The opioid epidemic has been linked to more than 500,000 deaths in the US over the past two decades, counting those from prescription painkillers such as OxyContin and generic oxycodone as well as illicit drugs such as heroin and illegally produced fentanyl.

The surge in deaths has led to more than 3,000 lawsuits filed by state and local governments, Native American tribes, unions, hospitals and other entities in state and federal courts over the toll of opioids. In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency last year in the Tenderloin neighborhood, saying something had to be done about the high concentration of drug dealers and people consuming drugs in public.

The city attorney’s office says San Francisco saw a nearly 500% increase in opioid-related overdose deaths between 2015 and 2020 and that on a typical day, roughly a quarter of visits at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital Emergency Department are opioid-related.

In 2020, 712 people died of drug overdoses, compared with 257 people who died of COVID-19, according to the city health department.

A high percentage of an estimated 7,800 homeless people in San Francisco — many of whom pitch tents in the Tenderloin — are struggling with chronic addiction or severe mental illness, often both. Some people rant in the streets, nude and in need of medical help.

Pharmacy chains have been south less often than opioid makers or wholesalers that distribute pharmaceuticals more broadly. In one groundbreaking case, a federal jury in Ohio last year found CVS, Walgreens and Walmart recklessly distributed massive amounts of pain pills in two Ohio counties.

In May, Walgreens reached a $683 million settlement with the state of Florida in a lawsuit accusing the company of improperly dispensing millions of painkillers that contributed to the opioid crisis. Walgreens did not admit wrongdoing in its agreement with Florida and will make payments to the state over 18 years.

The company also faces litigation in Alabama, Michigan and New Mexico, among other states.

Deerfield, Illinois-based Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. runs a network of around 9,000 drugstores in the United States. Walgreens and other prescription drug distributors have faced a slew of lawsuits over the opioid crisis.

This article was first published in the Associated Press, with contributions from Associated Press writer Tom Murphy in Indianapolis.

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SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) – Union leaders and members joined hundreds of San Francisco city workers in a march down Market Street on Wednesday, saying more needs to be done to fill the city’s staffing gaps.

Participants in the event called “Staff Up SF” insisted that the city is critically understaffed in so many areas. They pointed to more than 3,800 openings in positions across the city.

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Workers said the vacancies in areas like the Department of Public Works and the San Francisco International Airport are making it harder to do their jobs safely.

Mike Casey, the president of the San Francisco Labor Council, spoke at a rally outside City Hall.

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“This is not our building. This is the public’s building. And when they don’t staff up and when the staffing doesn’t happen, the services affect citizens across the city,” Casey said.

Heather Bollinger is a Registered Nurse and called on increased staffing at her hospital, saying the matter had reached critical levels.

“We can’t provide patient care without the resources to do it. It’s a really simple equation, when you come to the hospital, you need a nurse,” Bollinger said. “And they’re dropping like flies. It’s getting worse by the day in our departments.”

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KPIX 5 reached out to Mayor London Breed’s office for comment, but she is currently traveling in Europe to promote the city of San Francisco as a place for tourism and commerce.

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Last week, the Census Bureau pushed out new population estimates for counties and metropolitan areas. Here’s the executive summary for Florida: A lot of people died; a lot of people arrived. A familiar story, to be sure.

Florida, from July 2020 to July 2021, grew by 211,196 people. A number that’s all the more remarkable given that 255,553 Floridians died and only 210,305 new native Floridians were born over that time.

Subtract deaths from births and you get what demographers call “natural population change,” which for Florida was negative 45,248 over that time. The greatest natural population deficit of any state.

Likewise, Volusia County’s natural population deficit was 3,873. Flagler County’s was 828. And St. Johns County’s was 528. Yet none of these three counties lost overall population. All had healthy – some would say more than healthy – growth.

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St. Johns County chalked up the title of fastest-growing county in Florida in percentage terms with a smoking 5.6% 12-month growth rate. Flagler County was not far behind in the third spot with 4.3% growth. Volusia County was in the middle of the pack at 29th with a 1.7% population increase.

Florida always has been a place that people move to rather than come from. As a result, all but nine Florida counties grew in population over those 12 months. The exceptions, however, were notable. Populous Miami-Dade, Broward, Pinellas and Orange counties all lost people over that time. This reflected a broader national pandemic trend of people leaving big cities. Census Bureau figures show New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco combined lost more than 700,000 residents over that time.

Florida traditionally has a less-than-zero natural growth rate, something that reflects its status as a place where people retire after the kids are grown. Sumter County, home of the Villages retirement communities, had a natural growth rate of 2,253 below zero, yet still ranks 6th in percentage growth because more than 7,000 people moved there. Here in the home of Margaritaville, similar forces are at work with less golf cart traffic.

Growth, growth and more growth

It takes a lot of moving vans rolling down here to grow even a little bit. And we’re growing by more than a little bit. More than a quarter-million people arrived in Florida over this time and an estimated 13,533 of them ended up in Volusia County, 16,349 in St. Johns, and 5,881 in Flagler.

