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"title": "Mass COVID-19 Testing in Nursing Homes Still a Ways Off in Greater Bay Area Counties",
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"content": "\u003cp class=\"p1\">The Nine Bay Area counties and Santa Cruz don’t regulate assisted living, nursing homes, and other group housing situations — but they have developed “task forces” and “strike teams” who \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1961129/bay-area-covid-19-outbreaks-worsen-spread-in-long-term-care-homes\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">advise\u003c/span>\u003c/a> these risky places about ways to mitigate and control the spread of the coronavirus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Public health and infectious disease experts generally agree on what tactics help. They include training in hand-washing and using personal protective equipment (PPE), monitoring staffing levels and supplementing them where workers fall ill or must isolate, and testing, which may include residents and staff, whether they have symptoms or not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Lately, testing has risen to the top. That’s partly because, \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CHCQ/LCP/Pages/AFL-20-44.aspx\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">as of May 2\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, the California Department of Public Health gave new guidance expanding COVID-19 testing, giving priority for people in group living situations, even for people without symptoms. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-nCoV/hcp/clinical-criteria.html\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">something similar\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, later.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">And when San Francisco Mayor London Breed and her health officer, Dr. Grant Colfax announced plans to test every worker and resident at 21 skilled nursing facilities across the city, Colfax called it a “decisive” move to protect vulnerable people at high risk of outbreak.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Here’s how the Greater Bay Area counties are responding to the virus in long-term care homes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb>ALAMEDA:\u003c/b> Alameda County doesn’t test everyone at long-term care facilities, even where there’s an outbreak. The county has identified concerns about “ongoing limitations in testing resources and personal protective equipment,” and acting public health officer Dr. Erica Pan has emphasized that tests should have a purpose, and should be able to prompt a specific response. County officials say they’re following the state’s guidance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"> \u003c/span>Greg Shaw, a registered nurse working at the Rehabilitation Center of Oakland, says Alameda County should routinely test at nursing homes, as San Francisco and New York are doing. “We’re not very protected in the time before we have an outbreak,” he says, noting that transmission doesn’t require symptoms, tests take time, facilities are crowded, and protective gear is rationed until cases are confirmed. “I urge you to — quicker than you imagine it’s possible — start the type of testing where it’s regular and sweeps through everyone possible,” says Shaw.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb>CONTRA COSTA:\u003c/b> County officials say they don’t plan to require universal testing at skilled nursing facilities, but they do presently encourage testing. As the state suggests, Contra Costa prioritizes testing in long-term care homes, including when there is an outbreak, and for new residents of facilities, as recommended by the CDC.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb>MARIN:\u003c/b> County health officer Dr. Matt Willis says that he wants to test everyone at assisted living and skilled nursing homes, but doing so will take at least a month. Marin County has at least 70 group living situations licensed by state regulators; Willis says he would like to test sites every two weeks. A standing health order \u003ca href=\"https://coronavirus.marinhhs.org/standing-order-congregate-testing\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">enables\u003c/span>\u003c/a> testing at facilities; Willis says more language would be necessary to require it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">As for controlling the spread of the virus, “We’ve done a lot of teaching in terms of infection control,” he says, because care homes lack training and equipment to handle this virus, especially compared to hospitals. Willis says facilities should share the burden and cost of testing with the county; some nursing homes have contracted for their testing entirely independently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb>NAPA:\u003c/b> The county is offering free testing for anyone who works and lives in Napa, but health officials have not said anything specific about group living circumstances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb>SAN FRANCISCO:\u003c/b> It’s complicated to require testing at skilled nursing facilities; San Francisco’s \u003ca href=\"https://sfgsa.org/sites/default/files/Document/OrderNo%20C19-13SNFTestingCooperationandReporting.pdf\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">order\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, released May 7, is 19 pages long. San Francisco’s order specifically calls for “cooperation” from facilities; county health departments don’t have regulatory authority over skilled nursing homes, that’s the province of the California Department of Public Health. The order considers how to notify residents of facilities, obtain consent, and ask facilities to make records of testing. And tests might prompt “isolation, quarantine, cohorting of Residents or Personnel, and transfer of Residents.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb>SAN MATEO:\u003c/b> San Mateo County has not been testing everyone at licensed group living facilities during the coronavirus outbreak, but its health department says it has tested more than 700 people at more than 150 facilities around the county. Health officer Dr. Scott Morrow has asked the department to develop a plan for routine testing at assisted living facilities and nursing homes, and a statement from the county says “this aspiration is more feasible now.” Health officials will share the plan with county supervisors later this month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb>SANTA CLARA:\u003c/b> County health officials say that skilled nursing facilities “\u003ca href=\"https://mailchi.mp/phd.sccgov.org/health-alert-guidance-on-expansion-of-covid-19-testing-in-santa-clara-county-p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">should\u003c/span>\u003c/a>” test all workers, patients who have symptoms and patients who report possible exposure. Santa Clara investigates suspected and confirmed coronavirus cases at skilled nursing facilities; some of those investigations may prompt testing and site visits. The county advises workers at care facilities who develop symptoms to tell their employers and follow their employers’ directions. Santa Clara \u003ca href=\"https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx#LTCF\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">reports\u003c/span>\u003c/a> daily updated totals for cumulative cases at long-term care facilities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb>SANTA CRUZ:\u003c/b> “We don’t have a specific order” on testing in assisted living and nursing homes,” says communications manager Jason Hoppin. “But we do plan to offer it to everyone. I don’t know if it’s going to be mandatory.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb>SOLANO:\u003c/b> Medical officer Dr. Bela Matyas says the county is hoping to focus testing at long-term care facilities, but added, “it’s just a goal. We don’t have at the moment the resources or the bandwidth to test all of our nursing homes, staff and residents.” Matyas says the county has emphasized additional training on universal precautions like hand-washing, echoing Marin’s Dr. Matt Willis: “It’s not that the people are less competent or less smart in either of these facilities,” Matyas says. “It’s that the tools are used so much more frequently in hospital environments that it’s second nature.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb data-stringify-type=\"bold\">SONOMA:\u003c/b> The health department is conducting “enhanced surveillance” at care facilities and other group living environments, like homeless shelters and jails. As part of that effort, disease control specialists have been testing a small sample of the population at between five and ten facilities a week. “We visit facilities and test symptomatic and asymptomatic residents and staff, in an effort to catch any cases before they become an outbreak,” says county spokeswoman Jennifer Larocque. When sampling in group living settings, Larocque says county officials seek out higher risk individuals: residents who have trouble eating or moving (and thus may come into contact with more surfaces and other people), and workers who may visit multiple facilities. She says the longer-term goal is to test everyone at these facilities at regular increments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cem>Ari Remmel and Polly Stryker contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp class=\"p1\">The Nine Bay Area counties and Santa Cruz don’t regulate assisted living, nursing homes, and other group housing situations — but they have developed “task forces” and “strike teams” who \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1961129/bay-area-covid-19-outbreaks-worsen-spread-in-long-term-care-homes\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">advise\u003c/span>\u003c/a> these risky places about ways to mitigate and control the spread of the coronavirus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Public health and infectious disease experts generally agree on what tactics help. They include training in hand-washing and using personal protective equipment (PPE), monitoring staffing levels and supplementing them where workers fall ill or must isolate, and testing, which may include residents and staff, whether they have symptoms or not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Lately, testing has risen to the top. That’s partly because, \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CHCQ/LCP/Pages/AFL-20-44.aspx\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">as of May 2\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, the California Department of Public Health gave new guidance expanding COVID-19 testing, giving priority for people in group living situations, even for people without symptoms. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-nCoV/hcp/clinical-criteria.html\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">something similar\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, later.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">And when San Francisco Mayor London Breed and her health officer, Dr. Grant Colfax announced plans to test every worker and resident at 21 skilled nursing facilities across the city, Colfax called it a “decisive” move to protect vulnerable people at high risk of outbreak.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Here’s how the Greater Bay Area counties are responding to the virus in long-term care homes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb>ALAMEDA:\u003c/b> Alameda County doesn’t test everyone at long-term care facilities, even where there’s an outbreak. The county has identified concerns about “ongoing limitations in testing resources and personal protective equipment,” and acting public health officer Dr. Erica Pan has emphasized that tests should have a purpose, and should be able to prompt a specific response. County officials say they’re following the state’s guidance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"> \u003c/span>Greg Shaw, a registered nurse working at the Rehabilitation Center of Oakland, says Alameda County should routinely test at nursing homes, as San Francisco and New York are doing. “We’re not very protected in the time before we have an outbreak,” he says, noting that transmission doesn’t require symptoms, tests take time, facilities are crowded, and protective gear is rationed until cases are confirmed. “I urge you to — quicker than you imagine it’s possible — start the type of testing where it’s regular and sweeps through everyone possible,” says Shaw.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb>CONTRA COSTA:\u003c/b> County officials say they don’t plan to require universal testing at skilled nursing facilities, but they do presently encourage testing. As the state suggests, Contra Costa prioritizes testing in long-term care homes, including when there is an outbreak, and for new residents of facilities, as recommended by the CDC.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb>MARIN:\u003c/b> County health officer Dr. Matt Willis says that he wants to test everyone at assisted living and skilled nursing homes, but doing so will take at least a month. Marin County has at least 70 group living situations licensed by state regulators; Willis says he would like to test sites every two weeks. A standing health order \u003ca href=\"https://coronavirus.marinhhs.org/standing-order-congregate-testing\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">enables\u003c/span>\u003c/a> testing at facilities; Willis says more language would be necessary to require it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">As for controlling the spread of the virus, “We’ve done a lot of teaching in terms of infection control,” he says, because care homes lack training and equipment to handle this virus, especially compared to hospitals. Willis says facilities should share the burden and cost of testing with the county; some nursing homes have contracted for their testing entirely independently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb>NAPA:\u003c/b> The county is offering free testing for anyone who works and lives in Napa, but health officials have not said anything specific about group living circumstances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb>SAN FRANCISCO:\u003c/b> It’s complicated to require testing at skilled nursing facilities; San Francisco’s \u003ca href=\"https://sfgsa.org/sites/default/files/Document/OrderNo%20C19-13SNFTestingCooperationandReporting.pdf\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">order\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, released May 7, is 19 pages long. San Francisco’s order specifically calls for “cooperation” from facilities; county health departments don’t have regulatory authority over skilled nursing homes, that’s the province of the California Department of Public Health. The order considers how to notify residents of facilities, obtain consent, and ask facilities to make records of testing. And tests might prompt “isolation, quarantine, cohorting of Residents or Personnel, and transfer of Residents.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb>SAN MATEO:\u003c/b> San Mateo County has not been testing everyone at licensed group living facilities during the coronavirus outbreak, but its health department says it has tested more than 700 people at more than 150 facilities around the county. Health officer Dr. Scott Morrow has asked the department to develop a plan for routine testing at assisted living facilities and nursing homes, and a statement from the county says “this aspiration is more feasible now.” Health officials will share the plan with county supervisors later this month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb>SANTA CLARA:\u003c/b> County health officials say that skilled nursing facilities “\u003ca href=\"https://mailchi.mp/phd.sccgov.org/health-alert-guidance-on-expansion-of-covid-19-testing-in-santa-clara-county-p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">should\u003c/span>\u003c/a>” test all workers, patients who have symptoms and patients who report possible exposure. Santa Clara investigates suspected and confirmed coronavirus cases at skilled nursing facilities; some of those investigations may prompt testing and site visits. The county advises workers at care facilities who develop symptoms to tell their employers and follow their employers’ directions. Santa Clara \u003ca href=\"https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx#LTCF\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">reports\u003c/span>\u003c/a> daily updated totals for cumulative cases at long-term care facilities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb>SANTA CRUZ:\u003c/b> “We don’t have a specific order” on testing in assisted living and nursing homes,” says communications manager Jason Hoppin. “But we do plan to offer it to everyone. I don’t know if it’s going to be mandatory.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb>SOLANO:\u003c/b> Medical officer Dr. Bela Matyas says the county is hoping to focus testing at long-term care facilities, but added, “it’s just a goal. We don’t have at the moment the resources or the bandwidth to test all of our nursing homes, staff and residents.” Matyas says the county has emphasized additional training on universal precautions like hand-washing, echoing Marin’s Dr. Matt Willis: “It’s not that the people are less competent or less smart in either of these facilities,” Matyas says. “It’s that the tools are used so much more frequently in hospital environments that it’s second nature.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb data-stringify-type=\"bold\">SONOMA:\u003c/b> The health department is conducting “enhanced surveillance” at care facilities and other group living environments, like homeless shelters and jails. As part of that effort, disease control specialists have been testing a small sample of the population at between five and ten facilities a week. “We visit facilities and test symptomatic and asymptomatic residents and staff, in an effort to catch any cases before they become an outbreak,” says county spokeswoman Jennifer Larocque. When sampling in group living settings, Larocque says county officials seek out higher risk individuals: residents who have trouble eating or moving (and thus may come into contact with more surfaces and other people), and workers who may visit multiple facilities. She says the longer-term goal is to test everyone at these facilities at regular increments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Laguna Honda’s COVID-19 Outbreak Offers Lessons for Other Long-Term Care Homes",
"headTitle": "Laguna Honda’s COVID-19 Outbreak Offers Lessons for Other Long-Term Care Homes | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>This week San Francisco health officials have begun testing everyone at skilled nursing facilities for COVID-19, beginning with the county-run \u003ca href=\"https://lagunahonda.org/\">Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center\u003c/a>, where an early outbreak has amassed 21 cases of the virus among patients and staff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It could have been much worse. In early March, positive cases climbed rapidly at the facility, which serves hundreds of patients who are poor, old and vulnerable. But in the last month they’ve leveled off. To date, most cases of the coronavirus associated with the facility are among staff, and the health department reports the currently sick as being in good condition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mayor London Breed has heralded the advent of universal testing at San Francisco’s 21 long-term care facilities. But health officials say they’ve stemmed the Laguna Honda outbreak with a combination of public health interventions, some common, but uncommonly applied in this context.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>“By The Time You Get There, It’s Already Everywhere”\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two months ago, the coronavirus was moving mostly silently among Californians, often through asymptomatic transmission. But as authorities began to count cases: one Washington State nursing home accounted for a quarter of the known deaths nationally.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dr. Ayanna Bennett, an incident commander with the San Francisco Department of Public Health, says the message from other jurisdictions was that, in congregate living circumstances, nothing works.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They were saying, ‘By the time you get there, it’s already everywhere,’” Bennett remembers. “And so that’s how we entered the building. Oh, my God, it’s already everywhere.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that wasn’t the case. In part, says Bennett, because when COVID-19 showed up at Laguna Honda it was found mainly among staffers. So the facility’s nurse manager, Irin Blanco, not only sent home workers who seemed sick, but also others who came into contact with them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That aggressive movement, to take as much virus as you suspect might be there out of the building is the key to everything,” Bennett says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bennett says health officials knew that they couldn’t keep the coronavirus away from Laguna Honda forever. So they sought to interrupt transmission of the virus between staffers. The health department then began aggressive surveillance, gathering data by asking staffers more questions about their potential exposure to the virus, even if they didn’t have symptoms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That, I think, is a shift even for us,” she says. “It isn’t really traditional to do that, because we have not had the resources to be able to do that. We still don’t.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Support for Staffers, Sick and Not\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over time, Laguna Honda’s administrators observed that workers passed the virus to each other; now, they represent three-quarters of the cases. Some nurses work in multiple places; some staffers commute on public transit between two counties. Even as much of the Bay Area continues to stay at home, the department found that Laguna Honda’s front-line workers are exposed to numerous instances of community risk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So now Bennett says the facility asks every worker every day about their contacts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People used to work where they wanted and you would not necessarily even know,” she says. “But now we really do need to know because it has happened multiple times that someone working in an outbreak somewhere essentially carries that infection to another facility.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The questions prompt protective actions: for some staffers, the health department has paid for hotel rooms, to minimize their exposure to other essential workers. And Laguna Honda sends workers home — but with pay — to be cautious.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not all long-term care facilities can and will do that. But San Francisco can protect workers from losing their jobs for getting the coronavirus while working. And Gov. Gavin Newsom now has signed an executive order \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/5.6.20-EO-N-62-20-text.pdf\">granting\u003c/a> workers’ compensation benefits to those who must work outside the home, which would cover at least some workers in the city’s long-term care homes: It’s not yet clear whether the benefits would help workers on registries, like nurses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Anything that helps staff stay in the positions we need them to be would be really helpful because lack of staff makes everything else really very difficult,” Bennett says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beyond surveillance and paid leave, the San Francisco Department of Public Health says other actions have helped stem the spread of COVID-19. More training on infection control procedures, the development of plans to segregate existing patients, and detailed policies on transfers and admissions for patients as policies informed by the Laguna Honda outbreak.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bennett acknowledges that the coronavirus remains a threat at Laguna Honda. But she says the health department has created a “tool kit” that can help facilities work through these issues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re actually lucky something will work,” she says. “If Laguna Honda had not had any sense of containment we would be even more stuck.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>This week San Francisco health officials have begun testing everyone at skilled nursing facilities for COVID-19, beginning with the county-run \u003ca href=\"https://lagunahonda.org/\">Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center\u003c/a>, where an early outbreak has amassed 21 cases of the virus among patients and staff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It could have been much worse. In early March, positive cases climbed rapidly at the facility, which serves hundreds of patients who are poor, old and vulnerable. But in the last month they’ve leveled off. To date, most cases of the coronavirus associated with the facility are among staff, and the health department reports the currently sick as being in good condition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mayor London Breed has heralded the advent of universal testing at San Francisco’s 21 long-term care facilities. But health officials say they’ve stemmed the Laguna Honda outbreak with a combination of public health interventions, some common, but uncommonly applied in this context.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>“By The Time You Get There, It’s Already Everywhere”\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two months ago, the coronavirus was moving mostly silently among Californians, often through asymptomatic transmission. But as authorities began to count cases: one Washington State nursing home accounted for a quarter of the known deaths nationally.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dr. Ayanna Bennett, an incident commander with the San Francisco Department of Public Health, says the message from other jurisdictions was that, in congregate living circumstances, nothing works.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They were saying, ‘By the time you get there, it’s already everywhere,’” Bennett remembers. “And so that’s how we entered the building. Oh, my God, it’s already everywhere.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that wasn’t the case. In part, says Bennett, because when COVID-19 showed up at Laguna Honda it was found mainly among staffers. So the facility’s nurse manager, Irin Blanco, not only sent home workers who seemed sick, but also others who came into contact with them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That aggressive movement, to take as much virus as you suspect might be there out of the building is the key to everything,” Bennett says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bennett says health officials knew that they couldn’t keep the coronavirus away from Laguna Honda forever. So they sought to interrupt transmission of the virus between staffers. The health department then began aggressive surveillance, gathering data by asking staffers more questions about their potential exposure to the virus, even if they didn’t have symptoms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That, I think, is a shift even for us,” she says. “It isn’t really traditional to do that, because we have not had the resources to be able to do that. We still don’t.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Support for Staffers, Sick and Not\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over time, Laguna Honda’s administrators observed that workers passed the virus to each other; now, they represent three-quarters of the cases. Some nurses work in multiple places; some staffers commute on public transit between two counties. Even as much of the Bay Area continues to stay at home, the department found that Laguna Honda’s front-line workers are exposed to numerous instances of community risk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So now Bennett says the facility asks every worker every day about their contacts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People used to work where they wanted and you would not necessarily even know,” she says. “But now we really do need to know because it has happened multiple times that someone working in an outbreak somewhere essentially carries that infection to another facility.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The questions prompt protective actions: for some staffers, the health department has paid for hotel rooms, to minimize their exposure to other essential workers. And Laguna Honda sends workers home — but with pay — to be cautious.