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RECENT PODS:

• SacTown Talks: Assembly member Cristina Garcia (2020-12-18)
• If I Couid Change One Thing (SDSU): Dr. David "Davey" Smith on Operation Warp Speed" and vaccinations (2020-12-02)
• Inside Golden State Politics (Bill Boyarsky and Sherry Jeffe): Becerra: Another Bright Spot For California And The Rest of The Country (2020-12-10)
• Then There's California (Senate Democratic Caucus): State Senator Maria Elena Durazo, the new Chair of the California Latino Legislative Caucus, talks about public policy, health, and social justice priorities for our Latinx communities in 2021. (2020-12-09)
• Capitol Weekly Podcast (John Howard and Tim Foster): Vaccines are coming with Dr. Dean Blumberg, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, UC Davis School of Medicine and Acting Chief, Pediatric Infectious Disease Section, UC Davis Medical Center. (2020-12-07)
• Look West Podcast (Assembly Democratic Caucus): Introduction to new Assembly Democrats (2020-12-07)
• KQED's Political Breakdown (Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos): Dr. Anthony Fauci on California's New COVID Restrictions and Lessons from the HIV/AIDS Epidemic (2020-12-04)

MONEY MATTERS:

• Edison International: $30,000 to Californians for Sydney Kamlager for Senate 2021, sponsored by Healthcare Providers, Insurance, Energy, and Housing Suppliers

The Nooner for Friday, January 1, 2021, presented by SYASL Partners

• A Long December
• Do you recall?
• Double-X factor
• COVID-19
  -the numbers
  -new strain
  -the "kids"
  -vaccines
  -regional stay-at-home
  --regional data
  -enforcement
  -morgues and funeral homes
• Cakeday and classifieds 

A long December and there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last

The song by Counting Crows was released in 1996 but could not be more appropriate as we look back on December 2020 and ahead to 2021, particularly in California.

From American Songwriter:

December is a time of year when we are barraged by festiveness and holiday spirit to the point where it can all become overbearingly cheery. This unrelenting glee flies in the face of the fact that there is no moratorium on sorrow or pain in December. Nor does it acknowledge the kind of reflection that accompanies the passing of one year into the next.

It’s a good thing then that songwriters like Adam Duritz of Counting Crows are around to keep us in balance with bruised beauties like “A Long December.” The song is a contemplative ballad from 1996’s Recovering The Satellites, the band’s second album, and it’s excellent evidence that very few writers do bittersweet with as much soul-searching honesty as Duritz.

He told Rolling Stone that the song was inspired by visits to a friend recovering from being hit by a car (hence the line “The smell of hospitals in winter.”) But Duritz also admitted that, despite the song’s somber tone set by piano and accordion, “A Long December” was his way of seeing his glass of eggnog as half full for a change. “It’s a song about looking back on your life and seeing changes happening,” he said, “and for once me, looking forward and thinking, ‘Ya know, things are gonna change for the better — ‘maybe this year will be better than the last.’”

“A Long December” see-saws from heartbroken to hopeful without seeming strained. Regrets pile up, as they tend to do at the end of the year, but they are counteracted by the sense of optimism that the changing calendar inevitably brings. So it is that “the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters, but no pearls” is quickly replaced by a glimpse of “the way that light attaches to a girl.”

Shortly after midnight Eastern, the official Counting Crows Twitter account posted "Maybe this year will be better than the last." As of this writing, the tweet had 22,000 retweets and 117,000 likes.

Meanwhile, happy New Year!

It was an exciting night at Nooner Global HQ. I watched the Kings lose a very close game in Houston, ate dinner, watched the Joya-E service of the Buddhist Church of Sacramento, drank Allspicery gingerbread "tea," watching Andy and Anderson and complaining to myself about loud fireworks and partying neighbors until nearly 2am. It was like any other New Year's Eve and there was plenty of inter-household gathering against the public health order in my neighborhood. From what I saw on social media, it was the same in a lot of places.

