15 San Bernardino County Employees Have Tested Positive for Coronavirus – San Bernardino Sun

15 San Bernardino County employees have tested positive for coronavirus – San Bernardino Sun

LOCAL NEWS 15 San Bernardino County employees have tested positive for coronavirus

   

By SANDRA EMERSON | [email protected] |  PUBLISHED: April 3, 2020 at 4:02 p.m. | UPDATED: April 3, 2020 at 4:02 p.m.

Fifteen San Bernardino County employees have tested positive for the novel coronavirus since last week, county officials confirmed Friday, April 3.

The employees include nine who work in public safety, including five already reported by the sheriff’s department and one by the fire protection district, and six who work in health and human services, county spokesman David Wert said.

The county could not disclose the specific divisions or offices where the employees work to protect the privacy of employees, he said.

https://www.sbsun.com/2020/04/03/15-san-bernardino-county-employees-have-tested-positive-for-coronavirus/[4/6/2020 8:23:13 AM] 15 San Bernardino County employees have tested positive for coronavirus – San Bernardino Sun

However, public safety also includes probation, the District Attorney’s Office and Public Defender’s Office. Health and human services encompasses several departments, including Arrowhead Regional Medical Center, public health, behavioral health, children and family services, child support services, veterans affairs and the Transitional Assistance Department.

TOP ARTICLES 1/5

.st0{fill:#FFFFFF;}.st1{fill:#0099FF;}

READ MORE U S Britain brace for soaring death tolls as pandemic Aside from sheriff’s and fire departments and the medical RELATED LINKS center, Wert said the county employees who tested positive

did not have positions that required interacting with the San Bernardino County reports 50 more public. coronavirus cases, 2 additional deaths

Whenever there’s a positive case, employees of that Amazon worker in San Bernardino tests department are notified and the area is sanitized, Wert positive for coronavirus said. Employees are allowed to telecommute or use leave https://www.sbsun.com/2020/04/03/15-san-bernardino-county-employees-have-tested-positive-for-coronavirus/[4/6/2020 8:23:13 AM] 15 San Bernardino County employees have tested positive for coronavirus – San Bernardino Sun

San Bernardino County drive-thru time to stay at home and not work. coronavirus testing event open in Victorville “The county relaxed leave options,” Wert said. “They can take a variety of different types of leave if they just don’t San Bernardino County Fire moves feel safe at work but don’t want to work at home.” coronavirus management team to airport

The county has also provided hand sanitizer and 2 more San Bernardino County deputies rearranged offices to allow for social distancing, Wert said. contract coronavirus

Employees who feel unwell are told to stay home, even before the pandemic.

Newsroom Guidelines News Tips Contact Us Report an Error

Tags: Coronavirus, health, public health, Top Stories IVDB, Top Stories PE, Top Stories RDF, Top Stories Sun

SPONSORED CONTENT 15 Fights That Broke out on the Set of 'Saturday Night Live!' https://www.sbsun.com/2020/04/03/15-san-bernardino-county-employees-have-tested-positive-for-coronavirus/[4/6/2020 8:23:13 AM] San Bernardino County calls for closure of hotels, short-term rentals By Rene Ray De La Cruz Staff Writer Posted Apr 4, 2020 at 5:44 PM VICTORVILLE — To help slow the spread of the coronavirus, San Bernardino County public health officials have called for the temporary closing of hotels, motels, residential rentals and other short-term lodging facilities.

On Thursday, the county announced the order, which includes an exemption for facilities that are being used for mitigation and containment; service to those who are homeless; or support of critical infrastructure as part of a COVID-19 response.

“Short-term rental activity continues to be an issue in our county’s mountain and desert communities, which is understandably causing distress to local residents who are acting responsibly and are concerned about the spread of virus by tourists,” said Dr. Erin Gustafson, the county’s acting health officer. “We advised short-term rental owners on March 22 to comply with the State health order, which clearly prohibits their operation.”

Gustafson said a specific local order in the county will assist with additional efforts to bring about compliance and assist in enforcement with the closures.

Some hotel employees in the Victor Valley believe the recent county exemption includes the California Public Health Department’s list of “Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers.”

“Our hotel is designed mostly for those who fall into the essential worker category,” Rachel Ochoa, front desk manager at the Hilton Garden Inn in Victorville, told the Daily Press on Friday. “We have guests who work at our local hospitals, the prison, the aerospace companies out at SCLA and for various agencies.” Victorville Holiday Inn Marketing Manager Wesley Quintanar told the Daily Press that the doors to the hotel on Palmdale Road will remain open “for essential workers only.”

“People staying here work in the aerospace industry, in construction, for the government and at local hospitals.” Quintanar said. “It’s like we’re totally vacant, but the list of who can stay here is limited.”

County spokesman David Wert told the Daily Press on Friday that he didn’t know if the county had released a specific list of criteria for guests. He added that those with questions should call the COVID-19 hotline at 909-387-3911.

Ochoa and Quintanar both shared how the state and county’s calls to cease all gatherings and to restrict certain guests have impacted their hotels.

“We had to close our conference center, which meant laying off our entire banquet staff,” Ochoa said. “We currently have 20 employees in housekeeping for a limited amount of guests.”

On Friday afternoon, about a dozen cars were seen in the parking lot of the four- story, 139-room Hilton located on Mariposa Road, just north of Bear Valley Road.

Ochoa said on an average Monday, Wednesday and Friday, the Hilton is filled to about 90% capacity. Over the last two weeks, that figure has dropped to 43%.

After the call to restrict guests at the hotel, the Hilton Garden Inn waived its 48- hour cancellation fee for guests who had booked rooms.

“The owner decided that as long as we have guests, we’ll be here to service them,” Ochoa said. “But if we drop below 10%, we’ll have to close our doors.”

Quintanar said the essential worker criteria and no gathering order by the state and county also forced the cancellation of academic testing for college students.

“A local university didn’t have the room to practice social distancing, so the school was going to use our conference room for testing,” Quintanar said. “Before this order, we already canceled weddings, quinceaneras, a conference and other events.” Gustafson’s order on Thursday also indefinitely extended the county’s prohibition of gatherings, which was originally set until at least April 6.

The county’s original order closed all movie theaters, gyms, health clubs, bars, adult entertainment establishments and other businesses that serve alcohol but do not serve food. Food and beverage establishments must follow guidance issued by the California Department of Public Health.

The order does not apply to activities essential to the functioning of the state, including work, public transportation, airport travel, grocery stores, charitable food distribution, certified farmers’ markets and shopping at stores or malls.

The order also does not apply to congregate living situations, including dormitories and homeless encampments.

Rene Ray De La Cruz may be reached at 760-951-6227, or by email at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @DP_ReneDeLaCruz. San Bernardino County coronavirus cases inch up – San Bernardino Sun

NEWS • News San Bernardino County coronavirus cases inch up

   

https://www.sbsun.com/2020/04/05/san-bernardino-county-coronavirus-cases-inch-up/[4/6/2020 8:14:25 AM] San Bernardino County coronavirus cases inch up – San Bernardino Sun

A San Bernardino County public health worker screens drivers during a coronavirus drive-thru testing at the San Bernardino County Fairgrounds in Victorville on Thursday, April 2, 2020. (Photo by Watchara Phomicinda, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

By JENNIFER IYER | [email protected] | Redlands Daily Facts  PUBLISHED: April 5, 2020 at 6:01 p.m. | UPDATED: April 5, 2020 at 6:26 p.m.

Confirmed coronavirus cases in San Bernardino County only rose by one on Sunday, April 5, according to the county Department of Public Health, and there were no new deaths.

The county now has 373 cases and 13 deaths.

Health officials were not immediately sure what factors contributed to the small size of the increase.

CASES BY COMMUNITY S RELATED ARTICLES

TOP ARTICLES 1/5 Stocks rise sharply on signs of progress in E battling virus By https://www.sbsun.com/2020/04/05/san-bernardino-county-coronavirus-cases-inch-up/[4/6/2020 8:14:25 AM] San Bernardino County coronavirus cases inch up – San Bernardino Sun

Video calls replace hugs for elderly in senior care amid coronavirus outbreak

Long Beach nonprofit to help rural poor in M Guatemala after coronavirus shutdown

U.S., Britain brace for soaring death tolls as pandemic bears down

At least 30 Riverside nursing facility patients test positive for coronavirus; county cases jump to 799 .st0{fill:#FFFFFF;}.st1{fill:#0099FF;}

READ MORE U S Britain brace for soaring Here’s a list of coronavirus cases in San Bernardino County by city and unincorporated community. If an unincorporated community is not listed, no cases have been reported there.

Adelanto: 3 Alta Loma: 4 Apple Valley: 4 Barstow: 6 Big Bear City: 2 Big Bear Lake: 3 Bloomington: 3 Blue Jay: 2 Chino: 13 Chino Hills: 15 Colton: 7 Crestline: 1 Fontana: 40 Grand Terrace: 1 Hesperia: 9 Highland: 15

https://www.sbsun.com/2020/04/05/san-bernardino-county-coronavirus-cases-inch-up/[4/6/2020 8:14:25 AM] San Bernardino County coronavirus cases inch up – San Bernardino Sun

Joshua Tree: 2 Loma Linda: 9 Mentone: 3 Montclair: 4 Oak Hills: 1 Ontario: 18 Phelan: 1 Rancho Cucamonga: 28 Redlands: 27 Rialto: 13 Rimforest: 1 Running Springs: 2 San Bernardino: 23 Upland: 14 Victorville: 10 Wrightwood: 1 Yucaipa: 70 Yucca Valley: 2

Newsroom Guidelines News Tips Contact Us Report an Error

https://www.sbsun.com/2020/04/05/san-bernardino-county-coronavirus-cases-inch-up/[4/6/2020 8:14:25 AM] San Bernardino County coronvirus cases rise to 353, deaths up to 13 – Press Enterprise

   

LOCAL NEWS San Bernardino County coronvirus cases rise to 353, deaths up to 13

   

By SANDRA EMERSON | [email protected] |  PUBLISHED: April 3, 2020 at 5:36 p.m. | UPDATED: April 3, 2020 at 5:40 p.m.

The number of positive novel coronavirus cases in San Bernardino County is up to 353 and the death toll is now 13, data released Friday, April 3 shows.

Those figures are up from 304 cases and eight deaths on Thursday, April 2.

https://www.pe.com/...-up-to-13/?utm_content=tw-pressenterprise&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=socialflow[4/3/2020 5:44:26 PM] San Bernardino County coronvirus cases rise to 353, deaths up to 13 – Press Enterprise

#tail{fill:url(#fade)}#head{fill:#616570}stop{stop- color:#616570}

Of the 4,003 people tested for COVID-19, 8.8% had positive results, the county’s data show. Of those who tested positive, 50% are male, 49.7% are female and .3% were unknown.

Most of the cases, 147, were among people 18 to 49 years old, while 107 were 50 to 64 years old, 94 were older than 65 and four were 2 to 17 years old, according to the county.

Here’s where the San Bernardino County cases are RELATED LINKS located:

Drive-thru coronavirus testing coming to Adelanto, three San Bernardino for IEHP members Alta Loma, four Map shows coronavirus cases in San Apple Valley, four Bernardino County cities Barstow, six Big Bear City, two San Bernardino County recommends Big Bear Lake, three covering face in public to avoid spreading coronavirus Bloomington, three

Blue Jay, two San Bernardino County reports 50 more Chino, 13 coronavirus cases, 2 additional deaths Chino Hills, 14 Amazon worker in San Bernardino tests Colton, eight positive for coronavirus Crestline, one Fontana, 35 Grand Terrace, one Hesperia, six Highland, 14 Joshua Tree, one Loma Linda, nine Mentone, two Montclair, four Oak Hills, one Ontario, 18 Phelan, one Rancho Cucamonga, 26 Redlands, 26 Rialto, 13 https://www.pe.com/...-up-to-13/?utm_content=tw-pressenterprise&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=socialflow[4/3/2020 5:44:26 PM] San Bernardino County coronvirus cases rise to 353, deaths up to 13 – Press Enterprise

Rimforest, one Running Springs, two San Bernardino, 20 Upland, 14 Victorville, nine Wrightwood, one Yucaipa, 69 Yucca Valley, two

The location of 15 cases was undetermined.

Newsroom Guidelines News Tips Contact Us Report an Error

Tags: Coronavirus, Health, public health, Top Stories IVDB, Top Stories PE, Top Stories RDF, Top Stories Sun

Sandra Emerson | Reporter Sandra Emerson covers San Bernardino County government and politics for the Southern California News Group.

[email protected] https://www.pe.com/...-up-to-13/?utm_content=tw-pressenterprise&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=socialflow[4/3/2020 5:44:26 PM] https://www.fontanaheraldnews.com/news/inland_empire_news/san-bernardino-county-holds-second- major-public-testing-event-for-coronavirus/article_3b9a8c08-75d9-11ea-aa92-2fde9244fad6.html San Bernardino County holds second major public testing event for coronavirus

By MIKE MYERS Apr 3, 2020

A health worker conducts a drive-thru test for coronavirus at the San Bernardino County Fairgrounds in Victorville. (Contributed photo by Mike Myers)

The San Bernardino County Department of Public Health held its second major public testing event for COVID-19 on April 2 at the county fairgrounds in Victorville.

County Supervisor Robert Lovingood, who represents the 1st District, said that health workers were prepared to test about 600 people who made an appointment for the drive-thru event. The Health Department was testing people who were at risk and who were showing COVID-19 symptoms. Higher-risk groups were people ages 65 and over who had medical issues, and those who showed signs of having a temperature, shortness of breath and other u-like symptoms.

Although appointments were given during a phone interview, not everyone met the requirements for being tested at the event, said Lovingood.

When people don't qualify for testing, that makes more test kits available for more hospitals and rst responders, who are "the key to ghting the coronavirus," he said.

County supervisors and the Health Department are working with federal and state ocials to keep bringing test kits, PPE's and other medical equipment to San Bernardino County.

"There are literally dozens of potential kits and equipment that we are getting that need to be vetted to make sure they are approved by the FDA," said Lovingood.

Lana Culp, the public information ocer for the San Bernardino County Health Department, said that besides working on the coronavirus issues and data, the department is continuing to work on some of the other public health concerns that had existed before the COVID-19 outbreak.

Culp said that county health workers are using outside labs to do the testing, because they can test more people and get faster results than if the county had to do it on their own.

Based on the latest brieng, collectively, at least ve hospitals in the county have capacity, critical capacity and beds to handle what they are seeing right now, said Lovingood.

The Health Department held its rst testing event on March 27 at the National Orange Show in San Bernardino, where a total of 122 samples were collected. San Bernardino County now has 372 coronavirus cases – San Bernardino Sun

NEWS San Bernardino County now has 372 coronavirus cases

   

https://www.sbsun.com/2020/04/04/san-bernardino-county-now-has-372-coronavirus-cases/[4/6/2020 8:15:23 AM] San Bernardino County now has 372 coronavirus cases – San Bernardino Sun

A crowd people gather in front of Yucaipa City Hall as San Bernardino County and Yucaipa officials talk about the novel coronavirus outbreak at a Yucaipa nursing home during a news conference at Yucaipa City Hall in Yucaipa on Tuesday, March 31, 2020. (File photo by Watchara Phomicinda, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

By RYAN HAGEN | [email protected] | The Press-Enterprise  PUBLISHED: April 4, 2020 at 5:49 p.m. | UPDATED: April 4, 2020 at 6:17 p.m.

San Bernardino County confirmed another 19 cases of the novel coronavirus Saturday, April 4, giving the county 372 cases.

The number of deaths remains 13.

Yucaipa — where a nursing home had 51 patients and six RELATED ARTICLES staff test positive as of Thursday — now has 69 confirmed S Stocks rise sharply on signs of progress in cases, the most in the county. battling virus Fontana has the second-most confirmed cases of any city R

Video calls replace hugs for elderly in in San Bernardino County, with 35. Rancho Cucamonga By https://www.sbsun.com/2020/04/04/san-bernardino-county-now-has-372-coronavirus-cases/[4/6/2020 8:15:23 AM] San Bernardino County now has 372 coronavirus cases – San Bernardino Sun

senior care amid coronavirus outbreak has 26, and San Bernardino has 20.

Long Beach nonprofit to help rural poor in TOP ARTICLES 1/5 Guatemala after coronavirus shutdown M

U.S., Britain brace for soaring death tolls as pandemic bears down

San Bernardino County coronavirus cases inch up

.st0{fill:#FFFFFF;}.st1{fill:#0099FF;}

SKIP AD U S Britain brace for soaring Countywide, 8.8% of the tests are coming back positive, according to a dashboard set up by the county.

CASES BY COMMUNITY

Here’s a list of coronavirus cases in San Bernardino County by city and unincorporated community. If an unincorporated community is not listed, no cases have been reported there.

Adelanto: 3 Alta Loma: 4 Apple Valley: 4 Barstow: 6 Big Bear City: 2 Big Bear Lake: 3 Bloomington: 3 Blue Jay: 2 Chino: 13 Chino Hills: 14

https://www.sbsun.com/2020/04/04/san-bernardino-county-now-has-372-coronavirus-cases/[4/6/2020 8:15:23 AM] San Bernardino County now has 372 coronavirus cases – San Bernardino Sun

Colton: 8 Crestline: 1 Fontana: 35 Grand Terrace: 1 Hesperia: 6 Highland: 14 Joshua Tree: 1 Loma Linda: 9 Mentone: 2 Montclair: 4 Oak Hills: 1 Ontario: 18 Phelan: 1 Rancho Cucamonga: 26 Redlands: 26 Rialto: 13 Rimforest: 1 Running Springs: 2 San Bernardino: 20 Upland: 14 Victorville: 9 Wrightwood: 1 Yucaipa: 69 Yucca Valley: 2 Undetermined: 15

https://www.sbsun.com/2020/04/04/san-bernardino-county-now-has-372-coronavirus-cases/[4/6/2020 8:15:23 AM] https://www.championnewspapers.com/news/article_e1d3a674-75d7-11ea-916f-9f0c6299bfbc.html

FEATURED

Reaching out during the outbreak Virus cases up in county, Chino Valley

Apr 4, 2020

Chino has 11 and Chino Hills 10 posiitive cases of coronavirus as of Thursday evening, according to the county.

Although the county is now listing conrmed cases of the virus by city, it is not listing deaths by location.

The Champion learned earlier this week that a man in his 60s died Sunday at Chino Valley Medical Center in Chino after testing positive for coronavirus March 24. His city of residence was not disclosed because of privacy laws. The hospital is currently treating seven conrmed coronavirus cases, according to CEO Tim Moran. As of Thursday, San Bernardino County had conrmed 304 cases and eight deaths related to the coronavirus outbreak. This time last week, the county reported 55 positive cases and three deaths.

The county conducted its second drive-thru testing site in Victorville on Thursday. Its rst drive- thru was held March 27 at the National Orange Show grounds in San Bernardino.

Positive cases in the county by location are: Adelanto 3, Alta Loma 2, Apple Valley 3, Barstow 6, Big Bear City 1, Big Bear Lake 3, Bloomington 3, Blue Jay 2, Chino 11, Chino Hills 10, Colton 4, Crestline 1, Fontana 25, Grand Terrace 1, Hesperia 4, Highland 11, Loma Linda 7, Mentone 2, Montclair 4, Oak Hills 1, Ontario 14, Phelan 1, Rancho Cucamonga 25, Redlands 19, Rialto 12, Rimforest 1, Running Springs 2, San Bernardino 15, Upland 14, Victorville 9, Wrightwood 1, Yucaipa 68, Yucca Valley 2, undetermined locations, 17.

Cities not listed had zero conrmed cases as of the last update.

On Thursday, the county released a statement advising people to use face coverings when leaving home to conduct essential businesses such as grocery shopping, going to a medical appointment or visiting a pharmacy to help atten the curve of the coronavirus.

The county made the recommendation this week after reviewing guidance released April 1 from the California Department of Public Health.

Face coverings may include coverings that secure to the ears or back of the head and encompass the mouth and nose. Homemade cloth ear loop covers, bandanas and handkerchiefs may be used to reduce the spread of coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, particularly among asymptomatic people.

“Staying home, practicing social distancing and frequent handwashing are far more eective ways to combat the spread of COVID-19, and face coverings are not a substitute for continuing those practices,” said Acting County Public Health Ocer Dr. Erin Gustafson.

“Surgical masks and N95 masks should not be used because they must be preserved for healthcare workers and emergency responders,” Dr. Gustafson said. “If you do use a face covering, make sure to practice frequent hand washing before and after touching and adjusting the covering.”

County medical ocials recommend washing cloth face coverings frequently after each use — at least daily.

They said to place face coverings in a bag until washing them in detergent with hot water and dried on a hot cycle. They also said to discard cloth masks that no longer cover the nose and mouth or have holes. t stay on the face, and have holes or tears in the fabric.

“Covering your face may help reduce the chance that asymptomatic people spread COVID-19. This is not as eective as staying home and practicing social distancing,” said Curt Hagman, Chairman of the Board of Supervisors, whose Fourth District includes Chino and Chino Hills. “We all need to do our part to atten the curve and residents should use this as one more tool to stop the spread of this disease.”

Nearly all county departments will continue oering services only online and over the phone until the coronavirus emergency concludes and the County Health Ocer and the governor lift orders restricting gatherings and directing people to tay home whenever possible.

Information about the county’s eorts regarding the coronavirus is available online at sbcovid19.com, via email at [email protected], or by phone at 387-3911.

“We have a responsibility to do everything we can to limit the spread of the virus while still providing access to the county services people need, said Board of Supervisors Chairman Curt Hagman, whose 4th District includes Chino and Chino Hills.

Services of the following county departments and oces will be available only by phone and online (oces will be closed to the public): Agriculture/Weights & Measures, Assessor- Recorder-Clerk, Child Support Services, Children’s Network, Clerk of the Board of Supervisors, Clerk of the Board of Supervisors, Community Development and Housing Agency, County Fire and Fire Marshal, District Attorney, Economic Development, Human Resources, Inland Counties Emergency Medical Agency, Land Use Services (which includes Planning, Building and Safety, and Code Enforcement), Public Defender, Public Works (with the exception of lobby computer access to surveyor records), Purchasing, Registrar of Voters (with those exception of election observers by appointment only), Risk Management, Special Districts Water and Sanitation, Transitional Assistance, Veterans Aairs, Workforce Development (in person appointments will be conducted only when necessary).

The following county attractions and services are closed to the public until the indenite health orders are lifted: preschool services (Head Start), Big Bear Alpine Zoo at Moonridge, county branch libraries, county museums and historical sites, county regional parks including Calico Ghost Town, Park and Recreation District Preschool in Joshua Tree, all Big Bear Valley Recreation and Park District parks, all county service area parks, Oak Glen Park and Museum and North Etiwanda Preserve.

San Bernardino County’s conrmed COVID-19 cases increase by 19; no new deaths By Matthew Cabe Staff Writer Posted Apr 4, 2020 at 8:35 PM SAN BERNARDINO — The county reported 19 new cases of the coronavirus Saturday evening, while deaths remained at 13, a number unchanged since Friday.

San Bernardino County’s COVID-19 dashboard, updated Saturday evening, shows that a total of 372 people have contracted the virus out of the 4,230 who have been tested, a positive rate of nearly 9%.

Of the county’s positive cases, nearly 42%, or 155, are between the ages of 18 and 49. Another 122 are between the ages of 50 and 64, while 91 are aged 65 and up. Four are under the age of 18.

Local cases were mostly unaltered Saturday; however, three new cases were reported in Hesperia. Victorville added one. Those cities’ new totals are nine and 10, respectively. The Daily Press has added Joshua Tree to its local list, which has two cases, according to the data.

Here are the confirmed cases for the High Desert and surrounding mountain communities:

Adelanto: 3

Apple Valley: 4

Barstow: 6

Big Bear City : 2

Big Bear Lake: 3

Blue Jay: 2

Crestline: 1

Hesperia: 9

Joshua Tree: 2

Oak Hills: 1

Phelan: 1

Rimforest: 1

Running Springs: 2

Victorville: 10

Wrightwood: 1

Yucca Valley: 2

Total: 50, or nearly 13.5% of the county’s cases

Deaths in the county increased to 13 on Friday. On Saturday, the Daily Press requested the age, gender and date of death for each person, as well as whether they had underlying health conditions. In providing that information, county spokesperson David Wert said public health officials do not know if every deceased individual had health issues beyond COVID-19. As such, those details were not included in his response.

