Mohar Chatterjee

The US is undercounting COVID deaths, researchers say. Now they have a tool to figure out why.

The US is undercounting COVID deaths, researchers say. Now they have a tool to figure out why.

Death rates among Native, Hispanic and Black Americans still outpace pre-pandemic figures, showing the hidden toll of COVID-19 on communities of color even as vaccines have become widely available, according to data released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Consider the impact to Hispanic residents: In the first 10 months of 2021, before the typically deadly winter months,

Fentanyl Is Killing More People During the Pandemic. In Santa Clara County, Victims Are Getting Younger

In April, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office filed murder charges against one of those alleged dealers for selling fake pills that killed an 18-year-old woman.

Grace Bhardwaj and her 17-year-old boyfriend had purchased what they thought were Percocet pills on Snapchat on April 5, according to the county's District Attorney’s Office..

What the couple got instead, officials said, are known on the street as M-30s, little blue pills with an M inside a box on one side and the number

How We Analyzed Death Records and Found Overdoses Rising

While reporting on infectious disease deaths is normally considered the purview of the medical examiner or coroner, most counties in California assigned the tracking and reporting of COVID-19-related deaths to local health departments.

In Santa Clara County, all COVID-19 deaths were reported to, and reviewed by, the Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office, regardless of whether an individual lived in the county or elsewhere. This included deaths occurring at home, and in hospitals, long-term care fac

California's Working-Age Latinos Are Disproportionately Dying of COVID-19

On Dec. 20, as many Bay Area families prepared to celebrate an unusual pandemic Christmas, Maribel Alvarado’s family confronted some shocking news. The vibrant 38-year-old had died suddenly from COVID-19 that day, at a Kaiser Hospital in San Jose. Alvarado had started feeling symptoms less than a week before, and her doctor had recommended bed rest, said her sister Carmen Bueno. Alvarado didn’t have any other illnesses or high-risk medical conditions. “She was perfectly healthy. So I’m just conf

Analysis & updates | Why Some States Won’t Share Race and Ethnicity Data on Vaccinations with the CDC—and Why That’s a Problem

This past fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked every US state and territory to , agreeing to share wide-ranging vaccine data and records with the federal government. raised concerns, but every one signed.

But it turns out that most states ended up withholding the names, addresses, ZIP codes, and dates of birth of those vaccinated, and at least seven states go a step further and redact race and ethnicity data from the federal government or don’t collect it in the first plac

Michigan was warned about British COVID-19 variant, but many ignored it

Michigan was warned about British COVID-19 variant, but many ignored it

A deadlier coronavirus variant that had first ravaged Britain was now here — in metro Detroit, at the University of Michigan, a state prison in Ionia and rural counties in the Thumb region — with doctors, nurses and public health officials fully aware.

And yet Michiganders — from state prison employees to small business owners and local officials to parents of high school athletes — ignored medical experts' repeated warnin

The Demise of White House Market Will Shake Up the Dark Web

You’ve probably never heard of White House Market. Google can't find it. Its vendors don't advertise much. The few public references to the website are on Reddit forums or specialty tech blogs. But among users of the dark web, WHM was, for years, the go-to online marketplace for illegal drugs and fraudulent credit cards.

Despite never reaching the peak trading volumes of its more-famous cousins Silk Road and AlphaBay, White House Market had established itself as one of the most popular—and secu