DO YOU RECALL? On Wednesday, I included Jeremy B. White's article about the $500,000 from an obscure Irvine company to support the effort to qualify the recall of Governor Gavin Newsom. Now we have a report yesterday of $286,396 in-kind from the same company, Prov. 3:9, LLC, for two mailers sent 12/18 and 12/21. It appears that petitions are being mailed out by the "consulting" company that is not disclosing the source of its revenue.

Prov. 3:9 LLC registered with the Secretary of State on October 16, 2018 at the office of a CPA firm where the "manager" of the LLC is a CPA:

I wrote on Wednesday:

...I would surmise the "consulting" company that has no other trace is a shell to allow donors to obscure their donations and remain off Governor Newsom's "naughty" list. That would be illegal for a candidate campaign, but is allowable for a ballot measure campaign.

By going through an LLC for ostensible "consulting," donors can avoid major donor reporting requirements should the donor contribute directly to a campaign committee. I haven't been able to find any political trail of Thomas Liu and I'm guessing he's serving in the capacity of manager from only a professional standpoint.

Which begs the question now that we are at $786,396 to help the grassroots qualify the recall -- where is the money really coming from?

Backers of the effort have until March 16 to gather 1,495,709 valid signatures, a deadline that was extended like two initiatives because of pandemic limitations on signature gathering.

DOUBLE-X FACTOR: For Politico, Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna and Jason Grow profile the new women of the 117th Congress, including Sara Jacobs (D-CA53), Young Kim (R-CA39), Michelle Steel (R-CA48).

When the 117th Congress is sworn in on Sunday, it will have more women—and more women of color—than any Congress in history. There will be the most-ever Native American women serving, as well as the first group of Korean-born congresswomen and even the first Iranian American member of any gender. And those records are, in no small part, because of the success of Republican women.

Donald Trump might have been voted out of the Oval Office in November, but the GOP made significant gains on Capitol Hill, narrowing Democrats’ House majority to the slimmest margin in decades. Most of the candidates who flipped seats from blue to red were women. Twenty-nine Republican women will serve in the new House of Representatives, still well behind the 89 Democratic women but four more than the GOP’s previous record of 25 women in 2005. (The only newly elected woman in the Senate is former Rep. Cynthia Lummis, a Republican from Wyoming.)

In addition to Kim and Steel, Marilyn Strickland was elected to the Washington 10th. She was born in Seoul to a Korean mother and African-American father in the military. After her father was relocated to Fort Lewis, the new family moved to Tacoma.

The three women join Democrat Andy Kim (NJ-03), who was the second Korean-American elected to the House. The first was Jay Kim of Diamond Bar, who was primaried by Gary Miller (R) after Kim came under scrutiny for campaign finance irregularities.

COVID-19, cakeday and classifieds after the jump...

COVID-19: California added 573 deaths yesterday for a total of 25,984 since the pandemic began. Again, daily reporting has been somewhat screwed up because of the holiday and the Spectrum internet outage on Christmas Day. The 14-day trend is what is important, although it's good to look at what happened in the days since Christmas.

We'll look at the 14-day averages throughout 2020 below.

Source: California Department of Public Health, COVID-19 state dashboard

Here's an update of the numbers for LA County with a smoothing out average of the last eight days:

Of course, as we've talked about frequently in this space, deaths are a lagging indicator. The leading indicators are positivity rates and testing and the resulting number of new confirmed cases. Let's look at each of them with data through yesterday.

Positivity rate and number of tests (14-day rolling average):

• April 1: 32% of 1,904 tests
• May 1: 5.5% of 30,063
• June 1: 4.6% of 52,305
• July 1: 6.4% of 90,299
• August 1: 7.1% of 124,937
• September 1: 5.1% of 102,835
• October 1: 2.8% of 120,803
• November 1: 3.2% of 133,578
• December 1: 6.9% of 205,576
• December 31: 12.2% of 308,377

New confirmed cases (14-day rolling average):

• April 1: 1,036
• May 1: 1,660
• June 1: 2,304
• July 1: 5,818
• August 1: 8,891
• September 1: 5,230
• October 1: 3,389
• November 1: 4,274
• December 1: 14,154
• December 31: 47,189

Then we have the current indicators, hospitalizations and ICU hospitalizations.