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not all long-term care facilities can and will do that. But San Francisco can protect workers from losing their jobs for getting the coronavirus while working. And Gov. Gavin Newsom now has signed an executive order \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/5.6.20-EO-N-62-20-text.pdf\">granting\u003c/a> workers’ compensation benefits to those who must work outside the home, which would cover at least some workers in the city’s long-term care homes: It’s not yet clear whether the benefits would help workers on registries, like nurses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Anything that helps staff stay in the positions we need them to be would be really helpful because lack of staff makes everything else really very difficult,” Bennett says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beyond surveillance and paid leave, the San Francisco Department of Public Health says other actions have helped stem the spread of COVID-19. More training on infection control procedures, the development of plans to segregate existing patients, and detailed policies on transfers and admissions for patients as policies informed by the Laguna Honda outbreak.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bennett acknowledges that the coronavirus remains a threat at Laguna Honda. But she says the health department has created a “tool kit” that can help facilities work through these issues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re actually lucky something will work,” she says. “If Laguna Honda had not had any sense of containment we would be even more stuck.”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"big-cap-wrap\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap\">T\u003c/span>\u003c/span>he Bay Area drug maker Gilead Sciences released a bombshell two weeks ago: A study conducted by a U.S. government agency had found that the company’s experimental drug, \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/05/remdesivir-gilead-strategic-crossroads-reputation-far-more-at-stake/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">remdesivir\u003c/a>, was the first treatment \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/29/gilead-says-critical-study-of-covid-19-drug-shows-patients-are-responding-to-treatment/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">shown to have even a small effect\u003c/a> against COVID-19.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Behind that ray of hope, though, was one of the toughest quandaries in medicine: how to balance the need to rigorously test a new medicine for safety and effectiveness with the moral imperative to get patients an effective treatment as quickly as possible. At the heart of the decision about when to end the trial was a process that was — as is often in the case in clinical trials — by turns secretive and bureaucratic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has described to STAT in new detail how it made its fateful decision: to start giving remdesivir to patients who had been assigned to receive a placebo in the study, essentially limiting researchers’ ability to collect more data about whether the drug saves lives — something the study, called ACTT-1, suggests but does not prove. In the trial, 8% of the participants given remdesivir died, compared with 11.6% of the placebo group, a difference that was not statistically significant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>A ‘Lost Opportunity’\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A top NIAID official said he had no regrets about the decision.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There certainly was unanimity within the institute that this was the right thing to do,” said H. Clifford Lane, NIAID’s clinical director. “While I think there might’ve been some discussion, [because] everyone always tries to play devil’s advocate in these discussions, I think there was a pretty uniform opinion that this was what we should do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From the standpoint of the agency, he said, the study had answered the question it was designed to answer: The median time that hospitalized COVID-19 patients on remdesivir took to stop needing oxygen or exit the hospital was, at 11 days, four days shorter than those who were on placebo. “How many patients would we want to put at risk of dying,” he asked, for that last little bit of proof? Remdesivir, he noted, was not a home run, but is probably better than nothing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Steven Nissen, a veteran trialist and cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, disagreed that giving placebo patients remdesivir was the right call. “I believe it is in society’s best interest to determine whether remdesivir can reduce mortality, and with the release of this information doing a placebo-controlled trial to determine if there is a mortality benefit will be very difficult,” he said. “The question is: Was there a route, or is there a route, to determine if the drug can prevent death?” The decision is “a lost opportunity,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Peter Bach, the director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, agreed with Nissen. “The core understanding of clinical research participation and clinical research conduct is we run the trial rigorously to provide the most accurate information about the right treatment,” he said. And that answer, he argued, should ideally have determined whether remdesivir saves lives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The reason we have shut our whole society down, Bach said, is not to prevent COVID-19 patients from spending a few more days in the hospital. It is to prevent patients from dying. “Mortality is the right endpoint,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tough Call\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most experts contacted by STAT expressed opinions that fell between Nissen and Lane, believing that the decision was a difficult case, with several defending the NIAID.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think it was a really tough call,” said Janet Wittes, a prominent statistician and the president of Statistics Collaborative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the remdesivir results were announced, the NIH said the data came from an “interim” analysis. This means that a study was stopped early because a drug’s benefit was so undeniable that it would be unethical to continue the study. But Lane said this was incorrect. The data come from a preliminary final analysis, a point at which the study would normally end.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The ACTT study (short for Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial) began in late February. The first patient dosed in the study was an American repatriated from the Diamond Princess, a British cruise ship where there was an outbreak of more than 800 COVID-19 cases. By the terms of the study, hospitalized patients were randomly assigned to receive either intravenous remdesivir or a placebo. On day 15, the study would score patients on a scale from 1 (dead) to 8 (not hospitalized, with no restrictions on activities).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As results from other COVID-19 studies conducted in China started to trickle in, Lane and his team began to worry that looking at the outcome on only the 15th day could lead the study to fail even if the drug was effective. On March 22, with only 77 patients enrolled in the study, members of the NIAID team had a conference call on which they decided to change the measure that would be used. Instead of measuring patients on an eight-point scale on one day, the study would measure the time until the patients scored one of the best three outcomes on the scale. This decision was finalized on April 2; it was posted to clinicaltrials.gov, a government registry of clinical trials, on April 16.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ironically, Lane said, the study would still have been positive if the change had not been made. But the change in the study’s main goal also changed the way the study would be analyzed. Now, the NIAID decided, the analysis would be calculated when 400 patients out of the 1,063 patients the study enrolled had recovered. If remdesivir turned out to be much more effective than expected, “interim” analyses would be conducted at a third and two-thirds that number.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>First, Do No Harm\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The job of reviewing these analyses would fall to a committee of outside experts on what is known as an independent data and safety monitoring board, or DSMB. Though they generally go unseen, DSMBs are among the most important and powerful forces in medical research. They are allowed to analyze the data from a trial while it’s ongoing, even as drug companies, doctors, and patients are kept from knowing who is getting the medicine and who is getting placebo. These boards have two jobs: to make sure that patients aren’t being harmed by the experimental drug, and to ensure that it’s not already clear beyond a doubt that a medicine is effective.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those decisions bring moments of triumph, despair, and, occasionally, confusion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Merck decided to withdraw the painkiller Vioxx in 2004, it was because a DSMB had recommended stopping a study of the drug when it became clear the medicine increased the risk of heart attacks and strokes. In 2014, when a study of the cancer immunotherapy Opdivo first proved that drug extended survival in melanoma, it was because a DSMB had found the result incontrovertible and recommended stopping the study.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the DSMB for the remdesivir study did not ever meet for an interim efficacy analysis, Lane said. All patients had been enrolled by April 20. The data for a DSMB meeting was cut off on April 22. The DSMB met and, on April 27, it made a recommendation to the NIAID.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That recommendation was not about whether the patients on placebo should receive remdesivir. Instead, the DSMB recommended that in the next phase of the study, testing Eli Lilly’s arthritis drug Olumiant against remdesivir, there was no need for a placebo-only group.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That decision, Lane said, led the NIAID to conclude that patients who had been given placebo should be offered remdesivir, something that started happening after April 28.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is where Nissen and Bach disagree. There were 1,063 patients in the study, but only 480 had recovered at the time of the analysis. Researchers could have collected more data, they argue, and perhaps have learned if remdesivir saves lives. They were already close, both note. Results are considered “significant” if a measure called a p-value is less than 0.05; the value for mortality in the preliminary analysis was 0.059. “How many patients would we want to put at risk of dying to get that 0.01 on the p-value,” Lane retorted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Marc Pfeffer, a cardiologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said he believes NIAID made the right call. He said that he was “very sympathetic” to the fact that researchers were getting this study done during a pandemic. “If you make the decision that remdesivir should be part of everybody’s therapy in the next phase, then those volunteers taking the risks in the current trial should be switched to the active therapy now considered effective,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Should this decision have been left to the DSMB, not the NIAID? DSMBs are technically only advisory panels, said Richard Chaisson, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chaisson remembers running an NIH-funded study of a preventative treatment for tuberculosis. The DSMB recommended continuing the trial, but he decided not to, because it was putting patients at too much risk. “The NIH had no problem with me not following the DSMB’s advice, and were even relieved I made the decision I did,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wittes, of Statistics Collaborative, said she is glad she wasn’t on this DSMB, adding, “I don’t know where I would have come out.” And she said that when full results of the study are available, she would be “shocked” if the NIAID had not done things properly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think there are groups of people who you’d really respect who would not have stopped a study like this without a mortality benefit,” Wittes said. “And I think you can argue that both ways.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But she also worried that the evidence might not be strong enough to make the decision society is now making: that every new COVID-19 treatment must be given with or compared to remdesivir.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Not for Everybody?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The danger is now it’s the treatment for everybody,” she said. “Now this is the base drug and everything is going to be that plus something or the control. I think we don’t know if it’s strong enough for it to be the standard of care. I don’t think we know who should be treated.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Steven Joffe, an ethics expert at the University of Pennsylvania, said he believes the NIAID likely took the right steps in making its decision to give remdesivir to the placebo patients. But he worries about deciding to use time to improvement, not death, as the measure of success, in the first place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t find this endpoint very compelling, and to me the real issue is the decision to design the trial around the endpoint of time to recovery defined in the way they defined recovery,” Joffe said. “To me, the decisions that are this weighty ought to be based on clinically important endpoints.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All of this would normally wait until the full results were published, at which point the roster of the DSMB may be revealed. (Lane would not share their names.) But what is unusual in this case is that, before the data are even fully analyzed, the FDA has \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/01/fda-to-allow-emergency-use-of-gileads-covid-19-drug/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">authorized remdesivir’s use\u003c/a>. A Chinese study, meanwhile, \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/23/data-on-gileads-remdesivir-released-by-accident-show-no-benefit-for-coronavirus-patients/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">failed to show\u003c/a> remdesivir had a benefit. Several more studies of the drug expected to read out soon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ethan Weiss, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who traveled to New York two weeks ago \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/07/podcast-covid-19-gilead-pricing-dilemma/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">to treat COVID-19 patients\u003c/a>, said that he does worry that we have missed “a fleeting opportunity” to understand how well remdesivir works. “It is sad to me that we’re not going to get a complete answer about it.” But he said he also thinks the issue is “inside baseball.” Remdesivir, as several experts have pointed out, is not a game changer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The real problem, Weiss said, is not the handling of this particular study but that there aren’t more like it. He said he wished the U.S. had built the infrastructure needed to do more studies like this when the pandemic in New York was at its height. He wished there were more studies, with more DSMBs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve squandered an incredible opportunity to do good science,” Weiss said. “If we could ever go back and do something all over, it would be the infrastructure to actually learn something. Because we’re not learning enough.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/11/inside-the-nihs-controversial-decision-to-stop-its-big-remdesivir-study/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">story\u003c/a> was originally published by \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/\">STAT\u003c/a>, an online publication of Boston Globe Media that covers health, medicine, and scientific discovery.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"big-cap-wrap\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap\">T\u003c/span>\u003c/span>he Bay Area drug maker Gilead Sciences released a bombshell two weeks ago: A study conducted by a U.S. government agency had found that the company’s experimental drug, \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/05/remdesivir-gilead-strategic-crossroads-reputation-far-more-at-stake/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">remdesivir\u003c/a>, was the first treatment \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/29/gilead-says-critical-study-of-covid-19-drug-shows-patients-are-responding-to-treatment/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">shown to have even a small effect\u003c/a> against COVID-19.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Behind that ray of hope, though, was one of the toughest quandaries in medicine: how to balance the need to rigorously test a new medicine for safety and effectiveness with the moral imperative to get patients an effective treatment as quickly as possible. At the heart of the decision about when to end the trial was a process that was — as is often in the case in clinical trials — by turns secretive and bureaucratic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has described to STAT in new detail how it made its fateful decision: to start giving remdesivir to patients who had been assigned to receive a placebo in the study, essentially limiting researchers’ ability to collect more data about whether the drug saves lives — something the study, called ACTT-1, suggests but does not prove. In the trial, 8% of the participants given remdesivir died, compared with 11.6% of the placebo group, a difference that was not statistically significant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>A ‘Lost Opportunity’\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A top NIAID official said he had no regrets about the decision.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There certainly was unanimity within the institute that this was the right thing to do,” said H. Clifford Lane, NIAID’s clinical director. “While I think there might’ve been some discussion, [because] everyone always tries to play devil’s advocate in these discussions, I think there was a pretty uniform opinion that this was what we should do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From the standpoint of the agency, he said, the study had answered the question it was designed to answer: The median time that hospitalized COVID-19 patients on remdesivir took to stop needing oxygen or exit the hospital was, at 11 days, four days shorter than those who were on placebo. “How many patients would we want to put at risk of dying,” he asked, for that last little bit of proof? Remdesivir, he noted, was not a home run, but is probably better than nothing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Steven Nissen, a veteran trialist and cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, disagreed that giving placebo patients remdesivir was the right call. “I believe it is in society’s best interest to determine whether remdesivir can reduce mortality, and with the release of this information doing a placebo-controlled trial to determine if there is a mortality benefit will be very difficult,” he said. “The question is: Was there a route, or is there a route, to determine if the drug can prevent death?” The decision is “a lost opportunity,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Peter Bach, the director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, agreed with Nissen. “The core understanding of clinical research participation and clinical research conduct is we run the trial rigorously to provide the most accurate information about the right treatment,” he said. And that answer, he argued, should ideally have determined whether remdesivir saves lives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The reason we have shut our whole society down, Bach said, is not to prevent COVID-19 patients from spending a few more days in the hospital. It is to prevent patients from dying. “Mortality is the right endpoint,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tough Call\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most experts contacted by STAT expressed opinions that fell between Nissen and Lane, believing that the decision was a difficult case, with several defending the NIAID.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think it was a really tough call,” said Janet Wittes, a prominent statistician and the president of Statistics Collaborative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the remdesivir results were announced, the NIH said the data came from an “interim” analysis. This means that a study was stopped early because a drug’s benefit was so undeniable that it would be unethical to continue the study. But Lane said this was incorrect. The data come from a preliminary final analysis, a point at which the study would normally end.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The ACTT study (short for Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial) began in late February. The first patient dosed in the study was an American repatriated from the Diamond Princess, a British cruise ship where there was an outbreak of more than 800 COVID-19 cases. By the terms of the study, hospitalized patients were randomly assigned to receive either intravenous remdesivir or a placebo. On day 15, the study would score patients on a scale from 1 (dead) to 8 (not hospitalized, with no restrictions on activities).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As results from other COVID-19 studies conducted in China started to trickle in, Lane and his team began to worry that looking at the outcome on only the 15th day could lead the study to fail even if the drug was effective. On March 22, with only 77 patients enrolled in the study, members of the NIAID team had a conference call on which they decided to change the measure that would be used. Instead of measuring patients on an eight-point scale on one day, the study would measure the time until the patients scored one of the best three outcomes on the scale. This decision was finalized on April 2; it was posted to clinicaltrials.gov, a government registry of clinical trials, on April 16.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ironically, Lane said, the study would still have been positive if the change had not been made. But the change in the study’s main goal also changed the way the study would be analyzed. Now, the NIAID decided, the analysis would be calculated when 400 patients out of the 1,063 patients the study enrolled had recovered. If remdesivir turned out to be much more effective than expected, “interim” analyses would be conducted at a third and two-thirds that number.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>First, Do No Harm\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The job of reviewing these analyses would fall to a committee of outside experts on what is known as an independent data and safety monitoring board, or DSMB. Though they generally go unseen, DSMBs are among the most important and powerful forces in medical research. They are allowed to analyze the data from a trial while it’s ongoing, even as drug companies, doctors, and patients are kept from knowing who is getting the medicine and who is getting placebo. These boards have two jobs: to make sure that patients aren’t being harmed by the experimental drug, and to ensure that it’s not already clear beyond a doubt that a medicine is effective.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those decisions bring moments of triumph, despair, and, occasionally, confusion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Merck decided to withdraw the painkiller Vioxx in 2004, it was because a DSMB had recommended stopping a study of the drug when it became clear the medicine increased the risk of heart attacks and strokes. In 2014, when a study of the cancer immunotherapy Opdivo first proved that drug extended survival in melanoma, it was because a DSMB had found the result incontrovertible and recommended stopping the study.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the DSMB for the remdesivir study did not ever meet for an interim efficacy analysis, Lane said. All patients had been enrolled by April 20. The data for a DSMB meeting was cut off on April 22. The DSMB met and, on April 27, it made a recommendation to the NIAID.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That recommendation was not about whether the patients on placebo should receive remdesivir. Instead, the DSMB recommended that in the next phase of the study, testing Eli Lilly’s arthritis drug Olumiant against remdesivir, there was no need for a placebo-only group.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That decision, Lane said, led the NIAID to conclude that patients who had been given placebo should be offered remdesivir, something that started happening after April 28.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is where Nissen and Bach disagree. There were 1,063 patients in the study, but only 480 had recovered at the time of the analysis. Researchers could have collected more data, they argue, and perhaps have learned if remdesivir saves lives. They were already close, both note. Results are considered “significant” if a measure called a p-value is less than 0.05; the value for mortality in the preliminary analysis was 0.059. “How many patients would we want to put at risk of dying to get that 0.01 on the p-value,” Lane retorted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Marc Pfeffer, a cardiologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said he believes NIAID made the right call. He said that he was “very sympathetic” to the fact that researchers were getting this study done during a pandemic. “If you make the decision that remdesivir should be part of everybody’s therapy in the next phase, then those volunteers taking the risks in the current trial should be switched to the active therapy now considered effective,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Should this decision have been left to the DSMB, not the NIAID? DSMBs are technically only advisory panels, said Richard Chaisson, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chaisson remembers running an NIH-funded study of a preventative treatment for tuberculosis. The DSMB recommended continuing the trial, but he decided not to, because it was putting patients at too much risk. “The NIH had no problem with me not following the DSMB’s advice, and were even relieved I made the decision I did,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wittes, of Statistics Collaborative, said she is glad she wasn’t on this DSMB, adding, “I don’t know where I would have come out.” And she said that when full results of the study are available, she would be “shocked” if the NIAID had not done things properly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think there are groups of people who you’d really respect who would not have stopped a study like this without a mortality benefit,” Wittes said. “And I think you can argue that both ways.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But she also worried that the evidence might not be strong enough to make the decision society is now making: that every new COVID-19 treatment must be given with or compared to remdesivir.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Not for Everybody?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The danger is now it’s the treatment for everybody,” she said. “Now this is the base drug and everything is going to be that plus something or the control. I think we don’t know if it’s strong enough for it to be the standard of care. I don’t think we know who should be treated.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Steven Joffe, an ethics expert at the University of Pennsylvania, said he believes the NIAID likely took the right steps in making its decision to give remdesivir to the placebo patients. But he worries about deciding to use time to improvement, not death, as the measure of success, in the first place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t find this endpoint very compelling, and to me the real issue is the decision to design the trial around the endpoint of time to recovery defined in the way they defined recovery,” Joffe said. “To me, the decisions that are this weighty ought to be based on clinically important endpoints.