The coronavirus that has killed more than 11,000 people in Massachusetts this year thrived as people gathered against state and medical recommendations for Thanksgiving, Gov. Charlie Baker said Tuesday as he urged people to take COVID-19 safety precautions more seriously during the December holiday season.

The Department of Public Health will issue new guidance later Tuesday to offer tips on how to safely celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa and New Year's in the midst of a global pandemic.

"It's pretty simple," Baker said of the new DPH guidance. "The safest way to celebrate this year is with members of your own household and to postpone or cancel any travel plans and to avoid gatherings with people you don't live with. Any type of celebration beyond that has real potential, as we saw with Thanksgiving, to spread the virus and hurt the ones we love the most."

More than 100 local teachers unions have taken a vote of no confidence in Elementary and Secondary Education Commissioner Jeffrey Riley over concerns about his leadership during the pandemic, union representatives told the state education board on Tuesday.

Haverhill Education Association President Anthony Parolisi, a civics teacher, read a declaration he said was signed by more than 50,000 members of the Massachusetts Teachers Association. He described the votes and declaration as a grassroots effort that originated from several union locals, not the MTA.

Parolisi said the signatories want to see Riley changes his practices, listen more to educators, and "stop trying to overrule local decisions and strong-arm them into reopening schools."

Low interest rates and the work from home shift are contributing to a continuing "frenzy" of home-buying in Massachusetts and sales activity and prices both set new records in November.

Sales rose nearly 25% last month and the median sale price of a single-family home increased 17.6% compared to last November, to $460,000, The Warren Group reported Tuesday morning.

After a pause when the COVID-19 crisis hit in March, the market roared back in the summer and the sales pace has held up through the fall as buyers, sellers and the industry have adjusted to conditions in the pandemic.

Sales in November exceeded sales in June, reversing the traditional pattern in which home-buying picks up in the spring and slows down in the fourth quarter, said Tim Warren, CEO of The Warren Group.

Picture this: You wake up one morning with a cough and a sore throat. You think you might be getting sick, but you don't know if you should see a doctor.

Worse yet, you don't know if you really should see the doc because you're worried about COVID-19.

But now there's an app for that — and all it wants is your voice.

"Whether it be respiratory illness or asthma or COVID-19, give us six seconds of voice, and we'll give you a clear indication of what your health symptoms are," says David Liu, CEO of the Boston-based digital medicine company Sonde Health.

After thousands of voice tests, the Sonde Health smartphone app is out with a pilot program that will screen people's voices for illnesses.

Sonde's co-founder Jim Harper says our voices can be a biomarker of health issues, much like taking your temperature or blood pressure.

"You can think of it a lot like a conversation that you may have had many times in the past with your mother," explains Harper, "where in the first few seconds she can pick up on changes in your voice that reflect things like whether you have a cold, whether you've been tired."

Sonde stresses the app is not an approved medical product and can't diagnose illnesses like COVID-19 by itself. But they say the app's algorithm detects symptoms of respiratory conditions like asthma or pulmonary disease in around 70 percent of patients.

Company CEO David Liu says 10 companies in the U.S. and India are using its technology to help employees screen for COVID-19 and says its voice screening tests could help contain the surging pandemic if lots of people use it every day.

"If you want to control the spread, you need a screening or filtering regimen in a large population," Liu says. "This is the formula for how you do it: begin to use tools like this."

So I tried the app's respiratory screening test myself.

The first thing I see is a section called "Respiratory Symptom Risk." The screen tells me I have a questionnaire and a voice activity to complete.

There are seven questions, such as, "Have I been within six feet of someone with a confirmed covid case?" and "Do I have a fever or a cough?"

I'm feeling pretty good, so I select "No."

Then I'm asked to inhale and hold a vowel sound for at least six seconds — the familiar vowel sound you often make at the doctor's office: "ahhh."

Harper says the app compares my voice sample to thousands of others in the company's database and calculates a risk score for respiratory illnesses.

"There is a small handful, really two or three, changes that cause things like shortness of breath or coughing or difficulty breathing," says Harper. "What that score is reflecting is how similar those handful of voice characteristics are in your voice to people that have known changes in those respiratory symptoms."

