human […]

Gaps in COVID vaccination rates among the state’s Medi-Cal population persist. Five Medi-Cal plans still have vaccination rates under 50%.

A Democratic bill would no longer treat stillbirths as “unattended deaths,” investigated by coroners. But anti-abortion activists fear the change would legalize “infanticide” after babies are born.

The CDC said half of Californians live in high-risk counties. But the agency apparently relied on outdated numbers of COVID infections and patients. Newer data indicates only 19 counties are in the CDC’s riskiest category, where universal masking is advised.

As concern over the omicron variant mounts in California — with the state’s second case confirmed Thursday in Los Angeles County — another public health crisis is lurking in plain sight: the drug epidemic. A jaw-dropping report released Wednesday by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy found that nearly 1,500 people, the vast […]

Experts hope continued masking will reduce this season’s dual threat of COVID and flu.

A new strain of the coronavirus has been found in California. But no need to worry, experts say, since lambda is rarely detected, and delta dominates.

California has a history of treating public water as a commodity and entrusting it to corporate interests that fail to manage it responsibly. Its congressional delegation should co-sponsor the federal Water Act that would change this.

In the rural towns around Visalia, today’s dry spell is indistinguishable from the last one or the next one. Drought is a perpetual plight in the region, which is a hotspot for dry wells.

June 15 will be a big day for California. That’s when the state will ease its mask mandate to allow fully vaccinated people to forgo face coverings in most places, Dr. Mark Ghaly, the state’s health and human services secretary, said Monday. It’s also when California will lift capacity limits on businesses, permitting the state […]