February satellite readings in the troposphere (the lower atmosphere) of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a pollutant primarily from burning fossil fuels, show a dramatic decline compared to early January when power plants were operating at normal levels.; Credit: /NASA Earth Observatory

As China seeks to control the spread of COVID-19, fewer cars are driving, fewer factories are running and — in some places — skies are clearer.

Air pollution levels have dropped by roughly a quarter over the last month as coal-fired power plants and industrial facilities have ramped down so employees in high-risk areas can stay home. Levels of nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant primarily from burning fossil fuels, were down as much as 30%, according to NASA.

"It is an unprecedentedly dramatic drop in emissions," says Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, who tallied the reductions. "I've definitely spoken to people in Shanghai who said that it's been some of the most pristine blue skies that they remember over the winter."

Myllyvirta estimates that China's carbon emissions have dropped by a quarter over the same period. While that's a tiny fraction of its overall annual emissions, it's substantial in a worldwide context, since China is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

There's potentially a health benefit — although any gains due to a drop in pollution are set against the toll taken by the coronavirus outbreak.

Air pollution is estimated to contribute to more than 1 million premature deaths in China each year. Fine particle pollution, also known as PM 2.5, can enter the bloodstream through the lungs and has been linked to asthma attacks, heart attacks and respiratory problems.

Even a short-term reduction in air pollution can make a difference.

"There is no question about it: When air quality improves, that will be associated with a reduction in health-related problems," says Jim Zhang, professor of global and environmental health at Duke University.

Zhang says that was evident during the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing. To help improve the air, government officials shut factories and dramatically limited car travel before and during the games. Levels of some air pollutants dropped by half.

He and colleagues studied a group of young men and women in Beijing and found that during that time period, their lung and cardiovascular health improved. He also followed pregnant women.

"What we found is that the kids whose mothers had a third trimester pregnancy during the Olympics when the air quality was better, their birth weight was substantially higher than the kids who were born a year before and a year later," he says.

But health specialists sound a cautionary note.

"It would be a mischaracterization to say that the coronavirus was beneficial to health because of these air pollution reductions," says Jill Baumgartner, associate professor and epidemiologist at McGill University.

"The health impacts from the virus itself, the stress on the health-care system, the stress on people's lives — those health impacts are likely to be much greater than the short-term benefits of air pollution on health," she says.

Baumgartner says people with health issues other than COVID-19 may have avoided seeing doctors during the outbreak or potentially couldn't receive treatment they needed in areas with overtaxed health systems.

Those isolated at home and avoiding crowds may also have been exposed to more indoor air pollution.

"People spent a lot more time indoors and it's possible that they were exposed to higher levels of indoor tobacco smoke," Baumgartner says. "Or in the suburban areas, it's possible that they were using their traditional wood or coal stoves for heating."

Not all cities have experienced the recent improvements. In mid-February, Beijing saw a spike in pollution due to local weather patterns trapping air in the region.

The drop in air pollution and carbon emissions is also likely to disappear as Chinese industry ramps up again in an attempt to offset its economic losses.

"If you think back to the global financial crisis, the immediate impact was for China's emissions to fall," says Myllyvirta. "But then the government response was to roll out the biggest stimulus package in the history of mankind that then drove China's emissions and global emissions up for years."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Opah fish are hauled onto a dock for sale last week in San Diego. Fishermen coming home to California after weeks at sea are finding strict anti-coronavirus measures, and nowhere to sell their catch.; Credit: Gregory Bull/AP

Commercial fishermen in the U.S. who have already faced challenges in recent years to make it in an increasingly globalized and regulated industry, are now struggling to find customers during the coronavirus crisis.

"This is totally unprecedented. This is the biggest crisis to hit the fishing industry ever, no question about that," Noah Oppenheim, executive director of The Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations told NPR in a phone interview. The federation is a trade association representing commercial fishermen along the West Coast.

On Tuesday, seafood industry leaders, processors and fishermen sent a letter to House and Senate leaders requesting $4 billion in aid for the industry.

The closings of restaurants due to the coronavirus pandemic has hit commercial fishermen particularly hard.

An estimated 50% to 60% of wild seafood caught in the U.S. is exported, says Oppenheim. Those international markets have dried up. He says, of the seafood that's not exported, around 80% of that is sold to restaurants.

"Both of those sectors of the seafood economy are largely nonfunctional at the moment, so we're going to have to make up for approximately 90% of our markets ... through either new supply pipelines or new sets of customers."

Jerid Rold, a fishermen in Moss Landing, Calif., tells NPR, he's been out of work for a month, since South Korea stopped taking imports of hagfish. Further damaging profits, Dungeness crab prices on the West Coast have fallen from up to $7 dollars a pound to $2, says Oppenheim.

In Eureka, Calif., "there are no buyers purchasing products at the harbor there. You can't move the Dungeness crab out of the Humboldt bay," Oppenheim said. "It's actually extraordinary how similar these impacts are playing out across the country. They are palpable, they are profound and they are severe."

On the North Atlantic coast, Sam Rosen, a 30-year-old lobsterman based in Vinalhaven, Maine, said he and others are "selling lobster for amounts they shouldn't be sold for."

That's been close to $2.50 a pound, compared to a usual $10 a pound this time of year, Rosen said.

"It's definitely a shock to the system," Rosen said. "This is uncharted territory right now. I don't think anyone thought it was going to be as bad as it's getting."

If aid isn't provided to fishermen soon, "I think we could see hundreds to thousands of fishermen leave the industry nationwide," Oppenheim said.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Updated at 10 p.m. ET

Australia's High Court has found reasonable doubt that Cardinal George Pell sexually assaulted two boys in the 1990s and has overturned his conviction.

The court acquitted the former Vatican treasurer of the charges, and no retrial will be possible.

Pell, 78, had been serving a six-year prison sentence in the case. The High Court ordered that he be released.

He was convicted of sexually abusing two 13-year-old choirboys at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne.

As an adult, one of them went to the police in 2015 and accused the cardinal of abusing him and the other boy in 1996. The other individual died of a heroin overdose the previous year without reporting abuse.

In a statement after the acquittal, as reported by Reuters, Pell said, "I hold no ill will toward my accuser, I do not want my acquittal to add to the hurt and bitterness so many feel; there is certainly hurt and bitterness enough."

Pell was convicted in 2018 and an appellate court upheld those convictions last year.

The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference's comments on the acquittal recognize that the outcome will be good news for some people and "devastating for others."

"The result today does not change the Church's unwavering commitment to child safety and to a just and compassionate response to survivors and victims of child sexual abuse. The safety of children remains supremely important not only for the bishops, but for the entire Catholic community. Any person with allegations of sexual abuse by Church personnel should go to the police."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed an executive order banning all elective medical procedures, including abortions, during the coronavirus outbreak. The ban extends to medication abortions.; Credit: Eric Gay/AP

Governors across the country are banning elective surgery as a means of halting the spread of the coronavirus. But in a handful of states that ban is being extended to include a ban on all abortions.

So far the courts have intervened to keep most clinics open. The outlier is Texas, where the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit this week upheld the governor's abortion ban.

Four years ago, Texas was also the focus of a fierce legal fight that ultimately led to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in which the justices struck down a Texas law purportedly aimed at protecting women's health. The court ruled the law was medically unnecessary and unconstitutional.

Now Texas is once again the epicenter of the legal fight around abortion. In other states--Ohio, Iowa, Alabama, and Oklahoma--the courts so far have sided with abortion providers and their patients.

Not so in Texas where Gov. Greg Abbott signed an executive order barring all "non-essential" medical procedures in the state, including abortion. The executive order was temporarily blocked in the district court, but the Fifth Circuit subsequently upheld the governor's order by a 2-to-1 vote, declaring that "all public constitutional rights may be reasonably restricted to combat a public health emergency."

"No more elective medical procedures can be done in the state because of the potential of needing both people ... beds and supplies, and obviously doctors and nurses," said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in an interview with NPR.

'Exploiting This Crisis'

Nancy Northrup, CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, sees things very differently. "It is very clear that anti-abortion rights politicians are shamelessly exploiting this crisis to achieve what has been their longstanding ideological goal to ban abortion in the U.S.," she said.

Paxton denies that, saying Texas "is not targeting any particular group."
The state's the "only goal is to protect people from dying," he said.

Yet the American Medical Association just last week filed a brief in this case in support of abortion providers, as did 18 states, led by New York, which is the state that has been the hardest hit by the coronavirus.

They maintain that banning abortion is far more dangerous,because it will force women to travel long distances to get one. A study from the Guttmacher Institute found that people seeking abortions during the COVID-19 outbreak would have to travel up to 20 times farther than normal if states successfully ban abortion care during the pandemic. The AMA also notes that pregnant women do not stop needing medical care if they don't get an abortion.

Northrup, of the Center for Reproductive Rights, sees this as more evidence that the ban is a calculated move by the state: what "puts the lie to this is the fact that they're trying to ban medication, abortion as well; that's the use of pills for abortion.

"Those do not need to take place in a clinic and they can be done, taken effectively by tele-medicine. So it shows that the real goal here, tragically, is shutting down one's right to make the decision to end the pregnancy, not a legitimate public health response."

'I Was Desperate'

Affidavits filed in the Texas case tell of harrowing experiences already happening as the result of the Texas ban. One declaration was filed by a 24-year-old college student. The week she lost her part-time job as a waitress, she found out she was pregnant. She and her partner agreed they wanted to terminate the pregnancy, and on March 20 she went to a clinic in Forth Worth alone; because of social distancing rules, her partner was not allowed to go with her.

Since she was 10 weeks pregnant, still in her first trimester, she was eligible for a medication abortion. Under state law, she had to wait 24 hours before getting the pills at the clinic, but the night before her scheduled appointment, the clinic called to cancel because of Abbott's executive order.

He partner was with her and we "cried together," she wrote in her declaration. "I couldn't risk the possibility that I would run out of time to have an abortion while the outbreak continued," and it "seemed to be getting more and more difficult to travel."

She made many calls to clinics in New Mexico and Oklahoma. The quickest option was Denver--a 12-hour drive, 780-mile drive from where she lives. Her partner was still working, so her best friend agreed to go with her. They packed sanitizing supplies and food in the car for the long drive and arrived at the Denver Clinic on March 26, where she noticed other cars with Texas plates in the parking lot, according to the affidavit.

At the clinic, she was examined, given a sonogram again, and because Colorado does not have a 24-hour waiting requirement, she was given her first abortion pill without delay and told she should try to get home within 30 hours to take the second pill.

She and her friend then turned around to go home. They were terrified she would have the abortion in the car, and tried to drive through without taking breaks. But after six hours, when it turned dark they were so exhausted they had to stop at a motel to catch some sleep. The woman finally got home and took the second pill just within the 30-hour window.

She said that despite the ordeal she was grateful she had the money, the car, the friend, and the supportive partner with a job, to make the abortion possible. Others will not be so lucky, she wrote. But "I was desperate and desperate people take desperate steps to protect themselves."

A 'Narrative' Of Choice

Paxton, the Texas attorney general, does not seem moved by the time limitations that pregnancy imposes, or the hardships of traveling out of state to get an abortion. He told NPR "the narrative has always been 'It's a choice' ... that's the whole narrative. I'm a little surprised by the question, given that's always been the thing."

On Thursday abortion providers and their patients returned to the district court in Texas instead of appealing directly to the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the Fifth Circuit's ruling from earlier this week. The district court judge, who originally blocked the governor's ban, instead narrowed the governor's order so that medical abortions--with pills--would be exempt from the ban, as well as abortions for women who are up against the state-imposed deadline. Abortions in Texas are banned after 22 weeks.