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All of this would normally wait until the full results were published, at which point the roster of the DSMB may be revealed. (Lane would not share their names.) But what is unusual in this case is that, before the data are even fully analyzed, the FDA has \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/01/fda-to-allow-emergency-use-of-gileads-covid-19-drug/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">authorized remdesivir’s use\u003c/a>. A Chinese study, meanwhile, \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/23/data-on-gileads-remdesivir-released-by-accident-show-no-benefit-for-coronavirus-patients/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">failed to show\u003c/a> remdesivir had a benefit. Several more studies of the drug expected to read out soon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ethan Weiss, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who traveled to New York two weeks ago \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/07/podcast-covid-19-gilead-pricing-dilemma/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">to treat COVID-19 patients\u003c/a>, said that he does worry that we have missed “a fleeting opportunity” to understand how well remdesivir works. “It is sad to me that we’re not going to get a complete answer about it.” But he said he also thinks the issue is “inside baseball.” Remdesivir, as several experts have pointed out, is not a game changer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The real problem, Weiss said, is not the handling of this particular study but that there aren’t more like it. He said he wished the U.S. had built the infrastructure needed to do more studies like this when the pandemic in New York was at its height. He wished there were more studies, with more DSMBs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve squandered an incredible opportunity to do good science,” Weiss said. “If we could ever go back and do something all over, it would be the infrastructure to actually learn something. Because we’re not learning enough.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/11/inside-the-nihs-controversial-decision-to-stop-its-big-remdesivir-study/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">story\u003c/a> was originally published by \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/\">STAT\u003c/a>, an online publication of Boston Globe Media that covers health, medicine, and scientific discovery.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Flattening the Curve Bought California Time to Prepare for Future Surge",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In March, David Entwistle, the CEO of Stanford Health Care, braced for the worst. “We literally thought we would have hundreds of patients.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Models suggested he needed 1,000 hospital beds. At the time he had 600. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gov. Gavin \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Newsom warned more than 25 million Californians could contract coronavirus. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But an overwhelming surge never hit. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To date, about \u003ca href=\"https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-cases-tracking-outbreak/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">65,000\u003c/a> people have tested positive. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While preparing for the tsunami of patients that didn’t arrive, Stanford, like all California hospitals, canceled elective surgeries. Everything from tummy tucks to brain surgery was put on hold. The move freed up beds and staff, and it conserved precious resources like masks. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“When the first indication that there may be a surge came out, we shut down,” says Dr. Philip Theodosopoulos, a UCSF neurosurgeon. “We shut down the O.R. almost lock, stock and barrel.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Health care providers across the state also began to rely on telemedicine at unprecedented levels. Doctors at UCSF went from seeing 160 patients virtually a day to more than 2,000. In mid-March, physicians at \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sutter Health’s 24 hospitals were seeing about 20-30 patients a day online; today that number is up to 6,000.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Medical leaders around the Bay Area jumped on Zoom calls discussing contingency plans for potential patient overflows. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“It was incredibly complicated and incredibly time-consuming,” said Dr. Adrienne Green, the chief medical officer at UCSF. “We have mostly done this as our day job since the beginning of February, when we had our first couple of patients here.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hospitals erected pop-up tents outside of main entrances to triage COVID-19 patients as they arrived, new mobile respiratory clinics came online to treat less serious coronavirus cases, and decommissioned floors at numerous facilities were reopened. Even bankrupt hospitals that were scheduled to close, like Seton Medical Center in Daly City, got a reprieve to care for patients. In San Diego, hospitals converted college dormitories to alternative care sites. In Los Angeles, a navy ship hospital anchored off the coast, and 3D printing was used to manufacture ventilator parts. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Currently the number of California COVID-19 patients requiring hospitalization continues to fall, and the number of patients in intensive care units has flattened.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But medical leaders say all the planning will pay off. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“We have now built in the muscle memory to be able to surge when needed,” says Dr. Stephen Lockhart, the chief medical officer for Sutter Health. UCSF’s Adrienne Green agrees. “We’re now ready and we have all the building blocks to be prepared for a resurgence if it happens.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That includes not only a spike in coronavirus cases, but also California’s next devastating disaster like a deadly wildfire or an earthquake. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hospital surge capacity is one of the six indicators Gov. Newsom is using to assess when and how to relax stay-at-home orders. The state has prepared 14 facilities with 2,072 beds statewide to accept patients. There are also more than 10,000 ventilators on hand that are not currently in use. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/5.4-Report-Card-on-California-Resilience-Roadmap.pdf?campaign_id=49&emc=edit_ca_20200505&instance_id=18234&nl=california-today®i_id=78131845&segment_id=26636&te=1&user_id=3fb78e873af3312f34d0bc1d60a07c7f\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">report card\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> the state issued recently also laid out progress made on procuring personal protective equipment and hospital beds for any surge. The state eased some restrictions last week instituted under its March stay-at-home order, allowing lower-risk nonessential businesses to open for the first time in nearly two months. Most Bay Area counties, however, are sticking with stricter guidelines for now. San Francisco and Marin county are considering opening some stores May 18.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In March, David Entwistle, the CEO of Stanford Health Care, braced for the worst. “We literally thought we would have hundreds of patients.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Models suggested he needed 1,000 hospital beds. At the time he had 600. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gov. Gavin \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Newsom warned more than 25 million Californians could contract coronavirus. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But an overwhelming surge never hit. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To date, about \u003ca href=\"https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-cases-tracking-outbreak/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">65,000\u003c/a> people have tested positive. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While preparing for the tsunami of patients that didn’t arrive, Stanford, like all California hospitals, canceled elective surgeries. Everything from tummy tucks to brain surgery was put on hold. The move freed up beds and staff, and it conserved precious resources like masks. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“When the first indication that there may be a surge came out, we shut down,” says Dr. Philip Theodosopoulos, a UCSF neurosurgeon. “We shut down the O.R. almost lock, stock and barrel.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Health care providers across the state also began to rely on telemedicine at unprecedented levels. Doctors at UCSF went from seeing 160 patients virtually a day to more than 2,000. In mid-March, physicians at \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sutter Health’s 24 hospitals were seeing about 20-30 patients a day online; today that number is up to 6,000.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Medical leaders around the Bay Area jumped on Zoom calls discussing contingency plans for potential patient overflows. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“It was incredibly complicated and incredibly time-consuming,” said Dr. Adrienne Green, the chief medical officer at UCSF. “We have mostly done this as our day job since the beginning of February, when we had our first couple of patients here.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hospitals erected pop-up tents outside of main entrances to triage COVID-19 patients as they arrived, new mobile respiratory clinics came online to treat less serious coronavirus cases, and decommissioned floors at numerous facilities were reopened. Even bankrupt hospitals that were scheduled to close, like Seton Medical Center in Daly City, got a reprieve to care for patients. In San Diego, hospitals converted college dormitories to alternative care sites. In Los Angeles, a navy ship hospital anchored off the coast, and 3D printing was used to manufacture ventilator parts. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Currently the number of California COVID-19 patients requiring hospitalization continues to fall, and the number of patients in intensive care units has flattened.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But medical leaders say all the planning will pay off. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“We have now built in the muscle memory to be able to surge when needed,” says Dr. Stephen Lockhart, the chief medical officer for Sutter Health. UCSF’s Adrienne Green agrees. “We’re now ready and we have all the building blocks to be prepared for a resurgence if it happens.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That includes not only a spike in coronavirus cases, but also California’s next devastating disaster like a deadly wildfire or an earthquake. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hospital surge capacity is one of the six indicators Gov. Newsom is using to assess when and how to relax stay-at-home orders. The state has prepared 14 facilities with 2,072 beds statewide to accept patients. There are also more than 10,000 ventilators on hand that are not currently in use. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/5.4-Report-Card-on-California-Resilience-Roadmap.pdf?campaign_id=49&emc=edit_ca_20200505&instance_id=18234&nl=california-today®i_id=78131845&segment_id=26636&te=1&user_id=3fb78e873af3312f34d0bc1d60a07c7f\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">report card\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> the state issued recently also laid out progress made on procuring personal protective equipment and hospital beds for any surge. The state eased some restrictions last week instituted under its March stay-at-home order, allowing lower-risk nonessential businesses to open for the first time in nearly two months. Most Bay Area counties, however, are sticking with stricter guidelines for now. San Francisco and Marin county are considering opening some stores May 18.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Coronavirus: See If Your State Is Doing Enough Testing to Safely Phase Out Social Distancing",
"headTitle": "Coronavirus: See If Your State Is Doing Enough Testing to Safely Phase Out Social Distancing | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>To safely phase out social distancing measures, the U.S. needs more diagnostic testing for the coronavirus, experts say. But how much more?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote]Adequate testing is one key component, public health experts say, in assessing whether a state is ready to relax its social distancing measures. Here’s how each state is doing in terms of its current daily testing versus a target amount prescribed by one model. [/pullquote]The Trump administration said on April 27 that the U.S. will soon have enough capacity to conduct double the current amount of testing for active infections. The country has done nearly 248,000 tests daily on average in the past seven days, according to the nonprofit COVID Tracking Project. Doubling that would mean doing about 496,000 a day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Will that be enough? What benchmark should states try to hit?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One prominent research group, Harvard’s Global Health Institute, proposes that the U.S. should be doing more than 900,000 tests per day as a country. This projection, released Thursday, May 7, is a big jump from its earlier projection of testing need, which had been between 500,000 and 600,000 daily.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Harvard’s testing estimate increased, says Ashish Jha, director of the Global Health Institute, because the latest modeling shows that the outbreak in the United States is worse than projected earlier.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Just in the last few weeks, all of the models have converged on many more people getting infected and many more people [dying],” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But each state’s specific need for testing varies depending on the size of its outbreak, explains Jha. The bigger the outbreak, the more testing is needed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Thursday, Jha’s group at Harvard published a simulation that estimates the amount of testing needed in each state by May 15.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp id=\"responsive-embed-covid-testing-states-20200429\" data-pym-loader=\"\" data-child-src=\"https://apps.npr.org/dailygraphics/graphics/covid-testing-states-20200429/\">Loading…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cscript src=\"https://pym.nprapps.org/npr-pym-loader.v2.min.js\">\u003c/script>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Two ways to assess whether testing is adequate\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To make their state-by-state estimates, the Harvard Global Health Institute group started from a model of future case counts. It calculated how much testing would be needed for a state to test all infected people and any close contacts they may have exposed to the virus. (The simulation estimates testing 10 contacts on average.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Testing is outbreak control 101, because what testing lets you do is figure out who’s infected and who’s not,” Jha says. “And that lets you separate out the infected people from the noninfected people and bring the disease under control.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This approach is how communities can prevent outbreaks from flaring up. First, test all symptomatic people, then reach out to their close contacts and test them, and finally ask those who are infected or exposed to isolate themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our chart also shows another testing benchmark for each state: the ratio of tests conducted that come back positive. Communities that see about 10% or fewer positives among their test results are probably testing enough, the World Health Organization advises. If the rate is higher, they’re likely missing a lot of active infections.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What is apparent from the data we present below is that many states are far from both the Harvard estimates and the 10% positive benchmark.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just nine states are near or have exceeded the testing minimums estimated by Harvard; they are mostly larger, less populous states: Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Several states with large outbreaks — New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut, among others — are very far from the minimum testing target. Some states that are already relaxing their social distancing restrictions, such as Georgia, Texas and Colorado, are far from the target too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jha offers several caveats about his group’s estimates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Estimates are directional, not literal\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers at the Global Health Initiative at Harvard considered three different models of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak as a starting point for their testing estimates. They found that while there was significant variation in the projections of outbreak sizes, all of the models tend to point in the same direction, i.e., if one model showed that a state needed significantly more testing, the others generally did too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The model they used to create these estimates is the Youyang Gu \u003ca href=\"https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/covid19-projections.com/about/__;!!Iwwt!EPgZcyoMCKatS48-X1OvhJTkdvyloEkPTmp4-PEgTbIMvkBkuBTEb3tO-T90%24\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">COVID-19 Forecasts\u003c/a>, which they say has tracked closely with what’s actually happened on the ground. Still, the researchers caution, these numbers are not meant to be taken literally but as a guide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp id=\"responsive-embed-covid-testing-states-20200429-models\" data-pym-loader=\"\" data-child-src=\"https://apps.npr.org/dailygraphics/graphics/covid-testing-states-20200429/models.html\">Loading…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cscript src=\"https://pym.nprapps.org/npr-pym-loader.v2.min.js\">\u003c/script>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>If social distancing is relaxed, testing needs may grow\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Harvard testing estimates are built on a model that assumes that states continue social distancing through May 15. And \u003ca href=\"https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/state-data-and-policy-actions-to-address-coronavirus/#socialdistancing\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">about half of states have already started lifting\u003c/a> some of those.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jha says that without the right measures in place to contain spread, easing up could quickly lead to new cases.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The moment you relax, the number of cases will start climbing. And therefore, the number of tests you need to keep your society, your state from having large outbreaks will also start climbing,” warns Jha.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Testing alone is not enough\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A community can’t base the decision that it’s safe to open up on testing data alone. States should also see a consistent decline in the number of cases, of two weeks at least, according to White House guidance. If their cases are instead increasing, they should assume the number of tests they need will increase too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, Jha warns, testing is step one, but it won’t contain an outbreak by itself. It needs to be part of “a much broader set of strategies and plans the states need to have in place” when they begin to reopen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fact, his group’s model is built on the assumption that states are doing contact tracing and have plans to support isolation for infected or exposed people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t want anybody to just look at the number and say, we meet it and we’re good to go,” he says. “What this really is, is testing capacity in the context of having a really effective workforce of contact tracers.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The targets are floors, not goals\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>States that have reached the estimated target should think of that as a starting point.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve always built these as the floor, the bare minimum,” Jha says. More testing would be even better, allowing states to more rapidly tamp down case surges.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fact, other experts have proposed that the U.S. do even more testing. Paul Romer, a professor of economics at New York University, proposed in a recent white paper that if the U.S. tested every resident, every two weeks, isolating those who test positive, it could stop the pandemic in its tracks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jha warns that without sufficient testing, and the infrastructure in place to trace and isolate contacts, there’s a real risk that states — even those with few cases now — will see new large outbreaks. “I think what people have to remember is that the virus isn’t gone. The disease isn’t gone. And it’s going to be with us for a while,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Daniel Wood contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=U.S.+Coronavirus+Testing+Still+Falls+Short.+How%27s+Your+State+Doing%3F&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "One prominent research group, proposes that the U.S. should be doing more than 900,000 coronavirus tests per day if it is to safely phrase out social distancing measures. ",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>To safely phase out social distancing measures, the U.S. needs more diagnostic testing for the coronavirus, experts say. But how much more?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "Adequate testing is one key component, public health experts say, in assessing whether a state is ready to relax its social distancing measures. Here’s how each state is doing in terms of its current daily testing versus a target amount prescribed by one model. ",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The Trump administration said on April 27 that the U.S. will soon have enough capacity to conduct double the current amount of testing for active infections. The country has done nearly 248,000 tests daily on average in the past seven days, according to the nonprofit COVID Tracking Project. Doubling that would mean doing about 496,000 a day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Will that be enough? What benchmark should states try to hit?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One prominent research group, Harvard’s Global Health Institute, proposes that the U.S. should be doing more than 900,000 tests per day as a country. This projection, released Thursday, May 7, is a big jump from its earlier projection of testing need, which had been between 500,000 and 600,000 daily.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Harvard’s testing estimate increased, says Ashish Jha, director of the Global Health Institute, because the latest modeling shows that the outbreak in the United States is worse than projected earlier.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Just in the last few weeks, all of the models have converged on many more people getting infected and many more people [dying],” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But each state’s specific need for testing varies depending on the size of its outbreak, explains Jha. The bigger the outbreak, the more testing is needed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Thursday, Jha’s group at Harvard published a simulation that estimates the amount of testing needed in each state by May 15.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp id=\"responsive-embed-covid-testing-states-20200429\" data-pym-loader=\"\" data-child-src=\"https://apps.npr.org/dailygraphics/graphics/covid-testing-states-20200429/\">Loading…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cscript src=\"https://pym.nprapps.org/npr-pym-loader.v2.min.js\">\u003c/script>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Two ways to assess whether testing is adequate\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To make their state-by-state estimates, the Harvard Global Health Institute group started from a model of future case counts. It calculated how much testing would be needed for a state to test all infected people and any close contacts they may have exposed to the virus. (The simulation estimates testing 10 contacts on average.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Testing is outbreak control 101, because what testing lets you do is figure out who’s infected and who’s not,” Jha says. “And that lets you separate out the infected people from the noninfected people and bring the disease under control.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This approach is how communities can prevent outbreaks from flaring up. First, test all symptomatic people, then reach out to their close contacts and test them, and finally ask those who are infected or exposed to isolate themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our chart also shows another testing benchmark for each state: the ratio of tests conducted that come back positive. Communities that see about 10% or fewer positives among their test results are probably testing enough, the World Health Organization advises. If the rate is higher, they’re likely missing a lot of active infections.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What is apparent from the data we present below is that many states are far from both the Harvard estimates and the 10% positive benchmark.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just nine states are near or have exceeded the testing minimums estimated by Harvard; they are mostly larger, less populous states: Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Several states with large outbreaks — New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut, among others — are very far from the minimum testing target. Some states that are already relaxing their social distancing restrictions, such as Georgia, Texas and Colorado, are far from the target too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jha offers several caveats about his group’s estimates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Estimates are directional, not literal\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers at the Global Health Initiative at Harvard considered three different models of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak as a starting point for their testing estimates. They found that while there was significant variation in the projections of outbreak sizes, all of the models tend to point in the same direction, i.e., if one model showed that a state needed significantly more testing, the others generally did too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The model they used to create these estimates is the Youyang Gu \u003ca href=\"https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/covid19-projections.com/about/__;!!Iwwt!EPgZcyoMCKatS48-X1OvhJTkdvyloEkPTmp4-PEgTbIMvkBkuBTEb3tO-T90%24\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">COVID-19 Forecasts\u003c/a>, which they say has tracked closely with what’s actually happened on the ground. Still, the researchers caution, these numbers are not meant to be taken literally but as a guide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp id=\"responsive-embed-covid-testing-states-20200429-models\" data-pym-loader=\"\" data-child-src=\"https://apps.npr.org/dailygraphics/graphics/covid-testing-states-20200429/models.html\">Loading…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cscript src=\"https://pym.nprapps.org/npr-pym-loader.v2.min.js\">\u003c/script>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>If social distancing is relaxed, testing needs may grow\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Harvard testing estimates are built on a model that assumes that states continue social distancing through May 15. And \u003ca href=\"https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/state-data-and-policy-actions-to-address-coronavirus/#socialdistancing\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">about half of states have already started lifting\u003c/a> some of those.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jha says that without the right measures in place to contain spread, easing up could quickly lead to new cases.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The moment you relax, the number of cases will start climbing. And therefore, the number of tests you need to keep your society, your state from having large outbreaks will also start climbing,” warns Jha.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Testing alone is not enough\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A community can’t base the decision that it’s safe to open up on testing data alone. States should also see a consistent decline in the number of cases, of two weeks at least, according to White House guidance. If their cases are instead increasing, they should assume the number of tests they need will increase too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, Jha warns, testing is step one, but it won’t contain an outbreak by itself. It needs to be part of “a much broader set of strategies and plans the states need to have in place” when they begin to reopen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fact, his group’s model is built on the assumption that states are doing contact tracing and have plans to support isolation for infected or exposed people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t want anybody to just look at the number and say, we meet it and we’re good to go,” he says. “What this really is, is testing capacity in the context of having a really effective workforce of contact tracers.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The targets are floors, not goals\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>States that have reached the estimated target should think of that as a starting point.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve always built these as the floor, the bare minimum,” Jha says. More testing would be even better, allowing states to more rapidly tamp down case surges.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fact, other experts have proposed that the U.S. do even more testing. Paul Romer, a professor of economics at New York University, proposed in a recent white paper that if the U.S. tested every resident, every two weeks, isolating those who test positive, it could stop the pandemic in its tracks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jha warns that without sufficient testing, and the infrastructure in place to trace and isolate contacts, there’s a real risk that states — even those with few cases now — will see new large outbreaks. “I think what people have to remember is that the virus isn’t gone. The disease isn’t gone. And it’s going to be with us for a while,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Daniel Wood contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=U.S.+Coronavirus+Testing+Still+Falls+Short.+How%27s+Your+State+Doing%3F&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Mystery Inflammatory Syndrome In Kids And Teens Likely Linked To COVID-19",
