Paz Aguilar continued working seven days a week at two fast food restaurants and as a janitor, even as Oakland seemed to be grinding to a halt around her. Then in late June, her life did, too. By then two of her coworkers at a combo Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken joint stopped showing […]
CalMatters
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Mental Health ‘Tsunami’ Looms: Can California Prevent a Surge in Suicides?
Celinda Gonzales has a long list of worries: She worries about COVID-19, which recently spiked near the Yurok reservation where she lives in Humboldt County. She worries about the wildfires threatening her remote, forested town, Weitchpec. She worries about gill rot and algae blooms in the Klamath and Trinity rivers, which join together just over […]
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The Disclosure Question
Napa County doesn’t collect data about coronavirus outbreaks in workplaces while nearby Sonoma County does, but won’t identify them because it would compromise the county’s working relationship with employers. Alameda County won’t share outbreak locations to protect privacy and to guard against what one health official called undue stigma. Humboldt County tends toward not releasing […]
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Reopening Redux
For Jill and Larry Cromwell, owners of Folsom’s three Maribou Salons, the last six months have been a neverending series of financial nightmares. How could they pay $26,000 a month in rent with the hair salons closed due to coronavirus? Would they have to declare bankruptcy? What did it all mean for their three children, […]
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‘See You Again’
For generations, order and cleanliness had been Christina Lastra’s family’s way of fighting off poverty. But the day in July 1991 when her mother’s mysterious death was ruled an accident marked the end of the orderly life Lastra had been leading in Humboldt County. “We didn’t get peace. No one ever even thought of looking […]