In the end, though, this case may well be headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. And because of the addition of two Trump appointees since 2016--the composition of the court is a lot more hostile to abortion rights.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

; Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP

What does the right to a unanimous jury verdict have to do with abortion, or school prayer, or federal environmental regulations? Stay tuned.

The U.S. Supreme Court Monday struck down state laws in Louisiana and Oregon that allowed people accused of serious crimes to be convicted by a non-unanimous jury vote. The 6-to-3 decision overturned a longstanding prior ruling from 1972, which had upheld such non-unanimous verdicts in state courts.

And these days, any decision to overturn a longstanding precedent rings the alarm bells in the Supreme Court.

In the short run, Monday's decision was a victory for Evangelisto Ramos, who in 2016 was convicted of second-degree murder by a jury vote of 10-to-2 in Louisiana.

Only two states--Louisiana and Oregon--had provisions allowing non-unanimous verdicts, and Louisiana just recently changed its law to be like those in 48 other states and the federal government.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, laid out the history behind the laws in both states. Gorsuch noted that the measure was first added to the Louisiana state constitution in 1898, after the Supreme Court ruled that racial minorities could not be barred from juries; that same year, Louisiana added the non-unanimous jury provision to its state constitution as part of a package of amendments that deliberately made it difficult for black citizens to vote or otherwise participate meaningfully in the state's governance. Specifically, Gorsuch said, the non-unanimous jury provision was a way to ensure that even if one or two African Americans made it on to a jury, their participation would be "meaningless."

The adoption of the non-unanimous jury rule in Oregon, Gorsuch wrote, "can similarly be traced to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and efforts to dilute the influence of racial and ethnic and religious minorities on Oregon juries."

Despite these state provisions, there has never been any dispute that the unanimous jury requirement applies to the federal government. The question in this case was whether that aspect of the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial applied to the states as well.

Over the last 75 years or so, the court has applied just about every other provision of the Bill of Rights to the states, but in 1972 it deviated from that practice, declining to apply the unanimous jury requirement in a similar fashion.

On Monday, however, the 1972 decision came tumbling down. The six-justice court majority — composed of conservatives and liberals — said the earlier ruling was a mistake.

The decision, written by the conservative Gorsuch, was joined in whole or in part by liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Justice Clarence Thomas, another conservative, agreed with the result, but on entirely different grounds.

Writing for the dissenters, Justice Samuel Alito — joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and for the most part, Justice Elena Kagan — maintained that the principle of adhering to precedent should be followed in this case because to do otherwise would require "a potentially crushing" number of new trials for people currently imprisoned under the old rule.

"Where is the justice in that?" replied Justice Gorsuch. "Not a single member of this court" is prepared to say that the 1972 decision was correct, he noted. "Every judge must learn to live with the fact that he or she will make mistakes ... But it is something else entirely to perpetuate" a wrong "only because we fear the consequences of being right."

The consequences of Monday's decision will likely be felt more in Louisiana, which allowed non-unanimous verdicts for more serious crimes than Oregon. The court's decision will require retrials for any prisoner who still has appeals pending.

There are about 100 of those cases in Louisiana, says Jamila Johnson, the managing attorney at the Promise of Justice Initiative, which represented Ramos. But there are also at least 1,700 prisoners in the state who might qualify for a new trial if the court eventually holds that Monday's decision is retroactive.

The high court left that question open for another day.

Altogether the majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions totaled a whopping 86 pages and reflected an important subtext--divergent views about when the court should follow its usual rule of adhering to precedent and when it should not.

It's important because, the new ultra-conservative court majority has very different views than the courts of the last 75 years on topics as diverse as abortion, voting rights, federal regulation, and the clash between religious views and generally applicable laws.

"The court's views about when it's OK to overrule prior precedent have always been more about the eye of the beholder than they have been about a rule that is easy or straightforward to apply," says Deborah Pearlstein, professor and co-director of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy at Cardozo School of Law. Ultimately, she said, "all of these major questions that are coming before the court are going to be fought along these lines."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

; Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP

The U.S. Supreme Court is no stranger to controversy, but it still gets higher marks in public opinion polls than the other branches of government. Now though, for the first time in memory, the court is not just split along ideological lines, but along political lines as well: All the conservatives are Republican appointees, all the liberals Democratic appointees. That division could put the court in the crosshairs of public opinion if it is forced to make decisions that affect the 2020 election.

Chief Justice John Roberts has worked hard to persuade the public that the justices are fair-minded legal umpires--not politicians in robes. That image got pretty scuffed up earlier this month when the conservative court majority shot down accommodations for the coronavirus that would have allowed six more days for absentee ballots to be received in Wisconsin's election for 500 school board seats, over 100 judicial seats, and thousands of other state and local positions.

In the weeks leading up to the election, the COVID-19 pandemic had become a public health crisis. Encouraged by local officials, about a million more voters than usual requested absentee ballots, and local officials were unable to keep up with the surge. To mitigate that problem, the lower courts allowed an extra six days for election officials to receive completed absentee ballots.

But the day before the election, the Supreme Court overturned the lower court ruling by a 5-to-4 vote. The result was that tens of thousands of people who had not yet even received their absentee ballots were forced to, as the dissenters put it, choose between their health and their right to vote.

The TV footage of people wearing masks waiting for hours to vote at the very few precincts that were open amid the pandemic was, to say the least, not a good look. Health officials in Milwaukee have since identified six voters and one poll worker who appear to have contracted the virus during the election.

The majority opinion was unsigned, so no one knows who the principal author was. But we do know some things.

First, the emergency appeal in the case came through the justice assigned to that region of the country, Brett Kavanaugh. Typically, when a justice refers a case to the full court, he or she writes a memo about the issues, likely with a recommendation. Kavanaugh almost certainly did that. But other justices would then chime in. And in a voting case, Chief Justice Roberts assuredly would have played a pivotal role.

"John Roberts' fingerprints are on this as chief justice and as someone who has owned this area of the law," says Joan Biskupic, a Supreme Court biographer and CNN legal analyst who is the author of a critically acclaimed biography about Roberts.

Indeed, Roberts was invested in voting-rights law as far back as 1982 when he was a staffer in the Reagan administration. Back then, he led the effort to narrow the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. When that failed, President Reagan signed the broad extension of the law, rejecting advice to veto it. But years later, on the Supreme Court, Roberts wrote the decision in Shelby County v. Holder, gutting a key provision of that law.

So, it was no surprise when the conservative majority refused to make even a modest accommodation to the pandemic. What was surprising was the tone of the opinion. Critics of the opinion, including some Roberts defenders, called the language "callous," "cynical," and "unfortunate."

In fact, the word "pandemic" appears not once in the court's unsigned opinion. Rather, the majority sought to portray the issue before the court as a "narrow, technical question." The majority said the lower court had overstepped the Supreme Court's established rule that courts should "ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election."

The dissenters replied that the court's treatment of the current situation as ordinary "boggles the mind." Writing for the dissenters, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg opined that "a voter cannot deliver...a ballot she has not yet received. Yet tens of thousands of voters who timely requested absentee ballots" are being asked to do just that.

"I do think there's something to this idea that we need to stick with the rules even in the context of an emergency," says law professor Rick Hasen, an election expert at the University of California, Irvine.

He and others see the legal question before the court as a close call, but say the decision was, at the very least, tone deaf in light of the reality of a pandemic.

Hasen says that the court could have recognized "the inhumanity of making people vote in this way," but that instead the tone of the opinion was "really dismissive of the entire threat facing these voters."

Chief Justice Roberts has, on some occasions tried to bridge the two wings of the court, in a couple of big cases siding with the court's liberals, or sometimes trying to fashion a compromise. But as Hasen observes, "there really is not any case I can think of involving elections where Roberts has forged a larger consensus."

Roberts must have anticipated at least some of the outcry over the Wisconsin decision. He is, after all, an astute political observer.

But as any student of the court knows, Roberts is a reliable, and often leading member of the conservative majority when it comes to a whole host of issues involving campaigns, voting and elections. That includes decisions he has written striking down laws aimed at limiting the role of big money in campaigns and decisions upholding partisan gerrymanders. Moreover voting rights in particular "is an area of the law where John Roberts has not been deterred by anticipated public criticism," says Biskupic, his biographer.

For the chief, says Biskupic, "It's not just voting rights. It's a broader overlay of representation" in his decisions, a pattern that "often will favor Republicans, but more fundamentally, it seems to favor entrenched powers, the status quo in many states, against ordinary citizens. And we certainly saw that in Wisconsin."

Uncertainties around COVID-19 remain, with states facing decisions about when to reopen and what size of public gatherings are safe. As November inches closer, those decisions could affect the 2020 election. Who gets to vote, when, and how, are unanswered questions and states are surely exploring different plans to keep voters safe. But Roberts' Supreme Court may be the ultimate arbiter of what changes and accommodations to voting are allowed.

The majority opinion "tried to tell the public that this was a very small decision," says Biskupic. "But as the dissent pointed out, it laid down a very serious marker about how voters will be accommodated in the middle of the coronavirus crisis."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Attorney General William Barris pictured at a coronavirus task force meeting at the White House on March 23. The Justice Department is looking to crack down on coronavirus-related fraud.; Credit: Alex Brandon/AP

The coronavirus pandemic has brought out the good side of many Americans, but certainly not all Americans. Officials say that fraud related to COVID-19 — like hoarding equipment, price gouging and hawking fake treatments — are spreading as the country wrestles with the outbreak.

"It's a perfect ecosystem for somebody like a fraudster to operate in," said Craig Carpenito, the U.S. attorney for New Jersey and the head of the Justice Department's COVID-19 price gouging and hoarding task force.

"People want to believe that there's a magic pill that they can take or that if they buy a certain kind of mask or a certain kind of protective gear that it's going to protect them and their families," he said. "That creates opportunities for the types of people that prey upon scared people. They prey upon their fear."

A month ago, Attorney General William Barr instructed federal prosecutors around the country to aggressively investigate and prosecute scams and other crimes related to the COVID-19 pandemic. He also created the price gouging and hoarding task force and put Carpenito in charge of it.

From that perch, Carpenito has one of the best views of virus-related crime nationwide.

"Instead of seeing that tremendous support from all aspects of society, we're still seeing that sliver, that that dark underbelly, that small percentage of folks who instead of putting the interests of the country and support for those medical professionals that are putting themselves at risk in the forefront, they're finding ways to try and take advantage of this situation and illegally profiteer from it," he said. "And it's despicable."

The most prevalent kind of fraud that federal authorities are seeing at this point, he and others say, is tied to personal protective equipment like N95 masks, gloves or face shields.

In one notable case, prosecutors brought charges against a Georgia man, Christopher Parris, for allegedly trying to sell $750 million worth of masks and other protective equipment to the Department of Veterans Affairs but with a sizable advance payment.

The problem, prosecutors say, is the masks and other items didn't exist, at least not in the quantities Parris was offering.

Steven Merrill, the head of the FBI's financial crimes section, says the bureau refers to these sorts of operations as advance-fee schemes.

"We're getting many complaints that different entities are entering into these agreements, paying money upfront, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars, and may or may not get any masks or other PPE ordered at all," Merrill said. "So our guidance to the public is to please be wary of these frauds and solicitations."

Other problems, such as hoarding and price gouging, can arise even when the medical gear does exist.

The FBI is trying to identify individuals who are stockpiling protective equipment and trying to sell it at exorbitant markups, sometimes 40 to 70 times the value, Merrill said.

A few weeks ago, the FBI seized nearly 1 million respirator masks, gloves and other medical gear from a Brooklyn man who was allegedly stockpiling them and selling them to nurses and doctors at what officials say was around a 700% markup.