“That data is apparently difficult to come by,” Wert said. “We had it anecdotally for those on whom we reported it.”

Wert said the county is working on increasing the details and timeliness of its reporting. An aspect of the data-collection process that has proven complex is that the county is not notified of its COVID-19-related deaths as they occur, according to Wert.

“They are reported to the state, and the county does daily checks of the state database, which I’m told is clogged with tons of other non-disclosable data,” he said.

The ages, genders and dates of death for the county’s deceased is listed below. If underlying health conditions are known, they are included for the individuals who had them:

A 50-year-old man with underlying health conditions died March 23, 2020. His death was disclosed March 24.

A 42-year-old man with underlying medical conditions died March 24, 2020. His death was disclosed March 25 in a statement that listed his age as 46.

An 89-year-old woman with underlying health issues died March 26, 2020. Her death was disclosed the same day. The woman was a resident of the Yucaipa-based Cedar Mountain Post Acute rehabilitation facility, where a concentrated outbreak of COVID-19 was reported March 28.

A 95-year-old man died March 24, 2020. His death was reported March 31, according to a previous Daily Press report. The man’s age and gender were previously unknown.

A 79-year-old woman died March 28, 2020, and a 65-year-old man died March 29, 2020. Their deaths were reported March 31. Their ages and genders were previously unknown.

A 92-year-old man and an 89-year-old woman died March 30, 2020. Their deaths were reported April 2, the same day confirmed cases reached 304.

A 95-year-old woman died March 31, 2020, and a 70-year-old man died April 1, 2020. An 82-year-old woman, 65-year-old man and a 47-year-old man all died April 2, 2020. These five deaths were reported April 3, the day the county’s confirmed cases increased to 353.

Worldwide, more than 1.2 million people have tested positive for the coronavirus, with nearly 64,753 deaths and 246,457 recoveries, according to the Johns Hopkins University dashboard Saturday evening.

In the U.S., there were 311,544 people who tested positive with 8,488 deaths and 14,786 recoveries. Deaths in New York accounted for 42% of the nation’s total.

California reported 13,878 cases with 322 deaths. Data for the state’s recoveries was not available.

City Editor Matthew Cabe can be reached at [email protected] or 760-490-0052. Follow him on Twitter @DP_MatthewCabe.

San Bernardino County assumes 'all are positive' at Yucaipa nursing home, stops coronavirus testing

Nicole Hayden, Palm Springs Desert Sun Published 3:52 p.m. PT April 2, 2020 | Updated 3:54 p.m. PT April 2, 2020

San Bernardino County Health Department stopped coronavirus testing at Cedar Mountain Post Acute Rehabilitation in Yucaipa, where 51 residents and six staff have been infected with COVID-19, because "it could be safely assumed all are positive," said county spokesperson David Wert.

"Additional testing would be pointless and a waste of scarce testing resources," Wert said.

Two residents died as a result of the outbreak, according to county health officials.

Residents have been quarantined at the facility and all asymptomatic staff have been instructed to limit their presence to work and home, Wert said.

Wert said he did not know how many total people resided or work at the facility, since the county health department does not keep track of that information.

Media representatives from the facility did not return calls from The Desert Sun. Buy Photo

Cedar Mountain Post Acute Rehabilitation is a 24 hour nursing care facility in Yucaipa, March 30, 2020. (Photo: Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun)

Coronavirus: 2 dead at Yucaipa nursing home while 51 residents, 6 staff test positive (/story/news/health/2020/03/31/coronavirus-51-residents-6-staff- test-positive-yucaipa-nursing-home/5100521002/) This article is FREE to your community. $3 for 3 months. Save 90%. FAQ: Everything you need to know (/story/news/health/2020/03/11/coronavirus-faq-what-you-need-know-submit-your-questions/5021645002/)

The COVID-19 outbreak at the nursing home was first discovered when an 89-year-old woman with underlying health conditions died March 26 from complications of the virus.Then, three more residents were confirmed positive. By March 30, a second resident died.

The spread continued until a total of 57 individuals were confirmed positive, out of 79 people who were tested.

The outbreak was announced to the public on March 31.

Desert Sun reporter Nicole Hayden covers health and health care in the Coachella Valley. She can be reached at [email protected] or (760) 778-4623. Follow her on Twitter @Nicole_A_Hayden.

Read or Share this story: https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/health/2020/04/02/coronavirus-california-county-assumes-all-positive-yucaipa-nursing- home/5117814002/

This article is FREE to your community. $3 for 3 months. Save 90%. https://nyti.ms/2JCZ6Xw Does My County Have an Epidemic? Estimates Show Hidden Transmission

By James Glanz, Matthew Bloch and Anjali Singhvi April 3, 2020

Estimated chance of epidemic +

10 60 75 90% -

WWASH.ASH.

ME.ME. MMONT.ONT. NN.D..D.

MMINN.INN. OORE.RE. VVT.T. N.H.N.H. IIDAHODAHO WWIS.IS. SS.D..D. NN.Y..Y. MASS.MASS. CONN.CONN. WWYO.YO. MMICH.ICH.

IIOWAOWA PPA.A. NNEB.EB. NN.J..J. NNEV.EV. OOHIOHIO MMD.D. IILL.LL. DDEL.EL. UUTAHTAH IIND.ND. WW.VA..VA. CCOLO.OLO. CCALIF.ALIF. KKAN.AN. VVA.A. MMO.O. KKY.Y.

NN.C..C. TTENN.ENN. OOKLA.KLA. AARIZ.RIZ. NN.M..M. AARK.RK. SS.C..C.

MMISS.ISS. AALA.LA. GGA.A.

LLA.A. TTEX.EX.

AALASKALASKA FFLA.LA.

HHAWAIIAWAII

By The New York Times· Source: Emily Javan, Spencer Fox and Lauren Ancel Meyers, the University of Texas at Austin As the coronavirus spreads silently through American cities and towns, people are struggling with questions about the beneﬁts of social-distancing guidelines — especially in places that still have few reported cases.

Is the epidemic here yet? Is staying home and limiting contact with others really worth the trouble?

A new study by disease modelers at the University of Texas at Austin gives an answer: Even counties with just a single reported case have more than 50 percent likelihood that a sustained, undetected outbreak — an epidemic — is already taking place.

“I worry that many local ofﬁcials are waiting until there is clear evidence of local transmission before taking action,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, a professor of biology and statistics and one of the study’s authors. “The message is, we should not wait.” With no consistent federal policy, local ofﬁcials have been left on their own to decide when to enact control measures, Most should assume it is already here, she said.

Over all, the study finds, 70 percent of all counties in the United States — making up 94 percent of the country's population — are likely to have epidemics. The study defines an epidemic as an outbreak that grows exponentially instead of fizzling out on its own, eventually infecting a large fraction of the population.

Known cases in a county Probability of community transmission

0 9%

1 51%

2 70%

3 79%

4 84%

5 85%

10 95%

20 99%

43 or more 100%

By The New York Times· Source: Emily Javan, Spencer Fox and Lauren Ancel Meyers, the University of Texas at Austin

The University of Texas research team simulated the spread of the outbreak in every United States county to determine the most likely outcome in each county, along with reported case counts compiled by The New York Times.

People who have been infected and have mild symptoms, or none at all, can pass the disease to others. Those cases, often undetected, are a prime driver of the outbreaks, Dr. Meyers said. Even in counties with no reported cases, there is roughly a 9 percent chance that an undetected outbreak is already underway, she said.

For those reasons, social distancing should be practiced across the United States, whether an outbreak now is visible or not, Dr. Meyers said.

“This virus spreads quickly and sometimes silently,” she said. “It's an unseen threat, and by the time you see it, it can be too late to intervene. You have to intervene proactively against threats you can't see.”

Social distancing can slow those outbreaks, giving local hospitals and other healthcare facilities time to handle the cases rather than being quickly overwhelmed, Dr. Meyers said.

“Most of us are probably living in communities where this virus is beginning to spread widely,” she said. “The prudent measures at this point are doing whatever possible to prevent an infected person from spreading the virus to an uninfected person. The common theme is do what you can to keep people from congregating.” Drive-thru coronavirus testing coming to San Bernardino for IEHP members – Press Enterprise

LOCAL NEWS Drive-thru coronavirus testing coming to San Bernardino for IEHP members

   

By SANDRA EMERSON | [email protected] |  PUBLISHED: April 3, 2020 at 11:56 a.m. | UPDATED: April 3, 2020 at 11:56 a.m.

SAC Health System is offering drive-thru novel coronavirus testing at its San Bernardino campus for Inland Empire Health Plan patients.

Testing is available from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday, and is by appointment only.

To schedule a phone appointment, call 909-771-2911. Clinicians will evaluate members over the phone to determine if they need COVID-19 testing. If they do, members will be directed to the drive- thru clinic at 250 South G. St., San Bernardino.

https://www.pe.com/...embers/?utm_content=tw-pressenterprise&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=socialflow[4/3/2020 12:40:02 PM] Drive-thru coronavirus testing coming to San Bernardino for IEHP members – Press Enterprise

Members do not need to be assigned to a SAC Health RELATED LINKS System to be evaluated or tested. The health system will

share the test results with the member when they’re San Bernardino County reports 50 more available, which is typically three to five days. coronavirus cases, 2 additional deaths

Amazon worker in San Bernardino tests positive for coronavirus

San Bernardino County recommends covering face in public to avoid spreading coronavirus

San Bernardino County drive-thru coronavirus testing event open in Victorville

San Bernardino County coronavirus count grows to 111 cases

Newsroom Guidelines News Tips Contact Us Report an Error R

https://www.pe.com/...embers/?utm_content=tw-pressenterprise&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=socialflow[4/3/2020 12:40:02 PM] ADVERTISEMENT

15-Year Fixed 2 Today's Refinance Rate 2.66% APR

Terms & Conditions apply. NMLS#1136

CALIFORNIA

Coronavirus spreading rapidly through California nursing homes, assisted-living centers Orinda Care Center is a skilled nursing facility where 27 people tested positive for the coronavirus. (Maura Dolan / Los Angeles Times)

By ALEX WIGGLESWORTH, MAURA DOLAN, JEFF MCDONALD

APRIL 5, 2020 | 8:05 AM

Nursing homes and assisted-living centers across California continued to see significant increases in coronavirus cases, alarming officials who are trying to slow the spread.

The older populations of these facilities almost always have underlying health problems, making them particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus. They often live in close quarters. Administrators have responded by banning visitors, confining patients to their rooms and scrambling to create sterile wings to treat residents who contract the disease. Still, there have been outbreaks at facilities from Redondo Beach to Burlingame.

Twenty-seven people at a skilled nursing facility in the East Bay city of Orinda have tested positive for the coronavirus.

ADVERTISING

Ads by Teads

“We are very, very concerned,” said Dr. Chris Farnitano, the Contra Costa County health officer. “This is a virus without a vaccine. This is a virus without a medical treatment.”

He said the residents who have tested negative have been separated from those who are infected, and the staff also has been separated. Staff who have tested positive have been told to isolate at home, but if they have no symptoms, they may, with protective gear, continue to serve the residents who also tested positive.

At least 57 residents and staff of a Yucaipa nursing home were infected with the virus, including two people who died, and officials have told the facility to assume all of its patients have COVID-19, San Bernardino County public health officials said earlier this week. https://nyti.ms/3aJVlvc

How Many Coronavirus Cases Are in Each California County? Saturday: A special edition of California Today.

By Jill Cowan

April 4, 2020

The locations of people who have tested positive in the U.S.

(Here’s the sign-up, if you don’t already get California Today delivered to your inbox.)

Good Saturday morning. The news has been moving so quickly these days. (Just look at this list of all the state government’s initiatives and orders related to the pandemic, if you need a refresher.)

So we wanted to make sure to tell you about our new, interactive maps showing coronavirus cases by county — not just in California, but in every state.

It’s something lots of you have asked us about, but ﬁnding and putting together data in real time has been a herculean task.

I asked Amy Schoenfeld Walker, a journalist and former graphics editor who contributed to our California map, to explain the process a bit. Here’s what she said:

Putting out these maps for every state is such an enormous undertaking, but especially so for California. Tell me a little bit about how you’ve gone about getting the data.

In March, many states began to post the number of positive cases by county, but California said it would not, to protect patient conﬁdentiality. The state’s department of public health website listed positive cases and deaths in a single sentence. It added details such as counts by gender and age, but never total counts by county.

So Times reporters used county and city websites and news releases to tally positive cases for all 58 California counties. And in recent days, a team of Times developers has built web scrapers to automatically extract data from many of these websites.

The scrapers still need to be checked (and ﬁxed) by staffers, who are working around the clock to make sure data is up-to-date and accurate.

What made California a particular challenge in terms of mapping cases?

Every county in the state reports data a little differently. Some sites offer detailed data dashboards, such as Santa Clara and Sonoma counties. These counties also offer graphics, showing things like cases by day and the number of people hospitalized.

Other county health departments, like Kern County, put those data in images or PDF pages, which can be harder to extract data from. And some counties have much simpler formats. For example, Alameda County’s public health department website updates positive cases and deaths each day in a small table. The county also excludes the city of Berkeley in its count, so our team has been combining data from both county and city websites.

On April 1, the California Health and Human Services Agency launched county-by-county dashboards for positive cases and hospital data. However, many of the individual counties we have been tracking have more up-to-date case tallies than the new state dashboard.

[Here’s what trends to watch in the coronavirus numbers.]

As you were working through the California data, did anything stand out to you?

I think we were struck — and continue to be — by the unequal levels of information offered by the counties. Some sites offer detailed charts and maps, while others note just the total cases for the county.

This is likely because of different levels of staff and resources, but we know that many residents are looking for more information in their communities. There is a promising trend for readers who are seeking more details: We’ve noticed that local sites tend to offer more data over time, as testing access improves and case tallies go up.

City and county representatives have been reminding us that positive case counts are based on conﬁrmed lab testing, and that there may be many more cases in each community.

A city of Berkeley representative explained it this way: “We do not believe the number of cases actually captures the full breadth of what’s happening.”

[See the interactive map and case counts for California here.]

And ﬁnally …

Since we’re here, my colleagues rounded up some things to watch, read and listen to while you’re at home this weekend. (Stockhausen’s Lucifer, anyone?) You can ﬁnd the whole list here.

If you, like me, love television, you will probably enjoy this project from Vulture, wherein creators, showrunners and writers of beloved shows speculated about how they might’ve handled the coronavirus pandemic. (Don’t miss the “30 Rock” episode outline or Coach Taylor’s locker room monologue, depending on your mood.)

Also, here’s a thoughtful piece about how to celebrate upcoming holidays when you can’t gather with friends and family.

Hope you’re all safe and well.

California Today goes live at 6:30 a.m. Paciﬁc time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: [email protected]. Were you forwarded this email? Sign up for California Today here and read every edition online here.

Jill Cowan grew up in Orange County, graduated from U.C. Berkeley and has reported all over the state, including the Bay Area, Bakersﬁeld and Los Angeles — but she always wants to see more. Follow along here or on Twitter, @jillcowan.

California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley. 59°

LIVE NOW / KTLA 5 Morning News

WEATHER ALERTS /There are 11 areas under alert. Click for alert details.

LOCAL NEWS 30 residents at Riverside nursing facility test positive for coronavirus in county’s largest cluster

Extended Care Hospital of Riverside on 8171 Magnolia Ave. in Riverside is seen April 5, 2020. (KTLA)

by: Nouran Salahieh, Lauren Lyster

Posted: Apr 5, 2020 / 05:38 PM PDT / Updated: Apr 6, 2020 / 05:48 AM PDT 59°30 residents at Riverside nursing facility te…

Lauren Lyster reports for the KTLA 5 Morning News on April 6, 2020. v

At least 30 residents and several staff members at a Riverside nursing facility tested positive for the novel coronavirus in what is believed to be the largest cluster in the county, authorities said Sunday.

Health ofcials are trying to determine whether others at the Extended Care Hospital of Riverside, 8171 Magnolia Ave., have been infected after staff and residents tested positive for the virus, according to the Riverside University Health System.

Of the residents who have COVID-19, one or two of them are hospitalized but it's clear if they were sent there due to complications for the respiratory illness or other health conditions, the agency's spokesman Jose Arballo Jr. said. Their conditions were unknown Sunday.

It's unclear how many employees at the facility have tested positive.

All residents and staff members at the more than 90-bed nursing home are being tested for the coronavirus and ofcials are trying to determine if any of the infected staff members also worked at other nursing facilities, potentially exposing others, according to Arballo Jr.

Arballo Jr. said this appears to be the largest known coronavirus cluster in Riverside County.

“We will be seeing more and more of these outbreaks in the community,” Riverside County public health ofcer Dr. Cameron Kaiser said in a written statement. “This is a vulnerable population and we’ll take all the steps necessary to protect them. But these steps can only work effectively if people stay home, stay apart, and cover up their faces in public to reduce overall transmission.”

There were 799 conrmed COVID-19 cases and 19 deaths in Riverside County as of Sunday, according to the public health agency. County ofcials on Saturday ordered all residents to stay home and cover their faces when leaving.

Extended Care was closed to new residents and all patients were isolated and are being closely monitored, authorities said. Staff members were using personal protective equipment and those who test positive "will be removed from work59° until cleared," the public health agency said in a news release.

“This is a very serious situation and shows why we must all take serious steps to change our behavior, because these steps are intended to protect our most vulnerable. They need and deserve our protection and we must all do our part,” Second District Supervisor Karen Spiegel said in a statement.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists people who live in nursing homes or long-term care facilities as at higher risk for severe illness. Senior care facilities across the state have already restricted visitor and stepped up cleanings as health ofcials warned that people 65 and older and those with underlying health conditions are more vulnerable to COVID-19.

Extended Care Hospital's general counsel released a statement through the county's public health agency saying, “Extended Care has been proactively on the forefront of the efforts to stave off COVID 19, strictly following all government suggested and mandated protocols, including long term infection control measures in anticipation of circumstances like these."

Nursing homes and assisted-living facilities across the state have seen signicant increases in coronavirus cases.

At a Yucaipa nursing home, two residents have died and 51 residents and six staff members tested positive for the coronavirus.

In Burbank, two residents died from COVID-19 at a nursing home where at least ve other residents and 10 employees have also tested positive for the virus.

RELATED CONTENT

1 resident dies of COVID-19, 12 others test positive at Yucaipa nursing facility in San Bernardino County’s 1st cluster outbreak

Coronavirus spreading rapidly through California nursing homes, assisted-living centers

10 employees, 7 residents test positive for COVID-19 at Burbank nursing home; 2 residents have died

‘Not everybody’s getting the message’: Riverside county health ocials order people to stay home, cover face when leaving

Suggest a Correction

SHARE THIS STORY

YOU MAY LIKE Sponsored Links by Taboola Soak Your Dark Spots With This One Thing (Trending Morning Routine) Gundry MD

If Your Dog Eats Dry Food, Do This Everyday 30 residents, some staff test positive for coronavirus at Riverside skilled nursing facility

Nicole Hayden, Palm Springs Desert Sun Published 4:00 p.m. PT April 5, 2020 | Updated 4:00 p.m. PT April 5, 2020

At least 30 residents and some staff members at a skilled nursing facility have tested positive for coronavirus, Riverside County public health officials announced Sunday evening.

Officials currently do not know the exact number of patients and staff who are positive for the virus but are investigating to see how many others at the Magnolia Avenue location of Extended Care Hospital are infected.

The 90-bed facility is currently closed to new patients. Additionally, staff are disallowed from working at other nursing facilities, sick patients are isolated, and all are being closely monitored, said Riverside County public health officer Cameron Kaiser in a statement.

Editor's note: We have removed the paywall from this article as a public service. Please consider subscribing to The Desert Sun so we can continue reporting on stories like these. Click here to view our offers, including a 99- cent digital subscription. ( https://cm.desertsun.com/specialoffer) Thank you.

A county press release noted that all staff members are currently using personal protective equipment, and those who test positive will be sent home from work until they've recovered from the illness.

“We will be seeing more and more of these outbreaks in the community,” Kaiser said in a statement. “This is a vulnerable population and we’ll take all the steps necessary to protect them. But these steps can only work effectively if people stay home, stay apart, and cover up their faces in public to reduce overall transmission.”

Trent Evans, Extended Care general counsel, said the facility has been working closely with an infectious disease specialist to ensure it will have proper infection control protection.

“We’re proud of our team’s dedication and professionalism during this global pandemic,” Evans said. “Extended Care has been proactively on the forefront of the efforts to stave off COVID-19, strictly following all government suggested and mandated protocols, including long term infection control measures in anticipation of circumstances like these."

Extended Care Hospital, located at 8171 Magnolia Drive in Riverside, received one citation during an April 25, 2019 inspection for not providing and implementing an infection prevention and control program, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The company's sister location in Montclair received two citations, one in 2018 and another in 2019.

Riverside County health officials said rehabilitation facilities and nursing homes such as this present a challenge because the patients are at high risk for coronavirus complications and are clustered together, often with two people to a room.

AlreadyThis in Riverside article is County, FREE to public your healthcommunity. officials conducted nearly 200 tests at a Rancho Mirage assisted living facility after learning that a 73-year-old $3 for 3 months. Save 90%. woman, who died after acquiring the virus, spent time at the 99-bed home. ADVERTISEMENT

❯

Just one other person tested positive at Rancho Mirage Health and Rehabilitation Center — a woman in her 30s who did contract work at the facility. She was isolated at home and is expected to recover, officials said.

In neighboring San Bernardino County, public health officials are assuming "all are positive" at a Yucaipa nursing home where two residents died from coronavirus-related complications and at least 49 other residents and six staff tested positive. The county stopped testing at Cedar Mountain Post Acute Rehabilitation because to do so would be "pointless and a waste of scarce testing resources," spokesperson David Wert said.

Get the Daily Brieng newsletter in your inbox.

Start your day with the morning's top news

Delivery: Daily

Your Email

Desert Sun reporter Nicole Hayden covers health and health care in the Coachella Valley. She can be reached at [email protected] or (760) 778-4623. Follow her on Twitter @Nicole_A_Hayden.

Read or Share this story: https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/health/2020/04/05/thirty-patients-s-patients-staff-test-positive-coronavirus-riverside- skilled-nursing-facility/2952090001/

This article is FREE to your community. $3 for 3 months. Save 90%. https://nyti.ms/2JOKuEJ

Coronavirus Sweeps Through a San Antonio Nursing Home The virus infected 67 of the facilityʼs 84 residents, killing one, with several infected employees working at other facilities in Texas.

By Manny Fernandez

April 3, 2020 Updated 7:35 p.m. ET

HOUSTON — A coronavirus outbreak at a San Antonio nursing home has infected 67 of the facility’s 84 residents, killing one, the largest spread of the virus at a Texas long-term care facility, city and county ofﬁcials said on Friday.

The outbreak at the Southeast Nursing and Rehabilitation Center was described by local ofﬁcials as “contained,” but they were scrambling on Friday to perform additional tests and to track down all of the facility’s 60 employees. Eight of the staff members have tested positive for the virus, and tracking its spread has been complicated by the fact that numerous employees also worked at other nursing homes in the San Antonio region.

“This morning we launched an aggressive, multilayered response to try to get our arms around the extent of this local outbreak,” Charles Hood, the San Antonio ﬁre chief, told reporters at a news conference.

City ofﬁcials on Friday amended previously issued emergency orders to prohibit nursing home employees from working in multiple facilities. Two of the eight infected employees worked in other facilities, and employees who have not been tested worked in at least seven nursing homes in the area. Such crossover of workers at multiple sites was one of the factors that contributed to a deadly coronavirus outbreak in nursing homes in the Seattle area, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a recent report.

In San Antonio, medical-response teams were visiting the seven facilities where Southeast employees may have worked to test all residents and workers who show symptoms. Ofﬁcials were also planning to visit and evaluate 34 nursing homes that have received the lowest federal ratings.

“In case anyone in San Antonio needed a wake-up call about the seriousness of Covid-19 to our community, this is it,” Mayor Ron Nirenberg said on Friday.

For weeks, Texas had been the largest state whose governor had not ordered all residents to stay indoors except for certain essential activities. But at a news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Abbott announced he had issued an executive order instructing Texans to “minimize social gatherings and minimize in-person contact with people who are not in the same household.” except when they were providing or obtaining essential services.