Hospitalizations (14-day rolling average):

• April 1: 5,061
• May 1: 4,867
• June 1: 4,444
• July 1: 5,578
• August 1: 8,326
• September 1: 5,409
• October 1: 3,330
• November 1: 3,078
• December 1: 7,137
• December 31: 19,817

ICU hospitalizations (14-day rolling average):

• April 1: 1,283
• May 1: 1,486
• June 1: 1,323
• July 1: 1,560
• August 1: 2,199
• September 1: 1,506
• October 1: 881
• November 1: 765
• December 1: 1,628
• December 31: 4,123

-The kids: In the Los Angeles County Public Health release yesterday, the spread among younger folks like those partying in my neighborhood last night, is fueling community transmission and the numbers are staggering:

Younger residents continue to drive increases in community transmission in the county. At the beginning of the current surge on November 1, there were 463 cases a day among residents between the ages of 30 and 49 years old. By December 22, there were 4,419 cases a day among residents in this age group; an increase of about 950%. The next group driving increases are young adults between the ages of 18 and 29 years old. When the surge began, there were 303 cases a day among adults between the ages of 18 and 29 years old. On December 22, there were 3,072 cases a day; a nearly 1,000% increase

Indeed, those without an underlying health condition are less likely to have a fatal case of COVID-19. However, they are still spreaders.

Statewide, 58.5% of cases and 7% of deaths have been between 18 and 49 years old.

-New strain: There are now three additional confirmed cases of the new strain of SARS-CoV-2 in San Diego County, the virus that can lead to the COVID-19 disease. The new strain was first identified in the UK. Paul Sisson reports in the SDUT:

Officials said none of the four are related and had no contact with each other before testing positive.

The three additional cases confirmed Thursday were all men. Case investigators have interviewed two of the three who reported no recent travel outside the country. Two of the three new cases were in their 40s and the third was in his 50s. The third case for whom travel information was not available had not yet been interviewed.

They live in La Mesa, Otay Mesa, Mission Beach and the Rancho Bernardo-Carmel Mountain area.

The county public health lab was still awaiting the results of genetic testing to confirm whether a close contact of Wednesday’s first UK strain subject, who was said to have been experiencing symptoms of coronavirus infection, also has the UK strain.

...

Having cases from different parts of the county that did not know each other, [Dr. Eric McDonald, medical director of the county’s epidemiology department] said, shows that this strain, which is thought to spread more easily than other variants, has been among us for some time.

“This didn’t just spread to that many different parts of the county among people who don’t know each other in the past two weeks,” McDonald said. “The dispersal of these cases geographically tells you that it has probably been in the county for a longer period of time.”

San Diego also had a record number of reported deaths yesterday with 62.

-Vaccines: A team at the Times reports that many front-line health care workers who are first in line to receive a vaccine are declining to take it.

So many frontline workers in Riverside County have refused the vaccine — an estimated 50% — that hospital and public officials met to strategize how best to distribute the unused doses, Public Health Director Kim Saruwatari said.

The vaccine doubts swirling among healthcare workers across the country come as a surprise to researchers, who assumed hospital staff would be among those most in tune with the scientific data backing the vaccines.

The scientific evidence is clear regarding the safety and efficacy of the vaccines after trials involving tens of thousands of participants, including elderly people and those with chronic health conditions. The shots are recommended for everyone except those who have had a severe allergic reaction to any of the ingredients.

Still, skepticism remains.

...

The extent to which healthcare workers are refusing the vaccine is unclear, but reports of lower-than-expected participation rates are emerging around the country, raising concerns for epidemiologists who say the public health implications could be disastrous.

A recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 29% of healthcare workers were “vaccine hesitant,” a figure slightly higher than the percentage of the general population, 27%.

...

The consequences are potentially dire: If too few people are vaccinated, the pandemic will stretch on indefinitely, leading to future surges, excessive strain on the healthcare system and ongoing economic fallout.