The man, Baruch Feldheim, has been charged with lying to the FBI about price gouging. He's also been charged with allegedly assaulting a federal officer after he coughed on agents and claimed he had COVID-19.

The confiscated items, meanwhile, have been distributed to medical workers in the New York area.

Carpenito said the Justice Department has more than 100 investigations open into price gouging. It has hundreds more, he said, into other crimes tied to the pandemic, including fake treatments and cures.

In one case out of California, prosecutors charged a man who was allegedly soliciting large investments for what he claimed was a cure for COVID-19.

"He was doing so by broadcasting this scheme via, notably, YouTube, where had thousands of hits and views," Merrill said.

In a separate case out of Florida last week, the Justice Department got a court order to stop a Florida church from selling on its website an industrial bleach that was being marketed as a miracle treatment for the virus.

To be clear, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says there is no cure at this point for the virus.

More than a month into this crisis, there's no sense COVID-related crime is going to slow down.

In fact, Carpenito and Merrill say that with the massive $2 trillion economic relief package beginning to be doled out, they expect to see even more fraud in the weeks and months ahead.

"What we're worried about is that not only do we have these existing conditions, but we are awaiting — like everybody in the country — the arrival of $2 trillion to hit the streets," Merrill said. "And anytime there's that much money out there, you can just multiply the amount of frauds that are going to take place. So we're preparing for many more complaints to come in and new schemes to arrive on a daily basis."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

It was a new day at the Supreme Court, which for the first time ever live-streamed oral arguments.; Credit: Andrew Harnik/AP

The U.S. Supreme Court made history Monday. The coronavirus lockdown forced the typically cautious court to hear arguments for the first time via telephone, and to stream the arguments live for the public to hear.

Chief Justice John Roberts was at the court as the telephone session began, one or two other justices were in their offices at the court, and the rest of the justices dialed in from home.

The first and only case heard Monday involved an arcane trademark question only a lawyer could love. Online travel search engine Booking.com is appealing a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office refusal to grant a trademark to the company.

With the justices asking questions in order of seniority, the first big surprise was that Justice Clarence Thomas, who in the past has gone years without asking a question, did ask one, several in fact, when it came his turn.

"Could Booking acquire an 800 number ... that's a vanity number, 1-800-BOOKING, for example?" Thomas asked Assistant Solicitor General Erica Ross.

Yes, replied Ross, but domain names pose a different problem than phone numbers. Ultimately, she argued "the core problem with Booking.com is that it allows [Booking.com] to monopolize booking on the internet" to the exclusion of other sites like hotelbooking.com.

Justice Stephen Breyer followed up when his turn came: "Same question as Justice Thomas ... good morning, anyway ... You can have a trademark that's an address. You can have a trademark that's a telephone number. So why can't you have a trademark that's a dot-com?"

Justice Samuel Alito noted that the court's prior decision in this area of the law was more than 100 years old, and the statute dealing with trademarks was similarly enacted decades ago.

"How can a rule that makes sense in the internet age be reconciled with the language" in these "pre-Internet era" laws? asked Alito.

Next up to her lectern from her home was lawyer Lisa Blatt. This was her 40th Supreme Court argument and despite being a veteran, she said later that she was, as usual, sick to her stomach beforehand.

But once at the lectern "it's always a rush of excitement," she said, and this time it was a special rush.

"I loved getting a question from Justice Thomas ... I would go to the phone for the foreseeable future if I could get Justice Thomas to ask questions. That was wonderful," she said.

Indeed, despite the new format Blatt and Ross seemed to have had a good time.

"Your client would not object to the registration of any trademark that simply made a slight variation in Booking.com?" asked Alito.

"There's a million booking registrations already," parried Blatt.

Alito: "Would you just answer the question."

Blatt: "They don't and have not and would not."

Not, she added, unless another company ripped off the trademark with no variation. That would be theft, she said.

So, when when the argument was over, what was her reaction?

"After I hung up, I screamed, 'That was hard!' Because you're saying enough to answer, but not too much. And you don't have any like visual feedback, so it was hard."

In the end, she said, the argument felt more like an oral exam than an oral argument.

Tom Goldstein, publisher of Scotusblog, had a similar reaction. Goldstein, who has argued 43 cases before the court, said he thought the argument was probably more useful to the public than usual.

"But I bet it was less useful for the justices," he said. "Because there was less opportunity to follow up on lines of questions and less opportunity to influence someone ... so there's much less engagement in the oral argument."

Still there were no major hitches on this first day. Justice Sonia Sotomayor briefly forget to unmute her phone at one point, prompting a "Sorry, chief." Justice Breyer's voice broke up in static for a second or two. But as Goldstein observes, this was a big change for the court.

"Culturally a change, technologically a change. And it could have been a big embarrassment if it didn't go well, but it went fine," he said. "I think they're happy."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg poses for the official photo at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. in 2018.; Credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg underwent non-surgical treatment Tuesday for a benign gallbladder condition, according to a press release from the Supreme Court. She plans to participate in oral arguments from the hospital on Wednesday, according to the release.

In pain on Monday, Ginsburg went to Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington after hearing the first-ever Supreme Court teleconference of oral arguments. At Sibley, she was diagnosed with acute cholecystitis, a condition in which a gallstone migrates to the cystic duct. She nonetheless participated in arguments from home on Tuesday, but was in enough pain that she went to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for treatment of the infected duct later Tuesday.

Doctors not involved in Ginsburg's care said non-surgical treatment typically involves antibiotics and insertion of a tube to drain the infected duct.

Friends said the justice was in good spirits on Tuesday night, and watching the Metropolitan Opera on her iPad.

Ginsburg's emergency treatment coincides with the U.S. Supreme Court's historic live-streaming of its oral arguments in which the justices are participating by telephone because of the coronavirus. According to the court statement, Ginsburg, 87, is "resting comfortably" and plans to participate in oral arguments again on Wednesday when the court considers an important birth control case.

She is expected to remain in the hospital for another day or two.

Last year, Ginsburg completed three weeks of radiation treatment after a cancerous tumor was discovered on her pancreas. It was the fourth time in 20 years that she had been treated for cancer, and the second time in a year. In December 2019, she was operated on for lung cancer.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Nuns with the Little Sisters of The Poor, including Sister Celestine, left, and Sister Jeanne Veronique, center, rally outside the Supreme Court in Washington on March 23, 2016.; Credit: Jacquelyn Martin/AP

The birth-control wars return to the Supreme Court Wednesday, and it is likely that the five-justice conservative majority will make it more difficult for women to get birth control if they work for religiously affiliated institutions like hospitals, charities and universities.

At issue in the case is a Trump administration rule that significantly cuts back on access to birth control under the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare, the massive overhaul of the health care system, sought to equalize preventive health care coverage for women and men by requiring employers to include free birth control in their health care plans.

Listen to the arguments live beginning at 10 a.m. ET.

Houses of worship like churches and synagogues were automatically exempted from the provision, but religiously affiliated nonprofits like universities, charities and hospitals were not. Such organizations employ millions of people, many of whom want access to birth control for themselves and their family members. But many of these institutions say they have a religious objection to providing birth control for employees.

For these nonprofits, the Obama administration enacted rules providing a work-around to accommodate employers' religious objections. The workaround was that an employer was to notify the government, or the insurance company, or the plan administrator, that, for religious reasons, it would not be providing birth-control coverage to its employees. Then, the insurance company could provide free birth-control options to individual employees separately from the employer's plan.

But some religiously affiliated groups still objected, saying the work-around was not good enough, and sued. They contended that signing an opt-out form amounted to authorizing the use of their plan for birth control. Among those objectors was the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of Catholic nuns that runs homes for the elderly poor.

The Supreme Court punted in 2016

The Little Sisters sued, and their case first reached the Supreme Court in 2016. At the time, Sister Constance Viet explained why she refused to sign any opt-out form, saying that "the religious burden is what that signifies and the fact that the government would ... be inserting services that we object into our plan. And it would still carry our name."

Back then, when the Little Sisters' case got to the Supreme Court, the justices basically punted, telling the government and the sisters to work together to try to reach a compromise that would still provide "seamless birth control" coverage for employees who want it, without burdening the Sisters' religious beliefs. Although the Little Sisters did eventually get relief from the lower courts, the fight over the accommodations rules continued right up to the end of the Obama administration.

But when President Trump came into office, the administration issued new rules that would give broad exemptions to nonprofits and some for-profit companies that have objections to providing birth-control coverage for their employees. And the new rules expanded the category of employers who would be exempt from the birth-control mandate to include not just those with religious objections, but those with moral objections, too.

New rules

Those new rules, currently blocked by lower courts, are what is at issue Wednesday in the Supreme Court.

"Many states are suing and none of them can find a single actual woman who claims she's been harmed," says Mark Reinezi, president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is defending the Trump rules against challenges brought by Pennsylvania and other states.

And, he adds, "there are many other ways to provide contraceptive coverage to people if they happen to work for religious objectors."

Rienzi says that employees who work for birth-control objectors can get coverage from their spouse's insurance plan, or by switching to a different insurance plan on an Obamacare exchange. And he says that birth control is also available under a program known as Title X, which gives money to state and local governments to provide health care for women.

But Brigitte Amiri, the deputy director the of ACLU's Reproductive Freedom project, says the idea that Title X could make up for the lost coverage is "a joke." Amiri notes that the Title X program has been underfunded for years, and the Trump administration has issued new regulations that in her words "decimated the program."

According to Amiri, "the Trump administration and Vice President [Mike] Pence have long wanted to ... take away coverage for contraception. They want to block access to birth control. They want to block access to abortion ... so this is all part and parcel of the overall attack on access to reproductive health care."

Potential consequences

She maintains that if the expanded Trump rules are upheld for religious objectors, hundreds of thousands of women across the country will lose their contraceptive coverage. Ultimately, Amiri says, there just is no way to maintain birth-control coverage for employees who work for religiously affiliated institutions unless that employer, as she puts it, is willing to "raise their hand" to opt out.

A break in birth-control coverage that big could have serious consequences, say say birth-control advocates. They note that the National Academy of Medicine, a health policy nonprofit, recommended the original rules because birth control is prescribed not just to avoid pregnancy but also to treat various female medical conditions. In fact, it is the most frequently taken drug for women ages 15-60. And it is expensive, $30 a month and more for pills, and as much as $1,000 for buying and having an IUD inserted.

Birth-control advocates say that's the very reason that a broad requirement to cover birth control in insurance was included in Obamacare. They say the new Trump rule improperly undermines that mandate.

But selling that argument to the Supreme Court will be hard. When the court last considered this issue in 2016, its makeup was far less conservative than it is now. Since then, two Trump appointees have been added to the court. And both of those appointees — Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — have already indicated strong support for the notion that religious rights may often trump other rights.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

An apartment in Pomona that leases through the Housing for Health Program. (Matt Tinoco/LAist)

Our California Dream collaboration is looking for solutions to some of California's most pressing problems, in this case, homelessness. An initiative in Los Angeles seeks to save taxpayer money by housing some of the most vulnerable residents — those who cycle from the street to the emergency room and back again.

The California Dream series is a statewide media collaboration of CALmatters, KPBS, KPCC, KQED and Capital Public Radio with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the James Irvine Foundation.

READ THE STORY AT LAist.com.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

In L.A., community leaders are working to prevent an undercount of Asian Angelenos. ; Credit: via NPR

The 2020 Census kicks off in a matter of weeks. Census officials say Asian immigrants are “hard-to-count” because many have limited English and distrust government. 

Leo Moon is learning about the census with friends at a city-led workshop in Koreatown. He didn’t fill out the form in 2010, mostly because he didn’t want the government knowing he’s undocumented. But Moon says he’ll take part next year because the census determines how much funding and representation people get.  

