In a move criticized by business groups and hailed by labor advocates, California’s workplace regulators extended the state’s coronavirus pandemic regulations into next year with revisions that employers said could worsen the state’s severe labor shortage.

The revised rules require that vaccinated but asymptomatic workers who come in close contact with someone infected with the virus must wear masks and stay 6 feet from others for 14 days if they return to work.

The current rules allow those employees to keep working without restrictions unless they show symptoms _ under the assumption that the vaccine generally will protect them.

Some 14,000 firefighters facing changing weather conditions battled more than a dozen large wildfires across California, including a growing blaze that was slowly pushing toward the Lake Tahoe resort region.

Winds and temperatures were expected to pick up in coming days while humidity drops, adding to the challenges endured by crews working in rugged terrain.

Aftershocks have hit the region between Northern California and Nevada Friday after a magnitude 6 earthquake sent large boulders rolling into highways and knocked smaller items off shelves.

The quake shortly before 4 p.m. Thursday was centered south of Lake Tahoe near Walker, a rural community of a few hundred households in the eastern Sierra Nevada. It was felt as far off as Las Vegas and San Francisco, authorities said. Days of aftershocks are expected.

California state emergency crews worked overnight and found minor road damage but no significant impacts to infrastructure, said Brian Ferguson, spokesman for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. No injuries were immediately reported.

California officials on Thursday voted to toughen oversight of Pacific Gas & Electric, saying the utility had largely failed to perform required tree-trimming work near power lines in areas with the highest risk of wildfires.

The unanimous vote by the California Public Utilities Commission comes as the fire-prone state has stepped up scrutiny of utility efforts to mitigate wildfire risk. Climate change is fueling increasingly frequent and intense blazes in the state that are often ignited by power infrastructure.

(TNS) - If everything goes according to plan, much of California could come close to herd immunity levels of vaccination by late summer. Within weeks, the effects could be dramatic: very low case rates, people comfortably allowed to gather again, maybe even some looser rules around mask-wearing.

Of course, little about this pandemic has stuck to the plan.

Between the emergence of new coronavirus variants, unreliable vaccine supplies and uneven access to the doses available, it may take months or even years longer than anyone would like to hit herd immunity. It's possible California, the nation and the world may never get there.

(TNS) - California is more than eight weeks into a mass vaccination campaign to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, administering tens of thousands of shots a day.

The California Department of Public Health on its vaccine tracker reported Wednesday providers have administered 5,089,484 out of about 7.6 million doses that have been distributed to hospital systems and local health offices, an increase of 174,854 from Tuesday. The total grew by about 168,000 from Monday to Tuesday.

Jose Zepeda, 45, of Fresno, Calif., self-surrendered this week on multiple felony counts of insurance fraud and attempted perjury after filing a workers’ compensation insurance claim and allegedly misleading the insurance carrier regarding his employment status in order to collect disability benefits he was not entitled to receive.

According to an investigation by the California Department of Insurance, Zepeda was injured in August 2017 while employed by a local construction company. Zepeda began collecting disability benefits because his employer could not accommodate his work restrictions. The insurance company handling Zepeda’s workers’ comp claim reportedly instructed him to notify them if he found new employment because that would affect the benefits he was receiving.

(TNS) - Dec. 20—Orange County logged another single-day record on Sunday, Dec. 20, for new reported cases of the coronavirus as a winter surge spreads through its communities and packs local hospitals.

The additional 4,606 cases reported Sunday by the OC Health Care Agency in its daily update put the cumulative total since tracking began at 124,428 people testing positive for the virus.

Some 1,682 people needed hospitalization as of Sunday, 375 of them in intensive care units.

Powerful gusts pushed flames from a wildfire through Southern California canyons on Thursday, one of several blazes that burned near homes and forced residents to flee amid elevated fire risk for most of the region that prompted utilities to cut off power to hundreds of thousands.

The biggest blaze began late Wednesday as a house fire in Orange County’s Silverado Canyon, where gusts topped 70 mph.

“When crews arrived it was a fully engulfed house and the winds were extremely strong and they pushed flames into the vegetation,” said Colleen Windsor, a spokeswoman for the county’s Fire Authority.

The California Public Utilities Commission has raised concerns over certain deficiencies that it says could affect PG&E Corp.’s ability to provide safe and reliable service, the power provider disclosed in a regulatory filing on Wednesday.

The regulator, in a letter dated Tuesday, said it will require remediation on specific issues identified in the San Francisco-based utility’s wildfire mitigation plan progress reports.