New COVID-19 Testing Sites

San Diego County now has four new COVID-19 testing sites for teachers and school staff only. The sites are in San Diego, Chula Vista, Del Mar and El Cajon. The first person to get a COVID-19 test at the San Diego location was Jerome Gurule, a building service supervisor. He says the testing will help schools throughout the county reopen safely. "Everybody should before they come back to school to work. I've been wanting to do this before just to get it done so I know, so you don't give it to other people." The county is opening a dozen testing sites for the general public over the next two weeks. Mayor Kevin Faulconer says a handful of san diego public libraries will reopen for the first time since they were closed because of the pandemic. Starting tomorrow, the libraries will open at 25-percent capacity from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m monday through saturday. The facilities will close for cleaning from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. daily. To see a list of the dozen libraries allowed to reopen, go to kpbs dot org. Thursday was the third anniversary of the deadliest mass shooting in US history. On October 1st 2017 a man sprayed gunfire from his Las Vegas hotel room into a crowd of people attending a country music concert. Fifty-eight people were killed. Survivors are speaking out about the crime AND an 800 million dollar settlement, approved Wednesday by a judge. Some say life will never be the same. Tiffany Huidar of Orange County was shot in the stomach, the arm and her hand. She hopes the public doesn't forget what happened. "Why do we have to keep seeing it happen in schools. At concerts, at hotels, at bars. I continue to do these interviews because I want people to remember what we've been through, and let this be the end of this. Let us be the last." MGM Resorts, which owned the hotel and the concert venue, is paying the damages to victims and their families. They acknowledge no liability as part of the settlement. It’s Friday October 2nd. You’re listening to San Diego News Matters from KPBS News...a daily morning news podcast powered by everyone in the KPBS Newsroom. I’m Annica Colbert. Stay with me for more of the local news you need to start your day. After a positive coronavirus test inside council chambers, there are questions about how San Diego's city business will move forward. At least four council members and numerous city employees were inside the room during Tuesday's meeting. KPBS reporter Matt Hoffman spoke with a councilmember about what happens next. City officials say they've told every person who came in close contact with the positive individual to quarantine for two weeks. I was advised by my doctor to wait a few days before i get tested That includes San Diego city councilmember Chris cate, who has a wife and two children. if I do go out and about I'm masking up inside my house just be cautious City council president Georgette Gomez released a statement saying officials are in the process of evaluating how to safely move forward with city business. There is a council meeting scheduled for next week and some have already been participating virtually. I don't think city business needs to be impacted negatively by it I'm chairing a committee Wednesday and we're planning on moving forward. I can call in virtually There are coronavirus protocols in place for city employees -- like checking temperatures before entering buildings, physical distancing and wearing masks. Matt Hoffman, KPBS News. While the local, regional and national economy struggles in the wake of the pandemic -- there’s a glimmer of hope for San Diego. The effort to transform the old NAVWAR facility in the Midway District has taken a major step forward… and it could mean thousands of jobs for San Diego. KPBS reporter John Carroll says Governor Newsom just signed legislation to streamline the environmental review process for the project. Jobs, jobs, jobs was the message at Thursday morning's news conference. Jobs that are dependent on the revitalization of the old NAVWAR facility... more than 70-acres containing a series of decades-old aircraft hangars housing about five-thousand workers. AB 2731 co-authored by Assemblyman Todd Gloria and State Senator Toni Atkins of San Diego, allows SANDAG to streamline the environmental review process for the project. "In order to build a new cybersecurity facility for the Navy, a new central mobility hub linking various transit lines for the San Diego airport... as well as needed housing units and retail space." Along with keeping the current five-thousand jobs in San Diego, Gloria says the project has the potential to generate at least 16-thousand new jobs. Once the Navy's environmental process is complete, and if they decide to move forward with SANDAG, construction could begin sometime next year. JC, KPBS News. It's been a summer of racial unrest in response to police killings across the country. Now, California is taking small steps to address that. Governor Gavin Newsom has signed a handful of bills dealing with police reform. CapRadio's Nicole Nixon reports. Newsom approved bills to ban police from using certain neck restraints, and allow local governments to increase their oversight of police and sheriff's departments. A third new law would give the state Department of Justice more latitude to investigate police killings of unarmed