Health officials Friday said Los Angeles County has posted a second straight day of record coronavirus cases, reaching 13,815.

Thursday's record figure was 12,819, besting yet another high, 10,528, recorded Sunday. Los Angeles County Department of Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer, who fought back tears during a daily virus briefing Thursday, on Friday said she was optimistic the impending vaccination would turn things around by spring.

The nation's largest county also reached another milestone, health officials said: It has surpassed a half million total cases, with 501,635 recorded. There have been 8,199 deaths connected to Covid-19 in the county since the pandemic began, the health department said.

Los Angeles County is part of a Southern California region under strict stay-at-home orders imposed by the state. They include no restaurant dining, even outdoors, and 20 percent capacity at essential retailers.

The orders are triggered when a region's intensive care unit capacity falls below 15 percent. On Friday the California Department of Public Health reported the capacity in the Southern California region, which includes L.A., San Diego, Orange and several other counties, had fallen to 6.2 percent.

Already a holiday season like no other, the 2020 shopping experience has seen a huge shift in terms of when and where it is taking place — and how companies are advertising their wares amid a bleak economic landscape.

The new promotions, protocols and platforms have also led to a shift in holiday messaging.

“Advertisers are really trying to figure out this different world of ‘I'm not drawing people into the store,'” one expert told NBC News.

The home is now central to where retailers are placing their ads, as well as forming the core of the message itself. Spending on billboards, transit, street furniture and other outdoor advertising was down almost 22 percent this year, while ads on personal devices increased by 7.5 percent.

Traditional holiday themes such as family gatherings, lavish celebrations and in-person gift exchanges are off the table for 2020. Instead, companies are tapping into messaging surrounding the pandemic.

A Walmart ad features neighbors sharing a holiday dinner across a fence between their backyards, with a narrator saying, “This year, we came together. Tastes were shared. Traditions were invented and family was redefined. Let’s end the year united.”

Read the story here.

The patients who stream into her clinic in a low-income and predominantly Black section of Chicago's South Side have been terrified by the coronavirus pandemic, said Dr. Brittani James, stressed out by its harmful effects on the community and frustrated by mixed messages from government officials.

But now, just as a possible solution to the virus's spread is on the horizon, she is particularly worried about what she is hearing from her patients. Many of them fear that the vaccines aimed at stopping the spread of Covid-19 will be harmful to Black Americans.

Concerns about vaccines have left some Black people entirely unwilling to take a vaccine, while others have said that they want to wait and see how the first wave of vaccine distribution is handled.

When those concerns come up, “I look my patients in the eye and I say that I understand, I’ve read the studies myself, and my job is to protect you and I will not do you wrong,” said James, a family physician who is also an assistant professor at the University of Illinois College of Medicine. “I don’t respond with writing them off as irrational and ignorant.”

As a result of her conversations with patients and her own medical experience, “I’m already seeing the writing on the wall that we are not prepared to roll this vaccine out to vulnerable communities,” said James, who co-founded the Institute for Antiracism in Medicine earlier this year. “I feel like I’m screaming into a void in trying to get people to understand that I can see that this will fail if we continue to do what we normally do with distribution.”

Read the fully story here.

Almost 300,000 Americans have died of Covid-19 this year. Whether the worst is still yet to come is up to us.

The latest coronavirus death projections from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington shows in striking detail how the behaviors of everyday Americans and their elected officials could affect the death toll from the pandemic this winter. In most states, universal mask usage will either prevent daily deaths from rising exponentially or quicken declines that are already happening. 

Conversely, the relaxing of distancing mandates could lead to some states seeing death counts higher than ever before.

In California, daily deaths are projected to rise to five times their August peak if mandates are eased.

Deaths per day in Pennsylvania could reach twice April's levels without distancing mandates.

Oregon could reach almost 100 new Covid deaths per day by late January without distancing mandates.

Read more and find your state’s projection here.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Friday that a command center will open Monday to facilitate the distribution of the vaccine across the city. 

The Vaccine Command Center will be led by Deputy Mayor Hartzog and Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Commissioner Dave Chokshi and will track critical metrics on vaccine coverage, with a focus on the 27-hardest hit neighborhoods as identified by the Taskforce on Racial Inclusion and Equity.

"A vaccine must be distributed equally to be effective," de Blasio said in a news release Friday. "COVID-19 has exposed our city's most painful disparities, and we are addressing those inequities head-on and making a vaccine available for all New Yorkers."

New York City is expected to receive 465,000 doses of the vaccine by the beginning of January, de Blasio said.

The Vaccine Command Center will provide real-time troubleshooting and rapid response across public and private providers, including urgent cares, private pharmacies, hospitals and community vaccination sites. 

Joel Hulsey’s 70-year-old mother is at high risk for complications from Covid-19. But even as cases skyrocket across the country, he knows she isn’t taking proper precautions.

Hulsey said he can't even talk to her about wearing a mask anymore.

“She went from wearing a mask, to not wearing a mask, to getting very upset when I mention if she’s wearing a mask,” Hulsey said.

Like many Americans, Hulsey has found himself caught in the country’s divisions over public health measures needed to combat the coronavirus pandemic. For millions of people, the simple matter of wearing a mask has turned into a flashpoint driven more by politics and conspiracy theories than by science.

Without the ability to reach common ground, some like Hulsey are finding it hard to cope with non-believing friends and family members. But experts who have been studying the psychology of pandemics, and how human behaviors are shaped by moments of uncertainty and anxiety, say there are ways to prevent pandemic squabbles from fracturing relationships beyond repair.

They tend to agree on a central theme: Don't get into confrontations.

Read the full story here.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced on Friday that he is banning indoor dining in New York City starting Monday, as hospitalization and infection rates continue to rise. Cuomo said that indoor dining was "too high of a risk" as the city faces an uptick in COVID-19 cases. 

He did not say when the indoor dining would resume, but takeout, delivery, and outdoor dining will remain open. 

A conference held in Boston in February has been linked to between 205,000 and 300,000 Covid-19 cases around the world, according to a new study published Thursday in the journal Science.

The conference, at which nearly 200 people gathered for a Biogen corporate meeting, was at the heart of local outbreaks in Massachusetts early in the pandemic and has become one of the most prominent examples of a superspreader event. But in the new study, researchers show just how widely the virus was able to spread from the conference’s attendees.

Through genetic analyses, the scientists found that approximately 1.6 percent of all the Covid-19 cases in the United States could be traced back to the Biogen conference. In Florida alone, the researchers estimated that more than 71,000 cases had genetic links to the Boston superspreader event.

There is no official definition of a superspreader event, but they are typically characterized as incidents that result in large clusters of infection. Other examples include a cluster of more than 180 cases in June was traced to a restaurant and bar in East Lansing, Michigan. And an indoor wedding in Maine in August is thought to have resulted in at least 176 coronavirus cases and seven deaths.