Navajo Chief of Police Phillip Francisco - with a 200-member department that polices a rural Arizona area larger than West Virginia - hopes the federal government’s most recent COVID-19 relief bill will help pay for some of the department’s critical needs after the stresses of the pandemic. Read more»

In the first months of the pandemic, when demand for personal protective equipment far exceeded supply, Sam Wang helped lead a group called Chinese Americans COVID-19 Relief AZ, whose 40 volunteers used their skills to secure 158,000 masks from China for communities in Arizona. Read more»

Hospitals across the country have reported more hospitalizations and deaths of Black and Latino patients than of whites, and lower-income communities with patients who didn’t speak much, or any, English had a 35% greater chance of death. Read more»

Health care workers across the country have risked their lives to care for COVID-19 patients, and Cronkite News reporters teamed up with the Guardian and Kaiser Health News to tell some of the stories of those who died because of exposure to the novel coronavirus that causes the deadly disease. The overall project was awarded the Batten Medal for Coverage of the Coronavirus Pandemic on Monday. Read more»

More than 3,600 U.S. health care workers perished in the first year of the pandemic, according to “Lost on the Frontline,” a 12-month investigation by The Guardian and KHN to track such deaths, who died and why. Read more»

House Democrats investigating the COVID-19 response say Trump adviser Peter Navarro pressured agencies to award deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Navarro, who served as Trump’s deputy assistant and trade adviser, essentially verbally awarded a $96 million deal for respirators to a company with White House connections. Later, officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency were pressured to sign the contract after the fact, according to correspondence obtained by congressional investigators. Read more»

Face masks, plastic bottles and bags – and feces, both dog and human – are some of the unsightly waste you could encounter these days while hiking in the red rocks of Sedona. Discarded masks also litter the beaches of Southern California, which already were battling a growing scourge of plastic and microplastics in the ocean. Environmentalists fear the situation will get worse as the nation emerges from a year of pandemic restrictions. Read more»

A new wave of research now shows that several of the “aerosol-generating” procedures considered the riskiest were not the most hazardous to health care workers. Recent studies have determined that a basic cough produces about 20 times more particles than intubation, a procedure one doctor likened to the risk of being next to a nuclear reactor, and patients with COVID simply talking or breathing, even in a well-ventilated room, could make workers sick in the CDC-sanctioned surgical masks. Read more»

In the midst of a national shortage of N95 masks, the U.S. government quietly granted an exception to its export ban on protective gear, allowing as many as 5 million per month to be shipped overseas. FEMA issued the waiver in the final moments of Donald Trump’s presidency. Read more»

Almost a year into the pandemic, supply shortages remain so severe that nurse Kristen Cline reuses her N95 for several shifts while her hospital buckles, patients suffer and folks nearby socialize maskless as if the pandemic were already over. Read more»

The best way to help our medical workers isn’t to stand at windows cheering or to give them thank-you water bottles. It’s to stay out of their ERs and ICUs by keeping ourselves and our neighbors safe. Read more»

The nation’s pandemic hotspots have shifted to rural communities, overwhelming small hospitals that are running out of beds or lack the intensive care units for more than one or two seriously ill patients. Read more»

As COVID-19 began to spread across the Southwest in March, lawyers representing incarcerated Arizonans reported “unsanitary conditions,” “inadequate medical staffing and treatment” and a “failure to take strong and sensible precautionary measures” in state prisons. Read more»

Strewn across parking lots, in rivers and washing up on beaches, disposable face masks, gloves and other personal protection equipment are turning up everywhere except where they should be – in the landfill. Read more»

Nearly 8,000 ventilators are destined for foreign countries as part of Trump’s plan to make the U.S. “king of ventilators.” But public health experts worry the machines are crowding out more urgently needed aid. Read more»