Cases:
In Pasadena 39 new cases were reported on Friday, February 17th and no fatalities. In the past two years, Pasadena has experienced 39,493 cases and 442 fatalities due to COVIC-19.
In Los Angeles County reported 1096 new COVID cases on February 17th and 17 fatalities. Los Angeles Country has experienced 35,545 fatalities and 3,694,317 cases since the beginning of the pandemic.
From PasadenaNOW: Gov. Gavin Newsom says California’s COVID-19 state of emergency will end on Feb. 28, just four days shy of three years since he issued the first of countless orders he said were necessary to cope with the pandemic.
“Throughout the pandemic, we’ve been guided by the science and data – moving quickly and strategically to save lives,” Newsom said in October announcing the February end date. “The state of emergency was an effective and necessary tool that we utilized to protect our state, and we wouldn’t have gotten to this point without it.”
The efficacy of Newsom’s pandemic orders will be debated for years, particularly the shutdowns of schools and businesses and the billions of dollars in no-bid contracts his administration issued.
What cannot be debated, however, is that their impacts on millions of Californians will linger for years, decades or perhaps even generations.
Nearly 3 million Californians lost their jobs due to the shutdown orders. While the state has, on paper, recovered all of the jobs it lost, countless small businesses that shut their doors have not reopened.
With work-at-home the growing norm, restaurants and other businesses dependent on concentrated employment were clobbered. The downtowns of the state’s larger cities – including the state capital, Sacramento – were hollowed out and have not, in the main, recovered.
California’s stark divide between haves and have-nots grew wider. Upper-income Californians could do their jobs from home but lower-income service workers simply lost their jobs. Some qualified for unemployment insurance, but a managerial meltdown at the state Employment Development Department delayed, sometimes for months, benefits for legitimate claimants while EDD handed out billions of dollars to fraudsters.
School shutdowns, and the fitful efforts to continue instruction via the internet, had a devastating effect on students, especially those from poor families which lacked technology and whose parents could not work from home. The “achievement gap” that has long plagued California’s public school system widened even further, recent research has found.
Several new studies add even more evidence that the steps taken by the state to combat COVID-19 will have long-term negative impacts.
An analysis by The Associated Press, Stanford University’s Big Local News project and Stanford education professor Thomas Dee determined that 234,000 students in 21 states vanished from public school enrollment rolls during the pandemic. More than half of them were in California.
Overall, in those states, enrollment dropped by about 700,000 students, but most of the decline could be explained by enrollments in private schools, movements to other states or shifts to at-home instruction. Of the remaining 234,000 absences for which there was no explanation, researchers said, 152,000 were in California.
The Public Policy Institute of California crunched the numbers and discovered that not only did COVID-19 kill about 100,000 Californians but that the state’s life expectancy, which had been tied for the nation’s highest with Hawaii at 80.9 years, has dropped by two years – the first such decline since World War II.
PPIC found that the higher death rate has disproportionately affected non-white Californians, particularly Latino and Black residents. “Between 2019 and 2021, the death rate (deaths per 1,000 residents) increased 51% among Latinos, 31% among Blacks, 26% among Asian-Americans, and 17% among whites,” the PPIC reported.
Finally, a new study UCLA Center for Health Policy Research found that Newsom’s stay-at-home orders, affecting businesses, child care centers and school, created financial hardships that led to psychological distress and a sharp increase in turmoil and conflict, including domestic violence.
Some COVID-19 victims are experiencing long COVID, with lasting debilitative effects. California suffers from lingering effects as well.
From the LA Times: COVID outlook positive despite XBB.1.5 By Luke Money (Times staff writer Sean Greene contributed to this report.) The total number of coronavirus cases reported in California has topped 12 million. That milestone — reached last week, according to data compiled by The Times — comes as California is seeing increased circulation of the Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5, which has been described as perhaps the most infectious strain of the coronavirus.
But in many respects, the pandemic picture remains relatively rosy, with newly reported infections declining and stabilizing in recent weeks . Hospitalizations have also ticked down to levels not seen since mid- November, indicating less strain on the healthcare system.
The statewide tally — just under 12.02 million cases as of Friday, according to The Times’ tracker — is undoubtedly an undercount, because of both limited access to testing in the pandemic’s early days and the fact that many people now self-diagnose using at-home tests.
Even so, the figure constitutes a population larger than that of all but six states.
Modeling from the California Department of Public Health estimates that the spread of COVID-19 is probably decreasing statewide and has been for more than a month. Still, the coronavirus has thrown its share of curveballs during the last three years. The latest is XBB.1.5, a member of the sprawling family of Omicron subvariants that have been dominant in the U.S. for months.
