COVID-19

With the Bay Area currently showing the highest Covid-19 infection rates in California, health officers are reminding people of the importance of safety precautions such as continued masking indoors and vaccine boosters. The current wave of infections is fueled by the highly contagious Omicron subvariants,...

Four out of Santa Clara's five mass vaccination sites are closing in the next few weeks, but it is not a bad thing, county health experts said.  With nearly 80 percent of the eligible county residents vaccinated, temporary emergency sites are no longer needed.  Remaining vaccine...

Santa Clara County will close its mass Covid-19 vaccination and testing sites by the end of the month as they are no longer essential to the county’s pandemic response, officials said Feb. 1.  While county health officials emphasized that the pandemic is not over and...

Starting next week, Caltrain will offer free train rides to and from COVID-19 vaccination sites for people living or working in San Francisco, Santa Clara or San Mateo counties. The agency said that fare payment to vaccination sites will not be required until further notice,...

A group of employees at a Gilroy McDonald’s filed complaints to the county and state June 15, alleging that management endangered workers by not immediately notifying them of a staff member who tested positive of Covid-19. The owner/operator, meanwhile, said the restaurant took swift action...

With hospitals stretching beyond capacity and the number of people dying from Covid-19 continuing to rise, Santa Clara County officials described a “ray of hope” Dec. 15 when the first shipment of a vaccine arrived. The county received its first 5,850 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech...

Bay Area Community Health will host a free Covid-19 testing clinic on Thursday, March 31 from 10am to 3pm at Arteaga’s Food Center, 6906 Automall Parkway in Gilroy.  Masks are required at the event. The first 100 people to be tested will receive a free...

By Patricia Cohen, @nytimes New claims for unemployment fell last week, the government reported Thursday, the latest sign that the labor market’s recovery, however slow and unsteady, is continuing. “The numbers look encouraging on the face of it,” said Gregory Daco, chief U.S. economist at Oxford...

Health officials in seven Bay Area counties and the city of Berkeley issued a new indoor mask mandate Monday as the region faces a wave of new Covid-19 cases due to the more infectious delta variant and the remaining swath of unvaccinated residents. The mandate...

Deaths from fentanyl, a powerful opioid drug, are drastically on the rise in Santa Clara County this year, and public health officials think stress and anxiety resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic might be contributing to the increase.