A Vaccine On The Way

Good Morning, I’m Annica Colbert….it’s Monday, December 14th. How do hospitals direct resources when ICU capacity starts to dwindle? We’ll have a conversation with the leader of Sharp HealthCare. But first... let’s do the headlines…. With the Pfizer vaccine now approved for emergency use, doses are expected to arrive at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego and the Naval Hospital in Camp Pendleton this week. Meanwhile - County Health officers reported more than 2400 new covid-19 infections on Sunday, and 11 new deaths. Sunday was the fifth day that more than 2,000 cases were reported. Hospitalizations also continue to rise...the county’s hospitals have 16% of their ICU beds available, that’s down from 21% last Thursday. Federal officials say restrictions on non-essential travel between the U-S and Mexico will stay in place until January 21st because of COVID-19. That means businesses in San Ysidro relying on cross-border traffic for their busiest time of the year will suffer through the holiday season... Retail stores are still open in San Ysidro with limited indoor capacity… The San Diego Sheriff’s Department has backed off a policy of publicly posting the release dates of people in its custody. Immigrant advocates say the information was being used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help it arrest immigrants for possible deportation. They have lobbied against the policy for years…. And Sheriff Bill Gore pledged in a November hearing to look into the practice. From KPBS, you’re listening to San Diego News Now. Stay with me for more of the local news you need. As covid-19 cases climb, hospital resources are shrinking. So, what do hospitals do at that point? How do they decide what gets resources and what doesn’t? KPBS Health reporter Tarryn Mento spoke with Sharp’s Chief Operation Officer Brett McCalin. Here’s that interview…. That was KPBS Health Reporter Tarryn Mento speaking with Sharp COO Brett McClain. ... How do you take an organization that relies on people coming together... and keep it going during a time when people can’t come together? In this pandemic profile, KPBS reporter John Carroll talks to the leader of san diego’s largest muslim congregation to see how they’re making it through the crisis. “God can be worshipped anywhere on earth.” That statement by Imam Taha Hassane could probably be agreed to by just about every religious leader on the planet. But of course, when you’re talking about organized religion, it’s not quite that simple. Hassane leads the Islamic Center of San Diego in Clairemont… the city’s largest Muslim congregation. “At the very beginning, we had no idea about what’s going on and how we should operate.” What Hassane did know back then was the mosque portion of the Islamic Center… the large prayer hall, could not be used. So like countless other members of the clergy, Hassane had to figure out how to take things online… with some help. “Thank God we have smart people in the community, young people who are into this technology and in a matter of a few days, they came together and they installed all this system, the online system, so we broadcast live on our YouTube channel, live on Facebook.” But now, with vaccines expected to be distributed soon, Hassane is looking to the future, when his entire congregation can once again fill this hallowed space. JC, KPBS News. The COVID-19 pandemic hit California’s state budget hard, but not as hard as predicted. As it turns out, tax collections from the state’s wealthiest residents are higher than anticipated.... producing an unexpected windfall of around 26 billion dollars next year. The legislature has a long list of ways they can spend that money. CapRadio’s Nicole Nixon reports. This year’s budget deficit forced lawmakers to make deep cuts to health programs and skip payments to schools. Assembly budget chairman Phil Ting says he wants to restore that funding for the fiscal year starting next summer. The San Francisco Democrat also proposes using some of the windfall to get money into the pockets of Californians who need it most. TING: "It’s making sure they’re getting their unemployment checks, it’s making sure that those that don’t qualify [for unemployment] are getting earned income tax credit, or also the students that need additional financial aid are getting financial aid." Other funding priorities include homelessness and wildfire mitigation, but Ting didn’t say how much they want to spend on each item. Wildfire’s this year burned about a third of the habitat of the earth’s giant sequoia trees. That’s all from one complex of fires still burning near Sequoia National Park. Scientists say as many as one-thousand of the biggest sequoias could be incinerated. Kristen Shive is with Save the Redwoods League. “We just didn't think that quite could happen and so it made us realize that we are really in a crisis situation with the amount of fuels. Fast forward to 2020 and I am kind of blown away at the extent of high severity fire.” On top of the acreage burned, Scientists realized a native bark beetle is beginning to harm the iconic species. This insect is different from the kind that killed pine trees during the last drought. Coming up.... Local researchers say plants are becoming more of an option to help ease climate change. That’s up next just after this break. San Diego researchers think plants may offer a significant way to draw down excess carbon emissions in the air. KPBS Environment Reporter Erik Anderson HAS THE STORY. Greenhouse manager Mckenna Hopwood opens a door to what she jokingly calls, the meat locker. Bags of drying plants, both stalks and roots, hang from the ceiling like slabs of meat. But, of course, they’re plants. “These have all been root-washed and processed