San Diego News Fix

Wearing a mask is mandatory when you are outside starting May 1 in San Diego County. Reporter Pam Kragen discusses the details of the new rules, as well as provides suggestions about where to get masks or facial coverings.

North County leaders want the region to push harder against the state’s mandatory stay-at-home order that forced many nonessential businesses to close.During a Tuesday teleconference, county Supervisor Jim Desmond and five mayors stressed the toll the coronavirus pandemic has taken on their economies.People are suffering without jobs, they said, and shuttered businesses are more than willing to use the same precautions currently being employed by essential businesses like grocery stores to reopen safely.“If you go to Walmart right now, you’re not having your temperature taken, but you’re maintaining social distancing, you’re wearing a mask, you’re following the rules,” said Oceanside Councilman Chris Rodriguez, adding: “Business are creative, and they’re going to follow the rules because we all need to work together to get through this. ... We have to demand from the state to allow these businesses that are essential to our economy to open.”Currently, the state’s health order dictates which businesses can be

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday criticized Californians who defied the statewide stay-at-home order and flocked to beaches this past weekend, saying that ignoring restrictions could prolong the spread of the coronavirus in the state.Newsom’s comments come after thousands of beachgoers descended on the coast in Orange and Ventura counties despite his pleas last week to avoid the temptation of doing so during the warm weekend.“This virus doesn’t take the weekends off,” Newsom said during his daily COVID-19 briefing in Sacramento. “The only thing that will set us back is people stopping to practice physical distancing and appropriate social distancing. That’s the only thing that’s going to slow down our ability to reopen this economy.”

As the number of COVID-19 cases continue to rise in the South Bay, local officials want to see more testing to slow the spread.“At this point, we are losing our patience,” said Chula Vista Mayor Mary Casillas Salas during a Thursday news conference. “We want answers and we want to know specifically what is being done in the county and state level to protect our citizens.”The mayors of National City and Imperial Beach, as well as San Diego Councilwoman Vivian Moreno, who represents District 8, joined Salas in shining a spotlight on what is going on in the southern half of the county.“What’s clear is that residents of south San Diego County are suffering disproportionately from this crisis,” said Imperial Beach Mayor Serge Dedina. “We want to make sure that all of our residents are protected.”Read more here. Also, read more about how hospitals in Chula Vista are faring, here

U-T Sports columnist Mark Zeiger argues that outdoor recreation should be the next phase of reopening, in order to keep San Diegans healthy. Read the column here.

The local death toll jumped by 15 souls Tuesday, as the new case count in San Diego County hit triple digits for the first time since April 4, according to the latest daily COVID-19 update from the county health department.Though the newly announced deaths did not occur on a single day, they none-the-less show that talk of rapidly opening shut-down parts of the economy and sidelined social and recreational resources too quickly should be expected to backfire, officials said.County supervisor Nathan Fletcher made his daily effort to convey that those keeping these orders in effect in the face of public protest over the weekend are doing so out of a desire to prevent a deadly resurgence in cases such has the one now underway in Singapore.“They’re not out of a desire to infringe; they’re out of a desire to protect,” Fletcher said.Read more here.

Unprecedented times led to an unprecedented event in the energy sector Monday.For the first time in U.S. history, the futures price for domestic crude oil not only dropped to zero, it fell into negative territory. In essence, buyers paid sellers not to deliver oil because there is no place to store all the crude that has piled up around the world, including California, as the COVID-19 pandemic has decapitated demand.With no specific timeline in place to lift coronoavirus restrictions, fuel experts say gasoline prices will continue to fall — although there are few drivers in position to take advantage of it — and oil producers in the Golden State say they face an increasingly uncertain future.Read more here.

As scientists and doctors scramble to track the scope and severity of COVID-19, antibodies have become something of a buzzword.Here are five things you need to know about coronavirus antibodies, including how and why scientists — many of them in San Diego — are studying them, and why some think they might be the key to reopening the economy.Read more here.*****Listen to Victoria Robertson's porch concert here.

San Diego is closed for business — but it won't be forever. Recently announced federal guidelines suggest that some doors will open sooner rather than later, leaving local proprietors and landlords in the tricky position of needing to make room for radical change right away.In a press conference Thursday, President Donald Trump revealed a three-phase plan to reopen businesses, starting when each state meets a threshold of coronavirus case decline. Reopening would begin with restaurants, movie theaters and sporting venues. Later on, worksites and schools will reopen — all with appropriate social distancing. Some states, like Texas and Florida, are expected to begin reopening as early as late April, while others will wait longer.That means, across the county, human resource staffers and business owners are already huddling remotely to write a new rule book for returning to work or play. They have large blanks to fill in because there's only one certainty: Leave-your-home life will, for the foreseeable future, b

With less than half the scheduled flights taking off here in early April and more of the same anticipated as the coronavirus scare plays out across the world, San Diego’s international airport is facing a deep dive in monthly revenues that is forcing it to slash expenses and possibly delay the start late next year of a $3 billion project to expand its aging Terminal 1.The airport’s largest airline, Southwest, has already cut by half the number of flights scheduled across its system in June, and by Wednesday, all three of San Diego’s once-popular overseas flights — to London, Frankfurt and Japan — will have ended.Even more startling are stats released by the Transportation Security Administration, which reported that officers screened just 102,184 people at U.S. airport checkpoints on Monday — a nearly 96 percent drop from the nearly 2.5 million who went through security on the same day in 2019. No figures are available by airport, but in San Diego, a little more than 400,000 passengers boarded planes during t