Sign up to receive our daily Coronavirus Brieﬁng, an informed guide Sign Up with the latest developments and expert advice.

Those essential activities included health care, law enforcement, food and agriculture, energy, ﬁnancial services, and holding in-person gatherings at houses of worship, as long as social-distancing guidelines were followed.

At ﬁrst, the governor shied away from calling his new order a statewide stay-at-home mandate. “A stay-at-home strategy would mean that you have to stay at home, you cannot leave home under any circumstances,” Mr. Abbott told reporters. “That obviously is not what we’ve articulated here.”

The next day, however, Mr. Abbott released a video message, clarifying, “I issued this executive order that requires all Texans to stay at home, except to provide essential services or do essential things.” And on Friday, asked if Texas was indeed under a statewide stay-at- home order, Mr. Abbott’s spokesman, John Wittman, said that it was.

Of the San Antonio nursing home’s 84 residents, 11 have had their tests come back negative; those residents were being kept in a separate part of the building, and employees treating them were not providing services to those who are infected. Six residents’ tests were still pending or were inconclusive, ofﬁcials said.

The eight employees who tested positive are in self-isolation away from the nursing home. Ofﬁcials were attempting to test the other 52 employees — seven were tested on Thursday, 17 were scheduled to be tested on Friday and medical personnel were trying to contact the others.

The nursing home, which is licensed for 116 beds and is owned by Southeast SNF LLC, according to state records, is listed on the federal government’s Medicare website as “much below average,” receiving one out of five stars. The facility was fined $62,016 by federal regulators last March. The fine by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services came after the staff failed to consult the doctor of a woman who did not have a bowel movement for 13 days. She was later hospitalized, according to federal inspection data.

The Coronavirus Outbreak Answers to Your Frequently Asked Questions

Updated April 3, 2020

• How does coronavirus spread? It seems to spread very easily from person to person, especially in homes, hospitals and other conﬁned spaces. The pathogen can be carried on tiny respiratory droplets that fall as they are coughed or sneezed out. It may also be transmitted when we touch a contaminated surface and then touch our face.

• Is there a vaccine yet? No. The ﬁrst testing in humans of an experimental vaccine began in mid-March. Such rapid development of a potential vaccine is unprecedented, but even if it is proved safe and effective, it probably will not be available for 12 to18 months.

RELATED CONTENT

California unemployment claims surged to record 879,000 last week

With high number of new cases and fatalities, L.A. County emerges as coronavirus epicenter in California

Suggest a Correction

SHARE THIS STORY

YOU MAY LIKE Sponsored Links by Taboola Soak Your Dark Spots With This One Thing (Trending Morning Routine) Gundry MD

Before You Renew Amazon Prime, Read This Wikibuy

California: Say Bye To Expensive Solar Panels If You Own A Home In San Bernardino Energy Bill Cruncher Solar Quotes ADVERTISEMENT

TECHNOLOGY

Employees at 6 Amazon facilities in Southern California have tested positive for coronavirus

An Amazon center in San Bernardino. (Associated Press) By SAM DEAN, JOHANA BHUIYAN

APRIL 2, 2020 | 7 PM

Workers at six Amazon facilities in Southern California have tested positive in the last week for the virus that causes COVID-19. Four of those cases were confirmed and disclosed in the last 24 hours to workers at the facilities involved.

The newly affected facilities are fulfillment centers ONT2 in San Bernardino and LGB8 in Rialto, delivery center DLA8 in Hawthorne, and a smaller Amazon Prime Now warehouse in the Glassell Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. The Hawthorne and Glassell Park facilities both handle the final stage of deliveries to customers in Los Angeles, with the Hawthorne facility handling deliveries for much of L.A.'s west side.

Two other facilities in Riverside and San Bernardino counties had reported cases in late March.

In a statement, Amazon said that all employees diagnosed with COVID-19 or directed to quarantine will receive up to two weeks of pay to ensure they can self-isolate without worrying about lost income. The company is also offering unlimited unpaid time off for all hourly employees through the end of April.

“We are supporting the individuals who are recovering,” said Timothy Carter, an Amazon spokesman. “We are following guidelines from health officials and medical experts, and are taking extreme measures to ensure the safety of employees at our site.”

The company said it had informed other employees at the affected sites about each case. At ONT2 in San Bernardino and LGB8 in Rialto, employees were informed via prerecorded voice messages from their managers.

The company’s Eastvale warehouse in Riverside County, which was the first to report an employee testing positive for COVID-19, now has its third case as of Thursday, The Times confirmed.

Warehouse employees were notified about the most recent case on Wednesday, according to a worker who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal. Company communications The Times reviewed confirmed that while Amazon is not paying workers for the missed shifts, the company is allowing them to take time off without penalty if they feel uncomfortable coming into work.

“When I look at the operations leadership team who are making $100,000 to $150,000 a year, and they get to go home without worrying about if they’re going to get paid, that bugs me,” the Eastvale warehouse worker said. “Because we’re still here and if we go home, we don’t get paid.”

TECHNOLOGY

Delivery workers are keeping California fed. They say no one’s keeping them safe March 28, 2020

Amazon said it is taking measures to reduce infection in its facilities, including increasing the frequency and intensity of cleaning and sanitizing surfaces such as door handles and screens that multiple employees touch during a workday. It is also staggering shift times to promote social distancing, and suspending exit screenings, which the company typically performs to check if employees are stealing merchandise, to reduce traffic jams at exits and entrances.

But Amazon warehouse and delivery workers across the country have called for the company to do more to protect them from the spread of COVID-19 or compensate them for the health risks associated with working during the coronavirus outbreak.

As The Times reported, workers were told to stay only three feet apart — half of what the CDC recommends — as recently as March 24. On Monday, Amazon warehouse workers in New York staged a walkout over the lack of protective gear and other safeguards. After the walkout, Amazon said it would provide masks to all warehouse workers and perform daily temperature checks on all arriving employees.

At the Eastvale warehouse, one of Amazon’s largest on the West cCast, the company notified workers of the second case, via text message, on March 29. “The affected individual was last on site on 26 March and consistent with our daily processes, the site has been undergoing multiple enhanced cleanings during this time,” the message read.

Southern California Amazon workers have begun circulating petitions in response, demanding the company shut the affected warehouses down for two weeks because social distancing there “is almost impossible.”

BUSINESS

Instacart workers strike over safety; company claims ‘no impact’ on deliveries March 30, 2020

“Amazon is trying to take precautions to slow the spread of COVID-19, but the fact of the matter is we work with so many people every single day that we are in constant danger,” the petition read.

In addition to paid sick leave, the petition demanded hazard pay of 150% the usual rate, child care pay and subsidies, as well as free testing for the virus.

TECHNOLOGY BUSINESS Two Nordstrom warehouse workers in San Bernardino test positive for COVID-19, employees say By Martin Estacio Staff Writer Posted Apr 4, 2020 at 4:13 PM SAN BERNARDINO — Two workers at a Nordstrom warehouse here have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to several employees.

The employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, gave similar accounts of hearing the announcement Friday at the company’s fulfillment center at 17335 Glen Helen Parkway.

Nordstrom’s media relations did not confirm the accounts or respond to multiple requests for comment. A representative at the San Bernardino warehouse said she was not authorized to speak with the media.

According to the employees, a Nordstrom supervisor said one worker who tested positive had last been at work on March 10; the other, on March 26.

The Nordstrom supervisor said via a public address system that the building had closed overnight and been sanitized, according to the employees.

Additionally, the supervisor said they had made contact with everyone “that person” had come into contact with and that if an employee wasn’t spoken to, supervisors didn’t believe they were exposed, one anonymous employee said.

The announcement comes as employees deemed essential to the supply chain continue to work in warehouses that employ hundreds, if not thousands, of workers during the coronavirus pandemic.

Workers at six Amazon facilities, including ones in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, have tested positive in the last week for COVID-19, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday.

This prompted workers there to begin circulating petitions to have the affected warehouses closed for two weeks, the article read. Nordstrom announced it was temporarily closing its retail stores starting March 17 and extended the closure through April 5. A statement from Erik Nordstrom, the company’s CEO, said store employees would continue to be paid during this period.

“The health and safety of our customers and employees remain our top priority as we continue to make decisions during this rapidly evolving situation,” the CEO said. “We’re taking decisive actions across the business to help protect employees, customers and others in the communities we serve.”

A majority of its fulfillment and distribution centers would remain open “where permitted by local authorities to help us continue serving customers online and through our apps,” the company said.

The more than 600,000-square-foot fulfillment center in San Bernardino processes online orders for the company’s off-price brands, Nordstrom Rack and HauteLook, one of the employees said.

Online business made up one-third of sales in 2019, according to a Nordstrom statement. Precautions had been put in place, including additional cleaning and “adjustments to allow for social distancing between employees and resources to help them stay healthy,” the company said.

Additionally, Nordstrom officials said employees that had concerns about working in the centers could let their managers or human resources know.

On Friday, the Nordstrom supervisor told workers they could stay home if they felt uncomfortable, according to the employees. Some of the employees in San Bernardino said they saw workers walk out after the announcement was made.

The company said in a March 17 statement that some fulfillment and distribution centers had temporarily closed “as a result of direction from local authorities.”

A Nordstrom fulfillment center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa closed after being informed an employee had tested positive for COVID-19, news outlet KCRG reported.

Company officials there told KCRG the center would remain closed until Thursday for a deep cleaning and to “develop new strategies to enhance social distancing practices at the facility.”

Lana Culp, spokesperson for the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health, said the county was authorized to order the closure of a facility deemed essential, but had not done so yet to her knowledge.

“We would have to look into the severity of the situation to make someone close,” she said.

According to an order issued March 10 by the county’s Public Health Officer, Dr. Erin Gustafson, only healthcare providers and laboratories are required to report positive COVID-19 cases. Although Nordstrom officials at the San Bernardino facility said the building had been sanitized, one employee doubted how much disinfecting could have been done with mandatory 10-hour shifts:

“They said they did a deep cleaning but with everyone working 10s, it’s almost a (24- hour) operation. So how much cleaning really went on, you know?”

Martin Estacio may be reached at [email protected] or at 760-955-5358. Follow him on Twitter @DP_mestacio. Riverside County coronavirus cases climb by 145 to 638; 15 now dead – Press Enterprise

LOCAL NEWS Riverside County coronavirus cases climb by 145 to 638; 15 now dead

   

By JEFF HORSEMAN | [email protected] | The Press-Enterprise  PUBLISHED: April 3, 2020 at 3:43 p.m. | UPDATED: April 3, 2020 at 3:43 p.m.

Riverside County’s confirmed novel coronavirus caseload jumped 29% to 638 on Friday afternoon, April 3.

The number of deaths is now 15, up one from the day before.

The county had 493 cases entering Thursday, April 2. At the current rate, cases are projected to double every 4.7 days, with county health officials expecting more than 1,000 deaths and 65,000 cases by early May.

https://www.pe.com/...ow-dead/?utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_content=tw-pressenterprise[4/3/2020 3:44:55 PM] Riverside County coronavirus cases climb by 145 to 638; 15 now dead – Press Enterprise

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Amazon, Costco and UPS urged to ramp up coronavirus protections

CIF, sections cancel all spring sports playoffs in California in response to coronavirus crisis

Riverside County coronavirus cases not slowing down, health officials warn

Coronavirus: Gov. Newsom joins property tax relief fray Newsroom Guidelines News Tips Coronavirus: 3M fires back at Trump over Contact Us order to produce more face masks Report an Error

https://www.pe.com/...ow-dead/?utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_content=tw-pressenterprise[4/3/2020 3:44:55 PM] ADVERTISEMENT

El censo es así de importante. Llénalo por internet hoy.

Empieza aquí Dale forma a tu futuro EMPIEZA AQUÍ >

CALIFORNIA

15 more coronavirus deaths in L.A. County as cases jump to nearly 6,000

Laguna Woods Village retirement community residents protest outside a nearby Ayres Hotel on Saturday over a plan to hold some homeless COVID-19 patients there. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

By ALEX WIGGLESWORTH, ADAM ELMAHREK, MELODY GUTIERREZ, LAURA KING, MAURA DOLAN

APRIL 5, 2020 | 10:15 AM UPDATED 4:38 PM Los Angeles County on Sunday announced 15 additional deaths related to the coronavirus and 663 new cases, bringing the county’s totals to 132 deaths and 5,950 cases.

This weekend has seen a particularly deadly toll in the county, with 28 deaths reported Saturday, the largest one-day increase yet.

“We have some very difficult days ahead and now is the time for all of us to redouble our physical distancing efforts and look after our neighbors, friends, and families who may be at the highest risk for serious illness from COVID-19,” Barbara Ferrer, director of the L.A. County Department of Public Health, said in a statement.

Of the fatalities reported Sunday, 10 were patients older than 65, and 11 had underlying health conditions, officials said. One person was younger than 40. Two of the deaths already had been reported by the city of Pasadena, which has its own health department.

There have now been nearly 1,400 coronavirus infections recorded in L.A. County over the last 48 hours as the number of people tested has risen to 31,000. Officials in Long Beach, which also has its own health department, reported 15 new cases Sunday, for a total of 213.

Riverside County announced Sunday that another person had died of the coronavirus and 134 more had tested positive, bringing the county’s death toll to 19 and its total number of cases to 799.

They include 30 patients of the Extended Care Hospital of Riverside, a skilled nursing facility. Some staff members also had tested positive, and officials were awaiting results from other patients and workers at the 90-plus-bed facility, public health officials said Sunday.

The facility was closed to new admissions, sick patients were isolated, and staff members were not permitted to work elsewhere.

“This is a very serious situation and shows why we must all take serious steps to change our behavior, because these steps are intended to protect our most vulnerable,” Riverside County Supervisor Karen Spiegel said in a statement. Concerned about the rise of coronavirus infections, the county has taken the unprecedented step of ordering all residents to cover their faces when leaving home, marking an escalation by county officials in their attempts to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Despite previous pleas from county officials for residents to practice social distancing, cover their faces and stay home, “more and more” residents are getting infected with the virus, and “not everyone’s getting the message,” said Dr. Cameron Kaiser, Riverside County health officer, in issuing the order Saturday.

“We change from saying that you should to saying that you must,” Kaiser said in a prepared statement published by the county.

Los Angeles and counties in the Bay Area have urged residents to cover their mouths and noses, and San Diego County on Saturday ordered all essential workers to do the same, part of a broader effort among local governments and the state to flatten the curve of the pandemic before hospitals become overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients.

But Riverside County’s new mandate is far more strict, requiring anyone who leaves the house to cover up.

The order also bans all gatherings of people except for family members residing in the same home, according to the county’s news release. The sharply worded release said police officers had the power to enforce the orders “as they deem necessary.”

“We have already lost two of our deputies to this virus. I am asking all of you to honor them by staying at home,” said Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco.

U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams on Sunday also urged Americans to follow social distancing guidelines and to wear face coverings in public to help slow the spread of the virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week called on Americans to wear masks when venturing out, but President Trump said Friday, “I don’t see it for myself.”

“The president is making a choice that is appropriate for him,” said the surgeon general on “Fox News Sunday.” Adams has released a video showing how to make a simple homemade face covering with fabric and rubber bands. Wearing a mask, he cautioned, is not a substitute for physical distancing.

Adams also deflected questions about the need for a nationwide stay-at-home order. Trump has said he prefers to leave the decision to governors, nine of whom have not issued such a directive in their states.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said Sunday that states that did not take such measures harmed the overall effort to stem the outbreak.

“It isn’t that they’re putting the rest of the country at risk as much as they’re putting themselves at risk,” he said in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “Every time I get to that podium in the White House briefing room, I plead with people to take a look at those very simple guidelines of physical separation.”

Fauci said last week he did not understand why there was not a nationwide stay-at-home order in place.

Adams said in the Fox interview that the federal government’s guidelines, which are voluntary, were “essentially” a national order.

“Over 90% of the country is staying home,” he said.

Both officials warned of difficult times ahead.

Adams said the coming week was going to be “the hardest and saddest of most Americans’ lives,” likening the projected toll of COVID-19 to “our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment.”

More than 335,000 cases of the coronavirus have been reported nationwide, and the death toll is nearing 10,000.

There are preliminary signs that stay-at-home directives and social distancing have been effective, Fauci said, but “we’re still not at that apex.”

“Within a week, eight, nine days or so, we’re hopefully going to see that turning around,” he said.

Coronavirus-related deaths across California have soared past 300, reaching 344 by Sunday afternoon.

Orange County reported 49 additional coronavirus cases Sunday, for a total of 834 cases, including 14 deaths. Of those diagnosed, 137 were hospitalized and 56 were in intensive care units, officials said.

The cases include two Orange County sheriff’s deputies who tested positive for the virus last week, Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Carrie Braun said Sunday. One works at the Theo Lacy jail in Orange and the other at the Men’s Central Jail in Santa Ana, where at least one inmate also has tested positive. Both deputies were resting at home, Braun said.

In a move aimed at reducing the jail population to limit the spread of the coronavirus, California judicial leaders are set to meet remotely Monday, when they’re expected to adopt a statewide emergency order setting bail at zero for misdemeanor and lower-level felony offenses.

The Judicial Council, the policymaking body for California’s court system, also is expected to vote to suspend evictions and foreclosures and to allow for the expansion of court hearings held by video or telephone.

Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye heads the council, which is primarily made up of judges. Gov. Gavin Newsom has given her and the council extraordinary temporary powers to suspend laws to deal with the health crisis. California has recorded more than 14,000 cases overall, and officials believe that number will sharply rise as testing continues to expand.

In a Saturday news conference, Newsom said California would significantly increase coronavirus testing capabilities, adding that he was responsible for testing lapses in the state that had made it difficult to track the virus.

Newsom announced a task force that he said would work toward a fivefold increase in daily testing in the state by identifying supply shortages and adding testing locations.

“We are now in a position where I can confidently say it’s a new day,” he said.

The announcement comes as California continues to see dramatic increases in people hospitalized with the virus, with 2,398 patients in the state. An additional 3,187 people hospitalized are suspected of having COVID-19 but are awaiting test results.

From Friday to Saturday, the number of coronavirus patients in California’s ICU beds rose nearly 11% to 1,008 people. By Sunday, that number had inched up to 1,040.

In all, state officials said Sunday that 131,500 people had been tested in California, a state of about 40 million people. Of those who have been tested, 15,000 are awaiting results.

“The testing space has been a challenging one for us, and I own that,” Newsom said Saturday. “And I have a responsibility as your governor to do better and do more testing in the state.”

Public health experts have said widespread testing is crucial to the state’s efforts to accurately assess how many people are infected and where the virus is spreading.

Newsom said he was confident the newly announced task force, made up of private and public leaders, would deal with testing challenges in the state.

He said the state was partnering with universities, hospitals, labs and testing companies to increase testing locations across the state, reduce backlogs and ensure there were more accurate and timely data on the number of COVID-19 cases.

The task force will be led by Paul Markovich, president and chief executive of Blue Shield of California, and Dr. Charity Dean, assistant director of the California Department of Public Health.

State officials have been working to add more hospital and ICU beds to handle the expected surge in coronavirus patients. The state’s modeling suggests California will need 50,000 new hospital beds by mid-May. To meet that demand, the state is asking for recently retired medical providers, those with licenses from other states and medical school students to join the newly created California Health Corps. Newsom said that a “staggering number of individuals” — some 79,000 people — had signed up through the state’s Health Corps website.

Meanwhile, a crackdown on coronavirus-order scofflaws has escalated in recent days, with nonessential businesses that refuse to shut down, as well as people who defy orders to stay out of the water, finding themselves in the crosshairs.

Los Angeles prosecutors on Friday filed criminal charges against two smoke shops, a shoe store and a discount electronics retailer, accusing them of refusing to shut down despite orders. It marked the first time the city had filed charges for violations of the “Safer at Home” order, which requires businesses deemed nonessential to close their doors to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

City Atty. Mike Feuer on Friday said the four stores were deemed nonessential businesses under Mayor Eric Garcetti’s executive order.

Garcetti said the stores were putting lives at risk. At one store, police officers were told, “ ‘Forget you’ — probably not in as nice words — ‘We’re not going to do it,’ ” the mayor said.

That comes as workers at some businesses deemed essential are calling for their employers to grant them more protections against the virus.

Cooks and cashiers protested from their cars outside a McDonald’s on Crenshaw Boulevard on Sunday after a co- worker tested positive for the virus, they said, prompting the store to close for a day. The employees were then asked to come back the following day, they said.

The workers said they were going on strike until the company agreed to provide a two-week paid quarantine and to cover healthcare costs of any worker or immediate family member who becomes ill with COVID-19.

The owner-operator of the McDonald’s franchise, Nicole Enearu, said Sunday in a statement that the restaurant was closed and sanitized as soon as managers were notified that an employee had tested positive, and that all other staff who had been in close contact with the employee had been asked to self-quarantine for 14 days.

“We are committed to paying both the infected employee and the other employees who need to quarantine,” she said.

But as of Sunday evening, none of the employees who were involved in the protest had received calls from their managers advising them to quarantine or saying they would be paid for such time off, the workers said.

“We have no way of determining how McDonald’s is making the decision on who to send home and who’s allowed to work,” Fight for $15 and a Union, which helped organize the protest, said in a statement. “And we’re not comfortable taking the company’s word for it.” In Orange County, a plan to house homeless people with the coronavirus in a hotel near a gated retirement community has sparked outrage among some of its neighbors.

Orange County officials recently entered into an agreement to use two boutique Ayres hotels as temporary housing for those without shelter amid the pandemic. One hotel is just outside Laguna Woods Village, a community with thousands of residents older than 55.

County officials say they have few options as they try to quickly move people indoors amid fears that an outbreak among the homeless population could further strain health systems. They say the facility will be locked down, with patients unable to have visitors or leave freely.

Residents of the retirement community, where the average age is about 78, say they fear having homeless patients or the staff who care for the sick nearby because residents are at high risk of death from the virus.

On Saturday afternoon, dozens of residents gathered outside the hotel, at times shouting, “Don’t kill us,” while others circled nearby in their cars, honking their horns.

Laguna Woods city officials have said they are deeply concerned by the county’s decision and are exploring legal action.

Wigglesworth and Elmahrek reported from Los Angeles, Gutierrez reported from Sacramento, King reported from Washington and Dolan reported from San Francisco. Times staff writer Paloma Esquivel contributed to this report.

CALIFORNIA CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

The stories shaping California Get up to speed with our Essential California newsletter, sent six days a week.

Enter Email Address

SIGN ME UP

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Alex Wigglesworth

Twitter Instagram Email Facebook

Alex Wigglesworth is a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times. NEWS LA County becomes state coronavirus hotspot: 11 new deaths reported, bringing total to 89 County officials also announced 521 new COVID-19 cases.

Los Angeles County Health Director Dr. Barbara Ferrer speaks at Friday’s coronavirus update.

By ARIELLA PLACHTA || [email protected] || LosLos AngelesAngeles DailyDaily NewsNews PUBLISHED: April 3, 2020 at 1:35 p.m. || UPDATED:UPDATED: April 3, 2020 at 2:32 p.m.

Los Angeles County health officials reported another rapid increase in coronavirus cases on Friday, April 4, as they confirmed 11 new COVOID-19-related deaths, bringing the county’s toll to 89.

Seven of the victims were over the age of 65 and of those, all had underlying health conditions, according to Barbara Ferrer, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.

Another person who died was between ages 18 and 40 and also had underlying health conditions, Ferrer said. Three others who died were between ages 41-65, two of whom had underlying health conditions, she added.

Los Angeles County officials also announced 521 new COVID-19 cases. New cases inin LongLong BeachBeach werewere notnot reportedreported byby FridayFriday afternoon,afternoon, thoughthough thethe city’scity’s totaltotal stoodstood atat 153. There were 37 total confirmed cases in Pasadena. Both cities have their own health departments.

There were more than 4,500 confirmed cases overall in L.A. County as of Thursday afternoon. The daily count has increased by more than 1,000 in the last 48 hours.

Ferrer warned about the potential to see some 1,000 new confirmed cases per day inin thethe comingcoming weeks,weeks, givengiven thethe increaseincrease inin testingtesting andand spreadspread ofof thethe novelnovel coronavirus.

“The next few weeks are going to be critically important because we are going to see more cases of people who are positive with COVID-19 but its our hope that the rate increaseincrease continuescontinues toto bebe manageablemanageable andand doesn’tdoesn’t overwhelmoverwhelm ourour healthhealth carecare system,” said Ferrer. “And I think that in part depends on all of you.”