and they’ve been drying for about a week. depending on the crop, we’ll hang dry them for two to three weeks and then we’ll throw them in the plant drying over for a day or two. And then we’ll do our biomass weights.” This is the final stop for plants raised in this Salk greenhouse. (watering sound) Hopwood is constantly growing several different plant species here. “Some pants don’t really like to be watered from the top and these ones are really sensitive, so if they have soil that gets tossed into the middle of the plant, they won’t produce their flower, so we have to bottom water them. or mist them very lightly, which just takes a really long time.” Some of these plants grow fast, seed to harvest in a few months. Others are crop plants like, corn, soybeans and wheat. Add in sorghum, rice and canola and that’s most of the most popular food crops growing in the world. Total planted acreage is the size of India. “One of the biggest challenges, we think, and the biggest threat for humanity is the climate crisis.” Wolfgang Busch is looking for ways to make those widely used plants a lot better at moving carbon from the air and storing it deeper in the ground. He’s using millions of dollars in grants to develop longer and deeper root systems. They are the key to storing carbon that the burning of fossil fuels spews into the air. “And we’re trying to find, mechanisms. Genetic recipes to actually make better plants or make plants better at storing larger amounts of carbon underground longer in the soil.” Busch hopes to find the right combination of gene manipulation, breeding and the transfer of desirable traits from other plants to make those six crops better at carbon sequestration. Busch says they represent a short term answer to a long term problem. “There are currently only, actually, no really scalable methods to draw down carbon dioxide, except from plants. So if you think about this in the long run this technology will enable carbon drawdown that is really urgently needed to get back to carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere that are safe for us.” But the clock is ticking. The planet’s average temperature continues to climb at dramatic rates. Busch says it’ll still be about five years before he’s likely to develop the plants that he’s confident will help. It could be 15 years before enough of those plants are planted to make a difference. “I think we can but we’re really right on the edge.” Salk researcher Joanne Chory, who’s been living with Parkinson’s disease for 15 years, says temperatures are rising because people push more carbon dioxide into the air that what the planet can account for. She understands the urgency but remains hopeful. “You don’t have to fix everything. You only have to get those 18 gigatons that the earth can’t deal with. That’s a small part of what plants push around on a regular seasonal basis. They’re pushing around more like 800 gigatons.” Chory thinks plants can pull about four gigatons of that extra carbon out of the air and into the soil. Building out more renewable energy and making cars electric could help too, but those transitions will take time. Chory thinks developing plants that can move more carbon out of plant sugars and into non-biodegradable polymers buried in deep roots could buy some time until other solutions come along. McKenna Hopwood is spending that time in the search for a scalable solution in that Salk Greenhouse. “So I’ll take some wheat right here, it's been growing a little long. This is longer than preferred. Then you just take this guy, transplant it in and cover it with our substrate. There you go.” But success here and in the lab will have to be duplicated on a global scale. Researchers are confident the science will help them improve the plants, but they don’t share that optimism about governments and farmers who will have to implement the solution before the climate gets too warm. Erik Anderson KPBS News That was KPBS Environment Reporter Erik Anderson….. For our arts segment today, "News of the World" stars Tom Hanks as a Civil War veteran. KPBS film critic Beth Accomando says the film will be released to theatres on Christmas... and it’s being packaged as an Oscar hopeful. News of the World is set five years after the Civil War has ended. Tom Hanks plays veteran Jefferson Kyle Kidd. CLIP And I am here tonight to read you the news of the world. There are elements of News of the World that could have resonated today. Kidd is traveling through an America that’s still painfully divided in the aftermath of war. He sometimes crosses paths with people who don’t want to hear enlightening news from other place but rather only news from their own insular community. It’s also interesting to have someone reading newspapers and holding listeners rapt with news presented as engaging stories. But instead of focusing on these aspects, director Paul Greengrass focuses on Kidd’s task of delivering a young girl raised by the Kiowa tribe to her only living relatives. CLIP This says your name is Johanna and Indians took your parents six years prior… Greengrass addresses some of the same issues raised by the classic western The Searchers but sadly none of the interesting ones. At this particular moment in time a film looking to a Civil War vet, traveling through the South with a white girl teaching us lessons about Native Americans just feels a bit out of touch especially when the writing is so mundane and the plot so blandly formulaic. Beth Accomando, KPBS News. That’s it for the podcast today. Be sure to catch KPBS Midday Edition At Noon on KPBS radio, or watch KPBS Evening Edition at 5 O’clock on KPBS Television. As always you can find more San Diego news online at KPBS dot org. I’m Annica Colbert. Thanks for listening and have a great day.