4/7/2022
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Wall St Journal
Spokesman-Review
EVERGREEN ELEMENTARY EXPANDS ITS CLOTHING BANK
Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center accepting long COVID patients for study
KREM
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Wall St Journal
Reckless drivers, outdated infrastructure and fewer officers patrolling the roads cited by safety group
Camille FurstApr. 7, 2022 12:01 am ET
The number of U.S. pedestrians killed in motor-vehicle crashes surged 17% in the first half of 2021, according to a nonprofit safety group, which linked the increase to reckless drivers, outdated infrastructure and fewer officers patrolling the roads.
In the first six months of 2021, drivers struck and killed 3,441 people, up from 2,934 in the same period in 2020, according to a report released Thursday from the Governors Highway Safety Association, which represents state highway-safety offices that supplied the preliminary data.
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“The overall number, by far, is very shocking. That is a huge number,” said Jonathan Adkins, the association’s executive director. All these families “have lost someone all because someone was literally taking a walk.”
The increase is part of a rising trend in fatalities in recent years. Even in 2020, pedestrian deaths remained elevated despite a sharp decline in driving at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Overall, there were 6,516 pedestrian deaths in 2020, up from 4,457 in 2011, the highway-safety association said.
A surge in speeding related deaths in recent years is prompting some to propose new ways to slow down America’s drivers and to rethink a controversial rule that sets the speed limit for many roads in the U.S. WSJ’s George Downs explains.
In addition to rising pedestrian fatalities, car-crash deaths have also surged since the Covid-19 pandemic began.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration projects that about 31,720 people died in car crashes between January and September last year. That would be the highest number of fatalities reported in the first nine months of any year since 2006. The numbers show the fastest increase in car fatalities in nearly half a century.
“We have to change a culture that accepts as inevitable the loss of tens of thousands of people in traffic crashes,” Steven Cliff, deputy administrator for NHTSA, said earlier this year.
A Las Vegas intersection in spring 2021.Photo: Roger Kisby/Bloomberg News
Mr. Adkins said part of the problem is that fewer police officers are patrolling the roads. When there are fewer law-enforcement officials on the streets, the rate of people driving dangerously increases, he said. Better infrastructure including newer roads and highways would also prevent more pedestrian deaths, Mr. Adkins added.
He is hopeful for a safer future. President Biden signed into law last year a roughly $1 trillion infrastructure plan that includes repairing aging roads and bridges.
In addition, the U.S. Department of Transportation detailed earlier this year its National Roadway Safety Strategy. Mr. Adkins said he hoped the funding and strategy plans would help create safer roads and reduce dangerous behaviors among drivers, such as speeding and drunken driving.
“We know what to do, and now we have some of the resources we need to do it,” Mr. Adkins said. “So I’m really hopeful that things will start to turn around.”
Write to Camille Furst at camille.furst@wsj.com
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Spokesman-Review
EVERGREEN ELEMENTARY EXPANDS ITS CLOTHING BANK
New shed to be built to provide boutique setting for display
By Nina Culver
FOR THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
The Evergreen Elementary School PTO has spent this year creating a clothing bank for students in need and is looking forward to career and technical education students at Mead High School building a shed to give to the PTO to house its clothes closet.
PTO President Jennifer Boomer, who volunteers at the school, said she’s seen students wear the same clothes to school every day because those clothes are the only ones that fit. School social worker Tina Caskey said the goal is to help parents in need at Evergreen. “We’ve just seen the need grow, even before COVID,” she said. “We’re seeing more working poverty. They’re trying hard. Things are more expensive, but wages aren’t rising.”
While the Mead School District has a clothing bank for parents and families, it’s at a central location that is only open during the day and requires an appointment, Caskey said. “We wanted this to be accessible,” she said. “We can just send a bag home with the kids. We don’t want parents to be embarrassed. People have pride and we want to honor that for them.”
About half of the school’s 495 students qualify for free and reduced lunch. Boomer said the school has unique demographics. “We’ve got the wealthiest of the wealthy who live in gate communities and the poorest of the poor who live in the rundown apartments by the library,” she said.
Both women said they’ve been impressed by how compassionate people in the school are to one another. Caskey said she’s had students come to her and tell her that another student needs assistance. Caskey also said that she has some school families that she can call for donations if she has a student that needs something she can’t provide.
Making sure students have what they need is what drives both women. Boomer said she got the idea for a clothes closet after school board member Michael Cannon asked her what her goals were this year. After some thought, she said she wanted to make sure the basic needs of students were met. Since then, she’s been doing her best to collect a wide variety of clothing, coats, shoes, socks and underwear.
“We’ve been taking donations just by word of mouth,” Boomer said. “We’re pretty particular. We want quality, nice stuff that kids will be excited to wear.”
Currently, the clothes are mostly stuffed in plastic totes that are stored in the PTO shed next to the carnival cutouts, popcorn machine and other supplies. But work has been going on behind the scenes to get another shed for the school that will house the clothes closet.