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Donations fill up the entryway to a Goodwill Southern California Donation Center in Pasadena during the first week of 2020.; Credit: Carla Javier/KPCC

Now that the holiday season is winding down, thrift shops run by Goodwill, the Salvation Army, and other organizations are tallying up the annual flood of December donations. 

"It's always been a tradition that our donors donate between Christmas and New Year's ... and the last couple days of the year, they donate even more," Goodwill Southern California director of logistics Tinna Bauer explained. "Some do it for tax purposes, and some ... when they if they receive new items for Christmas, they clean out the old."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

; Credit: Courtesy Randy Newman

Read the full article at LAist

Oscar the Grouch. (Photo: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images); Credit: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

Read the full article at LAist

As millions of Americans have lost their jobs, Congress is trying to figure out what to do to help those who have also lost their health insurance.; Credit: South_agency/Getty Images

Mayra Jimenez had just lost the job she loved — and the health insurance that went along with it.

The 35-year-old San Francisco server needed coverage. Jimenez has ulcerative colitis, a chronic condition. Just one of her medications costs $18,000 per year.

"I was just in panic mode, scrambling to get coverage," Jimenez said.

A recent estimate suggests the pandemic has cost more than 9 million Americans both their jobs and their health insurance.

"Those numbers are just going to go up," MIT economist Jon Gruber said. "We've never seen such a dramatic increase in such a short period of time."

House Democrats introduced a bill in mid-April to help the millions of people, like Jimenez, who find themselves unsure of where to turn.

The Worker Health Coverage Protection Act would fully fund the cost of COBRA, a program that allows workers who leave or lose a job to stay on their former employer's insurance plan. COBRA currently requires workers to pay for their entire premium, including their employer's share.

The Worker Health Coverage Protection Act is one bill being considered as Congress tries to figure out what to do about the very real health care gap for those millions who have lost their jobs. Sponsors of the COBRA legislation say they hope their plan gets rolled into the next relief bill. But it's unclear when, how and whether the problem will get addressed in upcoming coronavirus relief measures.

Jimenez learned COBRA would run her $426 a month.

"I was kind of shocked to hear the number," she said. "That's almost half my rent."

The idea of allowing laid-off workers to stick with their coverage at no cost in a pandemic has clear appeal, says Gruber.

But he warns, "COBRA is expensive, and for many employees, it won't be there."

Only workers who get insurance through their employer are eligible for COBRA, leaving out more than half of the 26 million who have lost jobs in the last few weeks. Many of the industries hit hardest by COVID-19, including retail and hospitality, are among those least likely to offer employees insurance.

And even if someone had insurance through work, the person loses COBRA coverage if the former employer goes out of business.

Funding COBRA costs, federal dollars also wouldn't go as far as they could. Unpublished Urban Institute estimates show that an employer plan costs, on average, about 25% more than a Gold plan on the Affordable Care Act exchanges.

"We need to be all hands on deck, spending whatever we can to help people," Gruber said. "But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be thinking about efficient ways to do it."

Congress has tried this move before. In response to the Great Recession, lawmakers tucked a similar COBRA subsidy into the massive stimulus bill a decade ago. That legislation paid for 65% of COBRA premiums, leaving laid-off workers to cover the rest.

A federally commissioned study found that COBRA enrollment increased by just 15%. Mathematica senior researcher and study co-author Jill Berk said workers skipped the subsidy for two main reasons.

First, only about 30% of eligible workers even knew the subsidy existed.

"For those that were aware," Berk said, "their overwhelming response was that COBRA was still too expensive."

At that time, the average premium for a single worker — even with the subsidy — ran about $400 per month for a worker with family coverage.

"When you're actually facing those choices, choosing between rent and food and other bills," Berk said, "that COBRA bill looks quite high."

Berk's team also discovered that people who reported using the subsidy were four times more likely to have a college degree and a higher income than those who passed on it. In other words, Berk found that the COBRA subsidy was least helpful to those with the greatest need.

Several economists, including Gruber, and some Democrats in Washington are kicking around alternatives to COBRA. Among their ideas is a plan to have the federal government pick up more of a person's premium and other expenses on the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Another proposal would extend ACA subsidies to people who earn too much to qualify for any aid and to lower-income people who live in states yet to expand Medicaid.

Compared with funding COBRA, beefing up ACA subsidies could potentially help millions more people, including the pool of laid-off workers who did not get health insurance from their employer.

The ACA ties subsidies to people's income, giving more help to those at the bottom end of the wage scale and spending less on those who are better off. In contrast, the current COBRA plan would cover 100% of COBRA for everyone, regardless of the person's income.

There are some downsides to this approach. Making ACA subsidies more generous could end up costing the federal government more overall, because it gives more help to a lot more people.

Chris Holt from the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank, points out that the ACA already increases federal support when people's earnings fall and questions how much more of the tab Washington should pick up.

"If that subsidy would have been good enough for someone six months ago, why is it not good enough now?" he asked.

Maybe the biggest challenge to building on the ACA: The 10-year-old law remains a political football.

"There's just so much both emotion and, frankly, bitterness tied up in debates," Holt said, adding that this makes it hard to move anything forward.

Holt notes that COBRA is not free of political hang-ups either. He expects a fight over whether subsidy money can be spent on employer plans that cover abortion services, for example.

Holt and Gruber agree that perhaps the easiest idea is to leave the ACA alone with one minor tweak: allow people to take the ACA subsidy they're already eligible for and use it on COBRA if they choose.

As for Jimenez, she did not have time to wait for Congress. She brought in too much from unemployment to qualify for Medicaid. And she couldn't afford COBRA, so she picked out a plan on the ACA exchange, where she's eligible for generous existing subsidies. It will cost her $79.17 per month, and she gets to keep her doctors. Not everyone does.

This is the first time she has ever purchased insurance on her own, rather than gotten it through work — and that has delivered one other unexpected benefit.

"Freedom," Jimenez said. "It feels so freeing to take charge of my health care and to know that no one can take this away from me. I don't have to rely on a job to give me what they want to give me. I can make my own choices."

Policymakers, providers, employers and health-industry executives have been fighting over whether the United States should tie insurance to work since the end of World War II.

Subsidizing COBRA preserves the status quo, while doubling down on the ACA might just start to drive a real wedge between work and health insurance.

As states begin reopening businesses, some laid-off workers will get back their jobs, as well as their insurance. But many will remain unemployed and uninsured. A decade ago, faced with the same challenge, Congress chose to subsidize COBRA. It proved to be a narrow solution with limited impact.

Lawmakers now have the ACA at their disposal, a tool that may be a better fit for this moment. Whether they choose to use it may be a choice grounded more in political realism than policy idealism.

Dan Gorenstein is the creator and co-host of the Tradeoffs podcast, and Leslie Walker is a producer on the show, which ran a version of this story on April 23.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Deputy Chief Patricia Cassidy of the Jersey City Police Department has blood drawn to test for coronavirus antibodies in Jersey City, N.J., on Monday.; Credit: Seth Wenig/AP

The Food and Drug Administration is stiffening its rules to counteract what some have called a Wild West of antibody testing for the coronavirus.

These tests are designed to identify people who have been previously exposed to the virus. The FDA said more than 250 developers have been bringing products to the market in the past few weeks.

In a rush to make antibody tests available as quickly as possible, the FDA had set a low standard for these tests. Manufacturers were supposed to submit their own information about the accuracy of their wares, but the agency had no standards for what would be acceptable. Companies weren't allowed to claim the tests were authorized by the FDA, under initial guidance issued in mid-March.

Now the FDA is telling manufacturers that if they want their tests to remain on the market, they must meet minimum quality standards and submit a request for emergency use authorization, a temporary route to market for unapproved products when others aren't available. The EUA involves a lower standard than the usual FDA clearance or approval.

The FDA said 12 manufacturers have already opted to request EUA's for their products. More than 100 other producers have been talking to the agency about using this process, said FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn. He spoke on a press call Monday. Companies have 10 days to submit that request.

"Our expectation is that those who can't [meet the new standard] will withdraw their products from the market and we will be working with them to help them do that," he said.

These tests are now so widespread that people can order them from lab giants Quest or LabCorp. The tests can cost more than $100. Though the FDA's original guidance calls for these tests to be run by a certified lab, the kits themselves are simple to use and have been readily available.

Despite the enthusiasm surrounding these tests, they have substantial limitations. Though people who test positive for antibodies have in most cases been exposed to the coronavirus, scientists don't know whether that means those people are actually immune from the coronavirus, and if so for how long.

"Whether this is the ticket for someone to go back to work [based solely on an antibody test result], my opinion on that would be no," Hahn said.

The tests may be more useful when combined with information from a standard coronavirus diagnostic test, or in someone who has symptoms, or if the results have been confirmed with a different antibody test. That "would dramatically increase the accuracy of those tests," said Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health

Antibodies are a potentially valuable research tool, and can be used to determine the prevalence of a disease in a population. In that circumstance, individual false results are less important. New York State used antibody tests to determine that about 20 percent of people in New York City have already been exposed to the coronavirus.

In California, researchers have attempted to measure the prevalence of the coronavirus in Los Angeles County and Santa Clara County in the Bay Area. Those unpublished results have garnered criticism because even a test that's more than 99 percent accurate can produce many false positive results when used to survey hundreds or thousands of people.

In the face of this criticism, the authors of the Santa Clara study have posted revised results acknowledging the high degree of uncertainty in their findings. Those findings haven't been peer-reviewed.

The emergency use authorization is only valid during the time of the national emergency. "Once the national emergency ends, the EUA authorizations end as well," Shuren said. Companies that want to keep marketing these tests will need to get them approved through the regular, more stringent FDA process.

FDA officials say they will continue to crack down on companies that falsely claim their tests are approved by the FDA, or that market them for home use, which isn't currently allowed.

You can contact NPR Science Correspondent Richard Harris at rharris@npr.org.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Physical and occupational therapists carry bags of personal protective equipment on their way to the room of a COVID-19 patient in a Stamford Hospital intensive care unit in Stamford, Conn., on April 24. This "prone team" turns over COVID-19 to help them breathe.; Credit: John Moore/Getty Images

Intensive care teams inside hospitals are rapidly altering the way they care for patients with COVID-19.

The changes range from new protective gear to new treatment protocols aimed at preventing deadly blood clots.

"Things are moving so fast within this pandemic, it's hard to keep up" says Dr. Angela Hewlett, an infectious diseases physician at University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha and medical director of the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit. To stay current, she says, ICUs are updating their practices "on an hourly basis."

"We are learning at light speed about the disease," says Dr. Craig Coopersmith , interim director of the critical care center at Emory University. "Things that previously might have taken us years to learn, we're learning in a week or two. Things that might have taken us a month to learn beforehand, we're learning in a day or two."

The most obvious changes involve measures to protect ICU doctors, nurses and staff from the virus.

"There is a true and real probability of infection," says Dr. Tiffany Osborn a critical care specialist at Washington University School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. "You have to think about everything you touch as if it burned."

So ICUs are adapting measures used at special biocontainment units like the one at the University of Nebraska. These units were designed to care for patients affected by bioterrorism or infected with particularly hazardous communicable diseases like SARS and Ebola.

The Nebraska biocontainment unit "received several patients early on in the pandemic who were medically evacuated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship," Hewlett says. But it didn't have enough beds for the large numbers of local patients who began arriving at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

So the nurses, respiratory therapists and physicians from the biocontainment team have "fanned out and are now working within those COVID units to make sure that all of our principles and protocols are followed there as well," Hewlett says.

