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☀️Another sunny day with highs in the 70s. Sunset is at 7:15 p.m.

It’s been one year since two hospitals, Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer and Carney Hospital in Dorchester, shut down because of the bankruptcy of Steward Healthcare, the for-profit health care system. Other Steward hospitals were sold off and are still operating. But what’s going on in the communities that lost their nearest hospital? The answer: longer wait times and more pressure on community health centers, GBH’s Craig LeMoult found.

“It really created a void between Emerson Hospital to the east and HealthAlliance Leominster to the west. ... We saw really long trip times,” said Justin Precourt, president of UMass Memorial Medical Center. “The impact on the EMS services in the cities and towns was really profound.”

Do you have a story to share about seeking health care in Massachusetts? Send us an email at daily@wgbh.org.

Four Things to Know

1. Congratulations, we made it past the Sept. 1 move-in bonanza also known as “Allston Christmas.” But in some areas of Boston’s rental market, the search for tenants’ next Sept. 1 lease is only a few months away. And this year, for the first time, tenants will no longer be required to pay a broker’s fee for a realtor their landlord hired. 

However, renters are already seeing some new fees, perhaps in an attempt to get around the new law, like the $500 application fee for a rental apartment Boston University graduate student Shreya Mani spotted. “Even if I say that I won’t be paying this fee, then they’ll just say that your application got rejected,” she said. “And I want to live here so I have no option but to pay that fee.”

2. The federal agency that reviews immigrants’ applications for citizenship will start interviewing the neighbors, employers and coworkers of people seeking to become U.S. citizens, a practice that was more common from 1802 to 1981 and fell out of favor with the advent of fingerprinting and background checks in the 1980s and ‘90s. It’s unclear when interviews will start, but U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Agency Director Joseph Edlow said the idea is to “ensure that only the most qualified applicants receive American citizenship.”

“I suspect this is really just about slowing down the process, adding more obstacles in the way of people who are trying to become citizens, because they have no good justification for going to this,” said Sarang Sekhavat, chief of staff at the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition.

3. More people sought emergency medical attention for tick bites this year than any other year since 2019, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We have changed our environment or our environment has changed for other reasons, and the ticks that we’ve always had out there have been able to thrive and spread and cause us increased burden,” Richard Pollack, a public health entomologist, told GBH’s Dave Epstein.

Remember that while you may see fewer ticks than you did in the spring, ticks don’t leave town after Labor Day: data shows there’s usually a small rise in tick-related emergency department visits in October and November, as ticks can stay active any time the weather is above freezing.

4. If you’re looking for a fun outing to fight the back-to-school blues — or just a moment of peace in the middle of a hectic week — it’s worth a visit to the 19th Century Japanese house at the Boston Children’s Museum. Our colleagues at GBH’s Morning Edition got the story behind it: it was a gift to Boston from Kyoto, one of our sister cities.

“This house was disassembled and placed in 43 crates, put in a big, huge container ship all the way to Seattle and from Seattle, a train ride to Boston,” said Akemi Chayama, Japan program educator at the Boston Children’s Museum. “Carpenters from Kyoto came here to put this house back together inside the museum.” You can hear more and watch a video about the rebuilding process here.

Vaccine round-up: back to school shots and the national misinformation landscape

Kids in many communities across the state are back in school this week. The vast majority of them, up to 95 percent statewide, got their required vaccines before their first day. But some communities, especially in Western Massachusetts, are lagging behind in those rates: In Franklin County, 10 percent of incoming kindergartners did not get their recommended series of vaccines. In Berkshire Country it’s 9 percent of kindergartners, and in Hampden County 6 percent.

Misinformation about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines is much more common today than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic. You can hear it from friends and family, from social media, and from the highest levels of the federal government.

“There’s now a rationalization for people to take a second look at (not getting the vaccine) that may have been on the line about it before,” Jack Sullivan, a regional epidemiologist for Franklin county, told New England Public Media reporter Karen Brown. “It’s having an effect.”

Sullivan said when he hears parents who have been swayed by misinformation around vaccines and are feeling worried, he tries to educate them. Simply mandating the shots tends not to increase trust in the process, he said. 

“Our point isn’t just to say, 'you know, you should be vaccinating your children, and that’s that.’ That’s an argument that gets you nowhere,” Sullivan said. “We just want to be able to give them as much information as we can and meet them where they are, and hopefully they’ll make the best decision for them and their children.”

Dr. Robbie Goldstein, the Massachusetts Commissioner for Public Heath and a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official, said he worries when he sees public health becoming more partisan.

“I do worry that the turmoil — it’s a great word to use for this — the turmoil that exists in Atlanta at CDC is going to have real repercussions on the health of Americans,” Goldstein said in a conversation with GBH’s Morning Edition. 

Public health officials, insurance companies, and providers like pharmacies and doctor’s offices are still figuring out what the new CDC guidelines mean, particularly around the COVID-19 vaccine.

“I worry that we won’t have a federal partner in this, and there are a lot of implications of that,” Goldstein said, noting that the CDC’s directive can affect insurance coverage and accessibility, “whether the vaccines will be produced and shipped and on the shelves of pharmacies.”

“But I think actually most importantly, there are implications in trust,” he said. “We at the Department of Public Health have a lot of work to do to make sure that we maintain trust, that we build trust with communities and that they can look to us in this moment and know what we’re doing.”