Stay Safe Pledge Program- Sign Up Today! The City of Pasadena and Visit Pasadena are pleased to announce the launch of the Stay Safe Pledge Program. The Stay Safe Pledge encourages local businesses to go above and beyond CDC guidance to demonstrate their commitment to the safety and well-being of all Pasadena residents and visitors. The Stay Safe Pledge is voluntary! Businesses may choose whether participation in the program makes sense for their individual business operations.
To participate in the Stay Safe Pledge Program, business operators will need to sign a pledge committing to the implementation of at least one measure that exceeds current CDC guidance. The pledge form is a simple web-based checklist. Upon completion of the pledge, businesses will receive a certificate confirming their participation in the Stay Safe Pledge Program. To sign-up for the program, visit www.cityofpasadena.net/staysafepledge. In exchange for signing the pledge, businesses will be included in the Stay Safe Pledge Program directory on the Visit Pasadena website. Program participants will also be highlighted in an ad in a local publication. For more information, visit www.cityofpasadena.net/staysafepledge.
COVID Relief Grants CalOSBA Open: September 9, 2021 - September 30, 2021
Eligible applicants: current waitlisted applicants from certain previous rounds and new applicants that meet eligibility criteria found at CAReliefGrant.com. Eligible grant award: $5,000 – $25,000 Details: Applicants not selected to move forward in the review process in Rounds 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, or 7 do not need to re-apply and will be automatically moved into Round 9. New applicants will need to apply at CAReliefGrant.com. Click Here to Learn More
Cases: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s colorcoded map. So is Puerto Rico. In all other U.S. states, virus transmission is labeled as “high,” defi ned as 100 or more cases per 100,000 people in the last week.
California’s rate is 94 cases per 100,000. By comparison, Texas is 386 and Florida is 296. State health experts say relatively high vaccination rates in California ahead of the arrival of the delta variant made a difference, and additional measures, such as masking, also helped stem the surge. Nearly 70% of eligibleCalifornians are fully vaccinated, and another 8% have received their first shot, state data shows.
On Monday, a state mandate went into effect requiring attendees at indoor events with 1,000 or more people show proof of full vaccination or a negative test. Patrons previously were allowed to just attest they were vaccinated or had a negative test.
California has seen coronavirus cases and hospitalizations decline following a summer increase in cases with the arrival of the delta variant. In the past two weeks daily new cases are down by more than 4,000, a decrease of 32%, while hospitalizations have dropped by 22% to just over 6,000. The summer surge occurred after California lifted many limits on businesses in June. It followed a much more severe winter surge when officials shuttered shops and schools in the state of nearly 40 million. During that time, sick patients packed many hospitals, and thousands died every week.
California’s death toll is now more than 68,000, tops in the nation, but the per-capita rate is lower than more than the half the states.
The severity of last winter may have helped temper this most recent surge in California, said Andrew Noymer, a public health professor at University of California, Irvine.
Los Angeles County, which is home to one in four of the state’s residents and has some of the state’s strictest virus mandates, reported a 1.2% positivity rate on Monday. Barbara Ferrer, LA County’s director of public health, said safety measures that encourage masks and limit places where large numbers of unvaccinated people gather are needed to head off “a continual cycle of surges fueled by new variants of concern.”
In neighboring Orange County, which has looser restrictions than LA, coronavirus cases, positivity rates and hospitalizations also have declined in recent weeks, said Dr. Regina Chinsio-Kwong, the county’s deputy health director. She said she believes vaccinations made a difference, noting the recent surge was initially detected in the county’s coastal areas and other places with lower vaccination rates.
COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. have climbed to an average of more than 1,900 a day for the first time since early March, with experts saying the virus is preying largely on a distinct group: 71 million unvaccinated Americans.
The increasingly lethal turn has filled hospitals, complicated the start of the school year, delayed the return to offices and demoralized health care workers.
“It is devastating,” said Dr. Dena Hubbard, a pediatrician in the Kansas City, Missouri, area who has cared for babies delivered prematurely by cesarean section in a last-ditch effort to save their mothers, some of whom died. For health workers, the deaths, combined with misinformation and disbelief about the virus, have been “heartwrenching, soul-crushing.”
