On this week’s Valley Edition: What the research says about the risk of COVID-19 complications during pregnancy.

And mental health professionals help to process the anxiety some are feeling about reentering society post-vaccination.

Plus, a veteran journalist tells us what governor Newsom’s drought emergency declaration means for the San Joaquin Valley.

And county funding for community gardens in Fresno stops next month. We look at the impact. Listen to these stories and more in the podcast above.

More than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, many basic questions about the virus have been answered, including how it spreads, how it responds to treatment, and how it affects the body. But even those lessons learned apply mostly to generally healthy people and those with the most common pre-existing conditions, and unknowns still abound for many population subsets—including pregnant women.

It’s been 40 years since Dr. Ghia Xiong lived and farmed in Laos, but he says this seven acre community garden in Sanger always reminds him of his childhood.

“Going to the farm with my parents and seeing how beautiful it is and then being able to come to this garden just takes me back home like that,” he says.

Xiong says being here out in the open provides a sense of peace. 

“The plants, the corn, the lemongrass here tells you where the wind flows,” he says.

On this week's Valley Edition, we continue our series looking at how people are processing the magnitude of this pandemic. Today we hear from 79-year-old Dezie Woods-Jones. She’s the state president of Black Women Organized for Political Action and a former vice mayor of Oakland. Woods-Jones lives in Madera County. FM89’s Alice Daniel caught up with her there and produced this audio postcard. 

On Thursday, the CDC announced something that many have been waiting for, permission for fully vaccinated people to take off their masks in most settings. It was presented as a significant step toward normalcy. But just before that announcement was made, Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock had this conversation with mental health professionals about the complicated feelings some of us have about getting back to normal.

Earlier this week, Gov. Gavin Newsom extended the drought emergency declaration to much of California, including the San Joaquin Valley. To better understand the significance of that decision, Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock spoke to journalist Steven Greenhut. He is a columnist for the Orange County Register and the author of a book for the Pacific Research Institute called “Winning the Water Wars.”

Medical care at California State Prison, Corcoran received a poor rating in a recently published state watchdog review. Now, prison advocates worry that doesn’t bode well for the quality of care during the pandemic.

For a decade, the Central California Asthma Collaborative (CCAC) has aimed to reduce the burden of asthma in the San Joaquin Valley, which sits in one of the country’s most polluted air basins and reports some of the highest rates of asthma and asthma-related medical encounters in the state.

For many of us, hospitals are pillars of communities, representing safety nets that we hope will always be there. But there’s no guarantee they will be. A new report estimates that California’s hospitals have suffered billions of dollars in losses in the last year, and that they could lose billions more before 2021 is through.