Ferrer asked the members of the public to continue observing social distancing measures, in addition to wearing non-medical grade masks that should be washed regularly. She also made a plea to grocery stores in L.A. County to offer free delivery service for at-risk shoppers.

While improvements have been made in testing capacity across the county, Ferrer said, it remains limited and testing facilities will prioritize symptomatic patients.

The county is also investigating confirmed coronavirus cases in institutional settings likelike nursingnursing homes,homes, assistedassisted livingliving facilities,facilities, sheltersshelters andand prisonsprisons thatthat couldcould bebe homehome to significant numbers of people vulnerable to the virus in close-quartered situations.

The Department of Public Health said it was investigating 321 cases on Friday at 87 different institutions. Ferrer said 11 deaths from COVID-19 lived in such institutions,institutions, includingincluding fourfour newnew deathsdeaths asas ofof Thursday.Thursday.

Among the newly confirmed cases Friday were seven homeless individuals, said county officials, though two confirmed cases reported as homeless yesterday turned out not to be homeless. Seven cases were among incarcerated people. As the COVID-19 pandemic worsens across California, the number of cases in the state swelled to around 11,000 with the death toll crossing the 200 mark. Some 40% of those deaths have occurred in L.A. County, in which officials reported the illness has a 1.9% mortality rate.

Meanwhile, officials are continuing to urge the public to carry on with unprecedented social-distancing measures while also recommending mask-wearing inin publicpublic asas theythey attemptattempt toto getget moremore suppliessupplies toto hospitalshospitals experiencingexperiencing aa surgesurge inin sick patients.

Three new drive-up coronavirus testing locations openedopened inin L.A.L.A. CountyCounty Friday,Friday, though available by appointment only. The screening sites are at Gate 17 of the Pomona Fairplex; the South Bay Galleria, at 1815 Hawthorne Blvd. in Redondo Beach; and Antelope Valley Mall, 1233 Rancho Vista Blvd. in Palmdale.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti urged Southern Californians on Thursday to wear non-medical or homemade masks during needed trips outdoors to minimize the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Wrapping a black mask around his ears and face during his daily briefing, Garcetti modeled the new, COVID-19-inspired style, and safety precaution, before an online audience watching the briefing on live streams over Facebook and Instagram.

“This will be the look,” he said.

Efforts are underway to reserve N95 medical-grade masks for doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals treating patients infected with COVID-19, and to manufacture millions of masks for essential works.

The homemade ones are “for the rest of us, those who are going to the grocery store or the pharmacy to pick up your medicine,” he said.

Newsroom Guidelines News Tips Contact Us Report an Error

Tags: Coronavirus,, Health,, Top Stories Breeze,, Top Stories IVDB,, Top Stories LADN,, Top Stories LBPT,, Top Stories PSN,, Top Stories SGVT,, Top Stories WDN Watch Live

LA County spending $400,000 to hire 2 PR firms to guide coronavirus messaging By Bill Melugin | Published 3 days ago | Coronavirus | FOX 11

LA County spending $400,000 to hire 2 PR rms to guide coronavirus messaging

LOS ANGELES - FOX 11 has obtained contracts showing that Los Angeles County has hired not one, but two public relations rms to craft and guide the county’s coronavirus messaging, despite the fact that the county already has fully staed, paid communications teams, and the county is also hoping to be reimbursed with disaster relief funds.

Sponsored Stories Ad Content by Taboola |

The Dead Giveaway That Tells You When Amazon’s Giving You A Better…

RELATED CONTENT

List: Here’s where and how many cases of coronavirus have been conrmed in L.A. County communities

Orange County death toll from coronavirus rises to 3 as city-by-city data becomes available

Suggest a Correction

SHARE THIS STORY

YOU MAY LIKE Sponsored Links by Taboola California economy clobbered — for how long? – Press Enterprise

OPINION • Opinion, Opinion Columnist California economy clobbered — for how long?

   

https://www.pe.com/...w-long/?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_content=tw-pressenterprise&utm_source=twitter.com[4/6/2020 10:36:54 AM] California economy clobbered — for how long? – Press Enterprise

California Gov. Gavin Newsom updates the state’s response to the coronavirus, at the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services in Rancho Cordova Calif., Tuesday, March 17, 2020. At right is California Health and Human Services Agency Director Dr. Mark Ghaly. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, Pool)

By DAN WALTERS |  PUBLISHED: April 5, 2020 at 10:47 a.m. | UPDATED: April 5, 2020 at 10:52 a.m.

We’ve all seen slow motion video clips of horrific damage from head-on automobile collisions staged in auto safety testing facilities.

Something like that is happening to California’s economy.

Until a few weeks ago, the globe’s fifth largest economy was humming along with record-high output and record-low unemployment. Employers were begging for workers and state and local governments were enjoying revenue surges.

“California’s unemployment rate remained at its record low of 3.9% in February as the state’s employers added 29,000 nonfarm payroll jobs,” the state Employment Development Department reported on March 27.

ADVERTISING

“The job gains in February contributed to a record job expansion in California of 120 months,

surpassing the long expansion of the 1960s,” EDD added. “California has gained 3,425,700 jobs since the current expansion began in February 2010, accounting for 15% of the nation’s 22,846,000 job gain over the same timeframe.” M

However, by March 27, the state’s economy had already slammed into a brick wall called coronavirus. Closures of “nonessential” businesses and stay-at-home directives to slow the spread of the virus very quickly eliminated at least 2 million jobs and tripled unemployment among the state’s 19.5 million workers, with no end in sight. In a matter of days, those who lost their jobs filed 1.6 million new claims for unemployment insurance.

“We have taken a jump into unknown territory. Over the next few weeks, the number of workers laid off in California will reach unprecedented levels,” said Taner Osman, research manager at Beacon Economics and the UC-Riverside’s School of Business Center for Economic Forecasting and Development. “The hope is that stimulus measures will ease the short-term pain felt by workers, and that containment efforts will enable the economy to return to something like full capacity as the summer proceeds.”

Californians and their state and local governments are receiving billions of dollars from federal “stimulus measures,” but in what had been a $2.6 trillion economy, that will ease overall effects only slightly.

The economic jolt hits those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder most heavily, especially low- income workers in highly impacted service sectors such as restaurants, hotels and retail stores. And even those who still work in “essential” sectors feel the collateral effects.

“Grocery store cashiers, store clerks, farmworkers, and delivery and truck drivers make up sizeable shares of the essential workforce,” the Public Policy Institute of California says. “Given the low hourly wage rates for these workers, some may face hardships in caring for children or family members with

schools and care facilities shuttered.”

No one knows, of course, how long California’s economy will be crippled. Gov. Gavin Newsom and most Californians clearly believe that the battle to save lives is worth the economic damage, a belief bolstered by complex calculations from Joe Nation, a former state assemblyman who now teaches at Stanford University.

“Stay-at-home provides minimum net benefits to the state RELATED ARTICLES of $77 billion under the most conservative assumptions,”

Pension bomb fuse just got shorter Nation concluded in an Op-Ed for CalMatters. “ … In short, … the ‘cure,’ a stay-at-home policy, results in an economic The toxic side effects of coronavirus benefit. Under best-estimate assumptions, the net lockdowns economic benefit climbs to $4.9 trillion, an amount equal to

The blessing of time on our hands nearly 18 months of economic output for the entire state.”

Coronavirus: Paid sick days save all of “The sooner other elected officials recognize that the cure our lives is not worse than the problem and follow the lead of California and 25 other states with stay-at-home policies, Anti-eviction edict will worsen California’s the greater the economic benefit, the higher the number of economic woes lives saved and the faster the economy will return to normal,” he added.

CalMatters is a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how California’s state Capitol works and why it matters. For more stories by Dan Walters, go to calmatters.org/commentary

Newsroom Guidelines News Tips Contact Us Report an Error

Tags: Guest Commentary

Dan Walters

https://www.pe.com/...w-long/?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_content=tw-pressenterprise&utm_source=twitter.com[4/6/2020 10:36:54 AM] CALIFORNIA

Churches spark outrage by defiantly holding services despite coronavirus orders

Wearing gloves and a mask, Robyn Freeman of Orange County prays after taking Communion on Palm Sunday at Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Thousand Oaks, Calif. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

By ALENE TCHEKMEDYIAN, HAILEY BRANSON-POTTS, LAURA NEWBERRY

APRIL 6, 2020 | 5 AM UPDATED 7:18 AM

The congregants lined up six feet apart on Palm Sunday, waiting to take Communion at Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Thousand Oaks. Ten people were allowed inside at a time, with someone spraying chairs with disinfectant after each use.

By the end of the day, hundreds of people had cycled through.

Practicing social distancing and wearing masks and gloves, people wait in line to take Communion at Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Thousand Oaks. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

Nearby, in the church parking lot, protesters lined up their cars and honked their horns, disturbed that the church would so brazenly flout stay-at-home orders from Ventura County and the state, put in place to battle the coronavirus pandemic.

It wasn’t a decision Pastor Rob McCoy took lightly. On Saturday night, he resigned his position on the Thousand Oaks City Council, saying he planned to violate orders that deem churches nonessential. Rob McCoy, pastor of Godspeak Cavalry Chapel, recently resigned from the Thousand Oaks City Council, saying he planned to violate orders that declare churches nonessential. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

“As an elected official I am in conflict and thus must tender my resignation from the council,” he wrote in a letter obtained by The Times. “I have no desire to put our community at risk and will not. … However this is portrayed, please know I am obligated to do this.”

As the novel coronavirus continues to spread, pastors like McCoy have revolted against stay-at-home orders, pitting public health concerns against claims of religious freedom. And houses of worship have already proved to be hospitable breeding grounds for the virus, which as of Sunday had killed at least 347 California residents. Bethany Slavic Missionary Church in the Sacramento suburb of Rancho Cordova became the epicenter of an outbreak when more than six dozen of its members tested positive for COVID-19.

The Pentecostal church stopped holding large gatherings on March 18, according to its website. But public health officials last week worried that church members were still meeting in private homes to conduct services.

About 20 people, including Catherine Saillant, left, protested outside Godspeak Calvary Chapel in opposition to Communion being given inside. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

“It’s outrageous that this is happening,” said Dr. Peter Beilenson, the Sacramento County public health director. “Obviously there is freedom of religion, but when it’s impacting public health as this is, we have to enforce social distancing.”

In his resignation letter, McCoy detailed the church’s efforts to keep its members safe. Though the church can seat 400 people, congregants who wished to take Communion on Sunday afternoon would cycle through 10 at a time over a two-hour period after a morning livestreamed service.

Those who didn’t want to step inside the church drove up behind it to take Communion. Youth director Elijah Swartz, 22, served plastic cups of wine and bread from a wooden plate attached to a long pole. After each visit, he cleaned the plate with a Clorox wipe. He wore a mask and plastic gloves.

Elijah Swartz, youth director at Godspeak Calvary Chapel, delivers Communion wine and bread to congregants who did not want to enter the church. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) “They were taking a lot of precautions to make sure everybody was safe,” said Robyn Freeman, 39, a Tustin resident who went to take Communion with her mother, who lives in Westlake Village. She said the criticism of the church was unnecessary, noting that there were signs inside advising congregants not to hug or touch one another.

She was grateful for the opportunity to pray.

“I just prayed for our world, just that this epidemic, this pandemic, would cease soon,” she said.

Noel Hazard, 63, showed up to express his displeasure with the event, which worried him because it was attended by members of his own community.

“They shop at the same stores we do, the same pharmacies, go to the same gas stations,” he said. “There is a risk.”

Thousand Oaks Mayor Al Adam said McCoy, who has served on the council since 2015, was a “voice of strength and healing” after the city endured back-to-back tragedies: the shooting at the Borderline Bar & Grill and the Woolsey fire.

“He recognizes the fact that he has a calling here that is in conflict with his duties as a City Council member, so to his credit he resigned,” Adam added. “I think it was the right thing to do.”

Cross Culture Christian Center, a small evangelical church in Lodi, also continued to hold services despite stay-at-home orders. The pastor intended to convene Sunday, despite San Joaquin County health officials ordering the building closed.

“We’re going to meet as often as we can meet, and we do believe that this right is protected by the 1st Amendment and should be considered essential,” the church’s pastor, Jon Duncan, said in an interview with Fox 40 News last week.

But on Sunday, Duncan was greeted by several police officers in the parking lot about an hour before he planned to hold an in-person service.

Duncan’s church leases space in Bethel Open Bible Church, which stopped hosting in- person services March 15. Bethel changed the locks on the building to prevent Duncan and his congregants from entering, Lodi Police Lt. Michael Manetti told The Times.

On March 25, Lodi police officers came to one of Duncan’s Wednesday services and told the pastor about county and state orders against public meetings.

In response, the church retained a lawyer from the Escondido-based National Center for Law & Policy, a conservative Christian nonprofit law center.

Attorney Dean R. Broyles sent a six-page cease-and-desist letter to the city of Lodi, saying officers had “disrupted a peaceful and lawful worship service” and demanding that the city respect the church’s 1st Amendment rights. Observing social distancing and other precautions, congregants at Godspeak Calvary Chapel take Communion inside the church on Palm Sunday. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

“The church intends to meet this Sunday, and all future Wednesdays and Sundays in the future,” the March 27 letter said, noting that the church has implemented social distancing measures and has asked the elderly, sick and those with compromised immune systems to “stay at home.”

On Friday, police officers posted a notice from county health officials on the church building. The letter, addressed to the pastor of Bethel Open Bible Church, said Cross Culture Christian Center was continuing to hold services at the facility and ordered it and its parking lot closed.

Violation of the emergency order, the letter said, was a misdemeanor punishable by fine or imprisonment. In an interview with The Times, Broyles said that he plans to send a letter Monday to Gov. Gavin Newsom and San Joaquin County officials asking that they follow the lead of some other states and declare houses of worship as essential services exempt from stay-at-home orders.

Broyles said he is also planning a federal civil rights lawsuit “based on the fact that the governor and the county are violating my client’s 1st Amendment rights.”

The church, which has 60 to 80 attendees on a regular Sunday, believes that the Bible calls for churches to meet together, in person. And as of Sunday, Broyles said, no congregants had gotten sick.

”There’s a lot of things the Bible commands us to do, like love one another, serve one another, encourage one another,” Broyles said. “And those are difficult to do, if not impossible, if you’re not together.”

On Sunday, officers spoke to Duncan on the sidewalk as congregants attempted to pull into the parking lot. Duncan spoke briefly with the people in each car and gave them printed copies of Scripture, Manetti said.

For every pastor who has flouted stay-at-home orders, there have been many others who have adapted by streaming their services online.

President Trump tweeted over the weekend that he would be “tuning in” Sunday to listen online to Greg Laurie, a Southern California megachurch pastor.

And so, from his empty Riverside campus at Harvest Christian Fellowship, a church of 15,000 people that would normally be bustling Sunday morning, Laurie filmed a greeting for “a very special guest to our service today.” “Thank you for talking about the importance of the church in your press conferences,” Laurie said to Trump. “I know you had mentioned earlier that it was your hope that maybe we would be meeting in person on Easter, and unfortunately that has not worked out. But the amazing thing is we’re able to reach a lot of people now online.”

Laurie called for people to watch church services at home, citing the Bible verse Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three are gathered unto my name, there I am in their midst.”

CALIFORNIA

The stories shaping California Get up to speed with our Essential California newsletter, sent six days a week.

Enter Email Address

SIGN ME UP

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Alene Tchekmedyian

Twitter Instagram Email Facebook

Alene Tchekmedyian covers the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. She previously wrote about the county’s criminal courts and breaking news throughout California. Before joining The Times in 2016, she reported on crime and policing for the Glendale News-Press and Burbank Leader. She grew up in Huntington Beach and graduated from UCLA. ADVERTISEMENT

Ad Finally, there is a new instantly fix bad postu back pain. Finally, there is a new device that posture and relieve back pain.

ShopTrueFit.com

SCIENCE

CDC recommends wearing face masks during the coronavirus pandemic Bibi Sheonarine of Upland models a face mask that she sewed. She has sewn a number of masks to donate to local doctors and hospitals, and has recruited others to do the same. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

By LUKE MONEY, KAILYN BROWN, DEBORAH NETBURN

APRIL 3, 2020 | 2:47 PM

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidelines Friday recommending that the public voluntarily wear a non-medical basic cloth or fabric mask that can be either purchased online or simply made at home.

“The transmission from individuals without symptoms is playing a more significant role in the spread of the virus than previously understood,” President Trump said when announcing the guidelines at a White House briefing. “So you don’t seem to have symptoms and it still gets transferred.” He emphasized that the announcement did not replace rules on social distancing, and he said the government was not recommending medical grade masks, which should be reserved for healthcare workers. He also described the guidelines as voluntary.“I don’t think I’m going to be doing it.”

The move comes as a growing number of local and state agencies are offering similar guidance.

California officials said on Wednesday that covering your face could prevent you from becoming infected with the new coronavirus or from spreading it to others, but they stressed that it should not be seen as a substitute for social distancing, hand washing and other safety measures.

“Face coverings could provide some additional protection against COVID-19, but Californians should not have a false sense of security if they choose to wear them. Make sure you’re also staying six feet away from other people if you have to leave your home to get groceries or prescriptions,” Dr. Mark Ghaly, California’s health and human services secretary, said in a statement.

State officials have said people should not use medical or surgical masks, which are desperately needed by medical personnel. Until now, the CDC has said that healthy people do not need a mask if they are not working in a healthcare setting or caring for an infected person. But in recent days, the federal agency has been weighing whether to modify its recommendations and endorse the use of homemade masks.

Riverside County health officials released new mask guidance Tuesday, covering such essential situations as grocery shopping and medical visits.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said Wednesday that everyone performing essential tasks, such as food shopping, should wear homemade, nonmedical face coverings, or even bandannas, as people in other countries have done.

“To be clear, you should still stay at home. This isn’t an excuse to suddenly all go out,” Garcetti said.

SCIENCE CALIFORNIA CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

Get our free Coronavirus Today newsletter Sign up for the latest news, best stories and what they mean for you, plus answers to your questions.

Enter Email Address

SIGN ME UP

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Luke Money https://www.highlandnews.net/news/public_safety/public-health-ocer-recommends-face-coverings-during- essential-outings/article_9e6fa030-75f6-11ea-a726-e31bd308e706.html

BREAKING Public Health ocer recommends face coverings during essential outings

Apr 3, 2020

San Bernardino County health ocials are recommending people use face coverings when leaving home to conduct essential business such as grocery shopping, going to a medical appointment or visiting a pharmacy to help atten the curve of COVID-19.

The county made the recommendation after reviewing guidance released on April 1 from the state Department of Public Health.

Face coverings may include coverings that secure to the ears or back of the head and encompass the mouth and nose. Homemade cloth ear loop covers, bandannas and handkerchiefs, and neck gaiters may be used to reduce the spread of COVID-19 particularly among asymptomatic people.

Staying home, practicing social distancing and frequent hand washing are far more eective ways to combat the spread of COVID-19, and face coverings are not a substitute for continuing those practices, said Acting County Public Health Ocer Dr. Erin Gustafson.

“Surgical masks and N95 masks should not be used because they must be preserved for healthcare workers and emergency responders,” Gustafson said. “If you do use a face covering, make sure to practice frequent hand washing before and after touching and adjusting the covering.”

Wash cloth face coverings frequently after each use -- at least daily. Place face coverings in a bag until washing them in detergent with hot water and dried on a hot cycle. Discard cloth face coverings that no longer cover the nose and mouth; have stretched out or damaged ties and straps; cannot stay on the face; and have holes or tears in the fabric. “Covering your face may help reduce the chance that asymptomatic people spread COVID-19. This is not as eective as staying home and practicing social distancing,” said Curt Hagman, chairman of the Board of Supervisors. “We all need to do our part to atten the curve and residents should use this as one more tool to stop the spread of this disease.”

For more information about COVID-19 in San Bernardino County, visit sbcovid19.com. The public can also contact the coronavirus public information line from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday at (909) 387-3911, or email the county at [email protected]. ADVERTISEMENT

CALIFORNIA

Your guide to coronavirus face masks and coverings: How to do it right Bibi Sheonarine shows a face mask she sewed. The Upland resident asked friends and neighbors to help her sew the face coverings after realizing there was a shortage of face masks. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

By ANDREA CASTILLO, RONG-GONG LIN II, DIYA CHACKO, MARIA L. LA GANGA

APRIL 6, 2020 | 9:07 AM

Wearing masks or other face coverings is now recommended as one way of slowing the spread of the coronavirus.

But the new suggestion has led to some confusion because, for weeks, federal authorities insisted masks were not necessary. And while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, along with many California officials, suggest wearing them while shopping or being out in public, President Trump says he won’t be covering his face.

LIFESTYLE How to make your own coronavirus face mask — including a no-sew one April 2, 2020

Here is a guide to coronavirus and mask usage:

What do we know about the effectiveness of masks?

Experts say masks alone are not particularly effective in preventing infection. They don’t cover the eyes, for instance, and a bit of coughed saliva that sprays into the eye can cause an infection.

Wearing a mask but still touching your face with unwashed, virus-contaminated hands can also lead to infection. People often find masks uncomfortable and touch them to make adjustments.

But even if they don’t provide full protection to the wearer, masks can protect others nearby by removing contaminated droplets from the air released by asymptomatic people when breathing or talking.

Research published by Cambridge University Press in 2013 found that homemade cloth masks “significantly” reduced the amount of potentially infectious droplets expelled by the wearer.

Dr. Otto Yang, a UCLA expert in infectious diseases, said he thought universal mask- wearing had helped keep the virus under control in places such as Singapore and Taiwan.

“My personal opinion is that that’s probably been an important thing in other countries flattening their curve,” he said. “If you go to Taiwan or Singapore, everyone’s got a mask on all the time. Healthy or not. Sick or not.”

CALIFORNIA

Coronavirus could leave U.S. with a lasting imprint: Masks as normal part of life April 3, 2020

What are some basic tips?

The California Department of Public Health has these guidelines for cloth masks:

Face coverings can be made out of cloth, factory-made or hand-sewn, or improvised using bandannas, scarves, T-shirts, sweatshirts or towels. The material should cover both the nose and mouth. Be sure your mask is comfortable; you don’t want to have to keep adjusting the mask, because that means touching your face. Wash your hands, or use hand sanitizer, before and after touching your face or face coverings.

SCIENCE

How to keep your coronavirus face mask clean April 4, 2020

How do you keep your mask clean?

California health officials recommend frequently washing cloth face masks — ideally after each use, or at least daily. Place the coverings in a bag or bin until they can be washed with detergent and hot water and dried on a hot cycle (or at least washed with hot, soapy water). If you have to wear the covering again before washing it, wash your hands immediately after putting it back on and avoid touching your face. And throw out any masks that no longer cover your nose and mouth, have stretched out or damaged straps, can’t stay on your face or have holes or tears in the fabric.

COMPANY TOWN

Coronavirus turned these costumers into Hollywood’s ‘mask crusaders’ April 4, 2020

How do you make your own mask?

It’s not that hard. The Times has a guide here as well as video.

Bibi Sheonarine, a 66-year-old real estate broker decided to start making cloth masks from her Upland home.

First, she measured her face — ear to ear, nose to lower chin. Then she measured her husband’s face. He’s 73. She cut rectangles out of a bolt of cream-colored corduroy that she’d planned to use to make clothes for war-ravaged Syrians. She stitched elastic bands to the ends — and voila. The mask was done.

“It took me 10 minutes,” she said. “I made a simple video tutorial so others could make them, even a child.”

By March 27, she’d made 459 of them. Some went to local hospitals, others to family members in New York. And she realized that just maybe she and her neighbors could make a dent in the mask shortage. So she took to Facebook and Nextdoor, recruiting other crafty volunteers. BUSINESS

Searching for a mask? In coronavirus panic, L.A. stores are sold out Feb. 28, 2020

What should you not do?

State and local officials said people should not use medical or surgical masks, which are desperately needed by healthcare personnel.

Additionally, mask wearing is not a substitute for other key coronavirus guidance — such as handwashing and social distancing. Here are the basics:

Wash your hands for at least 20 seconds with soap and water. If you’re working outside your home, wash your hands before, during and after your shift. Avoid touching your face. If you choose to wear gloves, wash your hands before and after wearing them, and use the same precautions you would if you weren’t wearing gloves — i.e., don’t touch a surface and then touch another person. Avoid close contact with others. That means no mass gatherings or any other meet- ups in places where people may congregate. If you absolutely must be out in public, maintain a 6-foot radius of personal space. Here’s more on how best to do it.

