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When it first kicked off last month, the activist encampment that billed itself as Occupy City Hall was viewed as the latest wave of the city’s George Floyd protests — an innovative political space that, under summer skies, attracted peaceful crowds to speeches and teach-ins focused on a narrow goal: cutting $1 billion from the New York Police Department’s budget. In the past week, however, the number of protesters has dropped off sharply and those who have remained have taken on a new responsibility: caring for dozens of homeless people who were drawn to the compound for its free food, open-air camping and communal sensibility. (Feuer and Kim, 7/9)

Once thought of as a predominantly urban issue affecting cities like San Francisco and Oakland, homelessness has hit Bay Area suburbs like Pacifica hard in the past few years, pushing into the corners of every county across the region. Some suburbs registered exponential increases between 2017 and 2019 in the biennial point-in-time counts of the homeless population in each county. Yet the suburbs have historically been less prepared to handle the homeless, with less emphasis on affordable housing, political pushback on safe parking and fewer social services to address some of the reasons people landed on the streets in the first place — job loss, substance abuse, mental health issues and family crisis. (Tucker, Christian and Trumbull, 7/9)

In yet another study demonstrating racial disparities in the pandemic, a University of Chicago analysis has found that black people are twice as likely as whites to test positive for COVID-19. (7/9)

Citing new county-level data acquired and published by The New York Times last week, members of the Cape Cod Reopening Task Force warned during a Thursday press call that Black residents are overrepresented in confirmed COVID cases compared to their population in Barnstable County. (Lisinski, 7/9)

COVID-19 cases in US federal and state prisons were 5.5 times higher—and death rates three times higher—than in the general population from Mar 31 to Jun 6, according to a research letter published yesterday in JAMA. (Beusekom, 7/9)

San Quentin State Prison in California has erected tents and is converting a warehouse to treat a coronavirus outbreak that's infected more than 1,800 inmates and staff. Aerial footage shows nine tents on the institution's baseball field, part of the prison's efforts to treat inmates with COVID-19 right on the grounds while opening up space for social distancing, quarantine and isolation in the crowded facility. (Deliso and Longo, 7/9)

The state of Kansas settled a class-action lawsuit filed by child care advocates who accused the state of not providing foster children with adequate mental health care and moving them too frequently between homes. (7/9)

Women and racial minorities are disproportionately reliant on unemployment insurance, economic data shows, leaving them most vulnerable if Congress decides not to renew the expanded benefits that are set to expire at the end of the month. (Mueller, 7/9)