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Behind the decision to reopen San Diego parks | David Garrick Apr 23, 2020

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The local death toll jumped by 15 souls Tuesday, as the new case count in San Diego County hit triple digits for the first time since April 4, according to the latest daily COVID-19 update from the county health department.

Though the newly announced deaths did not occur on a single day, they none-the-less show that talk of rapidly opening shut-down parts of the economy and sidelined social and recreational resources too quickly should be expected to backfire, officials said.

County supervisor Nathan Fletcher made his daily effort to convey that those keeping these orders in effect in the face of public protest over the weekend are doing so out of a desire to prevent a deadly resurgence in cases such has the one now underway in Singapore.

“They’re not out of a desire to infringe; they’re out of a desire to protect,” Fletcher said.

Read more here.

What happens when the price of oil drops below $0 | Rob Nikolewski Apr 22, 2020

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Unprecedented times led to an unprecedented event in the energy sector Monday.

For the first time in U.S. history, the futures price for domestic crude oil not only dropped to zero, it fell into negative territory. In essence, buyers paid sellers not to deliver oil because there is no place to store all the crude that has piled up around the world, including California, as the COVID-19 pandemic has decapitated demand.

With no specific timeline in place to lift coronoavirus restrictions, fuel experts say gasoline prices will continue to fall — although there are few drivers in position to take advantage of it — and oil producers in the Golden State say they face an increasingly uncertain future.

Read more here.

Decoding the science of antibodies | Jonathan Wosen Apr 21, 2020

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As scientists and doctors scramble to track the scope and severity of COVID-19, antibodies have become something of a buzzword.

Here are five things you need to know about coronavirus antibodies, including how and why scientists — many of them in San Diego — are studying them, and why some think they might be the key to reopening the economy.

Read more here.

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Coronavirus update: Businesses worry about the "how" of opening back up| Phil Molnar, Brittany Meiling Apr 18, 2020

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San Diego is closed for business — but it won't be forever. Recently announced federal guidelines suggest that some doors will open sooner rather than later, leaving local proprietors and landlords in the tricky position of needing to make room for radical change right away.In a press conference Thursday, President Donald Trump revealed a three-phase plan to reopen businesses, starting when each state meets a threshold of coronavirus case decline. Reopening would begin with restaurants, movie theaters and sporting venues. Later on, worksites and schools will reopen — all with appropriate social distancing. Some states, like Texas and Florida, are expected to begin reopening as early as late April, while others will wait longer.That means, across the county, human resource staffers and business owners are already huddling remotely to write a new rule book for returning to work or play. They have large blanks to fill in because there's only one certainty: Leave-your-home life will, for the foreseeable future, be different than what we experienced in the days before COVID-19 upended everyday life.

Coronavirus update: San Diego International Airport may delay Terminal 1 expansion | Lori Weisberg Apr 16, 2020

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With less than half the scheduled flights taking off here in early April and more of the same anticipated as the coronavirus scare plays out across the world, San Diego’s international airport is facing a deep dive in monthly revenues that is forcing it to slash expenses and possibly delay the start late next year of a $3 billion project to expand its aging Terminal 1.

The airport’s largest airline, Southwest, has already cut by half the number of flights scheduled across its system in June, and by Wednesday, all three of San Diego’s once-popular overseas flights — to London, Frankfurt and Japan — will have ended.

Even more startling are stats released by the Transportation Security Administration, which reported that officers screened just 102,184 people at U.S. airport checkpoints on Monday — a nearly 96 percent drop from the nearly 2.5 million who went through security on the same day in 2019. No figures are available by airport, but in San Diego, a little more than 400,000 passengers boarded planes during the month of March, compared to well over twice that a year earlier, the Airport Authority reported.

Read more here.

Coronavirus update: Inmates fear COVID-19 outbreak | Jeff McDonald Apr 16, 2020

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Inmates and their family members say conditions are more serious than department officials have acknowledged. Among other problems, they cite a persistent lack of virus testing and inadequate protective gear and medical care.

As of April 9 the department had tested 62 inmates for the coronavirus — just over 0.13 percent of the people in custody and 16 more than the 46 tested by April 3.

Department officials say they are taking every reasonable precaution to keep COVID-19 from infiltrating the jails, including issuing masks to employees and inmates.

Story: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/watchdog/story/2020-04-12/theyre-filthy-inmates-decry-lack-of-clean-masks-testing-conditions-in-san-diego-jails

Coronavirus update: COVID-19 derails transit plans | Joshua Emerson Smith Apr 14, 2020

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Public transit was shaping up to have a banner year in 2020 — from a tax proposal to massively expand bus and trolley service to the unveiling of a vision for an entirely new commuter rail system.

Now those efforts could be, at least temporarily, derailed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic that continues to grip California and much of the world. The reality stings all the more since bus and trolley ridership in San Diego had been climbing in recent months, bucking a years-long trend impacting systems nationwide.

Story: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/transportation/story/2020-04-10/coronavirus-threatens-to-derail-san-diegos-plans-to-expand-public-transit

Coronavirus update: Feared "surge" of COVID-19 hospitalizations spared hospitals | Paul Sisson Apr 13, 2020

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They’ve built special wards, literally punching holes in their walls and snaking ventilation pipes through their halls to make their rooms ready to receive COVID-19 patients.

They’ve conserved personal protective equipment, and they’ve canceled most elective procedures, inconveniencing their own patients in ways that will surely take months to untangle.

But, as Easter arrived, the expected surge of patients with novel coronavirus infections still has not swamped local emergency rooms and intensive care units across San Diego County though news came this weekend that many hospitals in Baja California now have more patients than they can handle.

As of Saturday afternoon, the county public health department has tallied just 396 total hospitalizations since Feb. 14, nowhere near the number that would be needed to inundate the combined capacity of the region’s 21 acute care hospitals which, taken together, exceeds 7,000 beds.

But that does not mean that the burden has fallen evenly on San Diego’s houses of healing. Hospitals in Escondido, San Diego and Chula Vista, visited Friday, had similar but distinct COVID experiences.

Coronavirus update: The Navy's COVID-19 chaos | Andrew Dyer Apr 10, 2020

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In just one week, the Acting Secretary of the Navy has resigned following an outbreak of COVID-19 on an aircraft carrier, and now about 10% of its sailors are confirmed to have the virus. How the Navy is handling this pandemic.

Stories:

The San Diego Union-Tribune is providing some coronavirus content for free during the pandemic.

Coronavirus update: COVID-19 Q&A | Morgan Cook Apr 10, 2020

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Reporter Morgan Cook answers questions readers submitted about the virus.

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