CALIFORNIA

Face masks could provide coronavirus protection. But there’s a ‘but’ April 2, 2020 What worries experts about masks?

“What’s the downside to asking people to put on masks or wrap their faces with a shawl?” said Dr. William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University. “It may make some people think they’re bulletproof. Some bozo out there will say, ‘Let’s put on our bandannas and have a poker party tonight.’”

Summer Johnson McGee, dean of the University of New Haven’s School of Health Sciences, said there was still a lack of research on the effectiveness of using masks to slow the spread of the coronavirus. But she doesn’t see how wearing one can hurt.

“What do we have to lose?” she said. “Masks may prevent some transmission, which is better than not trying to prevent transmission at all.”

SCIENCE

CDC recommends wearing face masks during coronavirus pandemic April 3, 2020

Why has the guidance around masks been so confusing?

The CDC recommended face coverings Friday after insisting for weeks that healthy people did not need to wear masks in most circumstances.

“The transmission from individuals without symptoms is playing a more significant role in the spread of the virus than previously understood,” President Trump said Friday when announcing the new advice at a White House briefing. “So you don’t seem to have symptoms and it still gets transferred.” Surgeon General Jerome Adams acknowledged that government advice about masks had been “confusing to the American people.”

Until now, the CDC has said that healthy people do not need a mask unless they are working in a healthcare setting or caring for an infected person. “The best available evidence” did not suggest that wearing a mask would do much to protect a healthy person from contracting COVID-19, Adams said.

What changed that thinking was a recognition that people were spreading the virus even when they seemed healthy.

For instance, a study published Wednesday in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report documented seven clusters of COVID-19 cases in Singapore that were fueled by infected people who showed no signs of illness.

One of those clusters began with two tourists from Wuhan, China, who visited a church when they arrived in Singapore on Jan. 19 and fell ill several days later. Three other people who attended the same church that day became sick over the next four to 15 days. One of those patients sat in the same seat as one of the tourists, according to closed-circuit camera footage of the church.

Now that it’s clear asymptomatic people are spreading the virus, U.S. health officials decided everyone should wear cloth face coverings in places such as grocery stores and pharmacies, Adams said.

The masks will “help people who do have the virus and do not know it” by limiting their ability to transmit it to others, he said.

CALIFORNIA

Garcetti urges L.A. to wear face coverings when doing essential tasks in public April 1, 2020 Should wearing masks be mandatory?

It is in Riverside County.

The county’s public health officer on Saturday ordered all residents to cover their faces when leaving home, marking a dramatic escalation by county officials in their attempts to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Dr. Cameron Kaiser said, despite previous pleas from county officials for residents to socially distance, cover their faces and stay home, “more and more” residents were getting infected with the virus, and “not everyone’s getting the message.”

“We change from saying that you should to saying that you must,” Kaiser said in a prepared statement published by the county.

Face coverings can include bandannas, scarves “or other clothing that does not have visible holes,” according to a prepared statement from the county.

But Riverside is an outlier. Both federal and state mask guidance is currently just a recommendation.

× This woman is making hundreds of masks to donate to … Census is counting on you even during coronavirus – Daily Bulletin

   

LOCAL NEWS Census is counting on you even during coronavirus

   

https://www.dailybulletin.com/2020/04/02/census-is-counting-on-you-even-during-coronavirus/[4/3/2020 12:40:19 PM] Census is counting on you even during coronavirus – Daily Bulletin

After the blue postcard of shame arrived in the mail, it was time to face up to the census. (Photo by David Allen, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

By DAVID ALLEN | [email protected] | Inland Valley Daily Bulletin  PUBLISHED: April 2, 2020 at 2:16 p.m. | UPDATED: April 2, 2020 at 2:16 p.m.

Finally, it’s April. Officially Wednesday was the start of April, but I didn’t want to prematurely declare victory over March in case the calendar flip was merely an April Fool’s trick and Thursday turned out to be March 33. But as I write this on April 2, this seems to be April for real.

I have to be honest, so far I’m not seeing a lot of difference. We’re all likely to be stuck at home through April 30 at least. To paraphrase the Who, “meet the new month, same as the old month.” S Still, this March-like month has a new name, and that counts for something.

Did you get a census form? I did. On March 17, right after the stay-at-home order had gone out for

https://www.dailybulletin.com/2020/04/02/census-is-counting-on-you-even-during-coronavirus/[4/3/2020 12:40:19 PM] Census is counting on you even during coronavirus – Daily Bulletin

L.A. County and on my first, disorienting day of working from home, the mail included an envelope from the U.S. Census Bureau.

TOP ARTICLES 1/5

.st0{fill:#FFFFFF;}.st1{fill:#0099FF;}

READ MORE Final Four: Voting for Southern California favorite My reaction was to laugh in disbelief and set the envelope aside for later. Laughing not because the census isn’t important. Laughing because of the timing. The census folks were already worried about getting everyone counted, and then here comes the census right at the start of a pandemic.

A second census envelope arrived a week or so later and I put it atop the other one, unopened. This was slightly irresponsible of me, especially with the block letters on the front reading “Your Response is Required by Law,” but I had a lot on my mind: viruses, death, how to feed myself with restaurants closed, that sort of thing.

https://www.dailybulletin.com/2020/04/02/census-is-counting-on-you-even-during-coronavirus/[4/3/2020 12:40:19 PM] Census is counting on you even during coronavirus – Daily Bulletin

Then on Tuesday came a blue postcard reminder.

“Help us conserve natural resources, process data more efficiently and save taxpayer money by responding online,” it reads in part. “Otherwise, a Census Bureau interviewer may visit you to complete your 2020 Census questionnaire.”

This shamed me into action. I didn’t want a poor census employee to have to knock on my door during coronavirus, as if I were some backwoods bumpkin or anti-government zealot, and ask me basic questions through my screen door.

The next day, April 1, was National Census Day. That wasn’t a deadline but the date was a focal point for census efforts. That morning I booted up my laptop, went to my2020census.gov and logged in with the code they’d given me.

That morning’s newspaper had a big story on the census by my colleagues Deepa Bharath and Steve Scauzillo. The deadline for the questionnaire is now Aug 14 after having originally been July 31. California households so far have a response rate, 35.7%, a little under the 36.2% national average.

California, below average? I’d better get cracking to rescue our state’s reputation.

First I was asked to verify my address. Done. Then I was asked how many people were living in my household as of April 1. Just me.

The census, perhaps aware of my absent-mindedness, was unsatisfied. “Were there any additional people staying here on April 1, 2020, that you did not include in Question 1?” Suggestions to prompt my memory included “newborn babies,” relatives, live-in babysitters and “people staying here temporarily.”

I made a quick survey of my household and, finding no one else here, including newborns, stuck with

https://www.dailybulletin.com/2020/04/02/census-is-counting-on-you-even-during-coronavirus/[4/3/2020 12:40:19 PM] Census is counting on you even during coronavirus – Daily Bulletin

my original answer.

Am I an owner or a renter? Renter. My telephone number was requested and I filled it in.

My sex, date of birth and age were asked and answered. “Is David Allen of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin?” I should be so lucky. No.

“What is David Allen’s race?” The first choice was the correct one: white. How boring.

So many more options were listed: “black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Asian Indian (Pakistani, Cambodian, Hmong), Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Chamorro, other Pacific Islander (Tongan, Fijian, Marshallese).”

Every one of those sounds more interesting than being white. Chamorro, by the way, was new to me. To be Chamorro is to be a member of the indigenous people of the Mariana Islands, including Guam.

I was then asked if I “usually stay or live somewhere else” than this address. A variety of yes options were supplied: at college, in the military, for work, in a nursing home, with a parent or other relative, “at a seasonal or second residence,” or “in a jail or prison.”

What a range, especially there at the end. I might usually live at my summer home in Martha’s Vineyard, say, or New York City, or Paris. Or I might divide my time between Claremont and San Quentin. But, no, I’m afraid I’m stuck here year-round.

I was taking a census, but also thinking about my place in the universe and fantasizing about alternate lives I might be leading. Well, we’re supposed to keep mentally stimulated during lockdown, right?

Had I found more people in my household, further questions would have followed about their relationship to me. I could have biological or adopted children, stepchildren, a partner of the same or opposite sex (the same-sex option is new this census), parents, siblings, grandchildren, “parent-in- law,” foster children or roommates.

But it’s just me, and my survey was completed inside of 10 minutes. I was a little sheepish that I’d waited two weeks for something so simple.

An accurate count is important. The census is the only population count we have. And federal money to cities and states for schools, roads and more is often apportioned based on population.

Right now, with Congress basically turning on the firehose RELATED ARTICLES and spraying the country with high-pressure dollars as fast as they can be borrowed, the importance of an accurate https://www.dailybulletin.com/2020/04/02/census-is-counting-on-you-even-during-coronavirus/[4/3/2020 12:40:19 PM] Census is counting on you even during coronavirus – Daily Bulletin

Spring is in bloom at Arcadia’s Arboretum, which is still open during coronavirus population count should not be dismissed.

Is it still March? Month crawls by in If you haven’t filled out your census form, do it. These days Southern California during coronavirus it’s hard to plead that you don’t have any time.

Upland native now in China shares With the census handled, now I can go back to fretting coronavirus tales, tips about viruses, death and how to feed myself with

Beaches were crowded, but the sun restaurants closed. Is there any good Chamorro takeout? shines in Pomona too during coronavirus David Allen writes Friday, Sunday and Wednesday, a Series of last restaurant meals during schedule you can count on. Email [email protected], coronavirus ends in Chino Hills phone 909-483-9339, visit insidesocal.com/davidallen, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.

Newsroom Guidelines News Tips Contact Us Report an Error

Tags: Coronavirus, David Allen Column, Top Stories IVDB, US Census

David Allen | reporter Since 1997, David Allen has been taking up valuable newsprint and pixels at the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, where he is a columnist and blogger (insidesocal.com/davidallen). Among his specialties: city council meetings, arts and culture, people, places, local history, dining and a log in a field that resembled the Loch Ness monster. The Illinois native has spent his newspaper career in California, starting in 1987 at the Santa Rosa News-Herald and continuing at the Rohnert Park-Cotati Clarion, Petaluma Argus-Courier and Victor Valley Daily Press. A resident of Claremont who roots for the St. Louis Cardinals and knows far too much about Marvel Comics, the Kinks and Frank Zappa's Inland Valley years, he is the author of two collections of columns: 'Pomona A to Z' and 'Getting Started.'

[email protected]

 Follow David Allen @davidallen909

https://www.dailybulletin.com/2020/04/02/census-is-counting-on-you-even-during-coronavirus/[4/3/2020 12:40:19 PM] https://nyti.ms/2UTNk06

The Coronavirus LIVE Latest Updates Understand Face Masks Maps Markets What You Can Do Newslette Outbreak

Coronavirus in the U.S.: How Fast Itʼs Growing

By Josh Katz, Kevin Quealy and Margot Sanger-Katz Updated April 3, 2020, 12:21 PM E.T.

Totals over time Growth rate

Rate by severity Recent changes

Maps

The New York metropolitan area has become the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic.

But growth in cases and deaths also continues in other parts of the United States, including large metros like New Orleans and Detroit, and some smaller ones like Albany, Ga., where a large funeral apparently seeded many cases. If current patterns hold, several communities are on track to have epidemics as serious as New York’s.

The accompanying charts, which will be updated daily using data collected by The New York Times, describe the outbreak for metro areas around the country. Metropolitan areas are helpful units because they reﬂect the places where people socialize, commute and share health care resources.

Cumulative Cases and Deaths by Metro Area

These charts show cumulative coronavirus cases and deaths for metropolitan areas over time. Use the search box to compare growth rates in an area near you.

Choose a metro area Conﬁrmed cases by metro area for places with at least 200 cases Reported Partial (today) Current doubling time, in days

1 2 3 4 7 30

Cases double ...every 2 days every day ...every 3 days 100k New York City

Lombardy 50k region, Italy

20k

10k Detroit

5k Miami Seattle ...every week

Atlanta

500 ...every month

200 10 days 20 30 since 200th case

Deaths by metro area for places with at least 100 deaths

Deaths double ...every 2 days every day ...every 3 days Lombardy region, Italy

New York City 2k ...every week 1k

500

Detroit

New Orleans 200 ...every month Chicago

100 10 days 20 since 100th death

Notes: Cases and deaths are plotted on a log scale. Doubling times are based on growth rates averaged over the previous week. Some data points are interpolated to account for missing values.

What to look for Focus on the slope of the curve more than the absolute number of cases or deaths. Flatter is better.

The numbers are being measured on what’s called a logarithmic scale: A straight line means exponential growth, and the steeper a line, the faster the total number of conﬁrmed coronavirus cases or deaths is doubling. New metropolitan areas will be added to these charts once they experience 200 conﬁrmed cases or 100 deaths.

We are showing both case and death data because both have strengths and weaknesses. Cases give a better sense of what’s going on right now (deaths lag infections by weeks). But case counts are subject to variable rates of testing: Cases could fall in places simply because fewer tests are being done. Deaths from the virus are more likely to be counted.

In addition to metropolitan areas in the United States, we've included one foreign metropolitan area. The Lombardy region of Italy was an early and severe hot spot for the disease and may be helpful for comparison. Data there is not perfect either.

Daily Growth Rate

Another way of looking at how cases and deaths are changing in metropolitan areas is to plot the growth rates directly. Choose a metro area

Daily growth rate of conﬁrmed cases once reaching 200 cases

+80%

+60%

+40% Lafayette, La.

Providence, R.I.

+20% New Orleans

New York City San Francisco

Lombardy region, Italy Mar. 15 Mar. 22 Mar. 29

Daily growth rate of deaths once reaching 100 deaths

+40%

Detroit +30% Chicago New York City

+20% New Orleans

+10%

Lombardy region, Italy

Mar. 15 Mar. 22 Mar. 29

Notes: Growth rates are averaged over the previous week.

What to look for Root for these to go to zero. Low-seeming numbers still mean a lot of growth: A 20 percent daily growth rate means cases or deaths will double in less than four days.

With epidemics, these rates are often more important than the current totals because they tell us whether things are getting better or worse. A reading of 40 percent on the charts above means that, on average, the number of deaths in a place has been increasing by 40 percent each day. A reading of 100 percent would mean that cases were doubling daily.

Growth Rates by Case Count

The charts below show the growth rate by the number of cases or deaths in a given metropolitan area.

Choose a metro area

Daily growth rate of conﬁrmed cases once reaching 200 cases +80%

+60%

+40%

+20% New Orleans Detroit Los Angeles Boston New York City

Lombardy region, Italy 0 2 4 Total conﬁrmed cases per 1,000 people →

Daily growth rate of deaths once reaching 100 deaths

+40%

Detroit +30% Chicago Chicago

New York City

+20% New Orleans

+10%

Seattle Lombardy region, Italy

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 Total deaths per 1,000 people →

Notes: Growth rates are averaged over the previous week.

What to look for High growth rates combined with a lot of conﬁrmed cases is a bad combination.

Here, the growth rate is shown based not on how long an area has had coronavirus cases or deaths, but on how large its outbreak has become. If a line extends farther to the right, there’s a higher chance that people could become sick and die if the growth rate remains high.

New Cases and Deaths per 1,000 People

Instead of adding up all of the conﬁrmed cases and deaths from the start of the epidemic, these charts focus on new cases in various places, adjusted according to the population size of that metro area.

Choose a metro area

New weekly conﬁrmed cases per thousand once reaching 200 conﬁrmed cases New Orleans

3 New York City

Edwards, Colo.

Detroit

1 Lombardy region, Italy

Miami

Mar. 15 Mar. 22 Mar. 29

New weekly deaths per thousand once reaching 100 deaths

Lombardy 0.25 region, Italy

0.20 0.15

New Orleans

0.10 New York City

Detroit

0.05

Seattle Chicago

Mar. 15 Mar. 22 Mar. 29

What to look for If the number of new cases starts to fall, the severity of the initial outbreak may have peaked.

This chart can make it easier to see places where the concentration of infections or deaths has waxed and waned. Places that are high on the right-hand side of the chart have experienced a lot of recent infections or deaths, relative to their populations. Places where the lines point down might have begun to ﬂatten their local curves.

Maps of Metro Areas

These maps show the number of cases or deaths in all of the country’s metropolitan and micropolitan areas over the last four weeks.

Recent conﬁrmed cases, last 4 weeks Per thousand residents 0.100 0.250 0.500 1.000 2.000 4.000

Recent deaths, last 4 weeks Per thousand residents (in places with 3 deaths or more)

0.005 0.010 0.025 0.050 0.100 0.200 Because some parts of the country are more densely populated than others, these numbers are all adjusted for how many people live in each area. The darker an area appears, the greater proportion of its population is infected. This map also shows the parts of the country that are not categorized as metropolitan or micropolitan areas by the U.S. Census Bureau; those are shaded in light gray. Places without substantial cases or deaths are shaded in dark gray. These measurements focus on recent cases and deaths to give a sense of where coronavirus infections are widespread now.

World

United States

Deaths by country and state

Stay-at-home orders by state

Alabama Illinois Montana Puerto Rico

Alaska Indiana Nebraska Rhode Island

Arizona Iowa Nevada South Carolina

Arkansas Kansas New Hampshire South Dakota

California Kentucky New Jersey Tennessee

Colorado Louisiana New Mexico Texas

Connecticut Maine New York Utah

Delaware Maryland North Carolina Vermont

District of Columbia Massachusetts North Dakota Virginia

Florida Michigan Ohio Washington

Georgia Minnesota Oklahoma West Virginia

Hawaii Mississippi Oregon Wisconsin

Idaho Missouri Pennsylvania Wyoming

Source: New York Times database of reports from state and local health agencies, hospitals and C.D.C. data.

Additional reporting by Mitch Smith, Karen Yourish, Sarah Almuhktar and Danielle Ivory. ADVERTISEMENT

15-Year Fixed 2.38% 2.66% APR Today's Refinance Rate 30-Year Fixed 2.75% 2.96% APR

5/1 ARM 3.00% 3.23% APR

$225,000 (5/1 ARM) $949/mo 3.23% APR Calculate Payment $350,000 (5/1 ARM) $1,476/mo 3.18% APR Terms & Conditions apply. NMLS#1136

CALIFORNIA

To aid coronavirus fight, The Times releases database of California cases

The Los Angeles Times headquarters in El Segundo. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

By BEN WELSH DATA AND GRAPHICS EDITOR

APRIL 6, 2020 | 10:01 AM In an effort to aid scientists and researchers in the fight against COVID-19, The Times has released its database of California coronavirus cases to the public.

To follow the virus’ spread, The Times is conducting an independent survey of dozens of local health agencies across the state. The effort, run continually throughout the day, supplies the underlying data for this site’s coronavirus tracker.

Its tallies can arrive days ahead of numbers published by the California Department of Public Health. By polling local agencies, The Times database also gathers some information not provided by the state. The system has won praise from public health officials, who do not dispute its method of data collection.

California coronavirus cases: Tracking the outbreak

In recent weeks, experts have asked for access to the records in order to better study the pandemic. Starting today, the database is available on Github, a popular website for hosting data and computer code. The files will be updated daily at github.com/datadesk/california-coronavirus-data.

The Times data are already being put to use. The medical school at UC San Francisco today launched a new website for investigating COVID-19. The site, called the UCSF Health Atlas, is at healthatlas.ucsf.edu.

It allows users to cross-reference the location of coronavirus cases with other factors, like age, race and income. This practice is common in the field of public health, where scientists scour data to identify the underlying forces that drive the spread of disease.

“The coronavirus is something that we know has the ability to affect everyone,” said Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, chair of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at UCSF. “We also know that the impact of COVID is not going to be seen uniformly across the state.”

Bibbins-Domingo says it’s too soon to fully understand the forces shaping the coronavirus outbreak, which is why she says it’s vital to closely monitor the data as they arrive.

“As this pandemic plays out we will see many more patterns emerge,” she said. “Being able to see the COVID cases overlaid with other factors will help all of us better understand.” Bibbins-Domingo said she hopes the new site can make the techniques used by experts accessible to a wider group of people, including journalists, policy makers, students and the general public.

The Times data are free for personal, non-commercial use, though some restrictions apply. For instance, reselling the raw data is prohibited. Terms of use are spelled out on Github.

CALIFORNIA

Q&A: Behind the scenes of The Times’ coronavirus tracking effort April 1, 2020

CALIFORNIA

The stories shaping California Get up to speed with our Essential California newsletter, sent six days a week.

Enter Email Address

SIGN ME UP

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Ben Welsh

Twitter Email Github Facebook Linkedin

Ben Welsh is the editor of the Data and Graphics Department, a team of reporters and computer programmers who collect, organize, analyze and present large amounts of information. Send him tips at [email protected], on Signal at 626-382-6910 or via Keybase.

RELATED CONTENT

Amazon res warehouse worker who led Staten Island facility walkout

10 Amazon warehouses, including in Moreno Valley, hit with coronavirus cases

Michigan nurse uses paint to demonstrate how fast germs can spread while grocery shopping

Suggest a Correction

SHARE THIS STORY

YOU MAY LIKE Sponsored Links by Taboola Soak Your Dark Spots With This One Thing (Trending Morning Routine) Gundry MD

If Your Dog Eats Dry Food, Do This Everyday Ultimate Pet Nutrition Nutra Thrive Supplement Video calls replace hugs for elderly in senior care amid coronavirus outbreak – Daily Bulletin

NEWS Video calls replace hugs for elderly in senior care amid coronavirus outbreak 'It breaks my heart that he could die before this is over,' one woman says of her 83-year-old father, who has Alzheimer's

   

https://www.dailybulletin.com/...tm_source=twitter.com&utm_content=tw-ivdailybulletin&utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_medium=social[4/6/2020 10:39:04 AM] Video calls replace hugs for elderly in senior care amid coronavirus outbreak – Daily Bulletin

Vicki Ritter, left, of Orange stands on a patio as she takes a photo through the window of her mother, Marcella Olmstead, who sits inside at the Best Elderly Care home in Villa Park on Friday afternoon, April 3, 2020. The two speak to each other via cell phone for their visits during the coronavirus pandemic. (Photo by Mark Rightmire, Orange County Register/SCNG)

By SCOTT SCHWEBKE | [email protected] | Orange County Register  PUBLISHED: April 6, 2020 at 6:30 a.m. | UPDATED: April 6, 2020 at 6:31 a.m.

Three times a day for more than four years, 88-year-old Jeanne Wintheiser would amble from her one-bedroom apartment at the Town & Country senior community through a labyrinth of hallways and corridors to reach the room of her husband, an Alzheimer’s patient at the other end of the sprawling Santa Ana facility.

There, she would often feed Bob Wintheiser, 89, his favorite meal — hamburgers — and together during baseball season they would watch their beloved Los Angeles Angels on television. M About two weeks ago, however, the Wintheisers’ visits were suspended as senior care facilities across Southern California went on lockdown, prohibiting visitors and limiting the movement of

vulnerable residents inside to protect them from the ravages of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.

But that hasn’t prevented the Wintheisers from maintaining contact with each other. Every day at a designated time and with assistance from a pair of nurses, the couple use computer tablets to video chat from their separate rooms.

TOP ARTICLES 1/5

.st0{fill:#FFFFFF;}.st1{fill:#0099FF;}

READ MORE Altadena couple weds and neighbors find a way to “I can see him and he can see me,” Jeanne Wintheiser said in a phone interview as she strolled around Town & Country’s courtyard. “It’s kind of sad, but Bob isn’t real talkative anyway.”

Contact from afar

Welcome to the new normal, where hugs and handshakes have been supplanted with apps like FaceTime and Zoom, along with some decidedly low-tech approaches at nursing homes, assisted- living centers and senior-care facilities scattered across Southern California. https://www.dailybulletin.com/...tm_source=twitter.com&utm_content=tw-ivdailybulletin&utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_medium=social[4/6/2020 10:39:04 AM] Video calls replace hugs for elderly in senior care amid coronavirus outbreak – Daily Bulletin

Mary Kay Sherman, 66, of Corona, who is the Wintheisers’ daughter, says despite the options for staying connected, she still misses visiting her parents three times a week at Town & Country.