Those protocols involve measures like monitoring ICU staff when they remove their protective gear to make sure the virus isn't transmitted, and placing infected patients in negative pressure rooms, which draw air inward, when possible to prevent the virus from escaping.

One of the riskiest ICU procedures is inserting a breathing tube in a COVID-19 patient's airway, which creates a direct path for virus to escape from a patient's lungs. "If you're intubating a patient, that's a much higher risk than, say, going in and doing routine patient care," Hewlett says.

So ICU teams are being advised to add several layers of protection beyond a surgical mask.

Extra personal protective equipment may include an N95 respirator, goggles, a full face shield, a head hood, an impermeable isolation gown and double gloves.

In many ICUs, teams are also placing a clear plastic box or sheet over the patient's head and upper body before inserting the tube. And as a final safety measure, the doctor may guide the tube using a video camera rather than looking directly down a patient's airway.

"It usually takes 30 minutes or so in order to get all of that equipment together, to get all of the right people there," says Dr. Kira Newman, a senior resident physician at UW Medical Center in Seattle. "and that would be a particularly fast intubation."

But most changes in the ICU are in response to an ongoing flood of new information about how COVID-19 affects the body.

There's a growing understanding, for example, that the infection can cause dangerous blood clots to form in many severely ill patients. These clots can kill if they block arteries supplying the lungs or brain. But they also can prevent blood from reaching the kidneys or even a patient's arms and legs.

Clots are a known risk for all ICU patients, Cooperman says, but the frequency and severity appears much greater with COVID-19. "So we're starting them on a higher level of medicine to prevent blood clots and if somebody actually develops blood clots, we have a plan B and a plan C and a plan D," he says.

ICU teams are also recalibrating their approach to ensuring that patients are getting enough oxygen. Early in the pandemic, the idea was to put patients on mechanical ventilator quickly to make sure their oxygen levels didn't fall too far.

But with experience, doctors have found that mechanical ventilators don't seem to work as well for COVID patients as they do for patients with other lung problems. They've also learned that that many COVID-19 patients remain lucid and relatively comfortable even when the oxygen levels in their blood are extremely low.

So many specialists are now recommending alternatives to mechanical ventilation, even for some of the sickest patients. "We're really trying now to not intubate," Osborn says.

Instead, ICU teams are relying on devices that deliver oxygen through the nasal passages, or through a mask that fits tightly over the face. And there's renewed interest in an old technique to help patients breathe. It's called proning.

"Instead of them being on their back, we're turning them on their front," Osborn says. The reason, she says is to open up a part of the lung that is collapsed when a patient is on their back.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Coronavirus deaths in the U.K. have passed those in Italy. Workers in the intensive care unit at the Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge are shown gearing up to care for COVID-19 patients.; Credit: Neil Hall/AP

Over 32,000 people have died from the new coronavirus in the United Kingdom, according to the Office for National Statistics, marking the first time in the pandemic that it has led Europe in the number of deaths.

The country has surpassed Italy in COVID-19 deaths. The U.S. still leads the world in the highest number of coronavirus deaths; over 70,270 had died from the disease as of Tuesday.

The number of total deaths recorded in the U.K. is "higher than we would wish, I think is all I can say," Angela McLean, chief scientific adviser of Ministry of Defence said during the country's press briefing Tuesday.

McLean also emphasized that deaths in U.K. care homes have been steadily rising and said the trend was something the country "need[s] to get to grips with."

"I don't think we'll get a real verdict on how well countries have done until the pandemic is over," British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said Tuesday. "And particularly until we have comprehensive international data on all causes of mortality."

Since different countries collect and report coronavirus data using different methods, the comparisons between regions are not perfect. As more time passes and more tests are conducted and more data comes in, coronavirus death rates will become more precise.

The peak in deaths comes as other European countries, including Italy and Spain, are easing shelter-in-place restrictions, while U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to modify Britain's orders in the next week.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Two workers approach the entrance to Life Care Center in Kirkland, Wash., on March 13. An association that represents nursing homes is asking for billions of dollars in federal relief funds to cope with the coronavirus crisis.; Credit: Ted S. Warren/AP

With more than 11,000 resident deaths, nursing homes have become the epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis. Now, they're asking the federal government for help — $10 billion worth of help.

The American Health Care Association, the trade organization for most nursing homes, called the impact on long-term care facilities "devastating." In a letter sent this week to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, they ask for the federal government to designate relief funding from the CARES Act for nursing homes the way it has for hospitals.

The money would be used for personal protective equipment, salaries for expanded staff, and hazard pay. In addition, some of the funds would make up lost revenue for nursing homes that have been unable to admit new residents because of the outbreak.

The AHCA also wants nursing homes to have more access to testing and some members of Congress want that too. This week, 87 members of the House of Representatives sent their own letter to Azar, as well as to Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which regulates nursing homes. The letter asks those agencies to direct states — which have received billions of dollars for increased testing — to give priority to long-term care facilities.

The letter also notes that nursing homes are now required to report their numbers of COVID-19 infections and deaths to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but that they can't meaningfully do this unless they can test everyone in the facility.

Democrats in both the House and the Senate have also introduced legislation intended to make things safer for both nursing home staff and residents. The bill would require nursing homes to take a range of actions, from providing better infection prevention, to supplying sufficient protective gear, to protecting a resident's right to return to the nursing home after they've been treated for COVID-19 at a hospital.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

; Credit: Alyson Hurt/NPR

To safely phase out social distancing measures, the U.S. needs more diagnostic testing for the coronavirus, experts say. But how much more?

The Trump administration said on April 27 the U.S. will soon have enough capacity to conduct double the current amount of testing for active infections. The country has done nearly 248,000 tests daily on average in the last seven days, according to the nonprofit Covid Tracking Project. Doubling that would mean doing around 496,000 a day.

Will that be enough? What benchmark should states try to hit?

One prominent research group, Harvard's Global Health Institute, proposes that the U.S. should be doing more than 900,000 tests per day as a country. This projection, released Thursday, is a big jump from its earlier projection of testing need, which was between 500,000 and 600,000 daily.

Harvard's testing estimate increased, says Ashish Jha, director of the Global Health Institute, because the latest modeling shows that the outbreak in the U.S. is worse than projected earlier.

"Just in the last few weeks, all of the models have converged on many more people getting infected and many more people [dying]," he says.

But each state's specific need for testing varies depending on the size of its outbreak, explains Jha. The bigger the outbreak, the more testing is needed.

Thursday Jha's group at Harvard published a simulation that estimates the amount of testing needed in each state by May 15. In the graphic below, we compare these estimates with the average numbers of daily tests states are currently doing. (Jump to graphic)

Two ways to assess whether testing is adequate

To make their state-by-state estimates, the Harvard Global Health Institute group started from a model of future case counts. They calculated how much testing would be needed for a state to test all infected people and any close contacts they may have exposed the virus. (The simulation estimates testing 10 contacts on average.)

"Testing is outbreak control 101, because what testing lets you do is figure out who's infected and who's not," Jha says. "And that lets you separate out the infected people from the non infected people and bring the disease under control."

This approach is how communities can prevent outbreaks from flaring up. First, test all symptomatic people, then reach out to their close contacts and test them, and finally ask those who are infected or exposed to isolate themselves.

Our chart also shows another testing benchmark for each state: the ratio of tests conducted that come back positive. Communities that see around 10% or fewer positives among their test results are probably testing enough, the World Health Organization advises. If the rate is higher, they're likely missing a lot of active infections.

What is apparent from the data we present below is that many states are far from both the Harvard estimates and the 10% positive benchmark.

Just nine states are near or have exceeded the testing minimums estimated by Harvard; they are mostly larger, less populous states: Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Several states with large outbreaks — New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut among others — are very far from the minimum testing target. Some states that are already relaxing their social-distancing restrictions, such as Georgia, Texas and Colorado, are far from the target too.

Jha offers several caveats about his group's estimates.

Estimates are directional not literal

Researchers at the Global Health Initiative at Harvard considered three different models of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak as a starting point for their testing estimates. They found that while there was significant variation in the projections of outbreak sizes, all the models tend to point in the same direction, i.e. if one model showed that a state needed significantly more testing, the others generally did too.

The model they used to create these estimates is the Youyang Gu COVID-19 Forecasts, which they say has tracked closely with what's actually happened on the ground. Still the researchers caution, these numbers are not meant to be taken literally but as a guide.

If social distancing is relaxed, testing needs may grow

The Harvard testing estimates are built on a model that assumes that states continue social distancing through May 15. And about half of states have already started lifting some of those.

Jha says, that without the right measures in place to contain spread, easing up could quickly lead to new cases.

"The moment you relax, the number of cases will start climbing. And therefore, the number of tests you need to keep your society, your state from having large outbreaks will also start climbing," warns Jha.

Testing alone is not enough

A community can't base the decision that it's safe to open up on testing data alone. States should also see a consistent decline in the number of cases, of two weeks at least, according to White House guidance. If their cases are instead increasing, they should assume the number of tests they need will increase too.

And Jha warns, testing is step one, but it won't contain an outbreak by itself. It needs to be part of "a much broader set of strategies and plans the states need to have in place" when they begin to reopen.

In fact, his group's model is built on the assumption that states are doing contact tracing and have plans to support isolation for infected or exposed people.

"I don't want anybody to just look at the number and say, we meet it and we're good to go," he says. "What this really is, is testing capacity in the context of having a really effective workforce of contact tracers."

The targets are floors not goals

States that have reached the estimated target should think of that as a starting point.

"We've always built these as the floor, the bare minimum," Jha says. More testing would be even better, allowing states to more rapidly tamp down case surges.

In fact, other experts have proposed the U.S. do even more testing. Paul Romer, a professor of economics at New York University proposed in a recent white paper that if the U.S. tested every resident, every two weeks, isolating those who test positive, it could stop the pandemic in its tracks.

Jha warns that without sufficient testing, and the infrastructure in place to trace and isolate contacts, there's a real risk that states — even those with few cases now — will see new large outbreaks. "I think what people have to remember is that the virus isn't gone. The disease isn't gone. And it's going to be with us for a while," he says.

Daniel Wood contributed to this report.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

President Trump has said he wants to see the country begin to reopen. The pandemic crashed the economy by keeping people at home, leading to millions of job losses.; Credit: Pool/Getty Images

The White House coronavirus task force rejected detailed guidance drafted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how workplaces ranging from schools to bars to churches should resume operations to prevent the spread of the virus because it was viewed as "overly prescriptive."

President Trump has said he wants to see the country begin to reopen. The pandemic crashed the economy by keeping people at home, leading to millions of job losses. The White House task force issued guidelines on how to gradually and safely reopen but left decisions up to governors based on conditions in their states.

Experts have warned that a rush to reopen could have disastrous implications for containing COVID-19. Many businesses have said they want more details about how to do things safely.

The draft detailed guidance was provided to the task force in late April, a couple of weeks after it released its April 16 guidance to states for reopening.

The task force sought "certain revisions" to the CDC's detailed guidance, two administration officials told NPR. But revised recommendations were never returned to the task force.

The Associated Press first reported on the task force decision to shelve the detailed guidance. Copies obtained and published by the AP, The New York Times and The Washington Post revealed detailed, staged directions for child care centers, schools, camps, restaurants and bars, churches and mass transit providers about how to safely resume operations.

"I think many people would argue that it is not the role of the federal government to tell specific entities — whether they be schools or churches or businesses — how they should go about doing things because the nation is so diverse," one of the administration officials said.

The task force said that some of the points may be helpful, but they needed to "zoom out a little bit and not be so prescriptive," according to the official. The task force said they would welcome a new set of recommendations, but that never happened, the official said.

