Anna Maria Barry-Jester / Kaiser Health News

Across California, public health departments are losing experienced staffers to retirement, exhaustion, partisan politics and higher-paying jobs. Even before the coronavirus pandemic throttled departments, staffing numbers had shrunk with county budgets.

Kaiser Health News checks back with an emergency department doctor who was at the center of the Bay Area's COVID-19 lockdown last spring. As California hovers near the edge of running out of ICU capacity, we asked, 'What's the situation now?'