That strain accounted for an estimated 74.7% of cases over the last week, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Its rise has been slower in California, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii and the Pacific islands. But even in that Western region, XBB.1.5 accounts for an estimated 56.9% of new cases.
Despite its infectiousness, XBB.1.5 has not spawned a major spike in hospitalizations — sparking optimism that it may not be the beastly “kraken” some had feared.
In California, the number of coronavirus-positive patients hospitalized Thursday was 2,485. That’s down markedly from this winter’s high of more than 4,600.
According to the department, unvaccinated Californians were 2.4 times more likely to contract COVID-19 in December than those who had received at least their primary vaccine series. The unvaccinated were also 2.6 times more likely to be hospitalized and three times more likely to die from the disease.
The comparatively mild winter resurrected discussion of the once-hot topic of herd immunity — the point at which so many people are immune to a virus that it has difficulty finding new hosts to infect. While thousands of new cases are being reported each day in California, many individuals enjoy some protection through vaccination, prior infection or a combination of the two, experts say.
The way to think about it is “you’re more protected if you’re vaccinated,” she said. “You’re less protected if you’ve never been vaccinated or it’s been a long time since you’ve been vaccinated, and that’s when you need to add some extra layers.”
Aside from vaccination, Californians should mask up in indoor public settings, particularly among crowds, health officials say. Other familiar recommendations include practicing good hand hygiene, covering your mouth and nose when you cough or sneeze, staying home when you’re sick, testing if you suspect you’ve been exposed to the coronavirus and promptly seeking treatment if infected.
Those resources have helped forge what officials characterize as a new phase of the pandemic, one marked by careful preparation. Gov. Gavin Newsom has announced that the COVID-19 state of emergency in California will end Feb. 28, and the federal national emergency and public health emergency declarations will terminate May 11.
Another toll from COVID: Almost 60% of teen girls report feelings of persistent sadness or hopelessness during pandemic, CDC says.
The COVID-19 pandemic took a harsh toll on U.S. teen girls’ mental health, with almost 60% reporting feelings of persistent sadness or hopelessness, according to a government survey released Monday that bolsters earlier data. Sexual violence, suicidal thoughts, suicidal behavior and other mental health woes affected many teens regardless of race or ethnicity, but girls and LGBTQ youths fared the worst on most measures, according to the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 17,000 U.S. high school students were surveyed in class in the fall of 2021.
The research found: Among girls, 30% said they seriously considered attempting suicide, double the rate among boys and up almost 60% from a decade ago. Almost 20% of girls reported experiencing rape or other sexual violence in the previous year, also an increase over previous years. Almost half of LGBTQ students said they had seriously considered a suicide attempt. More than a quarter of American Indians and Alaska Natives said they had seriously considered a suicide attempt — higher than other races and ethnicities.
From The New York Times: Many economists and investors had a clear narrative coming into 2023: The Federal Reserve had spent months pushing borrowing costs rapidly higher in a bid to tame inflation, and those moves were expected to slow growth and the labor market so much that the economy would be at risk of plunging into a downturn.
But the recession calls are now getting a rethink.
Employers added more than half a million jobs in January, the housing market shows signs of stabilizing or even picking back up, and many Wall Street economists have marked down the odds of a downturn this year. After months of asking whether the Fed could pull off a soft landing in which the economy slows but does not plummet into a bruising recession, analysts are raising the possibility that it will not land at all — that growth will simply hold up.
Not every data point looks sunny: Manufacturing remains glum, consumer spending has been cracking, and some analysts still think a mild recession this year remains likely. But there have been enough surprises pointing to continued momentum that Fed officials themselves seem to see a better chance that the nation will avoid a painful downturn. That resilience could even be a problem.
While a gentle landing would be a welcome development, economists are beginning to ask whether growth and the job market will run too warm for inflation to slow as much as central bankers are hoping — eventually forcing the Fed to respond more aggressively.
The Fed has lifted rates from near zero early last year to above 4.5 percent as of last week — the fastest series of policy adjustments in decades. Those higher borrowing costs have translated into pricier car loans and mortgages, and for a while they seemed to be clearly slowing the economy.
But as the central bank has shifted toward a more moderate pace of rate moves — it slowed the speed of its increases first in December, then again this month — markets have relaxed. Rates on mortgages, for example, have come down slightly.
That’s showing up in the economy. Mortgage applications have been bouncing around, but in general they have ticked back up. New home sales are now hovering around the same level as before the pandemic. Used car prices had been declining, but they have begun to rise at a wholesale level — which some economists see as a response to some returning demand for those vehicles.
And while retail sales and other measures of household spending have been pulling back, according to recent data, several nascent forces could help to shore up consumer demand into 2023 — with potentially big implications for the Fed’s battle against inflation.