She laments losing the simple pleasure of taking her mom to a nearby CVS pharmacy for a cookie and a soda. “CVS is a hot date for her,” Sherman said with a chuckle.

Sherman has only caught fleeting glimpses of her parents from afar since Town & Country’s public closure last month. On one occasion March 22, she and other family members surprised her dad by gathering outside his second-floor bedroom to serenade him on his birthday.

“We had a nurse close his bedroom curtain and window,” Sherman said. “Then she opened the window. We sang “Happy Birthday.” My dad loves music.”

That same day, Sherman talked to her mom for a few minutes outside an open sliding glass door at Town & Country while maintaining appropriate social distancing.

Although Sherman phones her mom daily, nothing replaces one-on-one visits. “Not being able to give her a hug, that’s really hard,” she said.

Jeanne Wintheiser is quick to note she is receiving terrific care at Town & Country, where staff members deliver meals, prescribed medications, puzzles and snacks to her room.

The dining room has been shuttered and social activities have been abandoned, but she stays busy reading, doing puzzles and watching television.

“I’m really trying to keep occupied,” Jeanne Wintheiser said. “I’m glad I’m not living alone in a big house. But I don’t want this to go on for weeks and weeks and weeks.”

Heartbroken she can’t see parents

Wendy Koch, 58, of Anaheim Hills, has a different concern.

She fears her parents, John and Heather Barnes — who reside at ActivCare Yorba Linda, a specialized memory-care facility — could further deteriorate if the pandemic precautions continue for months.

Heather Barnes, 79, uses a wheelchair and suffers from Alzheimer’s, while her 86-year-old husband is in hospice with a heart condition and dementia. They share a room at the facility.

Koch understands the need to isolate her parents, but is heartbroken she can’t see them unless they exhibit end-of-life symptoms.

“I got one last visit (more than a week ago) but I’m sure the next visit won’t be a good one,” said Koch, who sympathizes with others in the same predicament. “I feel bad for families that can’t see their loved ones who are trapped in nursing homes.”

Father ‘may die alone’

Cindy Carter, 60, of Orange worries for both her mother-in law, Barbara Carter, 88, who is in the independent living wing at Town & Country, and her father, Frank Parrish, an 83-year-old Alzheimer’s patient in hospice at Lakewood Gardens in Downey.

She hasn’t seen either of the them since early March and is especially concerned for her dad, whose condition is declining.

“I fear that I won’t see him again and that he may die alone,” she said. “My hope is that he lives long enough for my family and I to see him again. I feel that he responds to the human touch and interaction we have with him even if he no longer knows who we are. It breaks my heart that he could die before this is over.”

Illness and isolation

Although existing COVID-19 protocols aim to protect seniors, prolonged isolation and loneliness puts them at risk for cognitive decline, depression, anxietry and heart disease, the National Institute on Aging said in a 2019 report.

Research by Steve Cole, director of the Social Genomics Core Laboratory at UCLA, also found that loneliness can change cells in the immune system promoting inflammation, which helps bodies heal https://www.dailybulletin.com/...tm_source=twitter.com&utm_content=tw-ivdailybulletin&utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_medium=social[4/6/2020 10:39:04 AM] Video calls replace hugs for elderly in senior care amid coronavirus outbreak – Daily Bulletin

following an injury, according to the NIA. However, prolonged inflammation increases the possibility of chronic diseases, Cole found.

Getting a jump on the virus

Southern California senior care facilities are a fertile hunting ground for the deadly virus.

So far, there have been 11 deaths at nursing homes, assisted-living facilities and senior-care facilities in Los Angeles County, officials reported Friday. San Bernardino County had five deaths and Orange County reported three. Figures were not immediately available for Riverside County.

Mariana Nita, a 59 year-old registered nurse who owns Best Elderly Care in Villa Park, a facility for six women ranging in age from 85 to 95, realized early on COVID-19 would likely reach Southern California, possibly endangering her vulnerable residents.

In late February, as the virus continued to pillage China and RELATED ARTICLES began making inroads into Europe, particularly Italy, it

Altadena couple weds and neighbors find became clear the U.S. was also in danger, Nita said. She a way to celebrate in age of coronavirus stepped up seasonal cold and flu protocols at her facility and braced for more stringent measures. Stocks rise sharply on signs of progress in battling virus “We also put a sign on the entry door stating, if any visitors had signs and symptoms of a cold or they had a cold in the Long Beach nonprofit to help rural poor in Guatemala after coronavirus shutdown last few days to reschedule their visit,” Nita said. “We also monitored our residents who went out to the doctor’s office Coronavirus sheds light on how many for any signs or symptoms of a cold so we could isolate Southern Californians still lack internet them in order to stop it from spreading. A simple cold could access be a death sentence for my residents.” Photos: Photographer’s eerie images of LA’s formerly bustling neighborhoods Then, in early March, COVID-19 began to bear down on California. Nita, after consulting with the families of her residents, decided to cancel all nonessential doctors appointments to limit their exposure.

“The precautions put in place by us did help,” Nita said. “However, we don’t feel that we are out of danger yet. This virus is very unpredictable so we have to stay alert and vigilant. The problem is that we don’t know for how long this will continue. We are working hard to flatten the curve.”

Staff Writer David Rosenfeld contributed to this report. https://www.dailybulletin.com/...tm_source=twitter.com&utm_content=tw-ivdailybulletin&utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_medium=social[4/6/2020 10:39:04 AM] ADVERTISEMENT

Learn today, lead tomorrow. Evening, Executive & Online MBA

WORLD & NATION

‘Hardest, saddest’ days ahead in coronavirus outbreak, surgeon general warns

The Manhattan skyline provides a backdrop to a pedestrian in Brooklyn, N.Y. Hospitals in New York City have been hit hard by the coronavirus. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

By LAURA KING STAFF WRITER

APRIL 5, 2020 | 2:22 PM UPDATED 5:22 PM WASHINGTON — As the U.S. coronavirus death toll neared 10,000 on Sunday, Surgeon Gen. Jerome Adams said the coming week would be “the hardest and saddest of most Americans’ lives,” likening the projected loss of life to “our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment.”

Joining in that somber assessment was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, who predicted that the dimensions of the outbreak would be “shocking to some” over the next eight or nine days.

“Things are going to get bad, and we need to be prepared for that,” Fauci, perhaps the best-known member of the White House coronavirus task force, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

He called on the country to “just buckle down, continue to mitigate, continue to do the physical separation, because we’ve got to get through this week that’s coming up.”

President Trump, however, largely eschewed talk of dire coming days, instead expressing hopes for a “leveling-off in the hottest spots” of infection. Brushing aside criticism of his administration’s performance, he said in an early- evening briefing that he was making use of “the full power of the American government.”

“We’re orchestrating a massive federal response, unlike anything our country has ever done,” he said, later adding: “We’re starting to see light at the end of the tunnel.”

Earlier Sunday, officials offered hope that in some areas hit hard and early, the coronavirus wave may be cresting. New York City is the national epicenter of the outbreak, its medical system staggering under a critical caseload, but Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the state’s daily death toll had dropped slightly.

Even so, Cuomo, who has been praised for steady leadership amid the crisis, said at a briefing in his state’s capital, Albany, that it was too soon to know if the slight easing marked a downward trend or was merely a “blip.”

Flare-ups of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, were in evidence elsewhere in the country — in New Jersey, across the river from Manhattan, and in Louisiana, whose governor warned that ventilator capacity would soon be exhausted. In Europe, the picture was mixed. Deaths were still climbing in the United Kingdom, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose COVID-19 diagnosis was announced March 26, was hospitalized Sunday. Trump expressed hopes for his recovery, saying Johnson was “strong.”

But Italy — the European epicenter — said Sunday that its daily toll was at a two-week low, with officials crediting strict lockdowns for seemingly slowing the progress of new infections. Hard-hit Spain, too, reported signs of a leveling-off.

U.S. officials pleaded for public cooperation in hopes of replicating that pattern.

U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams speaks about the coronavirus pandemic. (Alex Brandon / Associated Press)

“We can look like that,” said Dr. Deborah Birx, the coronavirus task force coordinator. Referring to strict isolation measures in Spain and Italy, she said: “The promise is, if we do this, we could potentially be better.”

Adams, appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” urged Americans to follow physical distancing guidelines and to wear face coverings in public when it would be difficult to remain six feet apart. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week called on Americans to wear masks in crowded public places. Trump said Friday of that precaution: “I don’t see it for myself.” The surgeon general, like many in the president’s orbit, was at pains to avoid publicly contradicting or criticizing him. “The president is making a choice that is appropriate for him” regarding masks, said Adams, who last week released a video showing how to make a simple homemade face covering with fabric and rubber bands.

Governors, for their part, renewed their pleas for more federal help in procuring necessary medical supplies and equipment. In appearances on news talk shows, some sharply contested Trump’s casting of blame on states for a lack of readiness.

Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee, appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” cited good communication with Vice President Mike Pence and the CDC, but said the overall lack of national coordination in fighting the outbreak had been “ludicrous.”

Without mentioning Trump by name, he blasted the president’s contention that the federal government was meant to serve as a “backup” for states’ efforts to obtain needed supplies.

“I mean, the surgeon general alluded to Pearl Harbor,” said Inslee, a Democrat. “Can you imagine if Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, ‘I’ll be right behind you, Connecticut. Good luck building those battleships.’ Look, we need a national mobilization of the manufacturing base of the United States.”

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, another Democrat who has, like Inslee, been the target of heated personal attacks by Trump, said Sunday that more robust testing efforts were needed to help public health experts tamp down scattered outbreaks before they become major conflagrations.

“My job is to do everything I can to protect the 10 million people of Michigan,” she said on “Fox News Sunday,” noting a worrying rate of COVID-19 cases in Detroit, the state’s largest city. “Michigan is a hot spot; we need assistance, and I’m grateful for any partnership at the federal level.”

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said his state was running out of ventilators and hospital beds, as New Orleans weathers one of the nation’s worst outbreaks.

“We now think it’s probably around the 9th of April before we exceed our ventilator capacity, based on the current number on hand,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” Edwards also said the state was “a couple days behind that on [intensive care unit] bed capacity being exceeded.”

Some GOP governors who have avoided criticizing Trump or the federal response nonetheless cited worsening situations in their states. Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson pointed to the challenges of procuring personal protective equipment for medical personnel.

“It’s difficult,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” saying Arkansas had sometimes been “outbid by another state after we’ve had the order confirmed.”

He added: “It literally is a global jungle that we’re competing in now.”

While upending daily lives and livelihoods across the country, the pandemic has also disrupted the 2020 election cycle. Former Vice President Joe Biden, who appears likely to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination, on Sunday floated the idea of a “virtual” convention rather than a traditional one.

The party had already pushed back the date for anointing its nominee to mid-August from mid-July over pandemic fears. Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” Biden suggested that the event might need to be moved online.

“I think we should be thinking about that right now,” he said. “We may not be able to put 10[ thousand], 20[ thousand], 30,000 people in one place.”

The former vice president also said he intends to follow CDC guidelines and cover his face in public, for as long as that recommendation remains in place. Of Trump’s balking at that, he said: “He may not like how he looks in a mask.”

Projecting the course of the outbreak is difficult to do, experts said, because much depends on the measures being taken now and in days and weeks ahead.

Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in his CBS interview that it would be false to say the outbreak is under control, even if there are glimmers of hope on the horizon.

“We are struggling to get it under control, and that’s the issue that’s at hand right now,” he said.

During Trump’s rambling 90-minute briefing, he repeatedly touted an unproven drug treatment, hydroxychloroquine, and cut off a journalist’s attempt to ask Fauci about it. Fauci has previously expressed more skepticism about the treatment.

WORLD & NATION POLITICS CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

Must-read stories from the L.A. Times Get all the day's most vital news with our Today's Headlines newsletter, sent every weekday morning.

Enter Email Address ADVERTISEMENT

Designed with the busy, working professional in mind. Evening, Executive & Online MBA

CALIFORNIA

L.A. County tells paramedics to delay transporting cardiac patients amid coronavirus A Los Angeles Fire Department paramedic with a patient. (Los Angeles Times)

By MELANIE MASON, SOUMYA KARLAMANGLA

APRIL 4, 2020 | 6 AM

Los Angeles County officials this week ordered paramedics to wait five minutes after reviving someone in cardiac arrest to see whether their heart stops again before racing them to the hospital, a policy intended to reduce the number of high-risk patients flooding emergency rooms during the coronavirus outbreak.

The policy, which could apply to 911 patients suffering heart attacks or drug overdoses, as well as those with COVID-19, instructs first responders to wait and see whether a patient loses heart function again within five minutes after being revived. If so, paramedics will continue CPR in the field until a doctor tells them to stop because it is probably futile. CPR could continue for as long as 40 minutes, county officials said.

The aim is to keep people who are likely to die out of hospitals, which are expected to soon be overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients as the pandemic worsens. The number of people who have been hospitalized with COVID-19 in L.A. County more than doubled from Monday to Friday.

“The likelihood we’re going to do something different in the ER is unlikely, so then you’re basically putting additional risk to the system without real, clear benefit,” said Dr. Marianne Gausche-Hill, medical director of the county Emergency Medical Services Agency, who signed the policy that went into effect Monday.

Typically, cardiac arrest patients are whisked to the hospital, sometimes while CPR is ongoing. There, doctors and nurses will continue CPR until the patient is either resuscitated or dies. But experts say that patients can receive the same care in the field and that, during a pandemic, there are clear reasons to stop transporting people to the hospital unnecessarily.

HOUSING & HOMELESSNESS

Horror, fatigue and constant calls: 24 hours with skid row’s firefighters Feb. 21, 2020 Because of COVID-19, when an ambulance arrives at a hospital, medical staff who respond must don full protective gear in case the patient is sick with the coronavirus.

Performing CPR on a patient who does have COVID-19 places health workers at risk, because repeatedly pushing on the patient’s chest can release dangerous virus particles into the air.

“The physicians and nurses and other staff members in the emergency department would continue that resuscitative effort, until they would make the determination that it was futile,” said Dr. Carl Chudnofsky, chair of the department of clinical emergency medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. “But during however long that takes — whether it’s a minute or two or five or 10, whatever that case may be — everybody in that room is going to be put at great risk.”

Chudnofsky said that about 60% of patients who have been resuscitated after cardiac arrest lose heart function again within minutes. He credited the county with “trying to do the right thing” in issuing this new guidance.

“Sometimes it’s hard to make these kinds of decisions, and I applaud the fact they’re willing to do that,” he said.

Gausche-Hill said the policy simply spells out what the agency has always recommended — that paramedics wait and stabilize patients before driving them to the hospital. 1/67

Wearing gloves and a mask, Robyn Freeman, of Orange County, prays after taking communion on Palm Sunday at the Godspeak Calvary Church in Newbury Park. Communion was given inside the church on Palm Sunday using social distancing and other precautions due to coronavirus Covid 19 (Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times)

However, the county’s previous policy did not say paramedics should wait any period of time after a patient regains circulation to take them to the hospital, and the revised protocol is labeled “guidelines for transport versus termination during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

“We thought we just needed to emphasize this more than this particular document had suggested. ... Our treatment protocol for cardiac arrest has not changed,” Gausche-Hill said.

In New York, paramedics are also being advised that patients who have gone into cardiac arrest and cannot be revived in the field should not be brought to the hospital.

ADVERTISEMENT The organization that coordinates the city’s emergency medical services issued new protocols this week amid a crush of COVID-19 patients flooding hospitals and straining the 911 system.

“Emergency Departments are severely overcrowded, and transporting patients pronounced on the scene only increases ED workload and potentially exposes ED staff and patients to COVID19,” the Regional Emergency Medical Services Council of New York City said in a news release.

Emergency medicine experts say the field has been moving toward having paramedics do more CPR and related care on-site, and the coronavirus crisis has brought these issues to the forefront.

Dr. Karl Sporer, Emergency Medical Services Authority medical director for Alameda County, said L.A. County would probably have been moving in this direction “with or without the COVID epidemic.”

He said that for paramedics working in the field, the choice for treating patients in cardiac arrest is to get them immediately to a hospital or to “stay and play” to work on resuscitation on-site. He said people have been moving toward stay and play, and an upcoming study will compare the two approaches.

Jason Hemler, director of the paramedic program at Cal State Sacramento, said it has become clear that staying on the scene to continue CPR and resuscitation is better than immediately moving the patient.

For patients in cardiac arrest, “there’s nothing they can do in the hospital that they can’t do in the field,” he said.

As for the effect on patients with COVID-19, Chudnofsky emphasized that the chances of a person surviving after going into cardiac arrest and losing heart function again shortly after being resuscitated in the field are close to zero. ADVERTISEMENT

“While it’s hard for laypeople to understand that, this is something that physicians and healthcare providers are faced with every day,” he said. “Sometimes we have to make really hard decisions, because we know what the ultimate end point is or is going to be. I think this is one of those cases where we know that the likelihood of that person surviving is just not going to happen.”

CALIFORNIA CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

The stories shaping California Get up to speed with our Essential California newsletter, sent six days a week.

Enter Email Address

SIGN ME UP

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Melanie Mason

Twitter Instagram Email Facebook

Melanie Mason is a reporter covering the 2020 presidential campaign. She started with the Los Angeles Times in Washington, D.C., in 2011, covering money and politics, and she also covered state politics and government in Sacramento.

Soumya Karlamangla

Twitter Instagram Email Facebook Coronavirus sheds light on how many Southern Californians still lack internet access – Daily Bulletin

NEWS Coronavirus sheds light on how many Southern Californians still lack internet access From online schooling to applying for services to avoiding isolation, the pandemic is making digital connectivity more important than ever.

   

https://www.dailybulletin.com/...tm_source=twitter.com&utm_content=tw-ivdailybulletin&utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_medium=social[4/6/2020 10:38:17 AM] Coronavirus sheds light on how many Southern Californians still lack internet access – Daily Bulletin

Tiffany Mitchell, director of youth and community partnership for Project Hope Alliance, left, along with Case Worker Karla Alvarez, center, and CEO Jennifer Friend at their headquarters in Costa Mesa, CA, on Friday, April 3, 2020. The group is suppling WiFi hotspots to Orange County families who’ve been living in their cars or motels. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

By BROOKE STAGGS | [email protected] | Orange County Register  PUBLISHED: April 6, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. | UPDATED: April 6, 2020 at 7:38 a.m.

Jessica Lopez’s struggle to afford home internet service has always been inconvenient, making it tough for her 6-year-old daughter to do school assignments or for Lopez to complete online forms occasionally required by her employers at the Hilton of Anaheim.

Now the coronavirus pandemic has moved her daughter’s kindergarten entirely online and shuttered her hotel, eliminating her job busing tables. And Lopez said her lack of internet access is forcing some tough decisions.

Though she’s trying to obey stay-at-home orders, the 24-year-old mom said she’s had to regularly M drive across town to her parents’ house so her daughter can do her schoolwork and she can apply for support services. But her dad is still working a public job deemed essential, so every visit brings new

“It’s been very difficult,” Lopez said. “Are the kids just not supposed to do any school work?”

TOP ARTICLES 1/5

.st0{fill:#FFFFFF;}.st1{fill:#0099FF;}

READ MORE Altadena couple weds and neighbors find a way to There are nearly 700,000 households across Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties that do not have internet subscription services, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent American Community Survey from 2018. That’s more than 12% of all families across the four counties, with Orange County boasting the best connectivity and San Bernardino County narrowly edging out Los Angeles County for the lowest percentage of households with internet subscriptions.

That so-called digital divide has narrowed in recent years, thanks to government, nonprofit and corporate intervention coupled with research on how lack of internet hurts student test scores, job success and more. But, as with so many other gaping holes in the safety net, the coronavirus pandemic is shining a light on how many families still don’t have steady internet access at home, with

people of color most affected.

Virus amplifies the need

That access is needed now more than ever.

With schools across California shuttered through the end of the school year, educators are scrambling to set up distance learning programs for some 6.2 million K-12 students across the state. But early reports show a significant portion of students aren’t engaging, with trouble accessing online schoolwork viewed as a common hurdle.

People who can’t afford internet access are more likely to hold low-wage service jobs that can’t be done from home, regardless of their internet status. But those people also are more likely to be out of work right now, which means they need support such as unemployment that’s largely being handled online as physical offices are closed to slow the spread of coronavirus.

Internet access also is important for other reasons, helping to ward off depression and other mental health issues that can be triggered by isolation.

Research from previous disasters shows that social support goes a long way to reducing the adverse effects on mental health, according to Merritt Schreiber, a psychologist at UCLA Medical Center who specializes in trauma triggered by emergencies. But during the coronavirus pandemic — and the need to eliminate person-to-person contact — Schreiber said social support has to be virtual, making electronic connection essential to “flatten the curve” for the psychological impact of the crisis.

“We must facilitate electronic social support to reduce the stress of COVID and the sense of isolation and loneliness, particularly for those living alone,” Schreiber said, encouraging virtual play dates and scheduled Facetime chats between school peers.

But many outlets that families once relied on for free internet, such as after-school programs, libraries or the local Starbucks, are closed due to the coronavirus.

That’s why Democratic Party of Orange County Chair Ada Briceño and other local leaders are pushing to get money for internet access in round four of federal stimulus funding, which is already in the works to buffer ongoing impacts from the coronavirus pandemic. They also want connectivity issues to be tackled by state and local relief packages, with a hope that changes made to combat the economic and social stresses of the epidemic now will lead to long-term help for at-risk families.

“I really, really do believe that we are going to be better and stronger for the kids at the end of this because we now see what was previously invisible,” said Jennifer Friend, chief executive of Project Hope Alliance, a Costa Mesa nonprofit that works with homeless children and families.

Some help available

Some companies, agencies and organizations are helping to fill the gaps.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday announced that Google will be providing 4,000 Chromebooks to California students, and offer three months of free WiFi to 100,000 rural households across the state.

Internet service providers — including Comcast, Charter Communications/Spectrum and Cox Communications — also are offering free installation and subscriptions for 60 days. Limitations apply, though, with Charter’s offer limited to households with K-12 or college students living at home and the Charter and Cox offers limited to low-income households. And those providers don’t cover all areas.

Since Lopez has no idea when she’ll be able to return to her job at the Anaheim hotel, she worries about signing up for a temporarily free or reduced program that will auto-renew and stick her with big bills down the road.

Some school districts are loaning out WiFi hotspots along with devices such as Chromebooks. But availability varies, with reports of some families struggling to get devices or information about what’s provided.

“It’s disingenuous to claim that children have the ability to access their education online when they literally don’t have access,” Friend said.

Friend pointed out the irony of her local school district using email to ask if she had internet access and a device for her own child to use at home. “If I didn’t have either of those, I wouldn’t be able to answer either of those questions,” she said.

Project Hope Alliance has worked to narrow the digital divide by passing out WiFi hotspot devices to Orange County families who’ve been living in their cars or motels. A month ago, the group ordered 140 more WiFi hotspot devices — at nearly $40 each, with data subscriptions that cost $30 a month — so they could help when schools started closing locally. But with demand so high, Friend said they still haven’t received that initial order. Instead, they found 40 more hotspot devices through resellers so they could start getting them into people’s hands now.

Tiffany Mitchell, director of youth and community partnership for Project Hope Alliance, shows a WiFi hotspot they suppling to Orange County families who’ve been living in their cars or motels. in Costa Mesa, CA, on Friday, April 3, 2020. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Hotspots offer lifelines

Single dad Matthew Sanchez of Santa Ana received a hotspot device and a Chromebook through Project Hope Alliance.

Sanchez, 43, paid for home internet until recently. But he’s RELATED ARTICLES in recovery from his 33rd and 34th surgeries, linked to

Altadena couple weds and neighbors find complications from a gastric bypass surgery that in 2011 a way to celebrate in age of coronavirus landed him in a coma for several months, and in the hospital for nearly three years. Sanchez’s immune system Stocks rise sharply on signs of progress in is still so vulnerable that his doctors don’t want him to leave battling virus the house during the coronavirus pandemic, making work Video calls replace hugs for elderly in impossible. So he dropped internet service to trim senior care amid coronavirus outbreak expenses.

Long Beach nonprofit to help rural poor in That’s left him feeling isolated, just as he was trapped by Guatemala after coronavirus shutdown the four walls of a hospital room for so long. And since

Photos: Photographer’s eerie images of school campuses closed a few weeks ago, Sanchez said LA’s formerly bustling neighborhoods his 12-year-old daughter, Amber, has been trying to keep up with her schoolwork using his smartphone.

