Allowing Restaurants In Parking Lots

Our COVID numbers continue trending up. On Tuesday, county health officials reported five new outbreaks in restaurants, bars, a grocery store and a local business. In the past seven days, 22 community setting outbreaks have been reported. That’s way over the trigger of 7 outbreaks in seven days. A community outbreak, by the way, is defined as three or more COVID-19 cases in a setting and in people of different households. *** County restaurants are now shuttered for indoor dining in response to a spike in local COVID-19 cases. On Tuesday San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer said he will sign an emergency executive order that will waive regulations and allow restaurants to expand their service into outdoor spaces, like sidewalks and even parking lots. That’s right, you’re parking lot can be used as part of the restaurant under the mayor’s order starting today. That was the city’s director of development services, Elise Lowe. The county has now been on the state’s monitoring list for three consecutive days. So...Indoor dining will be closed for at least the next three weeks The city is also finalizing a new ordinance for council approval that will cut fees and streamline permits to make it easier for businesses to operate outdoors long-term. The San Diego City Council is expected to consider that ordinance at a future council meeting. *** San Diego city voters in November will decide whether the city needs more powerful civilian oversight of the police department. Yesterday, the City Council voted unanimously to officially place a measure on the November ballot that would change the city's Community Review Board on Police Practices. The new commission would have the power to conduct independent investigations into police shootings, in-custody deaths and complaints of officer misconduct. The reform has been in the works for years, but gained new momentum during the recent wave of protests against racism and police brutality. *** From KPBS, I’m Kinsee Morlan and you’re listening to San Diego News Matters, a podcast powered by our reporters, producers and editors. It’s Wednesday, July 8. Stay with me for more of the local news you need. Tuesday was the first day of new closures for indoor operations at restaurants, tasting rooms and other businesses. KPBS Reporter Matt Hoffman says the move is impacting some places and their staffs more than others. Restaurants can still serve customers, but it has to be outside, like using a patio or a parking lot. But some eateries don't have either. 12;21;25;23 Eric Christiansen You try to make your hay while the sun is shining, well the sun is definitely shining but m not allowed to make any hay right now Guava Beach bar and grill co-owner Eric Christiansen says he was making it work with recent restrictions requiring food with alcohol purchases and closing early at 10pm.. But for restaurants in tourist hot-spots, summer months can make or break their business. 12;22;30;12 Christiansen Given our location in mission beach we're inundated with vacation rentals so im much more seasonal if i cant make money it's a lot harder in the offseason and you know we'll see San Diego officials are waiving permitting fees and fast tracking applications for outdoor service.. But along a busy mission blvd with limited space.. Chrsitansen thinks his only option is to try to use the sidewalk out front. 12;19;23;11 Christiansen hopefully by next week we can get five or six tables out front as it stands today we've got nothing going on just doing takeout Christiansen says with his dine-in sales nonexistent he has had to again make the tough decision to lay off staff. That’s KPBS reporter Matt Hoffman. *** The San Diego City Council Tuesday approved a measure for the November ballot that if passed would change how San Diego Unified School District board members are elected. KPBS Education Reporter Joe Hong explains that the goal is to increase neighborhood representation on the board. During the primaries, candidates for the San Diego Unified school board run campaigns only in their subdistricts. But in the November election, school board members are elected on an at-large basis, meaning candidates need to win the support of voters throughout the city of San Diego. On Tuesday, the San Diego City Council voted unanimously to put a measure on the November ballot that would make the general election a district-by-district contest starting in 2022. City Councilwoman Monica Montgomery spoke in favor of the measure. MONICA MONTGOMERY /// SD CITY COUNCILMEMBER This is an extremely important issue in my community in particular, and you can tell that from the calls we've received, and it's something folks have been fighting for for a long time. I'm very very happy to support this today. Advocates say that if passed, the measure would lead to fairer elections and encourage more people to run for the San Diego Unified school board. *** Army recruiters typically look for future soldiers at high schools and career fairs. But COVID-19 has forced the service to scale back face-to-face interactions, and the pandemic has revealed gaps in the Army's digital outreach strategy. Last week, it held its first-ever virtual recruiting event to help make up the difference. Carson Frame reports for the American Homefront Project. As the coronavirus pandemic bloomed this spring, the Army reduced staff at many brick-and-mortar recruiting stations across the country. Recruiters took their work remote--but lost out on some of the major recruitment opportunities that normally boost their numbers. WILSON: "that last moment before Senior leaves their high school, typically we're there, we're helping them support, finding them different avenues. However, we didn't have that moment this year." Staff sergeant Kara Wilson recruits from a 26-hundred square mile patch of west Texas, with its hub in El Paso. She and her team have had to build an online recruiting environment to reach those same young people. Apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat have proven the most effective. And Wilson's designed new campaigns for each. But she's had help. WILSON: I have teenagers at home so they have kind of schooled me on many of these new platforms, which allows me to get after the Generation Zs. Wilson says one of her best attempts was a 45-minute Instagram live Q&A about what it's like to be an Army soldier. She promoted it for weeks and posted a count-down to her feed. More than 300 people tuned in. The idea was her 14 year-old daughter's. WILSON: She said, "You know, mom I'm your kid." She was raised in the Army... "But other people just see you as a soldier. So what if you did, like a meeting with somebody else? Maybe a friend of yours in the army, and you guys did like a