COVID-19

SANTA CRUZ COUNTY—Santa Cruz County health officials announced Friday that two more county residents have died of Covid-19 complications, bringing the local death toll to eight. One was a man in his early 60s and the other was a woman in her late 90s. Both...

SANTA CRUZ COUNTY—The County of Santa Cruz has announced the availability of Covid-19 relief funds for local small businesses and nonprofits responding to the Covid-19 pandemic. Available through the Santa Cruz County Cares Recovery Program, applications are now being accepted through Sept. 15 for...

Various Bay Area health officers are asking communities to keep their Halloween and Dia de Los Muertos celebrations small to help slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. Traditional trick-or-treating and attending large parties are both considered high-risk activities, according to health officials, because it...

Cooler temperatures continue to run the show, both along the coast and inland. Brayden Murdock, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service of Monterey, said it will be, “quite a bit windier in the next few days and drier as well.” He added that...

SANTA CRUZ—Santa Cruz County on Tuesday moved back to the more restrictive red tier of the state's Covid-19 reopening plan, meaning that many businesses and services must once again take a step back in their services, and in the customers they can allow in. According...

WATSONVILLE—One year ago, a report by UC Santa Cruz’s Blum Center on Poverty, Social Enterprise and Participatory Governance and Second Harvest Food Bank painted a grim picture of hunger in Santa Cruz County. According to the report, some 83,000 residents were living in households earning...

SANTA CRUZ COUNTY—A group of Santa Cruz residents filed a lawsuit Tuesday in Sacramento County Superior Court to stop the Harm Reduction Coalition of Santa Cruz County (HRC) from continuing its syringe services program. Launched in 2018, the nonprofit HRC—and “harm reduction” programs in general—operate...

CENTRAL COAST—Most counties throughout California have now imposed some version of stay-at-home orders, which consist of a series of requests and requirements by local leaders and are designed to slow the spread of Covid-19. Gov. Gavin Newsom on Dec. 3 said that new orders keeping...

Growing strain on the health care system has triggered a stricter stay-at-home order for Santa Cruz County and the rest of the Bay Area region identified in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recently issued regional order. Intensive care unit (ICU) capacity in the Bay Area region, which...

By Jacob Pierce, Good Times News Editor Businesses all over Santa Cruz County are getting ready to close down or reduce their operations, as a new stay-at-home order takes effect. The order goes live at 11:59pm Thursday, now that the Bay Area region hit a threshold...