“I know that we’re not the only ones,” Sanchez said. “But it’s been really, really, really challenging.”

The hotspot device from Project Hope Alliance is proving to be crucial. It’s helping Sanchez stay connected and Amber to catch up in school. And, soon, Sanchez may use the device to keep his own education moving forward.

Last year, Sanchez went back to college for the first time since 1996. He’s studying to become a registered nurse, to give back to the nurses who saved his life a decade ago. Sanchez took a semester off for his surgeries, but was planning to start school again this summer. Now it’s looking like even summer classes might be held online. So until he got the hotspot device, Sanchez feared he might have to push his dream of becoming a nurse even further down the road.

Sanchez said he hopes the coronavirus pandemic will prompt the government and others to step up, so the digital divide won’t hold anyone back from pursuing their dreams when this crisis is over.

Newsroom Guidelines News Tips Contact Us Report an Error

Tags: Coronavirus, Education, politics, Top Stories Breeze, Top Stories IVDB, Top Stories LADN, Top Stories LBPT, Top Stories OCR, Top Stories PE, Top Stories PSN, Top Stories RDF, https://www.dailybulletin.com/...tm_source=twitter.com&utm_content=tw-ivdailybulletin&utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_medium=social[4/6/2020 10:38:17 AM] ADVERTISEMENT

CALIFORNIA

L.A. suicide hotline sees rise in coronavirus-related calls. Counselors feel the pain

Carolyn Levitan is the director of the crisis line at Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services, which expects a huge increase in call volume in the coming months during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

By BRITTNY MEJIA STAFF WRITER

APRIL 5, 2020 | 5 AM The voice on the other end of the line was filled with panic.

The woman on the phone had come back from the market with a dry cough; she was worried about having COVID-19, worried that she could infect her husband and her children. For a brief moment, she’d forgotten her fears and embraced her kids.

“Now I’m afraid they may have gotten it from me,” she said.

April Rosas comforted the woman the only way she could — over the phone from a small gray cubicle on the third floor of the Didi Hirsch Suicide Prevention Center in Century City.

Her children “were in need of love,” the caller said. “They were not doing OK, so I hugged them.”

“You did your role as a parent. You were there for them,” Rosas said. “That’s not a bad thing.”

The caller said she had been embarrassed to reach out. But she struggled with anxiety and had no one else to turn to.

“This is a safe place,” the 28-year-old crisis counselor reassured her. “Many people are reaching out, expressing your kind of concerns.”

But in an unusual turn of events, the crisis counselors at Didi Hirsch, whose job it is to reassure, need some reassurance of their own — because the coronavirus knows no boundaries. Didi Hirsch crisis counselors answered more than 1,800 calls related to COVID-19 in March. (Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services)

As cases mount across the country, topping 300,000 on Saturday, so too do fear and anxiety — over getting COVID-19, over loved ones who have it, over jobs lost because of it. With each day of uncertainty that passes, mental health services are becoming increasingly vital. And strained.

In New York, which has more confirmed coronavirus cases than anywhere else in the U.S., Gov. Andrew Cuomo has stressed that “the mental health impact of this pandemic is very real.” More than 6,000 mental health professionals have signed up to provide free online services in the state.

At Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services, a nonprofit organization, crisis counselors fielded more than 1,800 calls related to COVID-19 in March, versus just 20 in February. The top concerns? Anxiety and stress, health issues, relationships, loneliness and isolation. One in five COVID-19-related calls included “suicidal desire.” Although there has been only a slight uptick in overall call volume, Didi Hirsch is anticipating a huge increase in the coming months.

“We know that the longer this goes on, unfortunately, the more losses there will be — not just lives but also economic,” said Lyn Morris, senior vice president of clinical operations at Didi Hirsch. “And the more hopeless and helpless people become, the more at risk they are for substance use, depression and other mental health issues.”

For decades, Didi Hirsch crisis counselors have provided comfort to hundreds of thousands of people calling the Disaster Distress Helpline and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. They take about 130,000 calls and chats per year and have seen callers through recessions, hurricanes and the death of loved ones.

Amid the coronavirus outbreak, crisis counselors are dealing with some of the same fears as callers. (Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services)

The agency, which provides free mental health, substance-use disorder and suicide prevention services, has locations throughout Los Angeles and Orange counties.

In the last month, crisis counselors have experienced a dramatic shift in what callers want to talk about.

Rosas has heard from elderly people who haven’t left home and feel isolated.

“I just feel so lonely,” they say. “How do I deal with this loneliness?”

She has listened as parents have vented anxieties about their children.

After six years working as a crisis counselor, Rosas knows the importance of just being there for callers — especially right now.

“Some of them do want to hear they’re going to be OK. Unfortunately that’s not something that we can really say, because we can’t predict what’s going to happen next,” Rosas said. “But just letting them know, right now you’re OK, we’re taking things one minute at a time, and that’s all that we can do.”

For those already struggling with mental health issues, like the mother who called Rosas, the fear among counselors is that the pandemic could exacerbate their symptoms. So hundreds of staff and volunteers who answer calls, in English, Spanish and Korean, put aside their own worries to help those in need.

Column One A showcase for compelling storytelling from the Los Angeles Times. More stories

On March 27, Carolyn Levitan, director of Didi Hirsch’s crisis line, took nearly a dozen calls — all related to the coronavirus in some way. People were worried about their own safety and well-being, their children, job loss, car and mortgage payments.

“I’m worried if my utilities will continue if I can’t pay,” one caller said. “Will I still get power and water?”

Levitan spoke with someone worried about their grandmother. The call made her worry about her own 90-year-old grandmother, locked down in a care home. After her shift, Levitan called her.

Another counselor took a call from someone worried about job loss; the counselor understood — a family member was in the same situation.

“We’ve never experienced a time where all of our counselors are dealing with some of the same fears and anxieties that our callers and chat visitors are,” Levitan said.

At the same time, counselors have been dealing with the risk of the coronavirus spreading in the center. Didi Hirsch has been providing telehealth and telepsychiatry services but is still working on moving the entire call system off-site to enable counselors to work remotely.

Even with additional precautions, such as taking temperatures, physical distancing among dozens of cubicles and deep cleaning the building multiple times each day, about 40 people had to be placed in quarantine recently after a staff member and a volunteer tested positive for the coronavirus. No one they came in contact with at the center has contracted the virus so far.

“These types of situations put our own staff and volunteers in crisis somewhat,” Levitan said. And crisis-line directors across the country, she said, are dealing with the same types of concerns and fears.

“We’re a crisis line of people that can sometimes feel in crisis during this time.”

Despite that, volunteers and staff are asking to do more. Those who can’t come into the office are offering to work remotely, staffing the online Crisis Chat, a service for those who might not want to talk on the phone. Managers are picking up four to six shifts a week.

“People feel really helpless in a time like this, and we feel like we don’t have any control,” Levitan said. Taking calls and being able to help community, she said, “reduces our anxiety as well.”

In early-morning darkness last week, Rosas drove half an hour from Lakewood to the Didi Hirsch center for her regular graveyard shift. When she got in around 12:20 a.m., she used a no-touch thermometer in the building and, after logging her temperature, went upstairs.

She headed for her favorite booth, feeling soothed by the presence of the nearby window. After sanitizing the cubicle and her headset with Clorox wipes, she clicked “ready” on her computer and waited for the calls to come in.

Volunteers get close to 100 hours of training before they start taking calls. They are taught to listen, ask questions and be emotionally supportive through validation and empathy. They admit they don’t have all the answers, but they try to provide whatever resources they can.

Counselors don’t self-disclose and at times find themselves saying, “I can’t imagine how difficult that is for you,” even when — in reality — they can. Over the last weeks, Rosas has found herself comforting front-line workers. There are nurses worried over a lack of protective equipment and co-workers who have tested positive. People whose spouses work in healthcare, prompting fears that the family will contract the virus.

Rosas works hard to validate callers’ concerns and help them understand they are not alone. Together, they try grounding techniques.

“Why don’t we take a few deep breaths together,” she tells them.

She practices the same in her own life, checking in with herself when she starts to feel anxious and reaching out to loved ones. On Tuesday, after working her shift, she learned she might have been exposed to the coronavirus at the center.

As she waits to hear if that person tests positive, Rosas has tried to stay upbeat. She won’t be making calls at the center until the test results come back, but she can answer chats remotely.

“If it’s not us, then who is it going to be?” Rosas asked. “People still need these services; they still need to be able to have a safe place to reach out to someone. If I can be that for another person, even if it’s one person a day, then I did my job. I did enough.”

That, she said, is what keeps her going.

Suicide prevention and crisis counseling resources If you or someone you know is feeling suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273- 8255. For the Disaster Distress Helpline, call 800-985-5990.

CALIFORNIA CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC COLUMN ONE The stories shaping California Get up to speed with our Essential California newsletter, sent six days a week.

Enter Email Address

SIGN ME UP

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Brittny Mejia

Twitter Instagram Email Facebook

Brittny Mejia is a reporter on the Los Angeles Times’ Metro desk covering breaking news and stories on immigration and race. She is a military brat who calls Germany home and is a graduate of the University of Arizona.

MORE COLUMN ONE STORYTELLING

WORLD & NATION Chrystia Freeland leads Canada’s coronavirus fight April 2, 2020

CALIFORNIA Column One: Here’s what coronavirus testing for a very sick patient looks like from swab to result April 1, 2020 ADVERTISEMENT

Ad Petroleum Contaminated Liquid - Woman-Owned Our low costs for recycling contaminated liquid will save you money!

remediationfacility.com Visit Site

CALIFORNIA

‘These people are warriors.’ Meet the waste workers taking risks to sort your recyclables

Workers at the Recology warehouse in San Francisco check and sort items left in household “blue bins” on Friday. (Susanne Rust / Los Angeles Times)

By SUSANNE RUST, TONY BARBOZA

APRIL 6, 2020 | 5 AM SAN FRANCISCO — On Friday morning, Noel Turner — gloved, masked, and dressed in an apron and hard hat — attacked the refuse stream rolling by her on a fast-moving conveyor belt, pulling out plastic bags and loose plastic films, and tossing them into a metal bin by her side.

She’s a sorter at San Francisco’s Recology recycling center. And while most of the city’s residents are hunkered down in their homes, keeping clear of the coronavirus that has infected more than 1 million people worldwide, thousands of waste sorters, haulers, mechanics and engineers are getting up every morning and leaving their homes — putting themselves at risk to keep California’s towns and cities clean.

“These people are warriors,” said Robert Reed, Recology’s spokesman, as he showed a reporter around the bustling plant — a site of determined activity in a city that largely feels and appears abandoned.

Turner’s job, hazardous during normal times — according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it is the nation’s fifth- most-dangerous occupation — now carries a new level of risk.

Studies show the coronavirus can live on cardboard, cloth, plastic and metal surfaces for hours and, in some cases, days. That means Turner and her colleagues are potentially being exposed to live virus as they collect and sort trash from infected households.

Recology is taking precautions to keep its workers healthy, said Reed.

Seven vending machines near the entrance to the recycling plant hold protective gear, such as glasses, masks and gloves. Employees enter a code, and a spiral dispenser pushes the item forward and drops it down, where workers, such as Ben Carter, who demonstrated for a visitor, can retrieve it.

A worker at Recology in San Francisco checks out protective gear in a vending machine on Friday. (Susanne Rust / Los Angeles Times)

Carter said he preferred vending machines with food but was happy to have the gear he needed to keep protected as he and colleagues process the 650 tons of waste San Franciscans send his way, every day.

And though the company is 100% operational in terms of residential hauling services (it has closed a buy back center, closed in-person payment centers, and reduced hours at a transfer station), Recology has staggered shifts and spaced workers to reduce exposure, Reed said. The company’s employees earn more than $20 an hour, he said.

But what’s happening in San Francisco isn’t necessarily the norm.

In Los Angeles, city and county officials said that some residential recycling facilities had shut down temporarily to prevent workers from getting sick, leaving waste haulers no choice but to take everything directly to landfills.

Get our free Coronavirus Today newsletter Sign up for the latest news, best stories and what they mean for you, plus answers to your questions.

Enter Email Address

SIGN ME UP

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Garbage collection, solid waste removal and sanitation services are exempted from the city and county of Los Angeles’ “Safer at Home” orders that have banned events and gatherings and closed nonessential businesses, but only if they can comply with social distancing requirements.

This has meant that some facilities have had to suspend operations, said Coby Skye, assistant deputy director for the L.A. County’s Department of Public Works, in a statement Thursday.

“Therefore, the county is allowing some contracted waste haulers that service the county unincorporated areas to dispose of recyclables and green/organic waste at landfills temporarily, if recycling facilities are unable to process the material,” Skye said. “This is done on a case-by-case basis and reviewed weekly.”

Skye said the department was working with the county’s 88 cities, which are responsible for their own trash and recycling collection, to coordinate a “consistent approach” in order “to reduce confusion by the public.” Several facilities that process recyclables from the city of Los Angeles also have temporarily closed “as a precautionary measure to protect employees from possible exposure to the virus,” according to a statement from the city’s sanitation bureau.

Chuck Stiles, director of the Teamsters’ Solid Waste and Recycling Division, said that worker protection was his biggest concern.

“Many Americans will transition to telework to avoid exposure, including many of your corporate employees,” Stiles wrote in a letter to the largest recycling and waste management corporations in the country. “Our members, however, won’t have that option.”

He pointed to sites in New York and Atlanta, where workers are already becoming sick. He sent photos of leaky hauling trucks dribbling waste into neighborhood streets and drains, as well as unsafe work sites littered with surgical gowns and even ventilator tubes.

“Our people should be protected,” he said. “They’re at the front lines.”

Reed, of Recology, said residents could help reduce worker risk by:

collapsing cardboard boxes; flattening soda cans; scrunching plastic items.

Minimizing the volume of trash not only provides more space in a bin, but also saves haulers from having to leave the truck, and streamlines the sorting process in recycling centers.

For Turner and her colleague, Ayanna Banks, who has been with the company for 20 years, their work is essential in times of crisis.

“We are doing our part to keep families safe and healthy,” said Banks before heading back to her spot at the conveyor belt, ready to remove unwanted debris from the river of recyclable items flowing past her.

CALIFORNIA CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

The stories shaping California Get up to speed with our Essential California newsletter, sent six days a week. https://nyti.ms/39GKLUD

Decade of Job Growth Comes to an End, Undone by a Pandemic After an expansion that added 22 million to U.S. payrolls, March registered a loss, and worse is yet to come.

By Nelson D. Schwartz and Patricia Cohen

April 3, 2020 Updated 1:35 p.m. ET

The longest stretch of job creation in American history came to a halt last month, the Labor Department reported Friday, another reﬂection of the coronavirus pandemic that has brought the economy to a virtual standstill.

Compared with the astounding numbers of people recently applying for unemployment benefits — nearly 10 million in the previous two weeks — the figure announced Friday was less striking: a loss of 701,000 jobs. But the data was mostly collected in the first half of the month, before stay-at-home orders began to cover much of the nation. With that, what had been a drip-drip-drip of job losses turned into a deluge.

“As bad as this report is, next month will be many orders of magnitude worse,” said Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist at Barclays. “This is the initial slippage of the labor market.” He said the March unemployment rate of 4.4 percent could rise to 13 percent in April.

The decline in employment last month represents the biggest monthly drop since the depths of the Great Recession in 2008-9. It was paced by a net loss of 459,000 jobs in the leisure and hospitality sector.

The tally marks a stunningly abrupt end to a landmark stretch of job creation — 113 months in a row, more than twice the previous record. The gains began in late 2010 and totaled 22.2 million in an expansion that was steady, if not always spectacular.

A shop in the Bronx, like many others, is closed until further notice. Desiree Rios for The New York Times

The near-decade of resurgent hiring more than recouped the 8.7 million jobs wiped out in the recession that came just before.

For corporations, the last 10 years were a golden age. With interest rates low, many companies binged on debt even as they used excess cash to buy back stock. For workers, the results were mixed, with only modest increases in wages, especially for those in lower-paid jobs.

In the last few years, monthly hiring picked up, pushing the unemployment rate to a half-century low, including a 3.5 percent reading in February.

The coronavirus pandemic changed all that.

The closing of everything from restaurants and barbershops to retail stores and movie theaters eliminated broad swaths of employment in one blow, a loss only partly mitigated by vast government aid programs hurriedly enacted last month.

Latest Updates: Markets and Business

• The small business loan program is live. • Stocks slide after a painful jobs report.

• Job losses in March ended almost a decade of straight gains.

See more updates Updated 1h ago

More live coverage: Global New York

Hiring virtually stopped in March and nonessential businesses laid off staff as stay-at-home orders spread throughout the country. If anything, the picture has grown bleaker since the Labor Department collected the March data.

“April will be markedly worse,” said Ellen Zentner, chief U.S. economist at Morgan Stanley. “Job losses will be in the millions and will make March’s losses look tiny.”

She expects the unemployment rate to peak at 16.4 percent in May, the highest level since the Labor Department began keeping track after the Great Depression. The record is 10.8 percent in November and December 1982.

Ms. Zentner expects the unemployment rate to begin coming down in June but said the recovery would be slow. “The unemployment rate went up by elevator and will come down by escalator,” she said.

During the long expansion, corporations were confident enough to run their operations with low inventories, lots of debt, little cash and supply lines that stretched across the globe. Without that cash cushion and that confidence, said Stephanie Pomboy, president of the independent research firm MacroMavens, getting back to robust employment levels will not be easy.

“Companies saved nothing for a rainy day,” she said. “They will have a much more conservative approach to running their businesses in the future.”

With most workplaces shut down, laid-off workers confront a bleak landscape, with little prospect of being hired until the pandemic lifts.

Sign up to receive our daily Coronavirus Brieﬁng, an informed guide Sign Up with the latest developments and expert advice.

One exception is in shipping and delivery, with companies stafﬁng up to get goods to millions of customers who can’t leave home. Amazon is in the midst of hiring 100,000 warehouse and delivery workers, and said Thursday that it had already added 80,000. Walmart and Lowe’s are ﬁlling tens of thousands of new positions.

But those are rare opportunities in an economy largely frozen.

“We’re in a delicate period in which a mild recession could turn into something more damaging,” said Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist for Northern Trust. “Government policy must continue to be aggressive if we hope to put a ﬂoor under the current economic retreat.”

The data for March “represents the interruption of a very long winning streak and sadder still, this is only the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “It’s clear from the data that those with more modest levels of education remain the most vulnerable members of our labor force. They are often the ﬁrst to be laid off and often take a long time to get back to work.”

Even previous shocks to the economic system, like the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 or Hurricane Katrina in 2005, didn’t combine the magnitude of the job losses now underway with the pace of unfolding events.

“The speed of the job losses is unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” said Gabriel Mathy, an assistant professor at American University whose specialty is economic history. “We’re in uncharted waters.”

The feverish crush to ﬁle unemployment claims crashed government websites and caused those calling unemployment ofﬁces to endure hourslong waits on hold or persistent busy signals.

For workers like Jane Bunting, March was a transitional month between employment and unemployment. A member of the national touring company of “Come From Away,” a Broadway musical, she watched as one venue after another canceled show dates as March wore on.

She received her last payment on Thursday and has been trying to ﬁle for unemployment beneﬁts this week, only to see the website crash on every attempt. Ms. Bunting gave up her apartment in New York City when the show’s tour began a year and a half ago and is holed up in a rental place in upstate New York.

“I’ve been saving really aggressively, so I feel comfortable,” she said. “I haven’t had to dip into savings yet. But the longer this goes on, I deﬁnitely will.”

The show’s run has been canceled through early May, but Ms. Bunting is hoping the curtain rises soon after. “Of course I want to go back to work as soon as possible, but if people need to stay out longer to ﬂatten the curve, then I completely understand,” she said.

Megan-Claire Chase, who learned last week that Friday would be her ﬁnal day as a marketing project manager at EmployBridge, a national stafﬁng agency based in Atlanta, knows the anxiety of losing a job.

“I was laid off in the recession in 2008,” she said, “so this is a nightmare.”

For Ms. Chase, 43, the loss is more unnerving now.

“I’m a cancer survivor, so all of a sudden to be without my beneﬁts is very scary,” she said. Ms. Chase is supposed to undergo checks every six months to make sure she is still in remission. As soon as she heard the layoff news, she called to reschedule one scan for this week, but was not able to get an appointment.

“It’s very scary as a single person,” Ms. Chase said. One of 300 people at her firm who were laid off, she has to wait until after her last day of work to file for unemployment benefits.

“I realized I’m actually grieving — the loss of my jobs, the loss of my beneﬁts — and it’s not anything that I did,” she said.

As bad as the layoffs have been, some executives are trying their best to avoid cutting staff. Tom Gimbel, chief executive of LaSalle Network, a Chicago stafﬁng ﬁrm, is forgoing his salary through the second quarter of the year and potentially longer, he said. Business is down 25 percent, and he anticipates that it could ultimately be off 35 percent.

He has been holding all-hands meetings with his employees at 10 a.m. daily with the online conferencing app Zoom. The market for permanent positions is very weak, he said, but the temporary-stafﬁng business is holding up a bit better.

“There are no proﬁts right now,” he said. “But we’ve avoided layoffs so far.”

The Coronavirus Outbreak Answers to Your Frequently Asked Questions

Updated April 3, 2020

RELATED CONTENT

State Senate Approves Bill Covering Child Care Costs With Campaign Funds

University of California will not layoff employees through June amid coronavirus pandemic

California public schools won’t reopen before end of academic year, Newsom says

LAUSD packs 400,000 meals, prepares for months of ‘grab-and-go’ at various sites https://nyti.ms/2JIkmuS

Ofﬁcial Counts Understate the U.S. Coronavirus Death Toll Inconsistent protocols, limited resources and a patchwork of decision making has led to an undercounting of people with the coronavirus who have died, health experts say.

By Sarah Kliff and Julie Bosman

Published April 5, 2020 Updated April 6, 2020, 4:50 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — A coroner in Indiana wanted to know if the coronavirus had killed a man in early March, but said that her health department denied a test. Paramedics in New York City say that many patients who died at home were never tested for the coronavirus, even if they showed telltale signs of infection.

In Virginia, a funeral director prepared the remains of three people after health workers cautioned her that they each had tested positive for the coronavirus. But only one of the three had the virus noted on the death certiﬁcate.

Across the United States, even as coronavirus deaths are being recorded in terrifying numbers — many hundreds each day — the true death toll is likely much higher.

More than 9,400 people with the coronavirus have been reported to have died in this country as of this weekend, but hospital ofﬁcials, doctors, public health experts and medical examiners say that ofﬁcial counts have failed to capture the true number of Americans dying in this pandemic. The undercount is a result of inconsistent protocols, limited resources and a patchwork of decision making from one state or county to the next.

In many rural areas, coroners say they don’t have the tests they need to detect the disease. Doctors now believe that some deaths in February and early March, before the coronavirus reached epidemic levels in the United States, were likely misidentiﬁed as inﬂuenza or only described as pneumonia.

With no uniform system for reporting coronavirus-related deaths in the United States, and a continued shortage of tests, some states and counties have improvised, obfuscated and, at times, backtracked in counting the dead.

“We deﬁnitely think there are deaths that we have not accounted for,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, which studies global health threats and is closely tracking the coronavirus pandemic.

Late last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidance for how to certify coronavirus deaths, underscoring the need for uniformity and reinforcing the sense by health care workers and others that deaths have not been consistently tracked. In its guidance, the C.D.C. instructed ofﬁcials to report deaths where the patient has tested positive or, in an absence of testing, “if the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty.”

In infectious outbreaks, public health experts say that under typical circumstances it takes months or years to compile data that is as accurate as possible on deaths. The reporting system during an epidemic of this scale is particularly strained. And while experts say they believe that virus-related deaths have been missed, the extent of the problem is not clear.

But as mayors and governors hold daily news conferences reporting the latest ﬁgures of infections and deaths related to Covid-19, Americans have paid close attention to the locations and numbers of the sick and dead — one of the few metrics available for understanding the new and mysterious disease threatening their communities.

Public health experts say that an accurate count of deaths is an essential tool to understand a disease outbreak as it unfolds: The more deadly a disease, the more aggressively the authorities are willing to disrupt normal life. Precise death counts can also inform the federal government on how to target resources, like ventilators from the national stockpile, to the areas of the country with the most desperate need.