civilians. The bill was authored by Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, who pushed it for years, particularly after Stephon Clark was shot and killed by Sacramento police in his grandmother's backyard. Lawmakers proposed other police reforms, like creating a process to decertify police and banning the use of tear gas and rubber bullets during protests. But during the chaotic final night of the legislative session, they did not make it to the governor's desk... though lawmakers plan to bring them back next year. SOC Short-term vacation rentals remain a hot button issue in San Diego. Assemblyman and Mayoral candidate Todd Gloria is criticizing city leaders for their inaction on the issue. This comes after our partners at inewsource reported a dramatic spike in police activity at Pinnacle on the Park, where dozens of units in the downtown high-rise have been used to host pandemic parties. In a statement release on wednesday, Gloria vowed to take action within his first 100 days if elected. He said his opponent, Councilwoman Barbara Bry, would rather do nothing. Bry responded, saying Gloria has blocked regulations in the past and his campaign is supported by vacation rental companies. For more on this story go to inewsource dot org. Brandon Cronenberg is the son of Canadian director David Cronenberg, the man who gave us films as Videodrome and The Fly remake. KPBS film critic Beth Accomando says you can see the family resemblance in Brandon’s sophomore feature “Possessor.” With his first feature Antiviral, Brandon Cronenberg announced himself as a bold new talent and his second feature Possessor doesn’t disappoint. Like his father David Cronenberg, Brandon reveals a penchant for body horror, cerebral cinema and unnerving his audience. But despite the shared DNA, Brandon displays a unique cinematic personality. CLIP Interface is active and we're at full power... As with Antiviral, Possessor doesn’t waste time explaining the creepy science fiction that sets the plot in motion. In this case we have Tasya Vos, a woman who operates as an assassin by taking over the mind and body of an unwilling surrogate. CLIP Pull me out… The film taps into current anxiety about privacy issues and evil corporations but more disturbingly it digs into the human psyche to explore darker questions about identity. Possessor is disturbing and relentless but in a brilliant and riveting way. Experience it if you dare. Beth Accomando, KPBS News. The coronavirus case rate measures how many new daily positive tests are happening out of every 100,000 San Diegans. But it also determines if restrictions on businesses are tightened or loosened. In a series of stories, KPBS Health Reporter Tarryn Mento traces back where that data point comes from. President John F. Kennedy visited San Diego just five months before his 1963 assassination. A photograph captures his motorcade passing by the 24-hour Rudford's Restaurant. The community staple has welcomed diners at all hours since that day. But that streak ended in March. Governor Gavin Newsom closed all on-site dining to curb the spread of coronavirus. we let go 40 people. That was hard to do. Rudford's owner Jeff Kacha was forced to only offer take out. Kacha has since been stuck in a cycle of reopenings and threatened closings based on the up and down of local coronavirus cases. We've put in dividers, we have masks, we have gloves. Everything's sanitized. Across California activities like dining in a restaurant or practicing your faith are controlled by coronavirus numbers. KPBS examined the data that's driving decisions in San Diego and found it's riddled with complexities and caveats. I wouldn't say I'm confident down to the last decimal point. Dr. Bill Schaffner is the medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. He says these systems can be imperfect. But close. Close enough to make reasonable decisions and to assess trends over time. In a series of stories, KPBS is exploring this data driven system in San Diego to uncover the challenges and how they're overcome. And that system sort of begins with snot. You've going to go up to about the mid-level of your nose Nurse Darci LaRae walks me through how to shove a swab up my nostril. You're going to rotate it several times around the wall of your nose. Lab machines will examine the secretion for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. That's what causes COVID-19. You might cough or sneeze My results were negative. But thousands of snot-covered swabs from the noses of San Diegans are transported daily to labs. At Helix lab in La Jolla… the hours-long process to get test results begins with a robot named Bootes. NAT POP of Bootes saying "Bo-oh-tees" Actually he thinks he's Bo-oh-tees — that double O gives him problems. But the results he and his machine friends uncover are relayed back to local and state decision-makers through a complex and sometimes overlapping reporting network. And it gets a bit wonky, so stick with me. Helix only handles local swabs collected at county testing sites so Vice President Marc Laurent says they share results with San Diego officials twice. “one way is we actually send it back to the operations team that's going to contact the patient And then to the team that tracks the data that controls reopenings. That's sent by fax. : it's ancient, but it's also one of the most safe way to pass HIPAA information along. And