Within seconds, the app tells me I'm at low risk. I'm not surprised, but I am relieved. Then, I rerun the test to confirm my results, and it comes out the same.

The Sonde app may be new, but the theory behind it is not.

Voice pathologist Doug Roth of Brigham and Women's Hospital has been a human voice screener for the last 20 years.

"I'm listening to the quality of somebody's voice," Roth says. "And for example, if somebody breathy, you can hear some breathiness in the voice. There's a roughness, you can hear roughness in the voice. So there are different aspects of the voice that we listen for and they give us some indication of what might be going on."

Roth says voice pathologists rely mostly on their ears to identify vocal problems, but  clinics are using voice measurement technology more frequently to help identify diseases. Roth tried the Sonde app and says it could be useful for providing a general idea of someone's vocal health. But he warns that technology only tells part of the story.

"What we measure doesn't always perfectly line up with what our ear tells us that we're hearing, which is why we don't just use measurements," Roth explains. "Those things can still be hard to measure because it can deviate in so many different ways."

An app screening can't take the place of a diagnosis by a clinician. But Sonde CEO Liu believes it can help people stay on top of their health if they use it frequently.

"That actionable insights is what we hope will drive healthy behaviors and even take a step toward preventative or preventive health care."

Who knew you might learn so much about your health from an app by just saying "ahhh" — and without that wooden popsicle stick taste, too?

The city of Boston will take a step back in its reopening plans starting Wednesday, as coronavirus cases continue to rise.

Mayor Marty Walsh announced Monday that Boston will move to a "modified" phase two, step two of its economic reopening plan — and that mayors in cities surrounding Boston soon will order similar restrictions in response to increasing strain on the health care system.

"Rather than wait until the situation gets worse, we’re going to be proactive here in Boston," Walsh said Monday afternoon during a press conference. "We’re going to take action now ... and prevent our hospitals from getting overwhelmed."

Boston will start the rollback from its current phase three, step one on Wednesday, Walsh said, and remain in phase two for at least three weeks — or, at least through the holidays. The last time the city was in that phase was in July.

Museums, movie theaters and aquariums will close. Gyms and fitness centers will be shuttered for "general use," though one-on-one training may continue with space restrictions. Indoor recreational activities like rock climbing, driving ranges and bowling alleys will shut down.

State public health officials have begun providing the public with more detailed information on hospital bed availability as the health care system deals with a growing number of COVID-19 patients and shortages of people to care for them.

The Department of Public Health this weekend began using hospital bed counts as reported by the hospitals rather than rounded figures when reporting hospital capacity data in its daily reports. For instance, Friday's report said there were 9,400 total non-intensive care unit beds in Massachusetts and Saturday's new, more detailed report put the number at 9,365 total beds.

The switch happened on a weekend that saw DPH confirm 9,645 new cases of the coronavirus, 4,968 on Saturday and another 4,677 cases Sunday. The agency also announced a total of 88 recent COVID-19 deaths this weekend. Over the last week, Massachusetts has confirmed 29,552 new cases of the coronavirus. In all, 279,574 people here have been infected with the virus and 11,349 people have died with confirmed or likely cases of COVID-19.

As the pandemic wears on, concerns about the stability of the child care system are rising as many Massachusetts child care providers report losing money -- with some closing their doors entirely.

Eighty-two percent of the state's licensed providers reopened as of Nov. 23, according to the latest survey from the Department of Early Education and Care. But, many providers told the state that reopening has come with a slew of financial challenges. Many reported struggles to find qualified staffers, or families to fill available slots. Some were forced to contend with the costs of temporary closures because of suspected or confirmed exposure to the coronavirus.

"We still are ahead of many, many states in our reopening capacity," Commissioner Samantha Aigner-Treworgy said during a board meeting this week. "While that is really great, what we're hearing back is many of those [providers] are at a level of vulnerability that could easily put us behind the country quickly as well."

While only 5% of the state's 8,200 licensed providers closed permanently, the commissioner noted an accelerated pace of closures over the last month. Twenty-two more providers shut their doors for good, while another 180 told the state they no longer planned to reopen by the end of the year.