question answer thing. And I thought, Wow, that's awesome. Online fitness challenges, e-sports tournaments, and video testimonials are other ways Army recruiters have tried to grab the attention of young people online. Even before the pandemic hit, the Army was working to incorporate more digital outreach into its marketing. But it wasn't doing it especially well, according to Emma Moore, a researcher with the military, veterans and society program at the Center for New American Security. MOORE: the digital engagement was showing gains, but I would say from probably most other private company and marketing measures, it's been ad hoc... the army is not set up to be incredibly flexible and responsive to changing their narrative or their marketing campaign. That's a disadvantage in the digital space, where apps and communication platforms quickly evolve. The Army has backed off its top-down approach to recruiting and has given local recruiters more authority to design their own social media campaigns, like the instagram event that Wilson held. General Frank Muth heads Army recruiting. MUTH: especially with technology, there's innovations happening every day. And we've got to be able to not be so much a hierarchical organization that just validates the systems you put into place. But be a network. Things are starting to look up, numbers-wise, for Army recruiting since the pandemic began. Muth says there was an initial dip following the issuance of stay-at-home orders, but that interest from young people is slowly ticking back up. He adds that virtual outreach is here to stay, and that about 90 percent of the recruiting process can be done online. MUTH: I think at the end of the day, what will, we'll find is...that we may be able to reduce some of our recruiting force and reduce some of their brick and mortar, maybe not to, you know, not use the brick and mortar anymore, because it still has a place, but maybe it doesn't need to be as big. Muth says the pandemic's full impact on recruitment is unclear. But he guesses that if unemployment hasn't gone down by fall, the Army will see a bump in people wanting to join. And that was Carson Frame reporting from San Antonio as part of the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans. Funding comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting *** Researchers are keeping a close eye on new flu viruses that could hit us this fall. Biologists at UC San Diego say they're watching a new swine flu that has emerged in China. That story after the break. Due to the coronavirus, researchers are keeping an even closer eye on new flu viruses that could hit us this fall. UC San Diego’s Pascal Gagneux (gan-YOO) is an evolutionary biologist who specialises in influenza viruses. He told KPBS Midday Edition host Alison St. John that they are carefully watching a new swine flu that has emerged in China. It's very much like a very deadly flu that swept the world 11 years ago. based on several prevalence study, meaning studying hundreds of people in China, in households and people working with pigs. You know, many of these people were found to have antibodies against this virus and looking at the age distribution showed that it was the 18 to 32 year olds that had like a third, three time higher rate of being antibody positive. So that would, that would insinuate that this virus knows how to infect people with strong immunity. And that's another very big red flag. Speaker 1: 04:55 Why is it that some people are really not badly affected by flu viruses, some of them not badly affected by the Corona virus even. Speaker 2: 05:04 So they are a little piece of bad news wrapped in glycoproteins and a piece of membrane of the host. They come in and take over. Many of you settled functions so that you cells from then on just make more little viruses, but they require hundreds, if not thousands of parts of your own cells. And these differ between each of us, we are all genetically unique. So each individual is packed with idiosyncrasies of how their cellular machinery might react to a hijacking event by one of these viruses. And so there was a kind of protection in the diversity we have in human populations, meaning that the same virus is very unlikely to be deadly for everyone. Viruses are part of the living world, even though some biologists arguing, given that they have no metabolism are even alive while they replicate and they evolve. And there was a lot of evidence from the study of genomes of the genetic code of living organisms. Speaker 2: 06:06 That viruses are such an integral part of the history of life on this planet that every living animal on this planet. And that is true for plants as well, has a genetic code that is littered with past viruses that have essentially become us. So viruses on, on the one hand, a terrible threat, as we now see with this COVID-19 pandemic and, and, you know, have seen with past influenza, Abe, and dynamics, but they are also constructive agents of evolution. They introduce tidbits of genetic information across species. So viruses are both very bad sometimes and extremely good for introducing novel adaptations into genomes that they in fact, why is it that we're seeing more life threatening viruses spreading recently? I mean, is that true or is it just that we hear about the more, why is this a very good question? You could, you know, there's, there's a couple of possibilities. Speaker 2: 07:07 One could be, we have much more powerful means of detecting viruses, things like polymerase chain reaction, you know, DNA RNA technology that allows you to detect viruses in sewage, for example. But I think there is something else going on. If we, as a species homo sapiens have a disturbed and contacted and penetrated every habitat, you know, including under the deep ice of the ice cores on both poles and in doing so, we come into contact with other organisms or, you know, uh, environments that have not had contact with humans ever. So this notion of us humans as a disturbing force on the ecosystem and, um, by going everywhere and messing everything up, we sample viruses. And some of these are really, really bad news wrapped in an envelope. And so trade is, is an activity that defines humans, right? And, and that opens up think of the pangolin trade, for example, for, for traditional Chinese medicine or the bushmeat trade across Africa, where people eat, consume meat from animals captured in the forest. And so each one of these new contacts is an opportunity for viruses, bacteria, or single cell parasites to infect humans. That was UCSD's Pascal Gagneux (gan-YOO) who is an evolutionary biologist that specialises in influenza viruses. Hear more interviews like that one by subscribing to the Midday Edition podcast wherever you listen. That’s it. Thanks for listening.