Resilience

The Washington Department of Health requires masks to be worn in indoor public settings and at large outdoor events with 500 or more attendees. The order covers grocery stores, event venues, restaurants, theaters, malls and places of worship.

Doctors with OU Health shared advice and information about what they’re seeing during this surge, what the omicron variant looks like in children, and when COVID-19 symptoms are cause for concern.

The severity of each case is often based on a person’s vaccination status, their age and overall health. But even then there are unknowns.

Rhode Island, along with other states and regions, is experiencing a post-holiday surge in coronavirus disease. The latest estimates show that about 90% of new cases in Rhode Island are caused by the highly transmissible omicron variant.

The metro area has the nation’s fourth worst job shortfall from the “pandemic recession,” Fed economists wrote in their report. The area had 8.1% fewer jobs in October 2021 than it did prior to the pandemic.

To mitigate the effects of climate change and environmental racism that impact certain hotter and more polluted areas of the city, a group in Stockton, Calif., has secured funding from a state grant program.

“Omicron is here; it’s serious,” acting state Health Secretary Dr. David Scrase said during an online update Wednesday. “In another week or two, it will be 100 percent of the new cases in our state.”

Those facilities have some of the lowest percentages of available staffed hospital beds in New York. In the five-county Western New York region, just 3% of hospital beds were available in Chautauqua County and only 8% were open in Cattaraugus County.

Wearing her son’s ashes around her neck, she is committed to Singing River, even though she could be making triple her salary as a travel nurse. But she’s worried omicron’s spread will leave local hospitals “inoperable.”

If approved by the City Council, it would require all San Jose city employees to receive booster shots as a condition of employment and anyone who enters city-owned facilities to do the same.

When it comes to school shootings, what’s the real issue: whether the justice system and school administrators can handle the threats so common around the country? Or is it that guns are too easily available to children?

While flood mitigation and resilience studies often focus on urban areas, researchers in Michigan are using sensors, machine learning and crowdsourcing to create disaster response tools for rural communities.

Scientists are scrambling to learn more about the COVID-19 variant omicron, while the delta variant continues to ravage some areas of the country, filling hospital beds and killing more patients.

The rash of mass violence in November and a year-over-year increase in the number of teens killed and injured in Aurora shootings highlight what some city officials and community leaders described as a lack of attention by the city.

Less than half of all Kansans are fully vaccinated, according to the latest Kansas Department of Health and Environment report, while government-mandated public health mitigation measures have mostly fallen to the wayside.

The spate of threats proliferating on social media has presented police and school officials with the challenge of assessing their seriousness and determining whether to cancel class and close buildings.

Katy Howe, a registered nurse and director of emergency and trauma services at IU Health, said, “Just when we think we’ve made it through another surge (and there’s) a glimmer of hope ... then it hits again.”

What if, say, 100, 200 or 300 firefighters stick to their guns and quit, this could be a tremendous opportunity for the department to realign and better serve the public.