Twenty-two people died in one week alone at Cox-Health hospitals in the Springfield-Branson area, a level almost as high as that of all of Chicago. West Virginia has had more deaths in the first three weeks of September— 340— than in the previous three months combined. Georgia is averaging 125 dead per day, more than California or othermore populous states.
The nation was stunned back in December when it was witnessing 3,000 deaths a day. But that was when almost no one was vaccinated.
Now, nearly 64% of the U.S. population has received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. And yet, average deaths per day have climbed 40% over the past two weeks, from 1,387to 1,947, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Health experts say the vast majority of the hospitalized and dead have been unvaccinated. The number of vaccine eligible Americans who have yet to get a shot has been put at more than 70 million.
Vaccines: The Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine has been shown to be safe and highly effective in young children aged 5 to 11 years, the companies announced early Monday morning. The news sets the stage for authorization of the vaccine for younger children, possibly before the end of October. The need is urgent: Children now account for more than one in five new cases, and the highly contagious Delta variant has sent more children into hospitals and intensive care units in the past few weeks than at any other time in the pandemic.
Pfizer and BioNTech plan to apply to the Food and Drug Administration by the end of September for authorization to use the vaccine in these children. If the regulatory review goes as smoothly as it did for older children and adults — it took roughly a month — millions of elementary school students could begin to receive shots around Halloween.
An influential scientific panel on Thursday opened a new front in the campaign against the coronavirus, recommending booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine for a wide range of Americans, including tens of millions of older people. But the experts declined to endorse additional doses for health care workers, teachers and others who might have higher exposure on the job.
The decisions were made by the C.D.C. panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, in a series of votes, during which scientists agonized over their choices. The recommendations revealed deep divisions among federal regulators and outside advisers about how to contain the virus nearly two years into the pandemic.
Just a day earlier, the Food and Drug Administration authorized booster shots for certain frontline workers. But the C.D.C.’s advisers disagreed that the doses were needed by so many healthy people.
The next step is for Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the C.D.C., to make a formal recommendation. If she follows the guidance of the agency’s advisory committee, as is typically the case, the agency’s guidance may conflict with that of the F.D.A.
Seniors, people with underlying medical conditions and employees with high risk of exposure became eligible to receive third doses, or booster shots, of the Pfizer vaccine formulation in Los Angeles County on Friday, authorities announced.
The change followed a recommendation to do so by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Late Friday night, Pasadena city officials updated Pasadena’s website to match the CDC recommendation.
The city said it plans to open appointments for boosters next week, at Medical Point of Dispensing drive-thrus called “Pfizer Booster” clinics.
The Pasadena Public Health Dept. is not currently accepting on-site registration for booster doses. All individuals seeking a booster dose must make an appointment in MyTurn.CA.gov, according to city sources.
Meanwhile, CVS Health announced its pharmacies have already begun to administer booster shots in the Pasadena area.
Newly eligible groups include seniors age 65 and up, residents of long-term care facilities, people between 18 and 64 years old who have underlying medical conditions and people between 18 and 64 “with high institutional or occupational risk, including healthcare workers, first responders, teachers and daycare staff, grocery workers and workers in homeless shelters or prisons,” according to the statement.
The boosters should be given six months after initial vaccination, officials said.
Billions more in profits are at stake for some vaccine makers as the U.S. moves toward dispensing COVID-19 booster shots to shore upAmericans’ protection against the virus.
How much the manufacturers stand to gain depends on how big the rollout proves to be.
U.S. health officials late Thursday endorsed booster shots of the Pfizer vaccine for all Americans 65 and older— alongwith tens of millions of younger people who are at higher risk from the coronavirus because of health conditions or their jobs.
Officials described themove as a first step. Boosters likely will be offered even more broadly in the coming weeks ormonths, including boosters of vaccines made by Moderna and Johnson& Johnson. That, plus continued growth in initial vaccinations, could mean a huge gain in sales and profits for Pfizer and Moderna in particular.
The Economy: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell signaled Wednesday that the Fed plans to announce as early as November that it will start withdrawing the extraordinary support it unleashed after the coronavirus paralyzed the economy 18 months ago.
Powell said that if the job market maintained its steady improvement, the Fed likely would begin slowing the pace of its monthly bond purchases. Those purchases have been intended to lower longer-term loan rates to encourage borrowing and spending.