Latest Updates: Coronavirus Outbreak

• Hospitals face severe shortages of critical supplies, according to a new government report.

• White House warns that the week ahead will be full of sadness as U.S. death toll approaches 10,000.

• First legal challenge to public health restrictions ﬁled by the A.C.L.U. in Puerto Rico.

See more updates Updated 9m ago

More live coverage: Markets New York For families who have lost a loved one in the midst of this epidemic, there is an urge simply to know: Was it the coronavirus?

Lingering questions As the coronavirus outbreak began sweeping across the country last month, Julio Ramirez, a 43-year-old salesman in San Gabriel, Calif., came home from a business trip and began feeling unwell, suffering from a fever, cough and body aches. By the next day, he had lost his sense of taste and smell.

His wife, Julie Murillo, took him to an urgent care clinic several days later, where he was so weak he had to be pushed in a wheelchair. Doctors prescribed antibiotics, a cough syrup and gave him a chest X-ray, but they did not test for the coronavirus, she said. Just over a week after he returned from his trip, Ms. Murillo found him dead in his bed.

“I kept trying to get him tested from the beginning,” Ms. Murillo said. “They told me no.”

Frustrated, Ms. Murillo enlisted friends to call the C.D.C. on her behalf, urging a post-mortem test. Then she hired a private company to conduct an autopsy; the owner pleaded for a coronavirus test from local and federal authorities.

On Saturday afternoon, 19 days after the death, Ms. Murillo received a call from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, she said. The health department had gone to the funeral home where her husband’s body was resting and taken a sample for a coronavirus test. He tested positive.

In a statement, the health department said that post-mortem testing has been conducted on “a number of cases,” but did not provide speciﬁcs or comment on Mr. Ramirez’s case.

The work of counting deaths related to the virus falls to an assortment of health care providers, medical examiners, coroners, funeral homes and local health departments that ﬁll out America’s death certiﬁcates. The documents typically include information on the immediate cause of death, such as a heart attack or pneumonia, as well as on any underlying disease. In coronavirus cases, that would be Covid-19.

Refrigerated trucks were used as a makeshift morgue in New York City. Even as coronavirus deaths were being recorded in terrifying numbers across the United States, the true death toll may be even higher. Gregg Vigliotti for The New York Times The federal government does not expect to produce a ﬁnal tally of coronavirus deaths until 2021, when it publishes an annual compilation of the country’s leading causes of death.

A New York Times tally of known Covid-related deaths, based on reports from state and local officials, showed 9,470 deaths as of Sunday. On Friday, the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the C.D.C., began publishing preliminary estimates of coronavirus deaths, although a spokesman said that information would have a “lag of 1-2 weeks.” Its first estimate noted 1,150 deaths, based on the number of death certificates that included Covid-19 as an underlying disease.

Sign up to receive our daily Coronavirus Brieﬁng, an informed guide Sign Up with the latest developments and expert advice.

“It is not a ʻreal time’ count of Covid deaths, like what the states are currently reporting,” Jeff Lancashire, a spokesman for the National Center for Health Statistics, said.

But those who work with death certificates say they worry that relying only on those documents may leave out a significant number of cases in which coronavirus was confirmed by testing, but not written down in the section where doctors and coroners are asked to note relevant underlying diseases. Generally, certificates require an immediate cause, and encourage — but do not require — officials to take note of an underlying disease.

Then there are the many suspected cases.

Susan Perry, the funeral director from Virginia, said that she was informed by health workers and families that three recently deceased people had tested positive for the virus so that she and her staff could take necessary precautions with the bodies. Only one death certiﬁcate mentioned the virus.

“This probably happens all the time with different diseases, but this is the ﬁrst time I’m paying attention to it,” Ms. Perry said. “If we don’t know the numbers, how are we going to be able to prepare ourselves and protect ourselves?”

ʻNow weʼre having the “aha!” momentʼ Early in the U.S. outbreak, virus-linked deaths may have been overlooked, hospital ofﬁcials said. A late start to coronavirus testing hampered hospitals’ ability to detect the infection among patients with ﬂulike symptoms in February and early March. Doctors at several hospitals reported treating pneumonia patients who eventually died before testing was available.

“When I was working before we had testing, we had a ton of patients with pneumonia,” said Geraldine Ménard, chief of general internal medicine at Tulane Medical Center in New Orleans. “I remember thinking it was weird. I’m sure some of those patients did have it. But no one knew back then.”

An emergency department physician in San Francisco recalled two deaths that were probably coronavirus but not identiﬁed as such. One patient died at home; a relative in the same home later tested positive for the disease. Another patient was an older man who came to the hospital with typical coronavirus symptoms, and who had been in contact with someone recently traveling to China, but arrived at the hospital before testing was available.

In New York City, emergency medical workers say that infection and death rates are probably far higher than reported. Given a record number of calls, many ambulance crews have encouraged anyone not critically ill to stay home. The result, medics say, is that many presumed coronavirus patients may never know for sure if they had the virus, so any who later die at home may never be categorized as having had it.

Across the country, coroners are going through a process of re-evaluation, reconsidering deaths that occurred before testing was widely available. Coroners and medical examiners generally investigate deaths that are considered unusual, or result from accidents or suicides, or occur at home.

Joani Shields, the coroner in Monroe County, Ind., said she wondered about a man diagnosed with pneumonia who died in early March.

A coronavirus test was requested at the time, but the local health department denied it, Ms. Shields said, on the ground that the supply of tests was too limited.

“I wish we could have tested him,” she said.

In Shelby County, Ala., Lina Evans, the coroner, said she was now suspicious of a surge in deaths in her county earlier this year, many of which involved severe pneumonia: “We had a lot of hospice deaths this year, and now it makes me go back and think, wow, did they have Covid? Did that accelerate their death?”

Ms. Evans, who is also a nurse, is frustrated that she will never know. “When we go back to those deaths that occurred earlier this year, people who were negative for ﬂu, now we’re having the ʻaha!’ moment,” she said. “They should have been tested for the coronavirus. As far as underreporting, I would say, deﬁnitely.”

Disparate reporting, more waiting Even now, as testing is more widely available, there is a patchwork of standards about information being reported by state and local health ofﬁcials on deaths in the United States.

Around the world, keeping an accurate death toll has been a challenge for governments. Availability of testing and other resources have affected the official counts in some places, and significant questions have emerged about official government tallies in places such as China and Iran.

In the U.S., uncertainties and inconsistencies have emerged, and health departments have had to backtrack on cases of previously reported deaths. Florida officials rescinded an announcement of a Covid death in Pasco County. In Hawaii, the state’s first announced coronavirus death was later re-categorized as unrelated after officials admitted misreading test results. Los Angeles county officials announced that a child had died from the virus, then said they were unsure whether the virus caused the death, then declined to explain the confusion.

Adding to the complications, different jurisdictions are using distinct standards for attributing a death to the coronavirus and, in some cases, are relying on techniques that would lower the overall count of fatalities.

In Blaine County, Idaho, the local health authority requires a positive test to certify a death the result of coronavirus. But in Alabama, the state health department requires a physician to review a person’s medical records to determine whether the virus was actually the root cause of death.

“This is in the interest of having the most accurate, and most transparent data that we can provide,” said Karen Landers, a district medical ofﬁcer with the Alabama Department of Public Health. “We recognize that different sites might do it differently.”

So far, the state has received reports of 45 people with the coronavirus dying, but has only certiﬁed 31 of those deaths as a result of the virus.

Experts who study mortality statistics caution that it may take months for scientists to calculate a fatality rate for coronavirus in the United States that is as accurate as possible.

Some researchers say there may never be a truly accurate, complete count of deaths. It has happened before. Experts believe that widespread news coverage in 1976 of a potential swine ﬂu epidemic — one that never materialized — led to a rash of deaths recorded as inﬂuenza that, in years prior, would have been categorized as pneumonia.

“We’re still debating the death toll of the Spanish ﬂu” of 1918-19, said Stéphane Helleringer, associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It might take a long time. It’s not just that the data is messy, but because the effects of a pandemic disease are very complex.”

Sarah Kliff reported from Washington, and Julie Bosman from Chicago. Reporting was contributed by Mitch Smith in Overland Park, Kan., and Ali Watkins in New York. Susan C. Beachy contributed research from New York.

The Coronavirus Outbreak Frequently Asked Questions and Advice

Updated April 4, 2020

• What should I do if I feel sick?

READ MORE Pension bomb fuse just got shorter – Press Enterprise

OPINION Pension bomb fuse just got shorter

   

https://www.pe.com/...-shorter/?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_content=tw-pressenterprise&utm_medium=social[4/6/2020 10:40:50 AM] Pension bomb fuse just got shorter – Press Enterprise

The California state Capitol building is shown October 9, 2003 in downtown Sacramento, California. (Photo by David Paul Morris/Getty Images)

By JON COUPAL |  PUBLISHED: April 5, 2020 at 12:00 p.m. | UPDATED: April 5, 2020 at 12:01 p.m.

Homeowners have enough to worry about in the current coronavirus crisis.

They face an April 10 deadline for the second installment of their annual property tax bill and there is no relief — yet — coming from either the governor’s office or the majority of county treasurer/tax collectors.

Many taxpayers have been furloughed or laid off and the chances are high that property values throughout America will take a hit — even in California.

How could things possibly get worse?

Here’s how. The coronavirus crisis and the damage it inflicts on the state’s economy has exposed the Potemkin village of the state’s actual financial condition.

For the last several years, we’ve been told that the “California Miracle” has left the state flush with a surplus of tens of billions of dollars. But that surplus will be quickly depleted because of the unexpected demands that the crisis brings.

Even more troubling is the impact on California’s debt balance, which is a mountain compared to the molehill of surplus revenue. And the bulk of that debt is in the form of unfunded pension obligations.

Fiscal watchdogs have been warning about this for more than 40 years only to be ignored by our elected leadership, whose cozy relationship with public-sector unions makes even modest pension reform nearly impossible.

For example, this column back in 2018 warned, “California’s pension crisis exists in large part due to the very nature of defined-benefit plans. Unlike defined-contribution plans, where the taxpayers’ obligation to each public employee ends with every pay period, defined-benefit plans depend on a projection of future investment returns. Therein lies the problem. California has been horribly wrong in its application of assumed rates of return, leading to hundreds of billions in unfunded liabilities. This shortfall is occurring in good economic times when the state of California is relatively flush. A recession will quickly expose this short-sighted thinking.”

Similarly, other organizations such as the Reason Foundation and the California Policy Center have raised the alarm for decades about the unsustainability of our pensions systems.

David Crane, a research scholar at Stanford and president of Govern for California, makes the excellent point that, even without a stock market crash, California would still be in trouble: “Too many people incorrectly believe that pension costs increase only when stock markets decline, but pension costs would rise even if the stock market never declined. That’s because pension liabilities grow at the discount rate employed by pension funds for reporting obligations. Because California’s pension funds discount pension liabilities at the same high rate at which they hope pension assets will earn, the state’s pension liabilities grow very fast.”

Crane’s point is that even if the stock market rebounds, the problem won’t go away “because pension spending in California crowds out services at all times. E.g., the stock market quadrupled from 2009 to 2019 but state pension spending more than doubled over the same period, and that doesn’t count billions of supplemental payments authorized by elected officials.”

California would be on a much more solid financial footing if RELATED ARTICLES our elected leadership paid more attention to the

The toxic side effects of coronavirus advocates, academicians, think tanks and journalists lockdowns sounding the alarm on the inevitable pension disaster. Only a handful of electeds, such as Sen. John Moorlach, R- California economy clobbered — for how Costa Mesa, are demanding action. long? But perhaps politicians are already fully aware of the The blessing of time on our hands problem. It’s just that they willfully ignore it because they Coronavirus: Paid sick days save all of don’t wish to anger the labor interests that support their our lives political careers.

Anti-eviction edict will worsen California’s In some action movies there is a ticking time bomb about to economic woes https://www.pe.com/...-shorter/?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_content=tw-pressenterprise&utm_medium=social[4/6/2020 10:40:50 AM] Pension bomb fuse just got shorter – Press Enterprise

go off. When the clock runs out, there is usually a second of silence before the explosion. Will the current crisis spur legislators to start taking the pension crisis as seriously as the COVID-19 crisis? We doubt it. But either way, the bomb is ticking.

Jon Coupal is president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.

Newsroom Guidelines News Tips Contact Us Report an Error

Tags: Opinion Columns

Jon Coupal

TOP ARTICLES 1/5

.st0{fill:#FFFFFF;}.st1{fill:#0099FF;}

READ MORE These books can help you write your way through “If businesses do not comply, they are referred to law enforcement for follow up,” Culp said.

In the past week, Riverside County had no health-hazard-related closures, while San Bernardino https://www.sbsun.com/...arch-27-april-3/?utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_content=tw-sbsun[4/3/2020 3:30:59 PM] Rodents, dirty hands, metal in masa: Restaurant closures, inspections in the Inland Empire, March 27-April 3 – San Bernardino Sun

County had one.

Closures

If no reopening date is mentioned, the facility had not been listed as reopened as of this publication.

Subway, 58080 Twentynine Palms Highway, Yucca Valley

Closure date: April 1 Grade: 85/B Reason for closure: Rodent infestation. The inspector saw 50-60 fresh rodent droppings in multiple areas. Most were under shelving and a cabinet but a few were on the box of paper used to wrap sandwiches and on the paper itself. There was a rodent trap with cheese set up inside and some larger rodent catchers outside. Among the other violations, some dirty gloves had been left on the prep table and there was no soap dispenser at one of the sinks. The visit was for a voluntary rescore inspection — the restaurant had received an 86/B on Feb. 6 (and got in trouble last week for obscuring the B grade card).

Non-closure inspections of note

Here are selected inspections at facilities that weren’t closed but had other significant issues.

Boonsee Thai Kitchen, at 11368 Kenyon Way Suite G in Rancho Cucamonga, was inspected March 30 in a mandatory follow-up after receiving a 78/C on March 19. This time, it received a 92/A. There was one critical violation, for rice not being kept at a safe temperature. The inspector also noted that the C grade placard from the earlier inspection was not being displayed.

Los Juniors Market #2, at 3548 Cajon Blvd. in San Bernardino, was visited March 27 in response to a complaint that an employee was handling food with dirty hands. The inspector saw an employee handle raw meat, hand items to a customer, touch his hat, pick up trays and go back to working with food, all without washing hands or changing gloves. There were also flies behind the meat counter and multiple dirty surfaces. Furthermore, the market was only permitted to sell prepackaged food, not to operate a meat department.

The deli within El Cachanilla Meat Market, at 1553 E. 4th St. in Ontario, was inspected March 27 in a mandatory follow-up after receiving a 76/C on March 13. This time, it received an 84/B with two critical violations. Some food was adulterated — the inspector found multiple metal fragments in a container of masa, and meat stacked up on a prep table was touching the wall. Also, a knife was being stored against a dirty wall and another utensil wasn’t washed properly.

Delicias Mexican Cuisine, at 66121 Pierson Blvd. in Desert Hot Springs, was inspected March 24 in response to a complaint that a customer had gnats in their drink. It received a grade of 90/A with one critical violation: Multiple items of food inside four different coolers were at unsafe temperatures. Three of the coolers were impounded, although the walk-in cooler was adjusted and the impound tag was removed before the inspector left. There were also a couple of gnats and a fly, along with fly traps that the restaurant was told to relocate so they weren’t over food-contact surfaces.

Updates from past weeks

The Subway at 1611 E.Main St. in Barstow (in Barstow Station), which was closed March 19 because of a cockroach infestation, had the closure extended again March 27 when the inspector returned and found there were still a few live roaches.

Apollo Restaurant, at 14950 7th St. in Victorville, which was closed March 26 because of a rodent and cockroach infestation, was permitted to reopen March 27 after pest control visited and other issues were addressed.

The McDonald’s and Chevron at 3230 and 3260 Wagon Train Road in Phelan, which were closed March 26 after bacteria was detected in the area’s water system, were permitted to reopen March 30 after the boil-water notice was lifted.

The Del Taco at 56748 Twentynine Palms Highway in Yucca Valley, which was closed March 17 because of a cockroach infestation, was permitted to reopen March 30.

TOP ARTICLES 1/5

Don Smith, a legislative field representative who has come forward to accuse San Bernardino Mayor John Valdivia of abusing his power, speaks out during a press conference in front of the San Bernardino City Hall on Thursday, Feb. 27, 2020. (Photo by Watchara Phomicinda, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

.st0{fill:#FFFFFF;}.st1{fill:#0099FF;}

READ MORE U S Britain brace for soaring death Valdivia, a former councilman who was elected mayor in November 2018, declined to comment for this story, saying only that Smith is not credible. He has also denied the sexual harassment and hostile work environment allegations leveled against him. Since the beginning of the year, Valdivia’s office workers have pointed criticism at him for his alleged abrasive and off-color leadership style.

Following their resignation on Jan. 29, Cisneros, 30, and Cervantes, 24, filed claims with the city alleging Valdivia belittled, berated and subjected them to offensive and graphic sexual comments and innuendos. It prompted other employees to come forward with similar allegations, including Smith and city commissioner Alissa Payne.

Payne alleges Valdivia offered to put her and her children in an apartment last year, tried to get her drunk at a public dinner in January and subjected her to unwanted touching that same evening.

The city has 45 days to either deny or settle Smith’s claim, a precursor to a lawsuit. The city has

rejected Cisneros’ and Cervantes’ claims, letting the 45-day window lapse, said Pelayes & Yu spokeswoman Tamrin Olden. Pelayes said he plans to file lawsuits on behalf of Cisneros and Cervantes.

Smith lays out a laundry list of allegations in his nine-page claim, including Valdivia having Smith, on city time, perform work that was not city-related.

Valdivia had previously been warned by top city officials that his conduct was unbecoming an elected official and potentially violated city policy and state labor law. Last year, human resources director Helen Tran admonished Valdivia for having Cisneros attend after-hours events and meetings with him.

And in March 2018, then-City Attorney Gary Saenz warned Valdivia in a letter that his treatment of staff could be creating a hostile work environment, and that his conduct was “interfering with the administration of the city.” Saenz urged Valdivia to refrain from such conduct.

Newsroom Guidelines News Tips Contact Us Report an Error

Tags: Top Stories Sun, workplace

https://www.sbsun.com/2020/04/04/field-rep-alleges-san-bernardino-mayor-instructed-top-aide-to-fabricate-records/[4/6/2020 8:15:35 AM] Heavy rain, mountain snow coming to Riverside and San Bernardino counties – Daily Bulletin

NEWSCRIME + PUBLIC SAFETY • News Heavy rain, mountain snow coming to Riverside and San Bernardino counties A winter storm warning is in effect until 5 a.m. Thursday in the mountain communities above 5,500 feet

   

https://www.dailybulletin.com/...tm_content=tw-ivdailybulletin&utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social[4/6/2020 10:38:30 AM] Heavy rain, mountain snow coming to Riverside and San Bernardino counties – Daily Bulletin

Graphic courtesy of the National Weather Service

By CITY NEWS SERVICE | [email protected] |  PUBLISHED: April 6, 2020 at 6:32 a.m. | UPDATED: April 6, 2020 at 6:32 a.m.

RIVERSIDE — A cold, slow-moving storm will bring heavy rain Monday throughout Riverside and San Bernardino counties, as well as a chance of snow in the mountains, forecasters said.

Heavy showers are expected throughout the day Monday in the Riverside and San Bernardino metropolitan areas, the San Gorgonio Pass near Banning and the Riverside and San Bernardino county mountains, according to the National Weather Service. S The Coachella Valley is also expected to get wet Monday but with much lighter showers.

The storm system moving southeast is expected to drop rain showers through Thursday afternoon, https://www.dailybulletin.com/...tm_content=tw-ivdailybulletin&utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social[4/6/2020 10:38:30 AM] Heavy rain, mountain snow coming to Riverside and San Bernardino counties – Daily Bulletin

NWS meteorologist Miguel Miller said. There is also a slight chance of thunderstorms throughout the region until Thursday afternoon.

TOP ARTICLES 1/5

.st0{fill:#FFFFFF;}.st1{fill:#0099FF;}

READ MORE Altadena couple weds and neighbors find a way to

Graphic courtesy of the National Weather Service

Rainfall amounts through Thursday could reach 3 inches in the Riverside and San Bernardino metropolitan areas, 4 inches in the San Gorgonio Pass near Banning, 5 inches in the Riverside and San Bernardino county mountains and 1.5 inches in the Coachella Valley.

Low-lying areas in the Inland Empire could see some flooding Monday, but the rain showers will be much lighter the rest of the week, the NWS’ Miller said.

A winter storm warning is in effect until 5 a.m. Thursday in the mountain communities above 5,500 feet in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

Snow levels will be around 6,000 feet Monday morning, then rise to 6,500 feet later in the day before dropping to 5,500 feet on Tuesday, Miller said. Idyllwild could get trace amounts of snow, while up to a foot of snow is expected to fall near the peak of Mount San Jacinto.

Big Bear Lake is expected to get between 2 and 4 feet of snowfall by Thursday, but some of that snow will melt because of warm ground temperatures, Miller said.

NWS officials warned that roads could be slippery, and visibility will be limited by falling snow, making travel difficult on routes above 5,500 feet.

High temperatures Monday in Riverside County could reach 54 in Temecula; 57 in Riverside, 67 in the San Gorgonio Pass, 75 in the Coachella Valley, 40 in Idyllwild, 53 in Temecula, 56 in Lake Elsinore and 57 in Hemet.

San Bernardino County highs include 35 in Big Bear; 36 in Running Springs; 38 in Wrightwood; 50 in Yucaipa and Hesperia; 52 in Victorville; 54 in Rancho Cucamonga and Redlands; 55 in Ontario; 58 in San Bernardino

The storm is expected to move east out of the region through Friday, then dry weather will return through at least the weekend, Miller said.

Newsroom Guidelines News Tips Contact Us Report an Error

Tags: Top Stories IVDB, Top Stories PE, Top Stories RDF, Top Stories Sun, weather

https://www.dailybulletin.com/...tm_content=tw-ivdailybulletin&utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social[4/6/2020 10:38:30 AM] Construction to shut eastbound 210 Freeway in Highland – Redlands Daily Facts

LOCAL NEWS • News Construction to shut eastbound 210 Freeway in Highland

   

By JENNIFER IYER | [email protected] | Redlands Daily Facts  PUBLISHED: March 30, 2020 at 5:00 p.m. | UPDATED: March 30, 2020 at 5:00 p.m.

Work on the 210 Freeway widening project between Redlands and San Bernardino is expected to close the eastbound freeway for a few nights the week of Monday, March 30.

Work is still moving forward despite the novel coronavirus outbreak, according to the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority, because transportation and construction sectors are deemed essential.

The full closure is scheduled at Base Line in Highland RELATED LINKS between midnight and 5 a.m. Thursday and/or Friday.

Coronavirus isn’t stopping 210 Freeway Weeknight east- and westbound freeway lane and ramp work from Redlands to San Bernardino closures are also scheduled this week, though no consecutive ramps will be closed at the same time. 210 Freeway between Redlands and San Bernardino getting new lanes

TOP ARTICLES 1/5 What exactly are those roadways made of? California and a couple other states https://www.redlandsdailyfacts.com/...highland/?fbclid=IwAR3rrUMRi3WYIJdb7fkMGpmYSHTptDoHtUzTSqTl_WUn5M0jQM-dNoz4V5U[4/3/2020 5:35:21 PM] Construction to shut eastbound 210 Freeway in Highland – Redlands Daily Facts

use recycled material

Could the 210 Freeway through San Bernardino County get wider with only restriping?

Yucaipa to get new 10 Freeway interchange at Wildwood Canyon Road, eventually S

T .st0{fill:#FFFFFF;}.st1{fill:#0099FF;} By

READ MORE These books can help you write Victoria Avenue in San Bernardino and Pioneer Avenue in Redlands also could be closed Thursday and/or Friday nights below the freeway for restriping.

Weekday bridge construction is underway on Fifth Street in Highland, Pioneer and Victoria. This work is expected to run from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Information: gosbcta.com

https://www.redlandsdailyfacts.com/...highland/?fbclid=IwAR3rrUMRi3WYIJdb7fkMGpmYSHTptDoHtUzTSqTl_WUn5M0jQM-dNoz4V5U[4/3/2020 5:35:21 PM]