"headTitle": "Mystery Inflammatory Syndrome In Kids And Teens Likely Linked To COVID-19 | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Updated May 8 at 11:54 a.m. ET\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sixty-four children and teens in New York State are suspected of having a mysterious inflammatory syndrome that is believed to be linked to COVID-19, the New York Department of Health said in an alert issued Wednesday. A growing number of similar cases — including at least one death — have been reported in other parts of the U.S. and Europe, though the phenomenon is still not well-understood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pediatricians say parents should not panic; the condition remains extremely rare. But researchers also are taking a close look at this emerging syndrome, and say parents should be on the lookout for symptoms in their kids that might warrant a quick call to the doctor — a persistent high fever over several days and significant abdominal pains with repeated vomiting, after which the child does not feel better.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If [the child is] looking particularly ill, you should definitely call the doctor,” says \u003ca href=\"https://www.cudoctors.com/Find_A_Doctor/Profile/8599\">Dr. Sean O’Leary,\u003c/a> a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Children’s Hospital Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and member of the infectious disease committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new condition associated with COVID-19 is called Pediatric Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome. Symptoms include persistent fever, extreme inflammation and evidence of one or more organs that are not functioning properly, says cardiologist \u003ca href=\"http://www.childrenshospital.org/directory/physicians/n/jane-newburger\">Jane Newburger\u003c/a>, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and director of the Kawasaki Program at Boston Children’s Hospital.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s still very rare, but there’s been a wave of cases. Physicians and scientists are working hard to understanding the mechanisms at play, and why only some children are so severely affected,” Newburger says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some symptoms can resemble features of \u003ca href=\"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5717875/\">Kawasaki Disease Shock Syndrome\u003c/a>. \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/kawasaki/about.html\">Kawasaki disease\u003c/a> is an acute illness in children involving fever with symptoms including rash; conjunctivitis; redness in the lips, tongue and mucous membranes of the mouth and throat; swollen hands and/or feet; and sometimes an enlarged group of lymph nodes on one side of the neck, says Newburger. Some children with the condition develop enlargement of the coronary arteries and aneurysms in those blood vessels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A small percentage of Kawasaki cases go on to develop symptoms of shock, which can include a steep drop in systolic blood pressure and difficulty with sufficient blood supply to the body’s organs. Kawasaki disease and KDSS more often affect young children, although they can sometimes affect teens, Newburger says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some cases of the new inflammatory syndrome have features that overlap with KD or with KDSS — including rash, conjunctivitis, and swollen hands or feet. The new inflammatory syndrome can affect not only young children but also older children and teens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But patients with the new syndrome have lab results that look very different, in particular, “cardiac inflammation to a greater degree than we typically see in Kawasaki shock syndrome,” which is usually very rare, O’Leary says. In New York City and London, which have seen large numbers of COVID-19 cases, “those types of patients are being seen with greater frequency.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some patients “come in very, very sick,” with low blood pressure and high fever, O’Leary says. Some children have had coronary artery aneurysms, though most have not, he adds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Other patients exhibit symptoms more similar to \u003ca href=\"https://wwwn.cdc.gov/nndss/conditions/toxic-shock-syndrome-other-than-streptococcal/case-definition/2011/\">toxic shock syndrome\u003c/a>, with abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhea, and high levels of inflammation in the body, including the heart, O’Leary says. Most cases are treated in the intensive care unit, he says. Treatment includes intravenous immunoglobulin, which can “calm the immune system,” says Newburger, as well as steroids and cytokine blockers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The evidence so far from Europe, where reports of the syndrome first emerged, suggests most children will recover with proper supportive care, says O’Leary, though one adolescent, a 14-year-old boy in London, has died, according to a report published Wednesday in \u003ca href=\"https://www.thelancet.com/lancet/article/s0140-6736(20)31094-1\">The Lancet\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most children with the syndrome, O’Leary and Newburger note, have either tested positive for a current infection with the coronavirus, or for antibodies to the virus, which would suggest they were infected earlier and recovered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, according to case reports, some of the kids with the inflammatory syndrome who tested negative on coronavirus tests had been exposed at some point to someone known to have COVID-19. The inflammatory syndrome can appear days to weeks after COVID-19 illness, doctors say, suggesting the syndrome arises out of the immune system’s response to the virus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“One theory is that as one begins to make antibodies to SARS-COV-2, the antibody itself may be provoking an immune response,” says Newburger. “This is only happening in susceptible individuals whose immune systems are built in a particular way. It doesn’t happen in everybody. It’s still a really uncommon event in children.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In late April, the U.K.’s National Health Service issued an alert to pediatricians about the syndrome. Reports have also surfaced in France, Spain and Italy, and probably number in the dozens globally, Newburger and O’Leary say, though doctors still don’t have hard numbers. Newburger says there needs to be a registry where doctors can report cases “so we can begin to generate some statistics.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Doctors across countries are talking to each other, but we need for there to be some structure and some science so that everybody can interpret,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://findaprovider.nemours.org/details/1193/deepika-thacker-cardiology-glen_mills-seaford-wilmington\">Dr. Deepika Thacker\u003c/a>, a cardiologist with Nemours Children’s Health System, in Wilmington, Del., says she’s seen three cases in children that fit the profile for the new syndrome. The first case was back in mid-April.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When we first saw that kid, we didn’t know what it was,” she says. But a couple of days later, a pediatrician friend from the U.K. sent her a WhatsApp message about the emerging syndrome. “In retrospect, that’s what it was,” Thacker says now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He responded beautifully to treatment, so he was already out of the hospital by the time I got bad reports from Europe,” she says. Since then, doctors have gone back to that first patient and tested the boy for antibodies to the coronavirus; they’re still awaiting the results.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Earlier this week, the New York City Health Department issued an alert saying 15 children ranging in age from 2 to 15 had been hospitalized with the syndrome. \u003ca href=\"https://nyulangone.org/doctors/1629212592/purvi-s-parikh\">Dr. \u003cstrong>Purvi Parikh\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003cstrong>, \u003c/strong>a pediatric immunologist at NYU Langone Health, says she’s seen three patients with the syndrome in the past week, all of whom are doing well with treatment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They all present in varying ways,” says Parikh, who is also a spokesperson for \u003ca href=\"https://www.physiciansforpatientprotection.org/about-us/\">Physicians for Patient Protection\u003c/a>. “But the common theme was fever and rash. One had very, very swollen lymph nodes and lymph glands. And then, aside from that, they had markers of inflammation elevated in their blood.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Up until now, we were mostly seeing these markers of inflammation in adults that were presenting with COVID-19,” Parikh says. “But now we’re also seeing a similar syndrome in children.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A spokesperson for Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta says infectious disease specialists there are evaluating several cases of children who have exhibited Kawasaki-like symptoms and inflammation — to determine if those patients may also have had COVID-19 and to investigate if any association between the two conditions might exist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Newburger says that she’s been contacted about cases in New Jersey and Philadelphia, as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the syndrome’s precise connection to the coronavirus isn’t yet clear, O’Leary says the fact that the children in most of these cases are testing positive for exposure to the virus, one way or another, provides one point of evidence. The sheer number of cases — small in absolute terms, but still “much higher than we would expect normally for things like severe Kawasaki or toxic shock syndrome” — provides another, he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And then there’s the fact that most reports of the syndrome have come out of the U.K. and New York City, places that have been hit with large numbers of COVID-19 cases.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s pure speculation at this point,” he says, “but the U.K. cluster kind of went up about a month after their COVID-19 infections went up, which would suggest that it is some kind of an immune phenomenon.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Mystery+Inflammatory+Syndrome+In+Kids+And+Teens+Likely+Linked+To+COVID-19+&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Updated May 8 at 11:54 a.m. ET\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sixty-four children and teens in New York State are suspected of having a mysterious inflammatory syndrome that is believed to be linked to COVID-19, the New York Department of Health said in an alert issued Wednesday. A growing number of similar cases — including at least one death — have been reported in other parts of the U.S. and Europe, though the phenomenon is still not well-understood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pediatricians say parents should not panic; the condition remains extremely rare. But researchers also are taking a close look at this emerging syndrome, and say parents should be on the lookout for symptoms in their kids that might warrant a quick call to the doctor — a persistent high fever over several days and significant abdominal pains with repeated vomiting, after which the child does not feel better.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If [the child is] looking particularly ill, you should definitely call the doctor,” says \u003ca href=\"https://www.cudoctors.com/Find_A_Doctor/Profile/8599\">Dr. Sean O’Leary,\u003c/a> a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Children’s Hospital Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and member of the infectious disease committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new condition associated with COVID-19 is called Pediatric Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome. Symptoms include persistent fever, extreme inflammation and evidence of one or more organs that are not functioning properly, says cardiologist \u003ca href=\"http://www.childrenshospital.org/directory/physicians/n/jane-newburger\">Jane Newburger\u003c/a>, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and director of the Kawasaki Program at Boston Children’s Hospital.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s still very rare, but there’s been a wave of cases. Physicians and scientists are working hard to understanding the mechanisms at play, and why only some children are so severely affected,” Newburger says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some symptoms can resemble features of \u003ca href=\"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5717875/\">Kawasaki Disease Shock Syndrome\u003c/a>. \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/kawasaki/about.html\">Kawasaki disease\u003c/a> is an acute illness in children involving fever with symptoms including rash; conjunctivitis; redness in the lips, tongue and mucous membranes of the mouth and throat; swollen hands and/or feet; and sometimes an enlarged group of lymph nodes on one side of the neck, says Newburger. Some children with the condition develop enlargement of the coronary arteries and aneurysms in those blood vessels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A small percentage of Kawasaki cases go on to develop symptoms of shock, which can include a steep drop in systolic blood pressure and difficulty with sufficient blood supply to the body’s organs. Kawasaki disease and KDSS more often affect young children, although they can sometimes affect teens, Newburger says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some cases of the new inflammatory syndrome have features that overlap with KD or with KDSS — including rash, conjunctivitis, and swollen hands or feet. The new inflammatory syndrome can affect not only young children but also older children and teens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But patients with the new syndrome have lab results that look very different, in particular, “cardiac inflammation to a greater degree than we typically see in Kawasaki shock syndrome,” which is usually very rare, O’Leary says. In New York City and London, which have seen large numbers of COVID-19 cases, “those types of patients are being seen with greater frequency.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some patients “come in very, very sick,” with low blood pressure and high fever, O’Leary says. Some children have had coronary artery aneurysms, though most have not, he adds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Other patients exhibit symptoms more similar to \u003ca href=\"https://wwwn.cdc.gov/nndss/conditions/toxic-shock-syndrome-other-than-streptococcal/case-definition/2011/\">toxic shock syndrome\u003c/a>, with abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhea, and high levels of inflammation in the body, including the heart, O’Leary says. Most cases are treated in the intensive care unit, he says. Treatment includes intravenous immunoglobulin, which can “calm the immune system,” says Newburger, as well as steroids and cytokine blockers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The evidence so far from Europe, where reports of the syndrome first emerged, suggests most children will recover with proper supportive care, says O’Leary, though one adolescent, a 14-year-old boy in London, has died, according to a report published Wednesday in \u003ca href=\"https://www.thelancet.com/lancet/article/s0140-6736(20)31094-1\">The Lancet\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most children with the syndrome, O’Leary and Newburger note, have either tested positive for a current infection with the coronavirus, or for antibodies to the virus, which would suggest they were infected earlier and recovered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, according to case reports, some of the kids with the inflammatory syndrome who tested negative on coronavirus tests had been exposed at some point to someone known to have COVID-19. The inflammatory syndrome can appear days to weeks after COVID-19 illness, doctors say, suggesting the syndrome arises out of the immune system’s response to the virus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“One theory is that as one begins to make antibodies to SARS-COV-2, the antibody itself may be provoking an immune response,” says Newburger. “This is only happening in susceptible individuals whose immune systems are built in a particular way. It doesn’t happen in everybody. It’s still a really uncommon event in children.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In late April, the U.K.’s National Health Service issued an alert to pediatricians about the syndrome. Reports have also surfaced in France, Spain and Italy, and probably number in the dozens globally, Newburger and O’Leary say, though doctors still don’t have hard numbers. Newburger says there needs to be a registry where doctors can report cases “so we can begin to generate some statistics.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Doctors across countries are talking to each other, but we need for there to be some structure and some science so that everybody can interpret,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://findaprovider.nemours.org/details/1193/deepika-thacker-cardiology-glen_mills-seaford-wilmington\">Dr. Deepika Thacker\u003c/a>, a cardiologist with Nemours Children’s Health System, in Wilmington, Del., says she’s seen three cases in children that fit the profile for the new syndrome. The first case was back in mid-April.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When we first saw that kid, we didn’t know what it was,” she says. But a couple of days later, a pediatrician friend from the U.K. sent her a WhatsApp message about the emerging syndrome. “In retrospect, that’s what it was,” Thacker says now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He responded beautifully to treatment, so he was already out of the hospital by the time I got bad reports from Europe,” she says. Since then, doctors have gone back to that first patient and tested the boy for antibodies to the coronavirus; they’re still awaiting the results.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Earlier this week, the New York City Health Department issued an alert saying 15 children ranging in age from 2 to 15 had been hospitalized with the syndrome. \u003ca href=\"https://nyulangone.org/doctors/1629212592/purvi-s-parikh\">Dr. \u003cstrong>Purvi Parikh\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003cstrong>, \u003c/strong>a pediatric immunologist at NYU Langone Health, says she’s seen three patients with the syndrome in the past week, all of whom are doing well with treatment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They all present in varying ways,” says Parikh, who is also a spokesperson for \u003ca href=\"https://www.physiciansforpatientprotection.org/about-us/\">Physicians for Patient Protection\u003c/a>. “But the common theme was fever and rash. One had very, very swollen lymph nodes and lymph glands. And then, aside from that, they had markers of inflammation elevated in their blood.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Up until now, we were mostly seeing these markers of inflammation in adults that were presenting with COVID-19,” Parikh says. “But now we’re also seeing a similar syndrome in children.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A spokesperson for Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta says infectious disease specialists there are evaluating several cases of children who have exhibited Kawasaki-like symptoms and inflammation — to determine if those patients may also have had COVID-19 and to investigate if any association between the two conditions might exist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Newburger says that she’s been contacted about cases in New Jersey and Philadelphia, as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the syndrome’s precise connection to the coronavirus isn’t yet clear, O’Leary says the fact that the children in most of these cases are testing positive for exposure to the virus, one way or another, provides one point of evidence. The sheer number of cases — small in absolute terms, but still “much higher than we would expect normally for things like severe Kawasaki or toxic shock syndrome” — provides another, he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And then there’s the fact that most reports of the syndrome have come out of the U.K. and New York City, places that have been hit with large numbers of COVID-19 cases.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s pure speculation at this point,” he says, “but the U.K. cluster kind of went up about a month after their COVID-19 infections went up, which would suggest that it is some kind of an immune phenomenon.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Mystery+Inflammatory+Syndrome+In+Kids+And+Teens+Likely+Linked+To+COVID-19+&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "California Assisted Living, Nursing Homes Want Immunity from Legal Claims",
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"content": "\u003cp>Groups representing hospitals and long term care homes have asked Gov. Gavin Newsom for broad immunity against legal claims from residents in their care who suffer any injury or death during the COVID-19 pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The reason? Those groups say the pandemic has stretched staffing thin and made medical resources scarce, unprecedented circumstances that demand immunity from legal action.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An April 9 letter signed by the California Medical Association, the California Association of Health Plans, the California Hospital Association, the California Assisted Living Association, LeadingAge California, and the California Association of Health Facilities requested an executive order they said was imperative to help the care providers they represent save lives.[pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Jessica Lehman, director of Senior and Disability Action\"]“Often, staff are forced to work at multiple jobs and multiple facilities, and they themselves are more at risk of contracting the virus and spreading it.”[/pullquote]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nearly half of reported deaths in California blamed on coronavirus have been residents of assisted living and nursing homes. In recent weeks, the state has begun releasing limited information about current coronavirus cases and cumulative deaths in facilities regulated by the California Department of Public Health and the California Department of Social Services.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California has some existing protections for physicians and health care providers in times of emergency. The new language proposed by industry trade groups is written broadly, to relieve facilities from the threat of civil and criminal suits, as well as administrative sanctions, for injury, death, and loss stemming from caretaking services during the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Skilled nursing facilities have been on the front lines of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic and have suffered from a lack of access to testing and personal protective equipment, diminished nurse staffing and inconsistent directives from county, state and federal agencies,” said Deborah Pacyna, a spokeswoman for the California Association of Healthcare Facilities. “We are seeking baseline protection from the expected surge in litigation that will inevitably engage in the second-guessing of caregivers seeking to do their best under impossible circumstances.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Advocates for older and disabled residents of care facilities, including Senior and Disability Action, California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, and the Consumer Advocates for RCFE Reform have all objected to the request.\u003cbr>\n[documentcloud url=”https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6886420-Liability-Protection-Coalition-Letter.html” responsive=true text=false]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Read the April 9 letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom, above. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pat McGinnis, CANHR’s executive director, points out that the state has waived minimum staffing requirements and halted visits to care facilities from regulators, local public advocates, and family members. “We’ve suspended most of the rights for residents, and now the industry wants to suspend their right to sue for elder abuse,” McGinnis said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Advocates also argue that because long term care facilities in California are overwhelmingly operated for-profit, corporate entities compromise care.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They are typically understaffed,” said Jessica Lehman, the director of Senior and Disability Action. “Often, staff are forced to work at multiple jobs and multiple facilities, and they themselves are more at risk of contracting the virus and spreading it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The governor has not said whether or how he will act on the industry request. Similar arguments have persuaded sixteen other states to offer facilities some level of immunity for actions in care facilities during declared emergencies related to coronavirus, either through executive order or legislation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the federal level, Congressman Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from Bakersfield, has supported Missouri Senator Mitch McConnell’s call for liability as an essential part of any future COVID-19 relief package. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has said Democrats are “disinclined” to support that call.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Skilled nursing facilities have been on the front lines of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic and have suffered from a lack of access to testing and personal protective equipment, diminished nurse staffing and inconsistent directives from county, state and federal agencies,” said Deborah Pacyna, a spokeswoman for the California Association of Healthcare Facilities. “We are seeking baseline protection from the expected surge in litigation that will inevitably engage in the second-guessing of caregivers seeking to do their best under impossible circumstances.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Advocates for older and disabled residents of care facilities, including Senior and Disability Action, California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, and the Consumer Advocates for RCFE Reform have all objected to the request.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Read the April 9 letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom, above. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pat McGinnis, CANHR’s executive director, points out that the state has waived minimum staffing requirements and halted visits to care facilities from regulators, local public advocates, and family members. “We’ve suspended most of the rights for residents, and now the industry wants to suspend their right to sue for elder abuse,” McGinnis said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Advocates also argue that because long term care facilities in California are overwhelmingly operated for-profit, corporate entities compromise care.