Daily Admin Update
Day 29
Good Morning,
A family sent me the picture below. I am getting really excited. The corner of the building is a two story media center that will be used for all kinds of learning, group meetings, parent spaces to meet and catch up and offices for staff. It is going to be an amazing space. It has not been filled in like the rest of the building because the exterior will be filled in with two stories of glass bricks that will flood the space with natural light. They will be completing that in May. It is going to be an amazing space for our community!
Verizon said it was now handling an average of 800 million wireless calls a day during the week, more than double the number made on Mother’s Day, which is historically one of the busiest calling days of the year.
“The better-case scenario we always hoped for”
Today California will hit its peak in terms of the number of hospital beds, ICU beds and ventilators needed to treat COVID-19 patients, with a peak in daily deaths on Wednesday, according to a popular model from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
Although state officials continue to cite models that predict hospitalizations will peak in May, Health Secretary Mark Ghaly said Friday the peak may not be too different from current hospitalization levels.
Both Ghaly and Gov. Gavin Newsom emphasized the red dotted line will rise if Californians stop practicing physical distancing. Nevertheless, the line suggests that California is experiencing “the better-case scenario we had always hoped for,” as Ghaly put it, raising questions as to when the state will begin to reopen.
- Newsom: “I know all of us are developing some anxiety and cabin fever and want to get out. … Let’s continue to hold the line. Give us a few more weeks to see where these trend lines go, and then we’ll be talking a lot more … when we can go back to some semblance of normalcy.”
This is the biggest uprising by local scientists since the AIDS crisis
The laboratory lights burned long and bright during the AIDS crisis.
San Diego researchers coalesced into an army that helped find ways to detect, describe and stop one of the worst pandemics in history.
More than three decades later, there’s a new uprising.
From the research towers at UC San Diego to the pharmaceutical companies in Carlsbad, the region’s huge science community has joined the fight against COVID-19, which has killed more than 100,000 people worldwide.
“This is a from-the-ground-up movement that’s doing everything from screening for drugs to using 3-D printers to make ventilators,” said Dr. David Brenner, vice chancellor of health sciences at UCSD.
“I have never seen an entire scientific community change direction so fast to focus on one problem.”
The response involves a group of elite institutions, including UCSD, one of the nation’s biggest research schools; the J. Craig Venter Institute, whose namesake helped sequence the human genome; and the Salk Institute, whose founder, Jonas Salk, created the first effective vaccine against polio.
The coronavirus is so contagious many of the institutions are prohibiting scientists from entering their labs unless their work is deemed essential — a restriction that largely didn’t exist in the early days of AIDS.
But work is getting done, including UCSD’s move to begin human trials of the experimental drug remdesivir.
By GARY ROBBINS