they send it to a state team in Sacramento. But some commercial labs report only to the state, which automatically passes San Diego results on to the county. And labs report to the health care providers that sent them the tests so they can tell patients. Providers also report confirmed cases to the county. The county's public health team wouldn't agree to an interview but said in an email that staff checks daily results against its database. If they find a new result is actually a duplicate, it's attached to the existing record. But the county says some may slip through. Still, San Diego and Sacramento don't always agree on the numbers that may trigger closings. Their calculations didn't match for a bit… thousands of results were lost in a statewide glitch… and most recently elected county officials including Supervisor Greg Cox wanted the state to ignore positives among San Diego State University students. "Seriously consider discounting or not including approximately 700 cases that we have right now from SDSU students." But the governor disagreed. "The answer is no." That looming closure was avoided because the case rate even with SDSU positives was below a state threshold. But the back and forth has left Rudford's owner Kacha on edge. "We ran out of money. We were into our savings. We've overspent." He worries he can't survive another closure. But the case rate is only announced on Tuesdays, so businesses wait every week to learn if the data is going in the wrong direction. And this past week San Diego again narrowly avoided a case rate the governor considers too high. Tarryn Mento. KPBS News. That was KPBS Health Reporter Tarryn Mento. KPBS will continue to report on these data point triggers as part of its ongoing series. You can look at all 13 data points using the KPBS Trigger Tracker at kpbs-dot-org. Coming up on the podcast….the federal sedition act was repealed in 1920. But the San Diego city council only recently repealed its own seditious-language ordinance. That story next, after this quick break. Sedition is conduct or speech inciting insurrection toward the established order. To be arrested and charged with sedition sounds like a relic from a century ago. That’s because the federal Sedition Act, established after World War One to quell critics of the war and the government, was repealed by Congress in 1920. Yet, the San Diego City Council just recently around to doing something similar this week. Jonathan Markovits is a staff attorney with the American Civil liberties Union in San Diego. He sat down with KPBS Midday Edition Host Mark Sauer to talk about the unanimous decision to abolish the city’s seditious-language ordinance. Here’s that interview. We'll start with, uh, what the San Diego municipal code said about sedition. Speaker 2: 00:42 So it prohibited, um, words that have a tendency to create a breach of the public peace in the presence of other people. The heart of the problem with the code is that it flagrantly violates the first amendment. Um, there is no requirement in the code that the language that's being used will incite violence, um, that it's likely to incite violence, that it is directed to inciting violence, um, or that imminent violence or imminent lawless action is a likely outcome of the speech. Um, so it is a ordinance that criminalizes really just pure speech. Um, but the other thing to say about it is that it's an ordinance that whatever the actual words are doesn't seem to have been enforced in a way that has anything to do with what's addition is traditionally thought of which is an effort to overthrow the government. Um, it's addition as enforced by the San Diego police department seems to have entailed things like officers who were displeased with, um, people who were playing rap music too loud, or people who insulted them. Speaker 2: 02:02 Um, there's really good solid uncontroverted case law saying that contempt of cop is not a crime. Um, so the, the police for very, very long time have been arresting people or citing people, I'm sorry for really nothing more than pure speech. And that is again, just a flagrant violation of the first amendment. Um, one of the things that indicates just have starkly unconstitutional, this lie is, is that it appears that nobody in city government, um, had any interest in defending it. Um, as soon as the voice of San Diego reported on it, the, the city pretty much everybody in, in city government seems to have acknowledged that it was unconstitutional, that it was antiquated and that it should be repealed. And so it's great that it finally was the difficulty with that, I think is that that only goes for the, that only affects issues and people going forward. It doesn't affect the harm that the department in the city created by enforcing this blatantly unconstitutional law in what appears to be a racially discriminatory manner for a very long time, Speaker 1: 03:20 Right? There's evidence that the law in San Diego really affected people of color, right? Speaker 2: 03:26 The numbers that I've seen are the 30% of the people who were ticketed were, were black. Um, African Americans make up only about 6.5% of the city's population. Um, there were dozens of different officers according to the reporting, um, who issued citations under this law. It's just since 2013. So this appears to have really been a systematic, um, use of an unconstitutional ordinance. And one of