Month: January 2021

San Francisco residents can now register to get notified when it's their turn for the COVID-19 vaccine. The city launched a new notification system late Tuesday morning to sign up to get an email or text if you live or work in San Francisco. You can learn more details about the new system and availability of vaccines at an 11 a.m. press briefing streamed live on YouTube. Keep in mind that it could be weeks or months before you're eligible. For more information, visit here. .@SF_DPH is contacting and vaccinating people 65 and over who in the SF Health network, like Barbara Topps, who just received her first dose at one of our community clinics. Starting Tuesday, sign up to get notified when you're eligible to get vaccinat...

Rochelle Walensky, who has been nominated to serve as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, speaks after US President-elect Joe Biden announced his team tasked with dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic at The Queen in Wilmington, Delaware on December 8, 2020. Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Images Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who were sidelined by the Trump administration during the Covid-19 pandemic will "get heard again," Dr. Rochelle Walensky, President-elect Joe Biden's pick to lead the agency, said Tuesday. Last year, the CDC went months without addressing the U.S. public after Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned in February that schools and...

For months, she says, a wave of depression had enveloped her, but she had been too busy saving other people's lives to be able to identify it, or process it. Instead she "shoved" her feelings down into a "dark part" of her brain. The stress manifested physically: She had constant headaches, a short fuse, and couldn't eat, she said. Fazilah remembers laying on her bathroom floor for three nights -- each time after a grueling shift -- where she said she dry heaved until she fell asleep. "I hadn't ate anything all night so what was going to come out? I fell asleep shortly after, only to be disturbed by those unacknowledged feelings in my dreams instead of when I was at work, because who had time to process anything in that soul-destroying place?" Fazilah ultimately decided to stay at her j...

Rochelle Walensky, the incoming director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said she will start her new job with a big to-do list: helping states fix Covid-19 vaccination programs and persuading exhausted Americans to wear masks and take other precautions. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Dr. Walensky said the agency will try to help people overcome doubts about Covid-19 vaccines and she vowed to increase public trust in the CDC. Dr. Walensky will take the helm of the CDC on Wednesday, as a highly transmissible mutant, or variant, of the novel coronavirus threatens to cause a new surge in infections in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, the vaccination campaign to stop the pandemic is off to a slow start, and survey...

Wildfires Blazes, intensified by the climate crisis, are reversing decades of gains in cutting air pollution, scientists report Tue 19 Jan 2021 10.05 EST Increasingly ferocious wildfires in the western US are taking a devastating toll on the region’s air quality, with wildfire smoke now accounting for half of all air pollution during the worst wildfire years, according to a new study.Scientists from Stanford University and UC San Diego found that toxic plumes of smoke, which can blanket western states for weeks when wildfires are raging, are reversing decades of gains in cutting air pollution. While heat-related deaths have previously been predicted as the worst consequence of the climate crisis, researchers say that air pollution caused by smoke could be just as deadly.What is Califor...