-Regional stay-at-home:

--documents and updates:

• Governor's press release
• Official state order

--Update on 12/03 with Governor Newsom and HHS Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube

--Update on 12/07:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube

--Dr. Ghaly update on 12/08:

• YouTube

--Governor Newsom update on 12/18:

• Facebook
• YouTube

--Governor Newsom update on 12/28:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube

--Dr. Ghaly update on 12/29:

• YouTube

--Governor Newsom update on 12/30 (K-6 school reopening):

• YouTube

--Governor Newsom and Dr. Fauci on 12/30:

• Facebook

--the regions: Here are the regions with the latest ICU capacity (available physical beds and necessary staffing). The benchmark to avoid falling under the stay-at-home order is 15% capacity. Today provides bad news for the Greater Sacramento Region, which has dropped again below 15% the day before the four-week ICU capacity look-ahead could first be considered by the state.

No new regional data as of 11:25am 01/01.

• Northern California: Del Norte, Glenn, Humboldt, Lake, Lassen, Mendocino, Modoc, Shasta, Siskiyou, Tehama, Trinity
  ICU capacity as of 12/31: 34.1%

• Bay Area: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Monterey, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Solano, Sonoma
  ICU capacity as of 12/31: 8.5%
  
  
• Greater Sacramento: Alpine, Amador, Butte, Colusa, El Dorado, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, Sacramento, Sierra, Sutter, Yolo, Yuba
  ICU capacity as of 12/31: 14.4%

• San Joaquin Valley: Calaveras, Fresno, Kern, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Merced, San Benito, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Tulare, Tuolumne
  ICU capacity as of 12/31: 0.0%
  
  
• Southern California: Imperial, Inyo, Los Angeles, Mono, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura
  ICU capacity as of 12/31: 0.0%

--Greater Sacramento: In yesterday's press release from the California Department of Public Health, there was this nugget:

• Greater Sacramento: Eligible to exit the order as early as January 2, however the order will likely be extended based on early ICU projections. Official ICU projections will be calculated beginning with January 1 data and posted publicly on January 2, which will inform future status of the region.

Even if the state lifted stay-at-home order for the region, it is likely that Sacramento County would stick with its local order that incorporates the same restrictions and remains effective until amended or repealed.

-tiers for fears: There were no changes to county tier assignments yesterday.

• Purple/Widespread=54 counties
• Red/Substantial=3 (Alpine, Humboldt, Mariposa)
• Orange/Moderate=1 (Sierra)

-enforcement: A Costa Mesa bar owner faces misdemeanor charges after repeatedly ignoring the county's health order, writes Sean Emery in the Register.

Roland Michael Barrera, owner of the Westend Bar, faces a misdemeanor count of violating and neglecting to obey a lawful order and regulation. Luiza Giulietta Mauro, a bar manager, was charged with a misdemeanor count of resisting a police officer, court records show.

Police, code enforcement officials and state alcohol beverage control agents have gone out to the Westend Bar “numerous times” since an emergency order went into effect on Nov. 19 requiring that non-essential businesses close between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., according to a statement by the Orange County District Attorney’s Office.

The Westend Bar on “multiple occasions” hosted 50 to 70 patrons without requiring them to socially distance or wear facial coverings, prosecutors said.

They also allege that around 11 p.m. on Dec. 12, Mauro grabbed a uniformed police officer to prevent him from entering the bar.

In legal parlance, that is flat out stupid.

Ya know, there's a state agency department that can also step in.

-morgues and funeral homes: In the LAT, a team reports on the very sad impact in Los Angeles County of the high daily death rates.

A months-long surge of coronavirus cases in Los Angeles County is reaching its grim if inevitable zenith as deaths reach once-unthinkable levels, medical infrastructure is buckling under a flood of patients and officials fear the mortality numbers will only worsen in the coming weeks.

...

The sheer number of fatalities is causing more challenges to already overwhelmed hospitals and other institutions. Many hospital morgues are now filled with bodies, and officials are trying to move them for temporary storage at the county medical examiner-coroner’s office.

Mortuary and funeral home operators say they are having to turn away bereaved families because they don’t have the capacity to handle more bodies.

cakeday and classifieds after the jump...

CAKEDAY: No Nooner birthdays that I know about today!