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They are typically understaffed,” said Jessica Lehman, the director of Senior and Disability Action. “Often, staff are forced to work at multiple jobs and multiple facilities, and they themselves are more at risk of contracting the virus and spreading it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The governor has not said whether or how he will act on the industry request. Similar arguments have persuaded sixteen other states to offer facilities some level of immunity for actions in care facilities during declared emergencies related to coronavirus, either through executive order or legislation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the federal level, Congressman Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from Bakersfield, has supported Missouri Senator Mitch McConnell’s call for liability as an essential part of any future COVID-19 relief package. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has said Democrats are “disinclined” to support that call.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>By 2070, the world’s habitable climate zone will shift so much that billions of people will be pushed past human comfort levels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote size='medium' citation='Tim Lenton, Global Systems Institute']‘We’re going back to temperatures that we haven’t seen for 5 million years, territory that predates the divergence of humans from apes.’[/pullquote]A new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows a “surprisingly narrow” human climate niche—between 52 degrees Fahrenheit to 59 degrees Fahrenheit. And it will shift geographically more in the next 50 years than any time during the past 6,000 years. As a result, up to 3 billion people are “likely to live under climate conditions that are warmer than conditions deemed suitable for human life to flourish,” the international team of researchers wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Los Angeles and Paris will bake in fiery desert temperatures, and the world’s most populous cities in Asia and Africa will have deadly heat waves every year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It looks unlivable for many,” said co-author Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter. “Where we are headed is a place we don’t want to go.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some cities in North America and Europe that are now in the sweet spot of the human climate zone, with mean annual temperatures from 64 degrees and 68 degrees Fahrenheit, will be as warm as the North African coast by late in the century, Lenton said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s quite a climate shock. We’re going back to temperatures that we haven’t seen for 5 million years, territory that predates the divergence of humans from apes,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote size='medium' citation='Michael Mann, Penn State']‘It is within our ability, given a very worst case scenario, to make this planet largely uninhabitable to us and other life forms. The good news is that it doesn’t appear we’re headed on that trajectory now.’[/pullquote]Compounding the climate problem for humans is that the greatest population growth is expected exactly in those zones most affected by human-caused warming. If the inhabitants do not migrate to more livable areas, the researchers projected, one-third of the global population will experience a mean annual temperature warmer than 84 degrees Fahrenheit—an average currently found only on 0.8 percent of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Land areas are warming faster than the oceans, which mean “human-experienced temperatures are projected to rise by about 13 degrees Fahrenheit, more than twice the mean global temperature rise,” said co-author Marten Scheffer, with Wageningen University and Research. The poorest, most densely populated parts of the world, with the lowest adaptive capacity, are potentially the most affected, he added.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The buildup of heat and population could make the human climate bubble burst.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When you talk about the most extreme temperature end, put simply, one can adapt by having good air conditioning and importing your food. That is an unlikely option for the poorest portion of humanity who happen to be the ones most exposed to extreme conditions,” he said. Humans can survive and live under quite extreme conditions, but the “vast majority has always been concentrated in the places corresponding to conditions that we defined as the climate niche,” he added.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann, who was not involved in the research, said, “The study further reinforces an emerging body of research that suggests that it is within our ability, given a very worst case scenario, to make this planet largely uninhabitable to us and other life forms. The good news is that it doesn’t appear we’re headed on that trajectory now, given the progress already being made world-wide in transitioning away from fossil fuels.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But,” he added, ‘habitability of the planet’ is a very low bar indeed.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Massive Migrations and Huge Adaptations\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scheffer said the study tallied population densities based on mean annual temperatures—how many people lived in places where that average reading was 50 degrees, 70 degrees or 90 degrees Fahrenheit. The researchers then identified the temperature niche that has attracted the most people going back 6,000 years. Climate and populations changed, but the bulk of the people were always concentrated under the same conditions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1963878\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Heat-inline-image.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1963878\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Heat-inline-image.jpg\" alt=\"People hold Hollywood tourist maps over their heads as makeshift sunshade in Griffith Park in March 2015 in Los Angeles, California. A record-breaking series of unusual heat waves made this the first March to have had six days with highs in the 90s or above in Los Angeles since at least 1877 when record-keeping began.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Heat-inline-image.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Heat-inline-image-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Heat-inline-image-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Heat-inline-image-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Heat-inline-image-1020x680.jpg 1020w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">People use Hollywood tourist maps as makeshift sunshade in Griffith Park in March 2015 in Los Angeles, California. A record-breaking series of unusual heat waves made this the first March to have had six days with highs in the 90s or above in Los Angeles since at least 1877 when record-keeping began. \u003ccite>(David McNew/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Next we looked at the projected climate change using existing model predictions and asked: ‘Suppose that people would remain in the same climate preference as they have over the past 6,000 years, where would they have to be distributed over the globe in 50 years from now?'” Scheffer said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The projections suggested that the shifting human climate niche would elicit both heroic adaptation measures, as well as massive migrations of people to more suitable climate regions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Humanity has responded quite markedly to climate changes in the past. However, none of those in the past 5,000 years have been as strong as the one we are likely facing over the coming 50 years,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Washington State University evolutionary anthropologist Tim Kohler, who studies how earlier societies adapted to climate change, said he was a little surprised at the relative narrowness of the climate niche.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We archaeologists like to lecture about how our vaunted technology (clothes, fire, tools, boats…) and highly cooperative social organization have made it possible for us to colonize all habitats on Earth during the last 50,000 years or so,” Kohler said in an email. “That is still true of course, but what we show here is that despite the ability to live in many environments, we are densest within a small subset of those.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He added that their choice to begin their comparisons 6,000 years ago, a relatively warm time within the Holocene, was “a very conservative choice from the perspective of the finding that the coming warming will be unprecedented.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lenton said he hopes the paper will resonate as a “humanized” way to see climate change, and he made comparisons to humanity’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. The massive impacts projected by the new paper will have an immense financial cost. The findings suggest that swallowing the financial pill now to pay for adaptation and planned migration would be less bitter than waiting and responding to events as they unfold.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In response to the pandemic, societies have been recalculating the cost-benefit equation, but for climate change, that reckoning has been on the back burner for too long, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“By casting it in different terms, maybe we can trigger a much-needed change in our way of thinking,” he said. “Stepping out of making an economic judgment and starting to make a human judgment would be a powerful step to take.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">InsideClimate News\u003c/a> is a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for the ICN newsletter \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/newsletter/icn-weekly\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>A new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows a “surprisingly narrow” human climate niche—between 52 degrees Fahrenheit to 59 degrees Fahrenheit. And it will shift geographically more in the next 50 years than any time during the past 6,000 years. As a result, up to 3 billion people are “likely to live under climate conditions that are warmer than conditions deemed suitable for human life to flourish,” the international team of researchers wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Los Angeles and Paris will bake in fiery desert temperatures, and the world’s most populous cities in Asia and Africa will have deadly heat waves every year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It looks unlivable for many,” said co-author Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter. “Where we are headed is a place we don’t want to go.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some cities in North America and Europe that are now in the sweet spot of the human climate zone, with mean annual temperatures from 64 degrees and 68 degrees Fahrenheit, will be as warm as the North African coast by late in the century, Lenton said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Compounding the climate problem for humans is that the greatest population growth is expected exactly in those zones most affected by human-caused warming. If the inhabitants do not migrate to more livable areas, the researchers projected, one-third of the global population will experience a mean annual temperature warmer than 84 degrees Fahrenheit—an average currently found only on 0.8 percent of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Land areas are warming faster than the oceans, which mean “human-experienced temperatures are projected to rise by about 13 degrees Fahrenheit, more than twice the mean global temperature rise,” said co-author Marten Scheffer, with Wageningen University and Research. The poorest, most densely populated parts of the world, with the lowest adaptive capacity, are potentially the most affected, he added.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The buildup of heat and population could make the human climate bubble burst.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When you talk about the most extreme temperature end, put simply, one can adapt by having good air conditioning and importing your food. That is an unlikely option for the poorest portion of humanity who happen to be the ones most exposed to extreme conditions,” he said. Humans can survive and live under quite extreme conditions, but the “vast majority has always been concentrated in the places corresponding to conditions that we defined as the climate niche,” he added.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann, who was not involved in the research, said, “The study further reinforces an emerging body of research that suggests that it is within our ability, given a very worst case scenario, to make this planet largely uninhabitable to us and other life forms. The good news is that it doesn’t appear we’re headed on that trajectory now, given the progress already being made world-wide in transitioning away from fossil fuels.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But,” he added, ‘habitability of the planet’ is a very low bar indeed.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Massive Migrations and Huge Adaptations\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scheffer said the study tallied population densities based on mean annual temperatures—how many people lived in places where that average reading was 50 degrees, 70 degrees or 90 degrees Fahrenheit. The researchers then identified the temperature niche that has attracted the most people going back 6,000 years. Climate and populations changed, but the bulk of the people were always concentrated under the same conditions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1963878\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Heat-inline-image.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1963878\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Heat-inline-image.jpg\" alt=\"People hold Hollywood tourist maps over their heads as makeshift sunshade in Griffith Park in March 2015 in Los Angeles, California. A record-breaking series of unusual heat waves made this the first March to have had six days with highs in the 90s or above in Los Angeles since at least 1877 when record-keeping began.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Heat-inline-image.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Heat-inline-image-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Heat-inline-image-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Heat-inline-image-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Heat-inline-image-1020x680.jpg 1020w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">People use Hollywood tourist maps as makeshift sunshade in Griffith Park in March 2015 in Los Angeles, California. A record-breaking series of unusual heat waves made this the first March to have had six days with highs in the 90s or above in Los Angeles since at least 1877 when record-keeping began. \u003ccite>(David McNew/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Next we looked at the projected climate change using existing model predictions and asked: ‘Suppose that people would remain in the same climate preference as they have over the past 6,000 years, where would they have to be distributed over the globe in 50 years from now?'” Scheffer said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The projections suggested that the shifting human climate niche would elicit both heroic adaptation measures, as well as massive migrations of people to more suitable climate regions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Humanity has responded quite markedly to climate changes in the past. However, none of those in the past 5,000 years have been as strong as the one we are likely facing over the coming 50 years,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Washington State University evolutionary anthropologist Tim Kohler, who studies how earlier societies adapted to climate change, said he was a little surprised at the relative narrowness of the climate niche.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We archaeologists like to lecture about how our vaunted technology (clothes, fire, tools, boats…) and highly cooperative social organization have made it possible for us to colonize all habitats on Earth during the last 50,000 years or so,” Kohler said in an email. “That is still true of course, but what we show here is that despite the ability to live in many environments, we are densest within a small subset of those.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He added that their choice to begin their comparisons 6,000 years ago, a relatively warm time within the Holocene, was “a very conservative choice from the perspective of the finding that the coming warming will be unprecedented.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lenton said he hopes the paper will resonate as a “humanized” way to see climate change, and he made comparisons to humanity’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. The massive impacts projected by the new paper will have an immense financial cost. The findings suggest that swallowing the financial pill now to pay for adaptation and planned migration would be less bitter than waiting and responding to events as they unfold.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In response to the pandemic, societies have been recalculating the cost-benefit equation, but for climate change, that reckoning has been on the back burner for too long, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“By casting it in different terms, maybe we can trigger a much-needed change in our way of thinking,” he said. “Stepping out of making an economic judgment and starting to make a human judgment would be a powerful step to take.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "The Porn Industry Has A Lot of Safety Tips for the COVID-19 Era",
"headTitle": "The Porn Industry Has A Lot of Safety Tips for the COVID-19 Era | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>As states and employers furiously develop plans to safely reopen workplaces in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, they’re grappling with what seems like an endless list of questions: where to test, who to test, and how often to test for the virus? Further complicating matters are issues of workers’ privacy, geography, politics, science, and cost. It’s a difficult mandate. But there is one place to look for guidance — the adult film industry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote size='medium' citation='Dr. Ashish Jha, Harvard University Global Health Institute']‘What the adult film industry has produced has worked, and really could be the kind of tool we need. People can’t get distracted because it’s from a business they don’t approve of.’[/pullquote]Since the late 1990s, when an outbreak of HIV infections threatened to shutter the multibillion-dollar industry, the mainstream porn community has implemented procedures that require all performers to be tested for HIV and a host of other sexually transmitted infections every 14 days before they can be cleared to work. Any HIV-positive test leads to an immediate shutdown of all U.S. sets, followed by detailed contact tracing before sets can reopen. While not perfect, those in the industry say the nationwide PASS program works to protect thousands of performers, ensures safer workplaces, and curtails the spread of disease.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t think I could be in this industry without it. That would be insane. Bareback sex with strangers 20 times a month? It would be like the most dangerous job in the world,” said Lance Hart, a gay and straight adult film performer and independent pornographer in Las Vegas who runs the production companies Sweet Femdom and Man Up Films.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the 20 years it has been in place, PASS has met, and overcome, many of the same challenges that any large-scale coronavirus testing program might encounter, from issues of keeping databases of private medical information secure, preventing the forging of test results, dealing with false positive results, and educating workers about the need for repeated testing to keep workplaces safe. Those devising strategies to reopen workplaces and the larger economy during the coronavirus pandemic say their plans would involve, at their core, processes of rigorous testing, isolation, and contact tracing similar to those used in the adult film industry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In many ways, what they are doing is a model for what we are trying to do with Covid,” said Ashish Jha, a physician who directs Harvard University’s Global Health Institute and has been calling for widespread national testing to contain the coronavirus. “The adult film industry teaches us that as a proof of concept, this can work. We just have to scale it up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jha said he could envision a program similar to PASS where Covid-19 test results are put into a secure database that could be checked to verify whether people had recently tested negative for the virus. “You could imagine TSA verifying someone had tested negative before they were allowed on a flight,” he said. “Testing is particularly important for areas that are high risk, like airplanes or meatpacking plants.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1963924\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 724px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/adult-film-inline2.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1963924\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/adult-film-inline2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"724\" height=\"1024\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/adult-film-inline2.jpg 724w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/adult-film-inline2-160x226.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 724px) 100vw, 724px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">LAS VEGAS, NV – JANUARY 23: Adult film actress Lotus Lain attends the 2016 Adult Video News Awards at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino on January 23, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>While it did not cite the adult film industry, a “National Covid-19 Testing Action Plan” released by the Rockefeller Foundation last month included the creation of an “infection database” that could be accessed by employers, schools, TSA, and those scanning tickets for entry into sports or music venues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What the adult film industry has produced has worked, and really could be the kind of tool we need,” Jha said. “People can’t get distracted because it’s from a business they don’t approve of.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mike Stabile, communications director for the Free Speech Coalition, the adult entertainment trade association that runs PASS, said the adult film industry understands “better than most the discussion that has to happen for businesses to reopen.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet for all of that expertise, it would be hard to imagine the Trump administration, or state politicians, reaching out to the porn industry for guidance. Stabile said that while he has not been contacted by any government officials, he would have plenty of advice to share. “It’s going to be an ongoing process. It’s not going to be a binary open or shut,” he said. “But it’s not as heavy a lift as people think. This is something that’s doable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stabile, who is closely following coronavirus news, feels most people are unaware of the need for repeat testing that is standard in his industry. “When you look at the world at large, there’s an idea you’ll be tested once and then go back to work, but with coronavirus, it’s not that simple. We’re looking at a series of regular tests until this gets under control,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote size='medium' citation='Elizabeth “Betz” Halloran, Center for Inference and Dynamics of Infectious Diseases']‘We can’t sit around for 18 months waiting for a vaccine. We have to find a way out without pharmaceuticals, and that’s repeat testing, taking people out of circulation, and then contact tracing, so it’s an interesting analogy.’[/pullquote]Repeat testing will be necessary for the coronavirus, too, because — like with HIV — there is so much asymptomatic spread of the coronavirus, said Elizabeth “Betz” Halloran, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington who directs the Center for Inference and Dynamics of Infectious Diseases at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You’ll have to keep testing, maybe every 10 days. We need simpler tests that people can just do at home,” said Halloran, who envisions a low-cost “10-pack” of tests for home use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We can’t sit around for 18 months waiting for a vaccine. We have to find a way out without pharmaceuticals, and that’s repeat testing, taking people out of circulation, and then contact tracing, so it’s an interesting analogy,” said Halloran, who is working with colleagues to model a plan where the disease could be kept at levels that would not exceed health care capacity and that would require quarantining less than 10% of people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Performers say they have a lot to teach the rest of the post-Covid-19 world. “We’re already used to working in an environment of risk. That’s something the rest of the normal world is just learning to do,” said Lotus Lain, a bisexual adult film actress who works with Stabile’s group as an advocate for other performers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lain said the porn sets she works on are extremely clean and precautions are taken to limit infectious-disease risk. “All of the things people are looking for right now — gloves, masks, alcohol wipes — we have all those things on sets. It’s standard operating procedure,” she said. “I hope other industries look to our industry not just to learn, but to credit us as well.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1963929\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 1135px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Adult-film-inline3.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1963929\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Adult-film-inline3.jpg\" alt=\"Lance Hart, an adult film performer who also runs two production companies poses in a white shirt, pink tie, and white furry coat at the 2019 XBiz Awards in Los Angeles.\" width=\"1135\" height=\"902\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Adult-film-inline3.jpg 1135w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Adult-film-inline3-160x127.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Adult-film-inline3-800x636.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Adult-film-inline3-768x610.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Adult-film-inline3-1020x811.jpg 1020w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1135px) 100vw, 1135px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Lance Hart, an adult film performer who also runs two production companies, attends the 2019 XBIZ Awards in Los Angeles. \u003ccite>(Jesse Grant/Getty Images for XBIZ Awards)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>AIDS experts say the testing program within the adult film industry provides insight into how we might build national testing programs to safeguard workplaces, but also helps illustrate the many challenges that lie ahead, in part because the coronavirus has proved so contagious.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“HIV is our prior pandemic. Surely we can learn from that,” said Robert Gallo, the virologist who co-discovered HIV and now directs the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. But Gallo said preventing the spread of HIV in the film industry is a far more tractable problem than reining in the novel coronavirus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You have to deal with every virus differently,” said Gallo, who in 2011 co-founded the Global Virus Network, a consortium working to prevent and eradicate viral disease. HIV, he said, was difficult to contain because symptoms don’t occur for years, but it was also harder to transmit. “This virus is viciously infectious,” he said. “It’s as infectious as anything I’ve ever heard of.” One key to containment, he added, would be to take time now, before widespread testing begins, to ensure tests are highly accurate and avoid the false positive results caused by cross reactions with other common coronaviruses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pamina Gorbach, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health, has studied the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in the adult film industry. She says the testing program is a step in the right direction to protect the health of performers, but thinks there is room for improvement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote size='medium' citation='Mike Stabile, Free Speech Coalition']‘We’re asking questions like whether directors and camera people can shoot with N95 masks on. We are actively trying to figure out how to make sets safe, and that means coronavirus as well as HIV.’