the, the, I think really key questions is how did this happen? Speaker 1: 04:01 I was just going to say, what precipitated this? How did the law come about in San Diego? Speaker 2: 04:07 The law is, is a hundred years old. Um, I think voice of San Diego has done some reporting on it. It's a Relic of an era in which there was kind of unquestioned sense on the part of many government officials that it was permissible to do whatever you could do to quell dissent. Um, and I think that that, that understanding of what government authority was, is fortunately for the most part, a Relic of the past, Speaker 1: 04:39 Right. And why do courts allow it here? If it's a, if it's against the first amendment and unconstitutional, uh, why in the world, uh, didn't a defense attorney say, Hey, uh, raise these issues and stop these cases as they went forward. Speaker 2: 04:54 It's a really good question. And I think the answer probably has to do with the fact that the citations were issued as infractions rather than misdemeanors. So that meant that people weren't directly hauled into court. They weren't directly brought into the criminal justice system and they probably, they may not have had defense attorneys. Um, they, the, the way that I suspect this became a problem, a very serious problem for a lot of people who are resided, um, is if they were unable to pay their initial fines, um, if they were issued later warrant for that failure to, to pay fines or for failure to appear in court. Um, at that point there would have been probably some kind of judicial oversight, but when it was at the infraction level, I think that a lot could really escape judicial oversight Speaker 1: 05:52 In August. The police chief in San Diego told the officers to stop enforcing the language law and, uh, the city attorney's not got any of these cases anymore. What does that tell you about the department's progress in updating antiquated models of policing that have disproportionately impacted people of color? As it said, Speaker 2: 06:11 I think the fact that there were so many citations issued for so many years suggests that there's very little progress. The fact that the, the chief ordered an end to enforcement and that the city ultimately repealed the law is great, but I think it probably has to do with just how openly unconstitutional, blatantly unconstitutional and indefensible the ordinance was once the city was called on it. And once the police department was called on enforcement, I think they really just had no way to continue enforcing it. And, and repeal was the only thing that made sense. The fact that this is one of many kinds of biased policing that have been documented in the city in recent years, um, by the San Diego state university study by, um, the campaign zero study, um, suggests that progress really is probably not the right term when thinking about the police department and racial bias. Speaker 2: 07:14 Um, I think that if we want progress, then this is a step. Um, the city, I think, needs to come to terms with the harm that it's inflicted on the people who were cited here. So I think that it needs at the very least to expunge people's records, it needs to refund any fines that they paid. It needs to look to see if there were secondary charges, failure to appear, failure to pay, um, and expunge those records and make people whole pay those fines back or never return any funds to people. Um, but it also, I think, needs to take a serious look at decriminalizing, other offenses that should've never been criminalized. It needs to look at at traffic stops that are disproportionately effecting people of color. It needs to really take decriminalization much, much more seriously. Speaker 1: 08:08 Now, council members didn't want to stop with just overturning this. They want to investigate why it remained on the books for so long and why police were trained to cite people for seditious acts. Uh, that's pretty important, right? Speaker 2: 08:21 I think absolutely. I think that, that, again, this appears to have been a racially biased form of policing. It appears to have been a form of policing that really just targets behaviors that cops found, um, or that police found to be unappealing. Um, and there should be an investigation to how this was allowed to happen. How were the police allowed to penalize people for nothing but pure speech for so long and were they trained, do it, um, who trained them? What kinds of policies were in place that made this acceptable? Speaker 1: 09:04 And I'll know both president Trump and his attorney general William Barr have urge federal prosecutors to charge those involved in violence at protests with sedition, that's alarmed some us attorneys, even as Trump attacks the integrity of the election with lies about voter fraud. BARR went so far as to suggest CA Seattle's mayor, Jenny Durkan be criminally charged for allowing a police free protest zone for a time. What do you think about that? Speaker 2: 09:28 I think that we're living in really troubling times and that the federal overreach and seeking to impose criminal penalties on people who are engaged in peaceful protest really strikes at everything that makes a democracy possible. That was Jonathan Markovits, a staff attorney with the American Civil liberties Union in San Diego. Speaking with KPBS Midday Edition Host Mark Sauer. That’s it for the podcast today, thanks for listening.