Inmates and their family members say conditions are more serious than department officials have acknowledged. Among other problems, they cite a persistent lack of virus testing and inadequate protective gear and medical care.As of April 9 the department had tested 62 inmates for the coronavirus — just over 0.13 percent of the people in custody and 16 more than the 46 tested by April 3.Department officials say they are taking every reasonable precaution to keep COVID-19 from infiltrating the jails, including issuing masks to employees and inmates.Story: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/watchdog/story/2020-04-12/theyre-filthy-inmates-decry-lack-of-clean-masks-testing-conditions-in-san-diego-jails

Public transit was shaping up to have a banner year in 2020 — from a tax proposal to massively expand bus and trolley service to the unveiling of a vision for an entirely new commuter rail system.Now those efforts could be, at least temporarily, derailed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic that continues to grip California and much of the world. The reality stings all the more since bus and trolley ridership in San Diego had been climbing in recent months, bucking a years-long trend impacting systems nationwide.Story: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/transportation/story/2020-04-10/coronavirus-threatens-to-derail-san-diegos-plans-to-expand-public-transit

They’ve built special wards, literally punching holes in their walls and snaking ventilation pipes through their halls to make their rooms ready to receive COVID-19 patients.They’ve conserved personal protective equipment, and they’ve canceled most elective procedures, inconveniencing their own patients in ways that will surely take months to untangle.But, as Easter arrived, the expected surge of patients with novel coronavirus infections still has not swamped local emergency rooms and intensive care units across San Diego County though news came this weekend that many hospitals in Baja California now have more patients than they can handle.As of Saturday afternoon, the county public health department has tallied just 396 total hospitalizations since Feb. 14, nowhere near the number that would be needed to inundate the combined capacity of the region’s 21 acute care hospitals which, taken together, exceeds 7,000 beds.But that does not mean that the burden has fallen evenly on San Diego’s houses of healing. Ho

In just one week, the Acting Secretary of the Navy has resigned following an outbreak of COVID-19 on an aircraft carrier, and now about 10% of its sailors are confirmed to have the virus. How the Navy is handling this pandemic.Stories: Almost 1 in 10 Theodore Roosevelt sailors tested positive for COVID-19Theft of masks, sanitizer at Naval Medical Center San Diego lead to bag checks for staffSailor aboard hospital ship Mercy tests positive for COVID-19Acting Navy secretary resigns after controversial comments to aircraft carrier crewThe San Diego Union-Tribune is providing some coronavirus content for free during the pandemic.

Reporter Morgan Cook answers questions readers submitted about the virus.

Zoom is one of the most popular videoconferencing tools being used during the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers nationwide are using it to hold remote classes while schools remain physically closed.But stories of so-called “Zoombombing” like Armstrong’s highlight some of the security risks that come into play when school districts nationwide are forced to quickly switch instruction to online formats because of the COVID-19 pandemic.Zoombombing is loosely defined as people harassing others, spewing abuse or showing inappropriate content on Zoom, such as racist language or profanity.Zoombombing reports have prompted some school districts and agencies to ban Zoom, including New York City schools, the largest school district in the country. NASA, SpaceX and the Taiwanese government also stopped using Zoom.Story: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/education/story/2020-04-08/san-diego-zoombombing-incident-highlights-need-for-schools-to-use-safety-controls

San Diego County’s collective COVID-19 testing capacity now exceeds 1,200 per day, with significantly more resources poised to come online in the next few weeks.But, while the group of people throughout the region who can get tested quickly has gradually increased, supply shortages continue to force rationing.Just Wednesday, in a notice to all local physicians, San Diego County’s public health department reiterated that testing should be offered only to those with symptoms severe enough to require hospitalization and to people with higher-than-average infection risk. Those who are age 65 and older, have a chronic health condition, live in a group home or have a high-risk job are also on the short list for testing.For everybody else, especially otherwise healthy people with mild to moderate symptoms, the advice continues to be stay home even if that means day after day spent anxiously wondering whether it is coronavirus, or some other microscopic malcontent, causing their illness.Story: https://www.sandiegouni

In the days after the March 3 primary, Democratic political insiders met to socialize and organize for what was expected to be a bruising November contest.They were unaware that a far more formidable opponent was already in their midst.Chula Vista City Councilman Steve Padilla was the first among his political circle to announce he had fallen ill with the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Within a week of Padilla’s March 14 announcement, he was fighting for his life, and another person in the circle, Will Rodriguez-Kennedy, was critically ill in intensive care.Story: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/story/2020-04-05/whats-it-like-to-have-covid-19Watch the episode of the COVID diaries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhSzg0qHdSk

San Diego County Health officials have been releasing a trove of data in relation to the coronavirus pandemic. This data, however, has its caveats.

Weekly flu report results released Wednesday morning show that both leaders have a good reason to believe that it is possible for the curve to bend significantly in the coming days and weeks.The report shows a precipitous drop in the number of flu cases reported to the county health department last week, and similar sudden effects were felt last week at Rady Children’s Hospital for all respiratory viruses, not just the flu.Last week, a total of 90 confirmed flu cases were reported countywide, an 84 percent decrease in the previous week’s total of 583 cases, and a 71 percent decrease when compared to the prior three-year average of 310 cases observed in the fourth week of March.Story: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/health/story/2020-04-01/social-distancing-working-san-diego