[/pullquote]Gorbach’s 2017 study of 360 adult film workers showed 24% of performers were infected with either chlamydia or gonorrhea. One-third of those infections were found in the throat or rectum, she said, undetectable by the urine tests the industry uses to screen for sexually transmitted infections and serving as reservoirs for ongoing transmission. The findings show that testing protocols need to be carefully thought through, she said. (Chlamydia and gonorrhea, for example, can be transmitted within the 14-day repeat testing window that was chosen because it works to prevent HIV transmission.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her study also found more than 20% of film workers were self-treating without medical advice when they had symptoms, hoping to shorten the time they might miss work. Gorbach said she feared the same thing could happen with Covid-19, with people misusing or overusing inappropriate treatments in an attempt to cure themselves or mask symptoms so they won’t miss work. (Porn performers don’t get paid when they can’t get to sets, just like other workers without paid sick leave.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gorbach said she did see clear lessons that coronavirus testing programs could take from the film industry, including thinking about how to address people who “float,” or work at multiple locations that have vastly different standards for screening or protection. “People in nursing homes float, just like the adult film industry. They float, they work at multiple places with different rules and standards,” she said. “If one place they work screens for infection and one doesn’t, they can take the infection from one place to another.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film industry deals with this through frequent testing, and Stabile said most performers won’t work with untested partners. While the testing program is voluntary, Stabile said clear test results are a requirement on most mainstream sets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Who would pay for tests is also an issue. In the film industry, performers generally pay the roughly $150 testing fee to be cleared to work. Public health officials argue that workers, especially low-wage workers, should not bear the brunt of coronavirus-testing costs. “In public health, we try to reduce barriers to prevent the spread of disease, especially economic barriers,” said Angela Bazzi, an assistant professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health who has studied the health of sex workers in Mexico, Kenya, Ghana, and Boston. “If we place this burden on individuals, that’s worrisome.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The geography of testing is also a concern; when permits and condoms were required on film sets in Los Angeles, many producers moved filming to less restrictive locations. Employers might do the same, experts said, to avoid coronavirus testing programs they deem costly or onerous.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bazzi said it was fascinating to think about what could be learned from a program that increased safety for actors in the adult film industry. “It’s informative,” she said. “They’ve clearly gone through a decision-making process.” But she added that coronavirus testing would likely be far trickier for practical reasons. Adult film testing started more than a decade after the HIV outbreak, and only after years of research to improve HIV tests. Coronavirus tests are still a work in progress.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In HIV, we saw this progression of tests that took decades, and there are still new tests being developed,” Bazzi said. “With coronavirus, there are still a lot of unknowns with testing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Politics will also likely play a role in coronavirus testing programs, if the film industry is an indicator. The testing program continually comes under fire from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, whose leaders think testing does not do enough to prevent on-set HIV transmission and that condoms should be required. Another issue has been a simmering argument over whether HIV-positive performers who have such low levels of the virus that they cannot transmit it should be allowed to participate in filming. For now, any HIV-positive result, regardless of viral titre, disqualifies a performer from being cleared to film in the PASS program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, fears about sexually transmitted infections have faded into the background as those in the film industry grapple with the coronavirus. Performers can obtain the tests they need to be cleared to work because medical clinics remain open, but Stabile said few were participating, mainly because production is on hold due to the coronavirus. (People can still shoot solo videos, or videos with people they are quarantining with.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like many industries, Stabile’s group is trying to determine when and how it could safely resume work. Like workers across the country, those in the film industry are feeling the economic pain of loss of work — although those who run subscription porn sites say their business is booming during quarantine. “My revenue is through the roof,” said Hart, who, while at home with his wife and four cats, is raising money for makeup artists, production assistants, and other set workers who are struggling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A Free Speech Coalition task force is meeting twice a week by Zoom, grappling with questions like whether they can incorporate Covid-19 in their testing protocols and how to protect camera operators, makeup artists, and other on-set employees that did not require testing before. “We’re asking questions like whether directors and camera people can shoot with N95 masks on,” Stabile said. “We are actively trying to figure out how to make sets safe, and that means coronavirus as well as HIV.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>As states and employers furiously develop plans to safely reopen workplaces in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, they’re grappling with what seems like an endless list of questions: where to test, who to test, and how often to test for the virus? Further complicating matters are issues of workers’ privacy, geography, politics, science, and cost. It’s a difficult mandate. But there is one place to look for guidance — the adult film industry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Since the late 1990s, when an outbreak of HIV infections threatened to shutter the multibillion-dollar industry, the mainstream porn community has implemented procedures that require all performers to be tested for HIV and a host of other sexually transmitted infections every 14 days before they can be cleared to work. Any HIV-positive test leads to an immediate shutdown of all U.S. sets, followed by detailed contact tracing before sets can reopen. While not perfect, those in the industry say the nationwide PASS program works to protect thousands of performers, ensures safer workplaces, and curtails the spread of disease.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t think I could be in this industry without it. That would be insane. Bareback sex with strangers 20 times a month? It would be like the most dangerous job in the world,” said Lance Hart, a gay and straight adult film performer and independent pornographer in Las Vegas who runs the production companies Sweet Femdom and Man Up Films.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the 20 years it has been in place, PASS has met, and overcome, many of the same challenges that any large-scale coronavirus testing program might encounter, from issues of keeping databases of private medical information secure, preventing the forging of test results, dealing with false positive results, and educating workers about the need for repeated testing to keep workplaces safe. Those devising strategies to reopen workplaces and the larger economy during the coronavirus pandemic say their plans would involve, at their core, processes of rigorous testing, isolation, and contact tracing similar to those used in the adult film industry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In many ways, what they are doing is a model for what we are trying to do with Covid,” said Ashish Jha, a physician who directs Harvard University’s Global Health Institute and has been calling for widespread national testing to contain the coronavirus. “The adult film industry teaches us that as a proof of concept, this can work. We just have to scale it up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jha said he could envision a program similar to PASS where Covid-19 test results are put into a secure database that could be checked to verify whether people had recently tested negative for the virus. “You could imagine TSA verifying someone had tested negative before they were allowed on a flight,” he said. “Testing is particularly important for areas that are high risk, like airplanes or meatpacking plants.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1963924\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 724px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/adult-film-inline2.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1963924\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/adult-film-inline2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"724\" height=\"1024\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/adult-film-inline2.jpg 724w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/adult-film-inline2-160x226.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 724px) 100vw, 724px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">LAS VEGAS, NV – JANUARY 23: Adult film actress Lotus Lain attends the 2016 Adult Video News Awards at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino on January 23, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>While it did not cite the adult film industry, a “National Covid-19 Testing Action Plan” released by the Rockefeller Foundation last month included the creation of an “infection database” that could be accessed by employers, schools, TSA, and those scanning tickets for entry into sports or music venues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What the adult film industry has produced has worked, and really could be the kind of tool we need,” Jha said. “People can’t get distracted because it’s from a business they don’t approve of.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mike Stabile, communications director for the Free Speech Coalition, the adult entertainment trade association that runs PASS, said the adult film industry understands “better than most the discussion that has to happen for businesses to reopen.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet for all of that expertise, it would be hard to imagine the Trump administration, or state politicians, reaching out to the porn industry for guidance. Stabile said that while he has not been contacted by any government officials, he would have plenty of advice to share. “It’s going to be an ongoing process. It’s not going to be a binary open or shut,” he said. “But it’s not as heavy a lift as people think. This is something that’s doable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stabile, who is closely following coronavirus news, feels most people are unaware of the need for repeat testing that is standard in his industry. “When you look at the world at large, there’s an idea you’ll be tested once and then go back to work, but with coronavirus, it’s not that simple. We’re looking at a series of regular tests until this gets under control,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Repeat testing will be necessary for the coronavirus, too, because — like with HIV — there is so much asymptomatic spread of the coronavirus, said Elizabeth “Betz” Halloran, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington who directs the Center for Inference and Dynamics of Infectious Diseases at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You’ll have to keep testing, maybe every 10 days. We need simpler tests that people can just do at home,” said Halloran, who envisions a low-cost “10-pack” of tests for home use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We can’t sit around for 18 months waiting for a vaccine. We have to find a way out without pharmaceuticals, and that’s repeat testing, taking people out of circulation, and then contact tracing, so it’s an interesting analogy,” said Halloran, who is working with colleagues to model a plan where the disease could be kept at levels that would not exceed health care capacity and that would require quarantining less than 10% of people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Performers say they have a lot to teach the rest of the post-Covid-19 world. “We’re already used to working in an environment of risk. That’s something the rest of the normal world is just learning to do,” said Lotus Lain, a bisexual adult film actress who works with Stabile’s group as an advocate for other performers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lain said the porn sets she works on are extremely clean and precautions are taken to limit infectious-disease risk. “All of the things people are looking for right now — gloves, masks, alcohol wipes — we have all those things on sets. It’s standard operating procedure,” she said. “I hope other industries look to our industry not just to learn, but to credit us as well.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1963929\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 1135px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Adult-film-inline3.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1963929\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Adult-film-inline3.jpg\" alt=\"Lance Hart, an adult film performer who also runs two production companies poses in a white shirt, pink tie, and white furry coat at the 2019 XBiz Awards in Los Angeles.\" width=\"1135\" height=\"902\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Adult-film-inline3.jpg 1135w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Adult-film-inline3-160x127.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Adult-film-inline3-800x636.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Adult-film-inline3-768x610.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/05/Adult-film-inline3-1020x811.jpg 1020w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1135px) 100vw, 1135px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Lance Hart, an adult film performer who also runs two production companies, attends the 2019 XBIZ Awards in Los Angeles. \u003ccite>(Jesse Grant/Getty Images for XBIZ Awards)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>AIDS experts say the testing program within the adult film industry provides insight into how we might build national testing programs to safeguard workplaces, but also helps illustrate the many challenges that lie ahead, in part because the coronavirus has proved so contagious.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“HIV is our prior pandemic. Surely we can learn from that,” said Robert Gallo, the virologist who co-discovered HIV and now directs the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. But Gallo said preventing the spread of HIV in the film industry is a far more tractable problem than reining in the novel coronavirus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You have to deal with every virus differently,” said Gallo, who in 2011 co-founded the Global Virus Network, a consortium working to prevent and eradicate viral disease. HIV, he said, was difficult to contain because symptoms don’t occur for years, but it was also harder to transmit. “This virus is viciously infectious,” he said. “It’s as infectious as anything I’ve ever heard of.” One key to containment, he added, would be to take time now, before widespread testing begins, to ensure tests are highly accurate and avoid the false positive results caused by cross reactions with other common coronaviruses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pamina Gorbach, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health, has studied the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in the adult film industry. She says the testing program is a step in the right direction to protect the health of performers, but thinks there is room for improvement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Gorbach’s 2017 study of 360 adult film workers showed 24% of performers were infected with either chlamydia or gonorrhea. One-third of those infections were found in the throat or rectum, she said, undetectable by the urine tests the industry uses to screen for sexually transmitted infections and serving as reservoirs for ongoing transmission. The findings show that testing protocols need to be carefully thought through, she said. (Chlamydia and gonorrhea, for example, can be transmitted within the 14-day repeat testing window that was chosen because it works to prevent HIV transmission.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her study also found more than 20% of film workers were self-treating without medical advice when they had symptoms, hoping to shorten the time they might miss work. Gorbach said she feared the same thing could happen with Covid-19, with people misusing or overusing inappropriate treatments in an attempt to cure themselves or mask symptoms so they won’t miss work. (Porn performers don’t get paid when they can’t get to sets, just like other workers without paid sick leave.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gorbach said she did see clear lessons that coronavirus testing programs could take from the film industry, including thinking about how to address people who “float,” or work at multiple locations that have vastly different standards for screening or protection. “People in nursing homes float, just like the adult film industry. They float, they work at multiple places with different rules and standards,” she said. “If one place they work screens for infection and one doesn’t, they can take the infection from one place to another.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The film industry deals with this through frequent testing, and Stabile said most performers won’t work with untested partners. While the testing program is voluntary, Stabile said clear test results are a requirement on most mainstream sets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Who would pay for tests is also an issue. In the film industry, performers generally pay the roughly $150 testing fee to be cleared to work. Public health officials argue that workers, especially low-wage workers, should not bear the brunt of coronavirus-testing costs. “In public health, we try to reduce barriers to prevent the spread of disease, especially economic barriers,” said Angela Bazzi, an assistant professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health who has studied the health of sex workers in Mexico, Kenya, Ghana, and Boston. “If we place this burden on individuals, that’s worrisome.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The geography of testing is also a concern; when permits and condoms were required on film sets in Los Angeles, many producers moved filming to less restrictive locations. Employers might do the same, experts said, to avoid coronavirus testing programs they deem costly or onerous.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bazzi said it was fascinating to think about what could be learned from a program that increased safety for actors in the adult film industry. “It’s informative,” she said. “They’ve clearly gone through a decision-making process.” But she added that coronavirus testing would likely be far trickier for practical reasons. Adult film testing started more than a decade after the HIV outbreak, and only after years of research to improve HIV tests. Coronavirus tests are still a work in progress.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In HIV, we saw this progression of tests that took decades, and there are still new tests being developed,” Bazzi said. “With coronavirus, there are still a lot of unknowns with testing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Politics will also likely play a role in coronavirus testing programs, if the film industry is an indicator. The testing program continually comes under fire from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, whose leaders think testing does not do enough to prevent on-set HIV transmission and that condoms should be required. Another issue has been a simmering argument over whether HIV-positive performers who have such low levels of the virus that they cannot transmit it should be allowed to participate in filming. For now, any HIV-positive result, regardless of viral titre, disqualifies a performer from being cleared to film in the PASS program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, fears about sexually transmitted infections have faded into the background as those in the film industry grapple with the coronavirus. Performers can obtain the tests they need to be cleared to work because medical clinics remain open, but Stabile said few were participating, mainly because production is on hold due to the coronavirus. (People can still shoot solo videos, or videos with people they are quarantining with.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like many industries, Stabile’s group is trying to determine when and how it could safely resume work. Like workers across the country, those in the film industry are feeling the economic pain of loss of work — although those who run subscription porn sites say their business is booming during quarantine. “My revenue is through the roof,” said Hart, who, while at home with his wife and four cats, is raising money for makeup artists, production assistants, and other set workers who are struggling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A Free Speech Coalition task force is meeting twice a week by Zoom, grappling with questions like whether they can incorporate Covid-19 in their testing protocols and how to protect camera operators, makeup artists, and other on-set employees that did not require testing before. “We’re asking questions like whether directors and camera people can shoot with N95 masks on,” Stabile said. “We are actively trying to figure out how to make sets safe, and that means coronavirus as well as HIV.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "The Coronavirus Is Mutating. That's Normal. Does That Mean It's More Dangerous?",
"headTitle": "The Coronavirus Is Mutating. That’s Normal. Does That Mean It’s More Dangerous? | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>This week, the question of mutation has been front and center in coverage of the coronavirus — from controversial claims about changes that make the virus more contagious to reassurances that any mutations are not yet consequential.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here are some of the questions being raised — and what the specialists can (and can’t yet) say to answer them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Is the coronavirus mutating?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers say the coronavirus is \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/25/820998549/the-coronavirus-is-mutating-but-that-may-not-be-a-problem-for-humans\">making small changes\u003c/a> to itself as they would expect it to — at a relatively predictable and steady rate of around one to two changes per month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Viruses mutate naturally as part of their life cycle,” says Ewan Harrison, scientific project manager for the\u003ca href=\"https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/cambridge-to-spearhead-ps20million-alliance-to-map-spread-of-covid-19-coronavirus\"> COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium\u003c/a>. The coronavirus is no different.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When a virus infects a person, it enters their cells and makes copies of itself, which then circulate through the body or are transmitted — respiratory droplets is one method — to other humans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Inevitably, viruses “make mistakes in their genomes” as they copy themselves, Harrison says. Those changes can accumulate and carry over to future copies of the virus. Mutations are akin to typos in text — most typos are nonevents, but some can change the meaning of a word or sentence. Likewise, many mutations will be dead ends with no effect on people who are infected. But some of these mutations in a virus may change how quickly it infects people and replicates, or what kind of damage it does to cells.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These small, cumulative changes are useful to researchers, because they act as identification cards that help trace the pathway of the virus through groups of people over time. For instance, in a \u003ca href=\"https://jvi.asm.org/content/early/2020/04/30/JVI.00711-20\">surveillance study\u003c/a> on the Arizona State University campus, researchers found that the people who were showing up sick in mid-March with the coronavirus had different versions of the virus from each other. Comparing the virus genomes helped them figure out that the spike in mid-March cases probably didn’t signify an outbreak on campus; the cases had had likely caught this version of the virus elsewhere, perhaps when they traveled for spring break, and brought it back. So tracking virus genomes is valuable in tracing how and where the virus is spreading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Is the coronavirus becoming more transmissible?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twitter lit up this week when a \u003ca href=\"https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.29.069054v1\">draft research paper\u003c/a> posted to the preprint server bioRxiv got picked up by the media. The paper suggests in the title that their analysis of coronavirus mutations “reveals the emergence of a more transmissible form of SARS-CoV-2.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The study was conducted by researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, The University of Sheffield and Duke. They analyzed publicly available genome sequences from around the world posted on \u003ca href=\"https://www.gisaid.org/\">GISAID\u003c/a>, a global research platform that has amassed over 16,000 coronavirus sequences to date.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers found that a version of the virus, which was first detected in Europe in early February, appears to have become the most common strain in the U.S., Australia, parts of Africa — basically, anywhere it spread. The study authors hypothesize that a mutation in this virus strain, which changes one amino acid in the part of the coronavirus that finds and binds to cells, could cause the virus to spread more easily.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think that it is an important observation,” says \u003ca href=\"https://www.mailman.columbia.edu/research/center-infection-and-immunity/angela-rasmussen-phd\">Angela Rasmussen\u003c/a>, a virologist at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, “We have seen in other virus epidemics, such as the Ebola epidemic, that there are these mutations that seem to persist and become the dominant form of the virus.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, Rasmussen says, there’s no clear evidence that the mutation referenced in the paper does anything to change how the virus spreads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Other factors could also account for why the virus from Europe is dominant, says \u003ca href=\"https://vet.uga.edu/person/justin-bahl/\">Justin Bahl\u003c/a>, a computational biologist at University of Georgia. It could possibly be explained by the so-called “founder effect,” where the European version spread rapidly across international borders and established itself as the dominant strain because countries were slow to lock down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To prove whether the mutation identified in the paper causes the virus to spread more easily, researchers want to see experimental evidence: for instance, a study where both strains are tested in live cells, to see if the mutated virus replicates faster. If those results show such signs, they’ll want to see if one virus spreads more readily in lab animals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Is the coronavirus mutating to become less harmful?