We’re busy finding places for them. New construction is all over the place. When I drive on the edge of town, I’m often amazed at all the cranes and plywood I see in places that I used to regard as in the middle of nowhere. Apartment complexes rise above the tops of the slash pines.

My unscientific rule-of-thumb on yearly population change is that anything below 1% spells trouble for the local economy. Florida’s economy isn’t built for a stable population. But at somewhere just under 3%, things will overheat as the place deals with crowded roads, inadequate roads, infrastructure backlogs, government services stretched thin and environmental destruction.

Residents who had arrived in earlier waves will show up at local government meetings with signs and matching T-shirts. People who will no doubt be disappointed to learn that money from this round of growth is needed to pay for the previous round of growth, or maybe one before that, because that’s the Florida way. A way that sometimes is compared unfavorably to Ponzi schemes and perpetual motion machine designs. When things are running smoothly, we’re only one or two growth cycles behind.

So ask not for whom the U-Haul rolls, it’s rolling to you.

Mark Lane is a News-Journal columnist. His email is mark.lane@news-jrnl.com.

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LOS ANGELES (CBS / AP) – Ask for a roast beef sandwich at an Arby’s drive-thru east of Los Angeles and you might be talking to Tori – an artificially intelligent voice assistant who takes your order and sends it to the chefs.

“It doesn’t make you sick,” says Amir Siddiqi, whose family installed the AI ​​voice at Arby’s Franchise in Ontario, California this year. “It doesn’t get a corona. And the reliability is great. “

Not only did the pandemic threaten the health of Americans when it struck the US in 2020 – it could also pose a long-term threat to many of their jobs. Faced with labor shortages and higher labor costs, companies are starting to automate jobs in the service sector that economists once considered safe, on the assumption that machines couldn’t simply make the human contact they believed customers required .

Past experience suggests that such waves of automation ultimately create more jobs than they destroy, but also disproportionately destroy less qualified jobs, on which many low-income workers are dependent. The resulting growing pains for the US economy could be severe.

Without the pandemic, Siddiqi likely would not have bothered to invest in new technology that could alienate existing employees and some customers. But it went smoothly, he says: “Basically fewer people are needed, but these people now work in the kitchen and other areas.”

Ideally, automation can convert workers into better and more interesting jobs, as long as they get the appropriate technical training, says Johannes Moenius, an economist at the University of Redlands. But while that’s happening now, it’s not going fast enough, he says.

Worse, a whole class of service jobs that were created when manufacturing began to use more automation can now be at risk. “The robots have fled the manufacturing sector and immigrated to the much larger service sector,” he says. “I thought contact jobs were safe. I was completely surprised. “

Improvements in robotic technology are allowing machines to do many tasks that used to require humans – throwing pizza dough, moving hospital linen, inspecting gauges, sorting goods. The pandemic accelerated its rollout. After all, robots cannot get sick or spread disease. They also do not require any leave of absence to deal with unexpected childcare emergencies.

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As KPIX reported last year, robotic food service was a trend even before the coronavirus pandemic as hospitals, campus cafeterias, and others tried to meet demand for fresh, bespoke options around the clock while keeping labor costs in To keep check. Robot chefs have performed in places like Creator, a burger joint in San Francisco, and Dal.komm coffee outlets in South Korea.

Prior to 2020, Hayward-based tech company Chowbotics had sold around 125 of its $ 35,000 robots, mostly to hospitals and colleges. Shortly after the coronavirus outbreak, sales rose more than 60%, CEO Rick Wilmer said, with growing interest from grocery stores, senior housing communities and even the U.S. Department of Defense.

International Monetary Fund economists found that past pandemics had encouraged companies to invest in machines that could increase productivity – but could also kill low-skilled jobs. “Our results suggest that concerns about the rise of robots amid the COVID-19 pandemic seem justified,” they wrote in a January newspaper.

The consequences could hit the less educated women who disproportionately fill the low- and middle-wage jobs most exposed to automation – and viral infections. These professions include salespeople, administrative assistants, cashiers and helpers in hospitals, as well as nurses and geriatric nurses.

Employers seem eager to introduce the machines. A survey by the not-for-profit World Economic Forum last year found that 43% of companies planned to reduce their workforce due to new technology. Since the second quarter of 2020, corporate investment in equipment has increased 26%, more than twice the rate of the economy as a whole.

The fastest growth is expected in roving machines that clean the floors of supermarkets, hospitals and warehouses, according to the International Federation of Robotics, a trading group. The same group also expects increased sales of robots that provide information to shoppers or deliver room service orders in hotels.

Restaurants are among the most visible robot users. At the end of August, for example, the salad chain Sweetgreen announced that it was buying the kitchen robot startup Spyce, which makes a machine that cooks vegetables and grains and pours them into bowls.

It’s not just robots either – software and AI-supported services are also on the rise. Starbucks has automated the work behind the scenes to keep track of a store’s inventory. More shops have moved to self-checkout.

Scott Lawton, CEO of the Arlington, Virginia-based restaurant chain Bartaco, struggled to get waiters to return to his restaurants last fall when they reopened during the pandemic.

