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San Francisco is in a new pandemic place: It no longer has COVID-19 case rates that are lower than those of the nation overall, a reversal of its status throughout the pandemic. Legislation aimed at getting more people to get vaccinated against COVID-19 seems to have fallen out of vogue among California lawmakers. Masks, on the other hand, are being strongly recommended by health officers from around the Bay Area as coronavirus infections continue to climb. As new infections surge, USPS offers another round of free coronavirus tests Residential households in the U.S. are now eligible for another order of free at-home tests on USPS.com. Each order now includes eight rapid antigen coronavirus tests, which are supposed to arrive in two separate packages of fo...

Photo: Spencer Platt (Getty Images) Recent preliminary research might offer some comfort to the many vaccinated Americans who came across Omicron this past winter. A pair of studies suggest that vaccinated people who caught the variant went on to develop a strong and diverse immune response to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in general—more so than people who were vaccinated and boosted or people who were only infected with Omicron. The findings could also indicate that an updated booster, perhaps specific to Omicron, will be more effective at ensuring longer-term immunity moving forward. The results come from two preprint papers released on the website bioRxiv in April and May: one from University of Washington researchers and the other from researchers at BioNTech, the company that, al...

Hospital patients that are prescribed antibiotics are more likely to get fungal infections because of disruption to the immune system in the gut. Immune-boosting drugs could reduce the health risks from complex infections. Patients prescribed antibiotics in the hospital are more likely to get fungal infections because of disruption to the immune system in the gut. Using immune-boosting drugs alongside the antibiotics could reduce the health risks from these complex infections, according to a new study from the University of Birmingham and the National Institutes of Health. The life-threatening fungal infection invasive candidiasis is a major complication for hospitalized patients who are given antibiotics to prevent sepsis and other bacterial infections that spread quickly aro...