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another study, published in \u003ca href=\"https://jvi.asm.org/content/early/2020/04/30/JVI.00711-20\">Journal of Virology\u003c/a>, identified one patient in Arizona who was carrying a version of the virus with a chunk of it missing. The deletion was sizable — 81 nucleotides long, out of the 30,000 or so that make up the coronavirus’ genome sequence (in case you’re wondering, a nucleotide is a molecule that forms the building block of a DNA or RNA strand and is too tiny to be seen under most microscopes). It was also found in a location on the genome which, on the classic SARS virus, helped the virus fight the immune system, according to study co-author \u003ca href=\"https://sols.asu.edu/efrem-lim\">Efrem Lim\u003c/a>, a virologist at Arizona State University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers hypothesize that the deletion “may potentially reduce virus fitness” — a claim Lim says they’re now testing in labs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The paper is based on just one virus genome, out of the 16,000 that have been sequenced and shared, which makes it difficult to generalize to the larger group of circulating versions of the novel coronavirus. “We actually have no idea whether [a virus with this deletion] is transmissible or not,” Bahl says. “We don’t know whether it was just a one-off event or whether these variants are transmitting and becoming more frequent in the population [of people getting coronavirus].”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More evidence is needed to see if Lim’s hypothesis holds — and it will emerge as research continues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Do the mutations we’re seeing affect the development of treatments and vaccines?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not yet. “We’re getting the mutations that we’re kind of expecting here,” says \u003ca href=\"https://microbiology.utmb.edu/faculty/vineet-d-menachery-phd\">Vineet Menachery\u003c/a>, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch, so the research process already accounts for these changes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Menachery says the European mutation tracked in the Los Alamos paper is adjacent to, but not directly on, the receptor binding domain, which is a specific part area on the virus’ protein shell that initiates first contact in attaching to human cells. “If these mutations were there, there’d be a little bit more worry about antibody-based approaches and vaccine approaches,” he says, because the shifts might make it harder for antibodies to recognize the virus. But the mutations are not directly on the receptor binding domain, so researchers aren’t too worried about those specific changes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vaccines are also developed to target multiple sites on a virus, so it’s unlikely that a few random mutations to the virus can knock out their power completely, Rasmussen says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Versions of the virus that are drug- or vaccine-resistant may crop up once therapies are in use, says Lim. If a particular strain is obliterated by drugs or vaccines, then any viruses that survive will be the ones not affected by those treatments and could go on to infect others. But for now, there’s no pressure on the virus to change in a way that would help it evade measures that haven’t been introduced.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Why are scientists sharing unproven theories?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The main scientific purpose of sharing these papers early and often is to alert other researchers to interesting theories and call attention to potentially meaningful mutations, Lim says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It helps us prioritize what mutations should be studied in the lab, because there are so many mutations out there,” Lim says. By sharing leads and data-backed theories, scientists are highlighting specific mutations that may be affecting the behavior of the virus, in a sea of all the small changes the virus makes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So it helps researchers to know that scientists at Los Alamos Lab think that a particular change in the genome is worth additional study, or that a deletion in the virus has been found once and could be found again. The answers may not be definitive, but it feeds the global brain trust of researchers who are all working to understand the coronavirus better and help defeat it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=The+Coronavirus+Is+Mutating.+That%27s+Normal.+Does+That+Mean+It%27s+More+Dangerous%3F&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>This week, the question of mutation has been front and center in coverage of the coronavirus — from controversial claims about changes that make the virus more contagious to reassurances that any mutations are not yet consequential.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here are some of the questions being raised — and what the specialists can (and can’t yet) say to answer them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Is the coronavirus mutating?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers say the coronavirus is \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/25/820998549/the-coronavirus-is-mutating-but-that-may-not-be-a-problem-for-humans\">making small changes\u003c/a> to itself as they would expect it to — at a relatively predictable and steady rate of around one to two changes per month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Viruses mutate naturally as part of their life cycle,” says Ewan Harrison, scientific project manager for the\u003ca href=\"https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/cambridge-to-spearhead-ps20million-alliance-to-map-spread-of-covid-19-coronavirus\"> COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium\u003c/a>. The coronavirus is no different.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When a virus infects a person, it enters their cells and makes copies of itself, which then circulate through the body or are transmitted — respiratory droplets is one method — to other humans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Inevitably, viruses “make mistakes in their genomes” as they copy themselves, Harrison says. Those changes can accumulate and carry over to future copies of the virus. Mutations are akin to typos in text — most typos are nonevents, but some can change the meaning of a word or sentence. Likewise, many mutations will be dead ends with no effect on people who are infected. But some of these mutations in a virus may change how quickly it infects people and replicates, or what kind of damage it does to cells.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These small, cumulative changes are useful to researchers, because they act as identification cards that help trace the pathway of the virus through groups of people over time. For instance, in a \u003ca href=\"https://jvi.asm.org/content/early/2020/04/30/JVI.00711-20\">surveillance study\u003c/a> on the Arizona State University campus, researchers found that the people who were showing up sick in mid-March with the coronavirus had different versions of the virus from each other. Comparing the virus genomes helped them figure out that the spike in mid-March cases probably didn’t signify an outbreak on campus; the cases had had likely caught this version of the virus elsewhere, perhaps when they traveled for spring break, and brought it back. So tracking virus genomes is valuable in tracing how and where the virus is spreading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Is the coronavirus becoming more transmissible?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twitter lit up this week when a \u003ca href=\"https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.29.069054v1\">draft research paper\u003c/a> posted to the preprint server bioRxiv got picked up by the media. The paper suggests in the title that their analysis of coronavirus mutations “reveals the emergence of a more transmissible form of SARS-CoV-2.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The study was conducted by researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, The University of Sheffield and Duke. They analyzed publicly available genome sequences from around the world posted on \u003ca href=\"https://www.gisaid.org/\">GISAID\u003c/a>, a global research platform that has amassed over 16,000 coronavirus sequences to date.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers found that a version of the virus, which was first detected in Europe in early February, appears to have become the most common strain in the U.S., Australia, parts of Africa — basically, anywhere it spread. The study authors hypothesize that a mutation in this virus strain, which changes one amino acid in the part of the coronavirus that finds and binds to cells, could cause the virus to spread more easily.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think that it is an important observation,” says \u003ca href=\"https://www.mailman.columbia.edu/research/center-infection-and-immunity/angela-rasmussen-phd\">Angela Rasmussen\u003c/a>, a virologist at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, “We have seen in other virus epidemics, such as the Ebola epidemic, that there are these mutations that seem to persist and become the dominant form of the virus.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, Rasmussen says, there’s no clear evidence that the mutation referenced in the paper does anything to change how the virus spreads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Other factors could also account for why the virus from Europe is dominant, says \u003ca href=\"https://vet.uga.edu/person/justin-bahl/\">Justin Bahl\u003c/a>, a computational biologist at University of Georgia. It could possibly be explained by the so-called “founder effect,” where the European version spread rapidly across international borders and established itself as the dominant strain because countries were slow to lock down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To prove whether the mutation identified in the paper causes the virus to spread more easily, researchers want to see experimental evidence: for instance, a study where both strains are tested in live cells, to see if the mutated virus replicates faster. If those results show such signs, they’ll want to see if one virus spreads more readily in lab animals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Is the coronavirus mutating to become less harmful?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another study, published in \u003ca href=\"https://jvi.asm.org/content/early/2020/04/30/JVI.00711-20\">Journal of Virology\u003c/a>, identified one patient in Arizona who was carrying a version of the virus with a chunk of it missing. The deletion was sizable — 81 nucleotides long, out of the 30,000 or so that make up the coronavirus’ genome sequence (in case you’re wondering, a nucleotide is a molecule that forms the building block of a DNA or RNA strand and is too tiny to be seen under most microscopes). It was also found in a location on the genome which, on the classic SARS virus, helped the virus fight the immune system, according to study co-author \u003ca href=\"https://sols.asu.edu/efrem-lim\">Efrem Lim\u003c/a>, a virologist at Arizona State University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers hypothesize that the deletion “may potentially reduce virus fitness” — a claim Lim says they’re now testing in labs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The paper is based on just one virus genome, out of the 16,000 that have been sequenced and shared, which makes it difficult to generalize to the larger group of circulating versions of the novel coronavirus. “We actually have no idea whether [a virus with this deletion] is transmissible or not,” Bahl says. “We don’t know whether it was just a one-off event or whether these variants are transmitting and becoming more frequent in the population [of people getting coronavirus].”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More evidence is needed to see if Lim’s hypothesis holds — and it will emerge as research continues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Do the mutations we’re seeing affect the development of treatments and vaccines?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not yet. “We’re getting the mutations that we’re kind of expecting here,” says \u003ca href=\"https://microbiology.utmb.edu/faculty/vineet-d-menachery-phd\">Vineet Menachery\u003c/a>, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch, so the research process already accounts for these changes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Menachery says the European mutation tracked in the Los Alamos paper is adjacent to, but not directly on, the receptor binding domain, which is a specific part area on the virus’ protein shell that initiates first contact in attaching to human cells. “If these mutations were there, there’d be a little bit more worry about antibody-based approaches and vaccine approaches,” he says, because the shifts might make it harder for antibodies to recognize the virus. But the mutations are not directly on the receptor binding domain, so researchers aren’t too worried about those specific changes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vaccines are also developed to target multiple sites on a virus, so it’s unlikely that a few random mutations to the virus can knock out their power completely, Rasmussen says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Versions of the virus that are drug- or vaccine-resistant may crop up once therapies are in use, says Lim. If a particular strain is obliterated by drugs or vaccines, then any viruses that survive will be the ones not affected by those treatments and could go on to infect others. But for now, there’s no pressure on the virus to change in a way that would help it evade measures that haven’t been introduced.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Why are scientists sharing unproven theories?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The main scientific purpose of sharing these papers early and often is to alert other researchers to interesting theories and call attention to potentially meaningful mutations, Lim says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It helps us prioritize what mutations should be studied in the lab, because there are so many mutations out there,” Lim says. By sharing leads and data-backed theories, scientists are highlighting specific mutations that may be affecting the behavior of the virus, in a sea of all the small changes the virus makes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So it helps researchers to know that scientists at Los Alamos Lab think that a particular change in the genome is worth additional study, or that a deletion in the virus has been found once and could be found again. The answers may not be definitive, but it feeds the global brain trust of researchers who are all working to understand the coronavirus better and help defeat it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=The+Coronavirus+Is+Mutating.+That%27s+Normal.+Does+That+Mean+It%27s+More+Dangerous%3F&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "NASA Scientists Now Have to Explore Mars From Their Own Homes",
"headTitle": "NASA Scientists Now Have to Explore Mars From Their Own Homes | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>On Mars, nothing has changed for the rover Curiosity because of the coronavirus pandemic. It continues its \u003ca href=\"https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7400\">exploration up the slopes of Mount Sharp\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Curiosity drives where it’s told, \u003ca href=\"https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7617\">stopping to take a picture\u003c/a> or extend its robotic arm to drill into a rock. Under no shelter-at-home order, it’s business as usual for the rover.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, back on Earth, the room where Curiosity’s route is normally planned — by a team of scientists and engineers — stands empty.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Skeleton Crew, Ghost Staff\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Due to the shelter-in-place and social distancing directives, the normally bustling 117-acre campus of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/about/\">Jet Propulsion Laboratory\u003c/a> near Pasadena, California, where Curiosity is operated from, has become something of a ghost town.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The usual population of over 5,000 employees has been reduced to a skeleton crew of only a couple hundred performing essential functions that cannot be done remotely. Those who must come to the lab are all practicing social distancing, proper sanitization and wear personal protective equipment, or PPE.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most of JPL’s mission operators and other personnel, including the Curiosity rover team, are adapting to doing their jobs remotely from home. So, how does interplanetary exploration work from home —where cats walk across keyboards, kids attend school by Zoom and the dog needs to be walked?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Exploring Another World— From Home\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1962943\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 744px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1962943\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/3dglasses-curiosity-nasa.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"744\" height=\"712\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/3dglasses-curiosity-nasa.jpg 744w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/3dglasses-curiosity-nasa-160x153.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 744px) 100vw, 744px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Curiosity rover driver Keri Bean studies the terrain around the rover using red-blue 3D glasses, an adaptation to operating Curiosity from home without access to higher-tech equipment. \u003ccite>(NASA/JPL-Caltech)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>As the novel coronavirus began to hit countries around the globe, the Curiosity team predicted the need to carry on with \u003ca href=\"https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7638&utm_source=iContact&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nasajpl&utm_content=daily20200414-1\">rover operations remotely\u003c/a>, and outfitted home offices for video conferencing. The team had to make sure it could stay in close contact to analyze data and imagery from the rover to map its surroundings in detail and plot its movement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They had to adapt, and got creative. Without the high graphics computing and special equipment at JPL, at-home rover operators are using old theater-style 3D glasses to study the terrain and plan Curiosity’s work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One such maneuver took place on March 20, when operators commanded Curiosity’s drill to bore into a block of sandstone at a site dubbed “Edinburgh” to extract a rock sample for analysis. Not only was the \u003ca href=\"https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission-updates/8633/sols-2713-2714-check-your-work/\">operation a success\u003c/a>, it was also the first time the drill had been used to dig into rock since 2018, when a technical problem forced engineers to devise a new method of drilling. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Curiosity is \u003ca href=\"https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission-updates/8655/sols-2742-2743-driving-again/\">on the move again\u003c/a>, after a \u003ca href=\"https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission-updates/8653/sols-2740-2741-making-the-most-of-this-stop/\">pit stop to diagnose\u003c/a> an issue with its \u003ca href=\"https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft/instruments/mahli/\">Mars Hand Lens Imager\u003c/a> instrument. No time was wasted: The team directed Curiosity to collect images of the surrounding terrain and atmospheric data while it waited.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Impacts on Other Missions\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to Curiosity on Mars, JPL currently manages 20 different missions. All of them are impacted by the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1962942\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1962942 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/EuropaClipper-AC-NASAJPLCALTECH-800x704.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"704\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/EuropaClipper-AC-NASAJPLCALTECH-800x704.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/EuropaClipper-AC-NASAJPLCALTECH-160x141.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/EuropaClipper-AC-NASAJPLCALTECH-768x676.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/EuropaClipper-AC-NASAJPLCALTECH-1020x898.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/EuropaClipper-AC-NASAJPLCALTECH.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Artist concept of the Europa Clipper spacecraft making a flyby of Jupiter’s icy, ocean-harboring moon, Europa. \u003ccite>(NASA/JPL-Caltech)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>One of these is \u003ca href=\"https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/europa-clipper/\">Europa Clipper\u003c/a>, a mission to send a spacecraft to Jupiter to investigate the ocean beneath the icy crust of the moon Europa. The Clipper team now works almost completely from home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Europa Clipper team was already partly remote, since Clipper is a partnership between \u003ca href=\"https://www.jhuapl.edu/PressRelease/190702\">APL\u003c/a> and JPL,” said Krys Blackwood, senior lead human centered designer at JPL. “So, we adapted to working from home fairly rapidly. Luckily, the leadership of the mission is incredibly supportive, working to accommodate people’s unique home and family situations. I find myself looking forward to all those moments when someone’s kids or pets pop into a video conference. Rather than letting it disrupt us, we roll with it and support each other.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another critical program at JPL is running NASA’s \u003ca href=\"https://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/about/functions/\">Deep Space Network\u003c/a>, or DSN. That’s the global array of large radio dishes that keeps mission operators in contact with robotic missions across the solar system — including the veteran \u003ca href=\"https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7587\">Voyager\u003c/a> probes that are now traveling through interstellar space.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1962939\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1962939\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/JPLFlightControl-BBurress-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/JPLFlightControl-BBurress-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/JPLFlightControl-BBurress-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/JPLFlightControl-BBurress-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/JPLFlightControl-BBurress-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/JPLFlightControl-BBurress.jpg 1440w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mission Control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, nexus of NASA’s Deep Space Network for communicating with robotic missions across the solar system. \u003ccite>(Ben Burress)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Our research for Deep Space Network operations is definitely impacted,” said Blackwood of her \u003ca href=\"https://hi.jpl.nasa.gov/\">Human Centered Design Group\u003c/a> team, “as we mostly need to be face-to-face in order to measure and evaluate operational practices. So, we’re having to get creative about tools and methods, while trying not to impact operations at all — because no matter what, the DSN needs to keep receiving data.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Human Centered Design Group is also responsible for developing and programming the 3D terrain mapping system used by the Curiosity rover team. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>To Boldly Zoom\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Imagine the starship Enterprise traveling through interstellar space, exploring strange new worlds — and the Bridge is largely empty. All the crew, from captain to science officer to navigator, is cloistered away working from their personal quarters. The communications officer, also isolated, keeps everyone in touch via Zoom. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For JPL, it’s something like that.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>On Mars, nothing has changed for the rover Curiosity because of the coronavirus pandemic. It continues its \u003ca href=\"https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7400\">exploration up the slopes of Mount Sharp\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Curiosity drives where it’s told, \u003ca href=\"https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7617\">stopping to take a picture\u003c/a> or extend its robotic arm to drill into a rock. Under no shelter-at-home order, it’s business as usual for the rover.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, back on Earth, the room where Curiosity’s route is normally planned — by a team of scientists and engineers — stands empty.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Skeleton Crew, Ghost Staff\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Due to the shelter-in-place and social distancing directives, the normally bustling 117-acre campus of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/about/\">Jet Propulsion Laboratory\u003c/a> near Pasadena, California, where Curiosity is operated from, has become something of a ghost town.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The usual population of over 5,000 employees has been reduced to a skeleton crew of only a couple hundred performing essential functions that cannot be done remotely. Those who must come to the lab are all practicing social distancing, proper sanitization and wear personal protective equipment, or PPE.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most of JPL’s mission operators and other personnel, including the Curiosity rover team, are adapting to doing their jobs remotely from home. So, how does interplanetary exploration work from home —where cats walk across keyboards, kids attend school by Zoom and the dog needs to be walked?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Exploring Another World— From Home\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1962943\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 744px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1962943\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/3dglasses-curiosity-nasa.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"744\" height=\"712\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/3dglasses-curiosity-nasa.jpg 744w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/3dglasses-curiosity-nasa-160x153.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 744px) 100vw, 744px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Curiosity rover driver Keri Bean studies the terrain around the rover using red-blue 3D glasses, an adaptation to operating Curiosity from home without access to higher-tech equipment. \u003ccite>(NASA/JPL-Caltech)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>As the novel coronavirus began to hit countries around the globe, the Curiosity team predicted the need to carry on with \u003ca href=\"https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7638&utm_source=iContact&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nasajpl&utm_content=daily20200414-1\">rover operations remotely\u003c/a>, and outfitted home offices for video conferencing. The team had to make sure it could stay in close contact to analyze data and imagery from the rover to map its surroundings in detail and plot its movement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They had to adapt, and got creative. Without the high graphics computing and special equipment at JPL, at-home rover operators are using old theater-style 3D glasses to study the terrain and plan Curiosity’s work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One such maneuver took place on March 20, when operators commanded Curiosity’s drill to bore into a block of sandstone at a site dubbed “Edinburgh” to extract a rock sample for analysis. Not only was the \u003ca href=\"https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission-updates/8633/sols-2713-2714-check-your-work/\">operation a success\u003c/a>, it was also the first time the drill had been used to dig into rock since 2018, when a technical problem forced engineers to devise a new method of drilling. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Curiosity is \u003ca href=\"https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission-updates/8655/sols-2742-2743-driving-again/\">on the move again\u003c/a>, after a \u003ca href=\"https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission-updates/8653/sols-2740-2741-making-the-most-of-this-stop/\">pit stop to diagnose\u003c/a> an issue with its \u003ca href=\"https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft/instruments/mahli/\">Mars Hand Lens Imager\u003c/a> instrument. No time was wasted: The team directed Curiosity to collect images of the surrounding terrain and atmospheric data while it waited.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Impacts on Other Missions\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to Curiosity on Mars, JPL currently manages 20 different missions. All of them are impacted by the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1962942\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1962942 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/EuropaClipper-AC-NASAJPLCALTECH-800x704.