"Issuing overly specific instructions — that CDC leadership never cleared — for how various types of businesses open up would be overly prescriptive and broad for the various circumstances states are experiencing throughout the country," the second administration official said. "Guidance in rural Tennessee shouldn't be the same guidance for urban New York City."

The United States last month reached 1 million known coronavirus cases, representing one-third of all coronavirus cases worldwide. Nearly 74,000 Americans have been felled by the disease as of Thursday, according to data compiled by the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

The East Bay Municipal Utility District Wastewater Treatment Plant in Oakland, California. Stanford researchers are testing sewage in hopes of tracking the emergence and spread of COVID-19 outbreaks.; Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

With coronavirus testing still lagging behind targets, many health officials are searching for other ways to assess the spread of the outbreak. One possibility? Looking at what we flush.

SARS-Cov-2 is often spread through sneezes and coughs, but it also leaves the human body through our waste. Scientists around the world are now testing sewage for the virus, using it as a collective sample to measure infection levels among thousands of people.

While the field of "wastewater epidemiology" existed before the coronavirus pandemic began, it's now rapidly expanding in the hope that it can become a front-line public health tool.

"Normally when I tell people I work with poo, they're not super interested," Stephanie Loeb, a post-doctoral researcher at Stanford University, told NPR in an interview over Skype. But, she says: "There's really a lot of information in our waste."

In the basement of a university building, Loeb pulls samples from freezers filled with vials of raw sewage, collected regularly from 25 wastewater treatment plants around California. Each is a snapshot of that community's health.

"It's this perfect mix, you know," says Krista Wigginton, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Michigan, also working on the Stanford project. "The entire community is putting samples in at the same time."

She says by the time the virus reaches wastewater treatment plants, it's still possible to read its RNA.

"These are virus particles that are mostly intact, but that are no longer infective," Wigginton says. "That's what it looks like at this point."

The idea is that measuring overall virus levels in sewage over time could indicate whether an outbreak is growing or shrinking, potentially showing that trend earlier than patient testing would.

"That's a real-time measurement of what's happening in the community," says Wigginton. "Whereas some other tools we have, like the number of confirmed cases in clinics, sometimes those are delayed by quite a bit of time because people don't go get checked until maybe their illness has progressed by quite a bit."

The approach is already used for other diseases, such as polio. Health officials are working to eradicate polio around the globe and in Israel, an outbreak was spotted early through the wastewater system.

Stanford University isn't the only group working on coronavirus detection in sewage.

"We have a lot of nicknames," says Newsha Ghaeli, co-founder of the start-up Biobot. "I think some of our customers joke around that we're the 'sewer girls.'"

Biobot is currently testing sewage from about 150 communities across the U.S. Originally, the company was using sewage to monitor the opioid crisis, but quickly started offering coronavirus testing.

"It really caught fire," says Ghaeli. "Within ten days, we hit internal capacity."

Ghaeli says in some cities, they've been able to detect coronavirus in sewage the same week the first cases appeared. Other projects in France and the Netherlands have produced similar results.

In a more challenging scientific feat, the team is also working to estimate the number of individuals who have coronavirus in a community, based on the levels found in sewage.

Calculating that depends on knowing how much virus individuals shed, and some people seem to shed for a longer time than others, complicating the math. Other things could also affect the virus levels, such as how long it takes for the wastewater to reach the treatment plant and rainy weather, which causes runoff to flow in the sewage system in some communities, diluting the samples.

"There's a lot of research that needs to be done before we can say this number in wastewater means this many cases in the community," says Wigginton.

The advantage of testing sewage is that it may capture individuals who are less likely to go to a doctor's offices.

"Every person that is using the toilet has a voice," says Mariana Matus, Biobot's other cofounder. "And they can be taken into account for public health resources and prioritization of resources."

While it's still early in the technology's development, some see it being helpful in detecting new waves of the outbreak.

"I think it is potentially a new role that utilities can play," says Doug Yoder, deputy director of the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department in Florida, which serves 2.3 million people. "There has been, at the community level, not a whole lot of data about conditions community-wide."

Miami-Dade County has been sending sewage samples to Biobot for six weeks now, which have shown their virus levels going up and down a bit.

"We've seen in a couple instances the virus counts increase by a factor of six," he says. "And then the week following, it went back down. This data may not yet be ready for primetime in terms of community decision-making, but it has potential and promise for being able to see trends."

Health officials are eager for the information, he says, as one more way to gauge what's really happening with their local outbreak.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

A woman wearing a mask walks past closed store fronts in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens on April 15 in New York City. States are beginning to implement phased reopening plans, in part to help businesses hit hard by the coronavirus.; Credit: Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images

President Trump wants states to begin relaxing stay-at-home orders and reopen businesses after the spread of the coronavirus pummeled the global economy and killed millions of jobs.

The White House coronavirus task force released guidelines on April 16 to encourage state governors to adopt a phased approach to lifting restrictions across the country. Some states have moved ahead without meeting the criteria.

The task force rejected a set of additional detailed draft recommendations for schools, restaurants, churches and mass transit systems from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that it considered "overly prescriptive."

A number of states have already begun to lift restrictions, allowing for businesses including hair salons, diners and tattoo parlors to once again begin accepting customers. Health experts have warned that reopening too quickly could result in a potential rebound in cases.

States are supposed to wait to begin lifting any restrictions until they have a 14-day "downward trajectory" of influenza-like illnesses and confirmed virus cases, as well as sufficient hospital capacity and testing for health care workers.

Below is a summary of the three phases as outlined by the task force (read the full guidance here):

Don't see the graphic above? Click here.

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A man walks past Low Library on the Columbia University campus in New York City on March 9.; Credit: Mark Lennihan/AP

On Thursday, Columbia University and Pace University joined a growing number of colleges — including University of Miami, Drexel University and the University of Arizona — facing legal complaints aimed at their response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Thursday's suits were filed in federal court on behalf of Xaviera Marbury, a student at Pace, and an unnamed student at Columbia. Both complaints say students are owed reimbursement as well as damages for services that are no longer available now that campuses are closed. In both cases, those services include:

I. Face-to-face interaction with professors, mentors, and peers;
ii. Access to facilities such as computer labs, study rooms, laboratories, libraries, etc.;
iii. Student governance and student unions;
iv. Extra-curricular activities, groups, intramurals, etc.;
v. Student art, cultures, and other activities;
vi. Social development and independence;
vii. Hands-on learning and experimentation; and
viii. Networking and mentorship opportunities.

Marbury's complaint says her dorm rent costs $9,380 for the semester; she lost access to her dorm for approximately half the semester, the complaint says, but Pace is only offering to reimburse $2,000. Similarly, the Columbia complaint says that the student was refunded just 11% of their mandatory fees for the semester. The complaints also claim that though classes continue, their degree will eventually be worth less on the job market.

Marie Boster, a spokeswoman for Pace University, pointed out that the college is still offering services like tutoring and counseling along with classes remotely. "The faculty, staff and leaders of Pace continue to work tirelessly to support our students during this challenging time," she says. Columbia University had no comment on the suit.

The complaints, filed by a personal injury law firm in South Carolina, seek class action status on behalf of Columbia and Pace students. That same firm, Anastopoulo Law Firm, is also behind the suits against the University of Miami and Drexel.

"Universities are not delivering those services that students and their families have paid for," Anastopoulo attorney Roy T. Willey IV tells NPR. "It's not fair for the universities with multi-million dollar endowments to keep all of the money that students and their families have paid."

If the suits gain traction, the resulting damages would be a further blow to colleges already reeling from the financial impacts of the coronavirus. As NPR's Elissa Nadworny has reported, college endowments have taken a hit, some schools have begun to announce hiring freezes and others are looking at merging or closing their doors.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

; Credit: /Dani Pendergast for NPR

Friday, March 13, was the last time Alexandra Sullivan saw her fellow yearbook staffers in person.

"We were trying to get as many pictures of people as possible 'cause we knew we wouldn't be able to take any more," Sullivan, 18, says.

Like most U.S. public school students, Sullivan is learning from home now. And much like her lessons, her work on the yearbook continues.

Sullivan is the yearbook profiles editor at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. She's one of 10 seniors who were also on staff two years ago, when a gunman opened fire at their school. Back then, she and her classmates had to adapt to an unimaginable tragedy. Now, they have to adapt again – this time, to the pandemic.

"This book has to get done and we'll do whatever we have to do to finish it," she says, "which is exactly how we approached the '18 book."

Senior Caitlynn Tibbetts, the yearbook's co-editor-in-chief, was also on staff when the shooting happened. She says there's a collective grief among seniors over what their class — which has already lost so much — is losing now. They won't be able to dance together at prom, or walk across the stage at graduation.

"This class especially has gotten screwed over so much through the past four years," Tibbetts, 18, says. "The last two months were supposed to be the best, and they were supposed to make up for everything that we've been through. And it's really hard on us to kind of just watch it all disappear."

Amid all the uncertainty, she says, one thing is clear: The yearbook must get done, and it must get to students.

High school yearbooks are like time capsules. They record theater productions, which teams went to state finals, who was voted most likely to succeed.

And when a news event makes history – leaving a mark on students and society – it's the yearbook's job to document it. At Stoneman Douglas, that's meant changing plans just weeks before the yearbook is due.

Yearbook advisor Sarah Lerner says, "Having done one under unthinkable circumstances before, I hate to say that we're kind of, you know, used to it, but, for the seniors on staff, we are."

Two years ago, after the shooting, the yearbook staff pivoted to include remembrances of the victims. Tibbetts and Sullivan stepped up to help write them, and anything else that was needed at the last minute, while other yearbook staffers took time to attend funerals.

This year, they're making room for two new spreads about the pandemic.

"One of them is more of a factual-based one, how it's affected our community, including businesses," Tibbetts explains. "The other spread is focused on the effect it's had on us personally, both with online schooling and especially with seniors."

Logistically, putting the yearbook together and writing the new sections has been a challenge. Unlike 2018, they can't be in the same room with each other to finish the design.

"We have to social distance and our parents wouldn't let us go out," Tibbetts says.

They mainly rely on a group chat with everyone on the staff. "It can get hectic," Tibbetts says, "especially when it's all happening at like 12 a.m."

Lerner and her students missed the original deadline to finish the book, on April 6. But the printer, Walsworth, says the company is being flexible with Stoneman Douglas and other yearbook staffs across the country. Lerner says she's aiming to get the book in by the end of April.

Once the printed copies come back, more than 1,200 books will somehow have to be distributed to students. Lerner has some ideas for how to do that safely.

However, there's one important yearbook tradition they may not be able to save.

"We may not actually get to sign books this year," Lerner says. And that's been hard to accept.

"As a teacher, I really like to get my students to sign my book, you know, and I like to sign theirs and I like to see the kids carrying them around at school."

Lerner says she's sad that might not happen this year. But at least this time, the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School aren't on their own.

"Unlike the 2018 books, this situation is not unique to us," she says. "So there's comfort in knowing that all staffs are going through the same issue. It's not just us."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

; Credit: /Jackie Ferrentino for NPR

A lot is at stake for students taking Advanced Placement exams, even in normal times. If you score high enough, you can earn college credit. It's also a big factor in college applications. But for some students, the idea of studying right now feels impossible.

"I'm constantly thinking about making sure my family doesn't get sick and I don't get sick," says Elise, a high school junior outside Boston. (We're not using her full name because she's worried about hurting her college applications.)

Concerns about the coronavirus have put most standardized tests, such as the SAT and ACT, on hold this spring. But AP exams are going forward with a new online format — and that's raising questions about fairness.