At the same time, the Fed’s policymaking committee indicated that it expects to start raising its benchmark rate sometime next year — earlier than the members had envisioned three months ago and a sign that it’s concerned that high inflation pressures may persist. Powell stressed, though, that a rate hike would occur only after the Fed had ended its bond purchases, a process he said would likely last through the middle of next year.
Taken together, the Fed’s plans reflect its belief that the economy has recovered sufficiently from the pandemic recession for it to soon begin dialing back the emergency aid it provided after the virus erupted. As the economy has strengthened, inflation also has accelerated to a three-decade high, heightening the pressure on the Fed to pull back.
The central bank’s pullback in bond purchases and its eventual rate hikes, whenever they happen, will mean that some borrowers will have to pay more for mortgages, credit cards and business loans.
Stock and bond traders took the Fed’s message Wednesday in stride. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which had been up more than 400 points before the Fed issued a policy statement, closed up 338 points, or a full 1%. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note was all but unchanged at roughly 1.31%.
The economy has recovered faster than many economists had expected, though growth has slowed recently as COVID-19 cases have spiked and labor and supply shortages have hampered manufacturing, construction and some other sectors. The U.S. economy has returned to its prepandemic size, and the unemployment rate has tumbled from 14.8%, soon after the pandemic struck, to 5.2%.
At the same time, inflation has surged as resurgent consumer spending and disrupted supply chains have combined to create shortages of semiconductors, cars, furniture and electronics. Consumer prices, by the Fed’s preferred measure, rose 3.6% in July from a year ago — the sharpest such increase since 1991.
In their new quarterly projections, Fed officials expect to raise their key short term rate once in 2022, three times in 2023 — one more than they had projected in June — and three times in 2024. That benchmark rate, which influences many consumer and business loans, has been pinned near zero since March 2020, when the pandemic erupted.
One factor in the Fed’s move toward eventually raising rates is that inflationary forces, as Powell noted in his news conference, appear to be enduring longer than expected. In their new forecasts, Fed officials raised their projection for “core” inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, to 2.3% next year, from a 2.1% estimate in June.
Unemployment claims in California rocketed to their highest level in five months last week, raising uncertainties about the strength of a statewide economic recovery from the pandemic.
California workers filed 75,800 initial claims for unemployment during the week ending Sept. 18, an increase of 24,200 from the prior week, the U.S. Labor Department reported Thursday.
The number of first-time jobless filings is the highest since the week ending April 24 — nearly five months ago — when claims totaled 78,600.
It’s also the largest one-week increase since April 3, when jobless filings jumped by 39,100.
Nationwide, workers filed 351,000 initial claims for unemployment last week, an increase of 16,000 from the 335,000 that workers filed the prior week, the Labor Department reported.
The 75,800 claims filed last week are 69% more than the average weekly totals for January 2020 and February 2020, the final two months before government agencies ordered wide-ranging business shutdowns to combat the spread of the coronavirus.
During those two months, unemployment claims averaged 44,800 a week.
Sick Leave: California requires employers to provide at least three days of paid sick leave each year to full-time workers. But when the pandemic hit, that wasn’t enough to cover 14-day quarantine requirements. Many workers had to either come in sick or take time off without pay.
So in March 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a new law requiring companies with over 25 employees to offer as much as 80 hours of supplemental sick leave related to COVID-19, either for quarantines or vaccine side effects.
On Thursday, the program is set to end. The state’s business lobby says it’s time because many companies can’t afford the leave without a federal tax credit that offsets their costs, which also is expiring. It’s also a relief for some business owners struggling to find workers.
The White House and congressional Democrats have agreed to a “framework” to pay for their huge, emerging social and environment bill, top Democrats said Thursday, but they offered no details and the significance was unclear.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco announced the development as Biden administration officials and Democratic congressional leaders negotiated behind the scenes on the mammoth package of spending and tax initiatives.
Democratic leaders and President Joe Biden have wanted the measure to total some $3.5 trillion over 10 years.
But the party has been divided over the final size and many of the details, and there has been no public word that agreements have been reached on any of those crucial questions.
Republicans are solidly opposed to the package, and the Democrats will be able to push it through Congress only if they limit their defections to three House members and also none in the Senate.