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"704\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/EuropaClipper-AC-NASAJPLCALTECH-800x704.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/EuropaClipper-AC-NASAJPLCALTECH-160x141.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/EuropaClipper-AC-NASAJPLCALTECH-768x676.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/EuropaClipper-AC-NASAJPLCALTECH-1020x898.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/EuropaClipper-AC-NASAJPLCALTECH.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Artist concept of the Europa Clipper spacecraft making a flyby of Jupiter’s icy, ocean-harboring moon, Europa. \u003ccite>(NASA/JPL-Caltech)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>One of these is \u003ca href=\"https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/europa-clipper/\">Europa Clipper\u003c/a>, a mission to send a spacecraft to Jupiter to investigate the ocean beneath the icy crust of the moon Europa. The Clipper team now works almost completely from home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Europa Clipper team was already partly remote, since Clipper is a partnership between \u003ca href=\"https://www.jhuapl.edu/PressRelease/190702\">APL\u003c/a> and JPL,” said Krys Blackwood, senior lead human centered designer at JPL. “So, we adapted to working from home fairly rapidly. Luckily, the leadership of the mission is incredibly supportive, working to accommodate people’s unique home and family situations. I find myself looking forward to all those moments when someone’s kids or pets pop into a video conference. Rather than letting it disrupt us, we roll with it and support each other.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another critical program at JPL is running NASA’s \u003ca href=\"https://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/about/functions/\">Deep Space Network\u003c/a>, or DSN. That’s the global array of large radio dishes that keeps mission operators in contact with robotic missions across the solar system — including the veteran \u003ca href=\"https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7587\">Voyager\u003c/a> probes that are now traveling through interstellar space.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1962939\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1962939\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/JPLFlightControl-BBurress-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/JPLFlightControl-BBurress-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/JPLFlightControl-BBurress-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/JPLFlightControl-BBurress-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/JPLFlightControl-BBurress-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/04/JPLFlightControl-BBurress.jpg 1440w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mission Control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, nexus of NASA’s Deep Space Network for communicating with robotic missions across the solar system. \u003ccite>(Ben Burress)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Our research for Deep Space Network operations is definitely impacted,” said Blackwood of her \u003ca href=\"https://hi.jpl.nasa.gov/\">Human Centered Design Group\u003c/a> team, “as we mostly need to be face-to-face in order to measure and evaluate operational practices. So, we’re having to get creative about tools and methods, while trying not to impact operations at all — because no matter what, the DSN needs to keep receiving data.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Human Centered Design Group is also responsible for developing and programming the 3D terrain mapping system used by the Curiosity rover team. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>To Boldly Zoom\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Imagine the starship Enterprise traveling through interstellar space, exploring strange new worlds — and the Bridge is largely empty. All the crew, from captain to science officer to navigator, is cloistered away working from their personal quarters. The communications officer, also isolated, keeps everyone in touch via Zoom. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For JPL, it’s something like that.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Using More Power at Home Means Higher Bills. Here Are Financial Programs That Can Help",
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"content": "\u003cp class=\"p1\">For coming up on two months, Northern Californians have been at home working on computers, watching TV, charging devices and doing all manner of things that require electricity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In March and April, residential electricity usage skyrocketed between 15% and 20% compared to the same period last year, \u003ca href=\"https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/covid/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">according\u003c/span>\u003c/a> to the California Public Utilities Commission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Energy bills on all that power come due in May, and for many Californians, it may not be pretty, especially compared to April’s bill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Last month, across Northern California, PG&E and other utility customers received a break on their statements. For many, it was one of the smallest bills of the year, the result of warmer weather and the state’s issuing of an approximately $35 climate credit to most ratepayers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Even though the bills have been smaller, power providers say people are falling behind on their payments, and the impact of a constricting economy combined with the anticipated higher electricity costs could make things worse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Nick Chaset, CEO of East Bay Community Energy, a community choice aggregator based in Oakland that’s an alternative to PG&E,\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"> \u003c/span>says customers are already falling behind on payments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">“It’s because of those compounding effects that we’re seeing customers delay or be unable to pay their bill,” he said. “We are just at the beginning. There are some customers who are never going to be able to catch up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Will Reisman, press secretary for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which manages CleanPowerSF, another aggregator, says it has also seen customers falling behind.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It is still a little early, but on average we’ve seen a 6% increase in balances more than 30 days overdue as compared to the pre-COVID average,” he said in an email.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Deanna Contreras, a spokesperson for PG&E, wouldn’t confirm that people have been late in paying their bills. But she said in an email, “We understand many of our customers are facing severe economic challenges because of the crisis,”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb>Options for Relief\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">During a normal year, many Northern California customers would receive a second \u003ca href=\"https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/climatecredit/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">California Climate Credit \u003c/span>\u003c/a>in October.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recognizing the hardship Californians are facing, the CPUC directed the state’s big utilities to distribute the credit early — most people in Northern California will receive a credit of $17.87 in May and $17.86 in June.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The credit represents ratepayers’ share of payments from California’s cap-and-trade auction, which earns revenue for the state by requiring power plants and other industrial groups that emit greenhouse gases to buy carbon pollution permits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">\u003cb>Save On Your Power Bill Right Now \u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">Here are some programs available to help people who are having trouble paying their power bill:\u003c/p>\n\u003cul class=\"ul1\">\n\u003cli style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n\u003cul class=\"ul1\">\n\u003cli class=\"li6\">People who have recently lost their job, or those that are receiving unemployment benefits, can reduce their power and gas bills by 20% by enrolling in the California Alternate Rates for Energy (CARE) Program \u003ca href=\"https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/save-energy-money/help-paying-your-bill/longer-term-assistance/care/care.page?WT.mc_id=Vanity_care\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/a>.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli class=\"li6\">Families of three or more people who are facing similar economic hardship can apply for a monthly discount on their power bill of 18% through the Family Electric Rate Assistance (FERA) Program \u003ca href=\"https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/save-energy-money/help-paying-your-bill/longer-term-assistance/care/care.page?WT.mc_id=Vanity_care\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/a>.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli class=\"li6\"> People who make within 200% above the federal poverty guideline can apply for a $300 energy credit with the Relief for Energy Assistance through Community Help (REACH) program (a family of four would qualify if its annual income is less than $51,500 — look at the CARE chart \u003ca href=\"https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/save-energy-money/help-paying-your-bill/longer-term-assistance/care/care.page?WT.mc_id=Vanity_care\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/a> for a full breakdown and check these \u003ca href=\"https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/save-energy-money/help-paying-your-bill/one-time-assistance/reach/reach-criteria-and-guidelines.page\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">guidelines\u003c/span>\u003c/a> to see if you might qualify).\u003c/li>\n\u003cli class=\"li6\">If you or someone in your home uses respirators or other life support equipment, you can get additional electricity and gas for no extra cost by signing up for the Medical Baseline Program \u003ca href=\"https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/save-energy-money/help-paying-your-bill/longer-term-assistance/medical-condition-related/medical-baseline-allowance/medical-baseline-allowance.page?WT.mc_id=Vanity_medicalbaseline\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/a>. PG&E will also send an extra notice to people enrolled in this program before a power shutoff to prevent lines from touching off a wildfire, what it calls a Public Safety Power Shutoff.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>What Kind of Relief are Some Bay Area Power Providers Offering?\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>PG&E:\u003c/b> The utility says it has suspended service disconnections for people who can’t pay their bills and is offering flexible payment plans. Read more on that program \u003ca href=\"https://www.pge.com/en_US/about-pge/company-information/protective-protocols/covid19-protections.page?WT.mc_id=Vanity_covid19consumerprotections#financialAssistance\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>CleanPowerSF: \u003c/b>Customers won’t be unenrolled from the program if they cannot make payments, and CleanPowerSF is offering flexible payment plans — you can find more information on their services \u003ca href=\"https://www.cleanpowersf.org/covid-19\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here.\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Marin Clean Energy: \u003c/b>The North Bay choice aggregator has indefinitely suspended collections for people who can’t pay their bill and pulled together cost-saving resources \u003ca href=\"https://www.mcecleanenergy.org/news/energy-affordability-covid-19/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/a>. \u003cb>\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>East Bay Community Energy:\u003c/strong> EBCE suspended collections, and customers won’t be dropped from the program for nonpayment. Details on their COVID-19 Response \u003ca href=\"https://ebce.org/covid/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Monterey Bay Community Power: \u003c/b>MBCP is deferring 50% of electricity charges for May and June. More on what they are doing \u003ca href=\"https://www.mbcommunitypower.org/covid-response/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Redwood Coast Energy Authority: \u003c/b>RCEA compiled a checklist of energy efficiency measures, which you can find \u003ca href=\"https://redwoodenergy.org/covid-19/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Silicon Valley Clean Energy: \u003c/b>SVCE \u003ca href=\"https://www.svcleanenergy.org/covid-19/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">announced\u003c/span>\u003c/a> a commitment of $10 million in direct financial support for its lower-income customers and to pay for job training for electricians, plumbers and mechanical workers who have been impacted by the shutdown orders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Valley Clean Energy: \u003c/b>VCE released a COVID-19 statement, which you can find \u003ca href=\"https://valleycleanenergy.org/news/vces-response-to-covid-19/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp class=\"p1\">For coming up on two months, Northern Californians have been at home working on computers, watching TV, charging devices and doing all manner of things that require electricity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In March and April, residential electricity usage skyrocketed between 15% and 20% compared to the same period last year, \u003ca href=\"https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/covid/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">according\u003c/span>\u003c/a> to the California Public Utilities Commission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Energy bills on all that power come due in May, and for many Californians, it may not be pretty, especially compared to April’s bill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Last month, across Northern California, PG&E and other utility customers received a break on their statements. For many, it was one of the smallest bills of the year, the result of warmer weather and the state’s issuing of an approximately $35 climate credit to most ratepayers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Even though the bills have been smaller, power providers say people are falling behind on their payments, and the impact of a constricting economy combined with the anticipated higher electricity costs could make things worse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Nick Chaset, CEO of East Bay Community Energy, a community choice aggregator based in Oakland that’s an alternative to PG&E,\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"> \u003c/span>says customers are already falling behind on payments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">“It’s because of those compounding effects that we’re seeing customers delay or be unable to pay their bill,” he said. “We are just at the beginning. There are some customers who are never going to be able to catch up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Will Reisman, press secretary for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which manages CleanPowerSF, another aggregator, says it has also seen customers falling behind.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It is still a little early, but on average we’ve seen a 6% increase in balances more than 30 days overdue as compared to the pre-COVID average,” he said in an email.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Deanna Contreras, a spokesperson for PG&E, wouldn’t confirm that people have been late in paying their bills. But she said in an email, “We understand many of our customers are facing severe economic challenges because of the crisis,”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cb>Options for Relief\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">During a normal year, many Northern California customers would receive a second \u003ca href=\"https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/climatecredit/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">California Climate Credit \u003c/span>\u003c/a>in October.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recognizing the hardship Californians are facing, the CPUC directed the state’s big utilities to distribute the credit early — most people in Northern California will receive a credit of $17.87 in May and $17.86 in June.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The credit represents ratepayers’ share of payments from California’s cap-and-trade auction, which earns revenue for the state by requiring power plants and other industrial groups that emit greenhouse gases to buy carbon pollution permits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">\u003cb>Save On Your Power Bill Right Now \u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">Here are some programs available to help people who are having trouble paying their power bill:\u003c/p>\n\u003cul class=\"ul1\">\n\u003cli style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n\u003cul class=\"ul1\">\n\u003cli class=\"li6\">People who have recently lost their job, or those that are receiving unemployment benefits, can reduce their power and gas bills by 20% by enrolling in the California Alternate Rates for Energy (CARE) Program \u003ca href=\"https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/save-energy-money/help-paying-your-bill/longer-term-assistance/care/care.page?WT.mc_id=Vanity_care\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/a>.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli class=\"li6\">Families of three or more people who are facing similar economic hardship can apply for a monthly discount on their power bill of 18% through the Family Electric Rate Assistance (FERA) Program \u003ca href=\"https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/save-energy-money/help-paying-your-bill/longer-term-assistance/care/care.page?WT.mc_id=Vanity_care\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/a>.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli class=\"li6\"> People who make within 200% above the federal poverty guideline can apply for a $300 energy credit with the Relief for Energy Assistance through Community Help (REACH) program (a family of four would qualify if its annual income is less than $51,500 — look at the CARE chart \u003ca href=\"https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/save-energy-money/help-paying-your-bill/longer-term-assistance/care/care.page?WT.mc_id=Vanity_care\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/a> for a full breakdown and check these \u003ca href=\"https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/save-energy-money/help-paying-your-bill/one-time-assistance/reach/reach-criteria-and-guidelines.page\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">guidelines\u003c/span>\u003c/a> to see if you might qualify).\u003c/li>\n\u003cli class=\"li6\">If you or someone in your home uses respirators or other life support equipment, you can get additional electricity and gas for no extra cost by signing up for the Medical Baseline Program \u003ca href=\"https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/save-energy-money/help-paying-your-bill/longer-term-assistance/medical-condition-related/medical-baseline-allowance/medical-baseline-allowance.page?WT.mc_id=Vanity_medicalbaseline\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/a>. PG&E will also send an extra notice to people enrolled in this program before a power shutoff to prevent lines from touching off a wildfire, what it calls a Public Safety Power Shutoff.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>What Kind of Relief are Some Bay Area Power Providers Offering?\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>PG&E:\u003c/b> The utility says it has suspended service disconnections for people who can’t pay their bills and is offering flexible payment plans. Read more on that program \u003ca href=\"https://www.pge.com/en_US/about-pge/company-information/protective-protocols/covid19-protections.page?WT.mc_id=Vanity_covid19consumerprotections#financialAssistance\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>CleanPowerSF: \u003c/b>Customers won’t be unenrolled from the program if they cannot make payments, and CleanPowerSF is offering flexible payment plans — you can find more information on their services \u003ca href=\"https://www.cleanpowersf.org/covid-19\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here.\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Marin Clean Energy: \u003c/b>The North Bay choice aggregator has indefinitely suspended collections for people who can’t pay their bill and pulled together cost-saving resources \u003ca href=\"https://www.mcecleanenergy.org/news/energy-affordability-covid-19/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/a>. \u003cb>\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>East Bay Community Energy:\u003c/strong> EBCE suspended collections, and customers won’t be dropped from the program for nonpayment. Details on their COVID-19 Response \u003ca href=\"https://ebce.org/covid/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Monterey Bay Community Power: \u003c/b>MBCP is deferring 50% of electricity charges for May and June. More on what they are doing \u003ca href=\"https://www.mbcommunitypower.org/covid-response/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Redwood Coast Energy Authority: \u003c/b>RCEA compiled a checklist of energy efficiency measures, which you can find \u003ca href=\"https://redwoodenergy.org/covid-19/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Silicon Valley Clean Energy: \u003c/b>SVCE \u003ca href=\"https://www.svcleanenergy.org/covid-19/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">announced\u003c/span>\u003c/a> a commitment of $10 million in direct financial support for its lower-income customers and to pay for job training for electricians, plumbers and mechanical workers who have been impacted by the shutdown orders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Valley Clean Energy: \u003c/b>VCE released a COVID-19 statement, which you can find \u003ca href=\"https://valleycleanenergy.org/news/vces-response-to-covid-19/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"rss": "https://podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk/p02nq0gn.rss"
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},
"californiareport": {
"id": "californiareport",
"title": "The California Report",
"tagline": "California, day by day",
"info": "KQED’s statewide radio news program providing daily coverage of issues, trends and public policy decisions.",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-California-Report-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/californiareport",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 8
},
"link": "/californiareport",
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"amazon": "https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/26099305-72af-4542-9dde-ac1807fe36d5/kqed-s-the-california-report",
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}
},
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"id": "californiareportmagazine",
"title": "The California Report Magazine",
"tagline": "Your state, your stories",
"info": "Every week, The California Report Magazine takes you on a road trip for the ears: to visit the places and meet the people who make California unique. The in-depth storytelling podcast from the California Report.",
"airtime": "FRI 4:30pm-5pm, 6:30pm-7pm, 11pm-11:30pm",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/californiareportmagazine",
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"order": 10
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM3NjkwNjk1OTAz",
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},
"city-arts": {
"id": "city-arts",
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"info": "A one-hour radio program to hear celebrated writers, artists and thinkers address contemporary ideas and values, often discussing the creative process. Please note: tapes or transcripts are not available",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/05/cityartsandlecture-300x300.jpg",
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"airtime": "SUN 1pm-2pm, TUE 10pm, WED 1am",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "City Arts & Lectures"
},
"link": "https://www.cityarts.net",
"subscribe": {
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"rss": "https://www.cityarts.net/feed/"
}
},
"closealltabs": {
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"order": 1
},
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"title": "Code Switch / Life Kit",
"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
"airtime": "THU 10pm, FRI 1am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Commonwealth-Club-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"meta": {
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"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
"link": "/radio/program/commonwealth-club",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/commonwealth-club-of-california-podcast/id976334034?mt=2",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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}
},
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"id": "forum",
"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 9am-11am, 10pm-11pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Forum with Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal",
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"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 9
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5NTU3MzgxNjMz",
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"id": "freakonomics-radio",
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"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/freakonomicsRadio.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
"airtime": "SUN 1am-2am, SAT 3pm-4pm",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
"subscribe": {
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
"rss": "https://feeds.feedburner.com/freakonomicsradio"
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},
"fresh-air": {
"id": "fresh-air",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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},
"hidden-brain": {
"id": "hidden-brain",
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"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "NPR"
},
"link": "/radio/program/hidden-brain",
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},
"how-i-built-this": {
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"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/howIBuiltThis.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this",
"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
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"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/3zxy",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?mt=2",
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},
"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
"title": "Hyphenación",
"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"order": 15
},
"link": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
"meta": {
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"order": 18
},
"link": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1492194549",
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}
},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
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},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace-pm/rss/rss"
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},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
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"source": "WaitWhat"
},
"link": "/radio/program/masters-of-scale",
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"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510360/podcast.xml"
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},
"on-the-media": {
"id": "on-the-media",
"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
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"info": "One of public radio's most dynamic voices, Sam Sanders helped launch The NPR Politics Podcast and hosted NPR's hit show It's Been A Minute. Now, the award-winning host returns with something brand new, The Sam Sanders Show. Every week, Sam Sanders and friends dig into the culture that shapes our lives: what's driving the biggest trends, how artists really think, and even the memes you can't stop scrolling past. Sam is beloved for his way of unpacking the world and bringing you up close to fresh currents and engaging conversations. The Sam Sanders Show is smart, funny and always a good time.",
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