Elise, 17, says she spent months preparing for what is typically a three-hour, multiple-choice and essay-based exam; she was blindsided when she learned it will now be an online, 45-minute, open-response test.

"I have no idea what I'm going to get when I open that test," she says.

Elise was hoping the College Board, which administers AP exams, would cancel this year's exams, as it did the spring SATs. But since the tests are being offered, she says she feels she has to take them. She worries it would look bad on her college applications if she opted out.

For other students, just the idea of taking the exam at home is causing anxiety. Kayleen Guzman, 17, from Boston says it's hard to find peace and quiet in her house right now.

"Currently, it's me, my mom, my dog, my sister and my stepdad," she explains. "Sometimes I feel like it's too much chaos."

But Guzman is glad she still has the opportunity to take the AP exams at all this year. She says she worked hard in her two AP classes and she wants the chance to earn college credit.

However, it's still unclear how much credit colleges will give students for this year's exams.

"None of us would say that we are confident that a 3 or 4 or 5 on the AP exam this year means the exact same thing as a 3, 4 and 5 on the exam last year," says Harvard University's Andrew Ho, who studies the reliability of educational tests.

Ho says that because of the new format, this year's AP exams won't be measuring the same thing as previous years' exams. For one, the new tests will cover less material. And changing where kids take it — from a proctored classroom to their laptops at home — is a big deal. But Ho adds, "Just because it's not completely comparable doesn't mean the College Board and colleges, through their own policies, couldn't adjust."

Some colleges are already adjusting. The University of California system has come out explicitly to say it won't change the way it credits AP scores. Other colleges that didn't want to go on the record say they are planning to change their policies, but the details weren't ready to share just yet.

In a statement, College Board spokesperson Jerome White said the organization decided to move forward with AP testing to give motivated students the opportunity to earn college credit. He added that the organization is making "a significant financial investment" to make the exams available online, from cheating prevention software to helping students who may not have an Internet connection or access to a computer.

Still, some educators worry that those efforts won't be enough.

"This situation has created a lot of distraction," says Savannah Lodge-Scharff, an AP Physics teacher for Boston Public Schools. She argues that without in-person classes, many students won't be able to engage with the material in the same way. On top of that, financial stress means many of her students are juggling additional responsibilities, like taking care of siblings.

"I have some of my students who are working 40, 50, 60 hours a week at the grocery store right now in the fear their parents are going to be laid off," she explains.

And then there's the question of geographic equity. This year's exams will be administered at the same time worldwide, meaning students in Hong Kong will be up at midnight to take it.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

; Credit: Fanatic Studio/Gary Waters/Science Photo Library/Getty Images

There has been a rise in the number of minors contacting the National Sexual Assault Hotline to report abuse. That's according to RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, which runs the hotline.

By the end of March, with much of the country under lockdown, there was a 22% increase in monthly calls from people younger than 18, and half of all incoming contacts were from minors. That's a first in RAINN's history, Camille Cooper, the organization's vice president of public policy, tells NPR.

Of those young people who contacted the hotline in March, 67% identified their perpetrator as a family member and 79% said they were currently living with that perpetrator. In 1 out of 5 cases where the minor was living with their abuser, RAINN assisted the minor in immediately contacting police.

"As a result of looking at the information that we had from those sessions, it was clear that the abuse was escalating in both frequency and severity," Cooper says. "So a lot of the kids that were coming to the hotline were feeling pretty vulnerable and traumatized. And it was a direct result of COVID-19, because they were quarantined with their abuser. The abuser was now abusing them on a daily basis."

Lockdown orders are first and foremost public health and safety measures. But statistically speaking, home is not the safest place for every young person. RAINN reports that about 34% of child sexual abusers are family members. Closing schools and canceling youth activities like sports removes children from the watchful eyes of "mandatory reporters" — those trusted adults, like teachers, nurses and child care providers, who are required by law in most states to report suspicions of child abuse or neglect.

However, Cooper says her organization has confirmed with authorities around the country that the child welfare system is still operating during the pandemic. That is, an official report of current and ongoing abuse will still trigger an investigation, and, if necessary, a child will be removed from the home.

"[Child welfare workers] will be coming to the home in person and proceeding with a formal investigation and a child forensic interview and things like that," she says. If the abuse is farther in the past and the child is not quarantined with the accused, Cooper says, the interview may take place over video chat.

In the meantime, RAINN and other child welfare organizations are lobbying to make it easier for children to report abuse. Cooper says, "One of the solutions we came up with that we are now currently working directly with the leadership in Congress on is to get all of the online learning platforms that children are interacting with to have a reporting function on that platform in plain sight for children."

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This week, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced that more than $300 million from the first coronavirus rescue package will go to two education grant competitions for K-12 and higher ed.

States will be able to apply for a piece of the $180 million allotted to the "Rethink K-12 Education Models Grant" and $127.5 million allotted to the "Reimagining Workforce Preparation Grant."

The money is 1% of the more than $30 billion set aside for education in the CARES Act. Those billions are intended to help states with the highest coronavirus burden.

States can access the money by creating proposals to fund virtual or work-based learning programs. The grant categories include two of DeVos' pre-existing pet policy ideas: "microgrants" that go directly to home-schooling families, and microcredentials that offer a shorter path to workforce preparation.

On the higher ed side, the secretary has long pushed for workforce-oriented education and shorter paths to a degree. She's been praised for this stance by online and for-profit colleges, while traditional institutions have been less sanguine.

Similarly, the secretary is a longtime advocate of alternatives to public schools, including home schooling. She has praised programs like Florida's Gardiner Scholarship, which provides up to $10,000 to the families of children with special needs to support home schooling. Last fall, DeVos proposed a $5 billion "Education Freedom Scholarship" program, which would have used federal tax credits to support, essentially, a voucher program that families could use both for private schools and home schooling.

While this week's announcement is significant for the policy directions it signals, it's a comparatively small amount of money. Education groups have asked the federal government for $200 billion (with a B) more in funds to maintain basic services.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Secretary of Education Betsy Devos, seen on March 27, has released new rules for sexual assault complaints on college campuses.; Credit: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

New federal regulations on how schools – from kindergarten all the way through college — must respond to cases of sexual assault and harassment are drawing swift and mixed reactions.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced what she called historic changes Wednesday to Obama-era guidelines that she said will make the process fairer and better protect accused students. While some welcome the changes to Title IX as long overdue, survivors' advocates are panning the new rules as a throwback to the days when sexual assault was seldom reported or punished, and schools are protesting they can't possibly implement them by summer, as required.

Among the most significant changes are new regulations aimed at beefing up protections for accused college students, by mandating live hearings by adjudicators who are neither the Title IX coordinator nor the investigator, and real-time cross examination of each student by the other student's lawyer or representative.

"Cross examination is an important part of ensuring truth is found," said DeVos, adding that "our rule is very sensitive to not requiring students to face each other. In fact it specifically prohibits that. But it's an important part of ensuring that justice is ultimately served."

Under the new regulations, students also have a right to appeal, and schools are allowed to raise the evidentiary standard from "a preponderance of the evidence" to "clear and convincing," making it harder to find a student responsible for misconduct.

Also, the definition of sexual harassment narrows, so only that which is "severe, pervasive and objectively offensive" warrants investigation. On the other hand, dating violence and stalking would now be added to the kinds of offenses that schools must respond to.

Devos' proposed regulations, released last fall, would have given schools no responsibility to deal with off-campus incidents. But after a torrent of criticism, the final rules clarify that schools must respond to off-campus incidents that are in places or during events that the school is involved with. So, for example, frat houses would be covered, but a private off-campus apartment, would not. And a school would be obligated to respond to an alleged incident during a school field trip but not a private house party.

Cynthia Garrett, co-president of Families Advocating for Campus Equality, a group that advocates for the accused, welcomes the changes as long overdue.

"Anybody who's accused of something so vile [as sexual assault] has to have the opportunity to defend themselves," she says. "I think that in order to ruin someone's life [by expelling them from school] there has to be a process like this. It shouldn't be easy."

An accused student who asked to be identified as John Doe, as he was in his court cases, agrees that the new regulations are "very encouraging." He sued his school for suspending him after a hearing that he says denied him due process, by forcing him to defend himself without his attorney, and not allowing him to question his accuser. Later, after a federal court ruling in his favor, he reached a settlement with his school that wiped his record clean. But that was after nearly five years of what he describes as torment.

"People don't realize what these hearings used to look like," he says. "They can't just be a horse and pony show where they go through the motions and the school comes to a predetermined outcome."

Survivor advocates, however, say the new regulations will have a chilling effect on reporting, as alleged victims may view it as futile to file a formal complaint, or too retraumatizing, for example, to be subject to cross-examination. "This is extremely worrisome," says Sage Carson, manager of the survivor advocacy group Know Your IX. The new regulations "make it clear to me that DeVos cares more about schools and [accused students] than she does about survivors," says Carson.

The off-campus exclusion is also a sticking point. "We know that a majority of violence does not happen in libraries or in on-campus housing," says Carson.

She says she was assaulted in an off-campus apartment years ago, and was allowed to file a formal Title IX complaint back then. But if the rules then were like what DeVos is announcing now, Carson would not have had the option. "I would absolutely have dropped out of school," she says.

Doe, however, who was accused of an alleged assault during a private weekend jaunt hundreds of miles away from school during summer break, says the new rules prevent that kind of "overreach." His accuser wasn't a student at his college anymore. He says, "I just don't think that's reasonable."

Schools meantime, have objections of their own, first and foremost being forced to play the role of virtual trial courts to adjudicate intensely complex cases.

"We are not set up to do that," says Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, a trade association representing 2,000 public and private colleges and universities. "We do not have the legal authority to do that. We don't have the social legitimacy to do that. We want to teach students. We don't want to run courts."

Schools also object to the timing, requiring the changes to be implemented by August 14th, even though schools are already overwhelmed with managing their sudden switch to online learning because of COVID-19.

"This is madness," says Hartle. "This is an extraordinarily complicated piece of work that they have spent more than three years developing. It's a mistake to now turn to colleges and universities and say, put it in place in 100 days. It's simply not going to work very well."

Smaller schools, especially, Hartle says, "are just overwhelmed. They don't know how or where to begin" to implement these changes.

Anticipating the objections, DeVos insisted that "civil rights really can't wait. And students cases continue to be decided now." She suggested that this may actually be the best time for schools to make the changes since there are no students on campus.

Hartle says schools will continue pressing for the Department of Education to allow schools more time. Meantime, several legal challenges are in the works, so a temporary stay is also a possibility. That would give schools a reprieve while those cases wind their way through the courts.

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A for-profit college received millions of dollars from the federal government to help low-income students whose lives have been upended by the coronavirus outbreak, but that same school, Florida Career College (FCC), is also accused of defrauding students.

A federal class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of students in April calls FCC "a sham" and alleges that, long before the pandemic, the college was targeting economically vulnerable people of color. The plaintiffs say the vocational school enticed them with false promises of career training and job placement — but spent little on instruction while charging exorbitant prices and pushing students into loans they cannot repay.

The lawsuit comes as thousands of colleges across the country are receiving federal emergency relief in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Through the CARES Act, FCC has been allotted $17 million. The law requires that at least half of that money goes directly to students, but makes few stipulations for the rest of it.

Experts say the complaint against FCC raises serious concerns about the college's ability to safeguard taxpayer dollars, as well as its ability to serve its own students.

In a statement to NPR, Florida Career College General Counsel Aaron Mortensen says: "This lawsuit is baseless legally and factually. Though we cannot comment because the matter is in litigation, we will aggressively fight these false allegations."

Equipment was "at best limited, and at worse, nonexistent"

Plaintiff Kareem Britt was working as a cook when he noticed a Facebook ad for FCC.

