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Anna Almendrala was a correspondent for KFF Health News until August 2021.
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Virtual classrooms are aggravating the economic disparities that plague education, with widening divides in access to supplies, workspace and parental guidance. The problem is especially acute for children with learning disabilities.
“Lost on the Frontline” is an ongoing project by Kaiser Health News and The Guardian that aims to document the lives of health care workers in the U.S. who died from COVID 19, and to investigate why so many are victims of the disease.
Hundreds of thousands of essential workers have kept their kids in day care during the pandemic out of necessity and, so far, these centers haven’t been big disease spreaders. But the evidence remains incomplete.
Check out KHN’s video series — Behind The Byline: How the Story Got Made. Come along as journalists and producers offer an insider’s view of health care coverage that does not quit.
Although younger people are hospitalized and die less frequently than their elders when infected with COVID-19, their cases are harder to trace. As a result, the virus is spreading uncontrollably throughout much of Southern California. Even hospital staffs are affected by community spread.
Health care workers on the front lines of the COVID crisis have spent exhausting months working and self-quarantining off-duty to keep from infecting others, including their families. Encountering people who indignantly refuse face coverings can feel like a slap in the face.
Local governments around the country are declaring racism a public health crisis. That could be lip service, or it might lead to shifting resources from policing to health care, housing and other services, experts say.
Experts estimate local and state health departments will have to hire 100,000 to 300,000 people as contact tracers to get the economy back on track. Many states are trying hard to hire from the racial and ethnic minority communities hit hardest by the virus.
As a journalist, she wrote during the winter about the hostility shown toward Asian Americans for wearing masks. In May, she got cursed at for not wearing a mask herself.
The novel coronavirus is affecting black Americans disproportionately, which some community leaders and public health experts say is not surprising. So why didn’t anyone sound an alarm?
Nursing homes with COVID-19 infections tend to violate health rules more often and have more complaints and fines, records show. But infections also plague highly rated facilities — while sparing some low-ranked ones.
Poorly rated long-term care facilities stand out in the COVID-19 crisis — but even the best are affected.
Foot traffic in L.A. has fallen off a cliff amid the COVID-19 crisis, driving many street vendors away. But some are still on the streets, peddling their wares out of economic necessity. Many are undocumented immigrants who won’t get any help from the recently approved $2 trillion federal assistance package.
Young adults are being hit hard in the COVID-19 economy, but many have mixed feelings about losing jobs that might otherwise put them in harm’s way in the midst of the pandemic.
As schools shutter to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus, many districts are still offering free meals to their most vulnerable students. In two Southern California districts, families roll through school lunch drive-thrus to grab hot meals.
In advance of the Super Tuesday primary, California's Los Angeles County is rotating new touch-screen voting machines among 41 locations, including adult day care centers and jails, to increase voting among populations with historically low turnout.
In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, school districts, especially those with large Chinese student populations, are in uncharted territory as they apply new federal travel rules to their students. Some also are weighing requests from parents that are more about fear than science, such as whether to allow students with no travel history to stay home from school.
To date, the U.S. has multiple confirmed cases of the viral infection that originated in Wuhan, China. That includes cases in which the virus passed from person to person within this country. So why don’t health officials share more information with the public?
Since two cases of the mysterious new coronavirus were reported in Southern California, Chinese immigrants have begun donning face masks. The practice is common in China but goes against official guidance in the U.S., and that’s causing conflict in local schools.
A high-profile effort in Camden, New Jersey, to reduce health spending by identifying high-cost patients and giving them more coordinated and preventive medical care has been copied around the country. Many of those groups are pushing forward with the efforts, despite a recent critical study of the Camden initiative.
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