As in 1918, New York may use staggered work hours to keep subway safe

As New York City makes plans to reopen in the coming months, officials are dusting off the playbook from the 1918 flu pandemic, when businesses were ordered to begin their work days at staggered times to prevent the subway from becoming a vector of disease.

(TNS) -- After TSA rolled out a series of new measures Thursday to encourage social distancing and stop the spread of COVID-19, Acting U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf said the agency is considering checking temperatures and thermal imaging to help screen for the virus.

Wolf, a Plano native who toured Alliance Airport in Fort Worth for a look at shipping infrastructure, said it is a possibility that passengers will be screened for elevated temperatures before they board planes.

(TNS) - As California hurries to reopen stores, offices, restaurants and more this week, another rush is on behind-the-scenes.

State health officials have launched an unprecedented effort to train thousands of front-line, county-level workers to act as a firewall to stop the coronavirus from roaring back this fall.
Gov. Gavin Newsom calls them his “army of disease detectives.”

Commonly known in the public health world as communicable-disease “contact tracers,” this ad hoc group will serve as community strike teams in each county, working on tight deadlines to stop individual infections from turning into major outbreaks.

A new report titled, “Strong Social Distancing Measures in the United States Reduced the COVID-19 Growth Rate” finds that steps taken to reduce the spread of corononavirus by state and local governments have had a major impact. The results imply that by April 27, the number of cases would have been 35 times higher without any of the measures — suggesting the U.S. would have reported 35 million (rather than 1 million) COVID-19 cases.

Authors of the new study — Charles Courtemanche and Aaron Yelowitz, both professors at the University of Kentucky’s Gatton College of Business and Economics; Anh Le, a doctoral student at University of Kentucky; Josh Pinston, a professor at the University of Louisville; and Joseph Garuccio, a doctoral student at Georgia State — evaluated measures taken by states and counties across the country.

More than two dozen California counties have asked for permission to loosen their stay-at-home orders beyond what the state allows, Gov. Gavin Newsom said, promising a speedy review of their requests as jobs continue disappearing by the millions in a coronavirus-induced economic downturn.

Newsom relaxed some statewide restrictions last week by allowing curbside pickup at most retail stores and giving manufacturers the OK to resume with some limits. He’s promised to release guidelines on Tuesday for the return of dine-in restaurants.

A beach bordering two Southern California counties reopened Monday with some restrictions as parts of the state slowly reopened public spaces and businesses.

Seal Beach in northern Orange County allowed running, walking and surfing starting at sunrise.

(TNS) — As forecasters predict higher-than-normal chances of large fires in Northern California this year — as well as the usual risk of “large significant” burning in Southern California — fire authorities are growing increasingly concerned over their ability to muster a large, healthy force of firefighters in the face of COVID-19.

Realizing that wildfire smoke will steadily impair a firefighter’s immune system, and that traditional base camps can magnify the risk of infection, federal, state and county officials are urging a blitzkrieg approach to wildfires that will rely heavily on the use of aircraft.

Munich Re said on Thursday it expected to receive claims for canceled or postponed events because of the coronavirus crisis in excess of 1 billion euros ($1.08 billion) this year after it posted a 65% drop in first-quarter profit.

The German reinsurer, which joins a raft of insurers warning of threats to their business, had already said it would not meet a profit target this year.

(TNS) - Working from home with her children in another room and a cat lounging next to her laptop, Christina Zilke is a public-health nurse on the front lines of trying to contain COVID-19.

She is one of about 20 employees of the Washtenaw County Public Health Department currently involved in contact-tracing, which is the process of reaching out to individual coronavirus patients to stymie the chain of infection.