"Are you tired of working minimum wage jobs? Eating ramen noodles?" the ad asked. "Are you ready to step up to steak? HVAC degrees make $16 to $23/hr."

An FCC representative told Britt that a degree could change his life and that the school would help him land a job. He qualified for a $6,000 federal Pell Grant and an FCC "scholarship loan" for $3,000. Britt decided to enroll in the HVAC training program.

After classes began, though, Britt says equipment necessary to learn the trade was in short supply. "Tools, machinery, and other learning devices were at best limited, and at worse, nonexistent," according to the complaint.

When it came time for the school to help Britt find a job, he says, FCC found him just two, two-week placements, and he failed to find HVAC work on his own. Making matters worse, once he'd finished school, Britt learned that he had also taken on federal loans worth $9,500, which he must now pay back as a hotel cook, the same kind of job he'd held before enrolling.

Reverse redlining

The complaint alleges that Florida Career College, along with its parent company, specifically targets economically vulnerable people of color.

"They are recruiting at majority Black high schools," says Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School, one of the organizations representing the plaintiffs. "They are putting up billboards in towns where the population is mostly Black. And they're doing a lot of advertising on social media where you can choose to target your ad essentially by race."

Stephen Stewart is Jamaican and says he was drawn to an FCC ad on Instagram. He decided to visit campus, and says one word captures his experience: "pressure."

Like Britt, Stewart was considering FCC's HVAC program. After his tour, when a representative told him the program would cost more than $20,000, Stewart balked. He remembers the representative pushed, telling him: "'I know so many students that have went here... I'm talking about people with five, six kids in a worse situation than you're in.'" Stewart was 20 at the time and childless. "'You're telling me that they can go through this, make their payments and pay off their tuition, and you can't?'"

Stewart enrolled in FCC's HVAC program after being promised that, within a year, the school would find him a job in his field.

The complaint takes aim at these recruiting practices. It alleges that FCC is selling the promise of a career and financial success to cash-strapped communities of color where college feels out of reach, "discriminating against students on the basis of race by inducing them to purchase a worthless product by taking on debt they cannot repay."

According to Education Department data, 85% of FCC's students are people of color.

This practice of discriminating by targeting students of color has a name: Reverse redlining — a reference to the historical practice of excluding African-American families from home ownership and denying them access to services. Reverse redlining is illegal, and it's what sets this suit apart from previous legal battles over alleged predatory practices by for-profit colleges.

"In a weekly memo to my board last Friday, I said, 'So the new angle of attack against our sector is that we are predatory to minority communities,'" says Steve Gunderson, head of Career Education Colleges and Universities, an organization that serves as the national voice for career education schools like FCC.

"We have always celebrated the fact that approximately 45 to 50% of the students in our schools are African American and Hispanic," he says. "We're proud of that."

"Classes were a scam"

Long before the federal government granted FCC $17 million in pandemic relief, the school was already largely government-dependent. According to federal data, the lion's share of FCC's revenue — 86% — comes from federal financial aid funds, namely Pell Grants and student loans.

At the same time, federal data also suggest that the college fails to prepare many students for their chosen professions. Under an Obama-era rule known as "gainful employment," schools could lose access to federal aid if graduates don't earn enough income to repay their student debts. According to the complaint, 16 of the 17 FCC programs evaluated under the gainful employment rule failed that metric, meaning graduates weren't able to repay their loans. (The gainful employment rule was repealed in 2019.)

The median annual earnings of FCC graduates who ultimately found employment ranged from $8,983 to $32,871, according to the suit, which helps explain why, according to the most recent federal data, just 23% of FCC students have been able to pay down any of their loans' original balance within three years of leaving.

"Classes were a scam, a waste of time," says Stephen Stewart. The equipment was "limited" and "outdated," he says, and the instructor admitted to the class that he had little experience with HVAC. Stewart's worst day, though, came near the end of his nine-month program when he visited the career services department to ask when they'd help him find a job as they had promised.

Stewart says he was given a list of possible HVAC companies and told, "'You gotta get your job.'" So he did, with no help. But Stewart says it was clear that FCC hadn't given him the skills he needed to keep up in the job, let alone succeed, and he ultimately left. Today, Stewart is $15,000 in debt and says he feels "shattered" by the whole experience.

"The thing that upsets me the most about this is how much it preys upon people's hopes and dreams," says Ben Miller, who studies higher education accountability at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. "You know, you have a lot of folks who want to make a better life for themselves. They have maybe one shot at college, and you rip them off and basically ruin it."

But Gunderson takes a very different view, as head of the national association for postsecondary career colleges.

"[This lawsuit] is so frustrating, because this is nothing more than an organized national effort to destroy the reputation of the [career college] sector," he says.

Gunderson insists that career colleges, including FCC, have been held to unrealistic standards. He points to the gainful employment rule, which he says measured students' incomes relatively soon after graduation. "You've got to go into the five- or 10-year mark before most of these occupations have what you and I would call our respectable salaries."

But federal data also show that, even 10 years after enrolling in FCC, more than half of its students still didn't earn more than the typical high school graduate.

Gunderson says this lawsuit is just the latest salvo in a decade-long fight to discredit for-profit, career colleges — a fight he calls "monotonous and disappointing."

"Even if you're doing a terrible job"

The law requires that at least half of the $17 million FCC is receiving through the CARES Act must go directly to students, but makes few stipulations for the rest of those funds. In a letter, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said institutions have "significant discretion" on how to award the assistance to students.

"We stand ready to deliver these funds," said Fardad Fateri, the head of FCC and its parent company, International Education Corporation, in a press release. "It is important we get these grants into the hands of our students right away, so they can better deal with this crisis."

FCC's $17 million is a small piece of the more than $14 billion lawmakers set aside in the CARES Act to help colleges and vulnerable students during the coronavirus pandemic. But Ben Miller says, in Congress' haste to help schools that serve low-income students, lawmakers are giving money to many schools with questionable records like FCC's.

"When there's no consideration of quality or outcomes, it's potentially a big award, even if you're doing a terrible job," Miller says.

Meanwhile DeVos has also championed separate policies that have made it easier for schools like FCC to continue to enroll students and receive federal student aid even as their graduates struggle. In 2019, DeVos repealed the Obama-era gainful employment rule that would have denied low-performing schools access to federal student aid.

Under the Trump administration, the Education Department has also changed the College Scorecard, a website meant to help prospective students compare colleges by price and performance. The department has removed easy access to schools' loan repayment rates. In 2018, it also removed another important metric: How the earnings of a school's graduates compared to the earnings of high school grads.

"Rather than highlighting institutions that show the best employment and loan repayment outcomes for students, this administration has made a concerted effort to hide this information from students with no explanation as to why," says Michael Itzkowitz, who was director of the College Scorecard during the Obama administration. "What's become more transparent is their willingness to prioritize certain institutions — namely for-profits — even if those aren't the best options for students choosing to pursue a postsecondary education."

The Education Department did not respond in time to requests for comment.

When students filed suit against the now-defunct for-profit Corinthian Colleges, claiming, like Britt and Stewart, that their schools had made promises about job placement and future earnings that they simply did not keep, DeVos revised another rule, known as "borrower defense," to make it more difficult for defrauded borrowers to get their money back. But the revision was so strict that 10 Senate Republicans joined with Democrats in March to rebuke the education secretary and reverse her decision.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

; Credit: LA Johnson/NPR

When Congress allocated money for higher education in the coronavirus rescue package, it set aside nearly $350 million for colleges that had "significant unmet needs."

Most of that money has now been allotted by the U.S. Department of Education to small, private colleges that serve just a fraction of U.S. college students. Meanwhile, public colleges — which serve more than 70% of all college students — are facing a steep drop in state funding.

The 20 institutions that received the most amount of money from the unmet-need fund serve less than 3,000 students combined, and about half are religious schools — including Bible colleges and seminaries — several of which serve less than 100 students.

Don't see the graphic above? Click here.

Lawmakers designed this unmet-need fund to give priority to any higher education institution that has received less than $500,000 through the CARES Act's other pots of funding. As a result, a school like Virginia Beach Theological Seminary, which serves 47 students, is eligible to receive $496,930 in federal aid.

"Imagine you had a special reserve fund to deal with a big crisis and you spent over 90% of that in one fell swoop on vacation tickets," or something that "wasn't as necessary in the moment," says Ben Miller, the vice president for postsecondary education at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. Miller argues larger public colleges, including community colleges that serve tens of thousands of students, should be getting more financial support. He calculates the department allocated more than $320 million of the $350 million on relief for small colleges, most of them private.

"As a result, they only have about 8% of the dollars they originally got here left to help any other college in the country that might be most affected," he says.

As with other CARES Act funding, in order to receive the money, an institution would still need to request it from the Department of Education.

Much of the CARES Act's more than $14 billion for higher education is being distributed according to the number of full-time low-income students a college serves, which is measured through federal Pell Grants.

The $350-million unmet-need fund followed a different formula. Miller says for this particular pot, schools that did not receive $500,000 or more from other available CARES Act funds were given the difference between what they did receive and $500,000 limit.

"So the result is that the smaller you are and the less money you've already gotten, the more you get from this program," Miller says.

But $350 million can only go so far. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was given the discretion to choose which schools would benefit from the fund, and by how much.

Some schools were baffled when they learned they had been allotted hundreds of thousands of dollars in relief, and many weren't aware they were even eligible for the money. Brad Smith, the president of Bakke Graduate University in Dallas, which was allotted $497,338 in federal aid, says he didn't learn of his school's eligibility until he was contacted by NPR.

"I don't know anything about this," Smith says, noting that his school hadn't asked for additional federal help. "I'm taking responsibility to find out what it means."

An Education Department spokesperson tells NPR, "In order to receive this funding, an institution will need to request it. Any institution that does not need this money should simply decline to request it so schools will not be in the position of having to return unneeded funds."

The department says, once the requests are processed, any remaining funds will be redistributed through competitive grants.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Patt Morrison's outfit from her June 5, 2013 Patt's Hats entry. ; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

There are so many things  I like about this dress – the sleeve length, the boat neck, the fact that it’s navy and not black, and the fact that it wasn’t made in Bangladesh – but mostly it’s the gaily asymmetrical floral design that caught my eye.

The pattern is front and back, and I’m a stickler about those things. It looks like I have been loaded down with festive leis, but also loaded with one too many Mai Tais, so the flower garlands are askew as if I were listing a little bit.

There’s more of my current yellow shoe madness with these very Michelle Obama kitten-heel slingbacks in two different tones of yellow, one a more acid shade and the other more canary, or perhaps chrome yellow. That’s not to be confused with “Crome Yellow,” a very sardonic Aldous Huxley novel parodying the artsy intelligentsia set of 1920s England.

I hope you can see this bracelet. It’s a piece of Victorian mourning jewelry. The Victorians went way, way over the top on this stuff; some of it borders on the ghoulish, with lockets containing elaborately braided locks or even portraits or scenes made entirely from the hair of the deceased. I can admire the artistry but the sentiment can seem excessive. This piece, though, has a black and white enamel border around a tiny fly. Why a fly, I wondered. Then I read the inscription inside:

“From JR to AHR [clearly a husband to a wife] in loving memory of our darling little May Queen, died 7th August 1880, age 14 Mos.”

That inscription made the fly make sense. It’s a mayfly, a creature that lives a few days, or even just a few minutes, and here was this little girl, born in May – hence the May Queen reference to the mythical springtime queen of antiquity -- and died barely a year thereafter. So sweet, so sad, so human, all from an inscription on a bracelet. The girl’s parents are long dead, and so too are any siblings she may have had, but it can touch us more than 130 years later.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

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