So he decided to give it up. With the help of a software company, his company developed an online ordering and payment system that customers could use over their phones. Guests now simply scan a barcode in the center of each table to access a menu and order their food without having to wait for a waiter. Workers bring food and drinks to their tables. And when they finish eating, customers pay on their phone and leave.

Innovation has reduced the number of employees, but employees are not necessarily worse off. Each Bartaco location – there are 21 – now has up to eight deputy managers, roughly double the pre-pandemic total. Many are former servers and they wander between the tables to make sure everyone has what they need. They receive annual salaries of $ 55,000 or more instead of hourly wages.

Tips are now shared among all other employees, including dishwashers, which now typically make $ 20 an hour or more, far more than their pre-pandemic salary. “We don’t have the labor shortage you read about on the news,” Lawton says.

The rise in automation has not stalled a breathtaking rebound in the US labor market – at least so far.

The US economy lost a staggering 22.4 million jobs in March and April 2020 when the pandemic storm hit the US. Attitudes have since recovered rapidly: employers have brought back 17 million jobs since April 2020. In June they posted a record 10.1 million vacancies and complain that they cannot find enough workers.

Behind the hiring boom is an increase in consumer spending, many of whom have come through the crisis unexpectedly financially – thanks to both federal relief checks and, in many cases, the accumulated savings from working from home and the elimination of the daily commute.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, assumes that employers will likely be looking for workers for a long time to come.

For one thing, many Americans are taking their time to get back to work – some because they are still concerned about the health risks and childcare issues posed by COVID-19, others because of the generous federal unemployment benefits that came out on September 6th nationwide expires.

In addition, many baby boom workers are retiring. “The job market will be very, very tight for the foreseeable future,” says Zandi.

Currently, the short-term benefits of economic snapback outweigh any job losses from automation, the effects of which are gradually becoming apparent over a period of years. That can’t last. Last year, researchers from the University of Zurich and the University of British Columbia found that the so-called unemployment rallies of the past 35 years, in which economic output recovered from the recession faster than employment, could be explained by the loss of automation-vulnerable jobs .

Despite strong hires since the middle of last year, the US economy is still missing 5.3 million jobs compared to February 2020. And Lydia Boussour, senior US economist at Oxford Economics, calculated last month that 40% of the missing jobs are vulnerable to automation, especially in food preparation, retail and manufacturing.

Some economists fear that automation will push workers into lower-paying positions. Daron Acemoglu, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University estimated in June that up to 70% of the stagnation in US wages between 1980 and 2016 could be explained by machines replacing humans in routine tasks.

“Many of the jobs that are being automated were in the middle of the skill distribution,” says Acemoglu. “They no longer exist and the workers who used to do them are now doing less skilled jobs.”

© Copyright 2021 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All rights reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report

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Daina Lujan

The South San Francisco Unified School District Board of Trustees appointed a new president and agreed to appoint a member after former President Eddie Flores, who had joined the South San Francisco City Council, left.

The trustees unanimously voted to appoint Daina Lujan as president of the school board during a meeting on Thursday, February 11, when officials also agreed to appoint a new member rather than hold an election to approve a replacement for Flores Find.

The decisions come weeks after Flores stepped down from his position on the school board to join the South San Francisco city council to complete the tenure begun by Vice Mayor Mark Nagales during the city’s transition to a district electoral system. Nagales is now in a district seat on the council.

School district officials had considered holding an election where voters could determine who would complete Flores’ term on the Board of Trustees, but ultimately found the cost to be too high to justify it.

“I don’t think I have to spend a million dollars [for a special election] A pandemic is really in the best interests of our students or our district, ”Board Trustee John Baker said in a prepared statement. “So I would agree with the recommendation to make a preliminary appointment.”

The application deadline for the school board ends on Thursday, March 11th. Applications are available on the school district website. A first round of interviews is expected to take place one week after the application deadline, followed by a second round of finalist interviews. Civil servants are required to find a replacement for Flores within 60 days of his resignation.

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It was a strange sight in the middle of our pandemic when hundreds of believers gathered in the church for a special Saturday mass in front of the West Coast Walk for Life.

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The state’s COVID-19 health ordinance allows small outdoor services, but has banned all indoor worship.

“It’s wonderful to have mass inside. I know we’re not allowed to, but we’re very safe,” said parishioner Kennedy Ching.

“We had every plan, every intention, to hold mass outdoors,” said Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone.

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San Francisco Catholic Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone said a security threat caused him to move the service inside. This is due to violence that can be traced back to an alleged protest and a counter-protest next door at the Chinese consulate.

“One group that was part of the capital storm, another left-wing group,” said the archbishop.

We saw a large police presence in front of the consulate on Saturday. Dozens of officers were also stationed around St. Mary’s Cathedral.

In a statement to ABC7 News, SFPD said, “There were no specific threats to the Church. Our presence was a precautionary measure to the safety of everyone in the area.”

“So it was a compromise between an extra step of caution and the safety of people because of the threat of violence,” said Cordileone.

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Cordileone was an outspoken critic of the indoor worship ban.

“To me, it’s unjust and unconstitutional,” he said.

The archbishop plans to hold smaller indoor church services with security measures in the future.

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