Each year the career and technical education students have a Trades Day organized by the Spokane Homebuilders Association where students can work with local companies to learn basic skills in different areas. During this year’s event, scheduled for May 21 and 22, students from Mead High School and Spokane Public Schools will work with local contractors to build four sheds, two for the Mead district and two for Spokane Public Schools. One of those sheds will become Evergreen’s new clothes closet.
The new shed will make it possible to display the clothes better and keep them organized. “We want to make it a boutique,” Boomer said. “We want kids to go shopping.”
She’s also collecting clothes and shoes for older and younger children as well so that they can help older and younger siblings of Evergreen’s students. “Our goal is to not turn anyone down,” Caskey said. “We have some bigger shoes right now and bigger coats.”
The clothes closet will also benefit students at the nearby Shiloh Elementary School, Boomer said, which has an even higher rate of students who qualify for free and reduced lunch. “We’re going to be giving their social worker a key to the shed so they can access it too,” Boomer said.
This year has made it clear that a clothes closet is highly needed. Boomer said as she was collecting a large amount of donations at the beginning of the year, she thought she’d never go through it all. She was wrong.
“I have refilled and restocked, refilled and restocked, refilled and restocked,” she said. “I knew we needed it, but I didn’t realize how much.”
Anyone who would like to donate new or gently used items to the Evergreen clothes closet can contact Boomer at evergreenpto@mead354.org. Nina Culver can be reached at nculver47@gmail.com.
Jennifer Boomer, head of the PTO at Evergreen Elementary in north Spokane, shows the interior of a shed outside the school that is serving as a clothes closet for storing extra clothing donated for students. The CTE students at Mead High Schoola are going to build a dedicated shed for the closet in the next month or two and deliver it to Evergreen.
JESSE TINSLEY/ THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center accepting long COVID patients for study
By Arielle Dreher
THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
Patients across the Inland Northwest suffering from long COVID have an opportunity to be a part of the science and research seeking to find treatmentsand answers. Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center is one of a handful of sites in the Pacific Northwest cohort of hospitals researching long COVID as a part of an initiative from the National Institutes of Health.
Institute for Systems Biology, a Seattle-based organization, received the federal contract for the study in the Pacific Northwest and is partnering with Providence hospitals throughout Washington and California to follow, test and potentially treat long COVID patients.
The study is called The RECOVER initiative and is looking for about 1,000 participants in the Pacific Northwest 18 and older to be a part of a four-year study.
COVID-19 can have debilitating and devastating long-term consequences, from heart, lung and kidney damage to chronic fatigue, brain fog and other symptoms.
Some people have lost their sense of smell entirely; others can no longer work due to the
Dr. Katherine Tuttle, photographed Tuesday, is researching long COVID-19 at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center.
JESSE TINSLEY/ THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
constant fatigue or brain fog brought on by the virus.
Long COVID patients in Eastern Washington have had to rely on their primary care providers for care due to no specialty clinics available east of the Cascades.
Now, their experiences can be shared with researchers in Spokane.
The RECOVER study has been designed with patients in mind, said Dr. Katherine Tuttle, a nephrologist and director of research at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center.
Tuttle was part of the team that helped design the study, and she said the correct controls will be important to understanding which symptoms can be linked to a person’s COVID infection.
Also important, she said, is putting long COVID patients and their experience at the center of the study.
“Patients are the experts in their disease, and they should not be passive advisers,” Tuttle said. “They should be partners in the research and help us answer the questions.”
After more than two years of the pandemic, long COVID is finally being discussed at the national level. President Joe Biden released a memo this week, directing federal health agencies to prioritize planning and reporting about long COVID in the country. Tuttle said she hopes this means there will be a substantial increase in support for developing more long COVID clinics with the aim of research being done where patients are treated.
Dr. Jim Heath, president of the Institute for Systems Biology and the director of the consortium, said the study is enrolling patients who recently had COVID along with those who continue to exhibit COVID symptoms long after their initial diagnosis, and patients who tested positive but might not have those symptoms. The study will also seek to enroll some people who have not tested positive for the virus as controls.
Patients in the study will participate for four years, and initial enrollment will place patients in different tiers, based on the severity of symptoms and side effects. In Spokane, patients enrolled through Sacred Heart will likely be contacted about every three months, Tuttle said. Some visits can be done remotely while other visits may require blood draws, physical evaluations and additional scans.
Through wide-scale observation and the large amount of patients enrolled in the study, researchers hope to sort out what conditions might predict whether a person gets long COVID as well as which symptoms are most commonly linked to the virus.
Heath said the goal is to go beyond that, however, to understand what mechanisms are at play and hopefully test and develop treatments to help suffering patients.
“The hope is we’ll also get mechanistic information about why these conditions are appearing and how to reverse them,” he said.
While there are no drugs or treatments being tested through the consortium, Heath said the expectation is that there will be eventually.
The Sacred Heart site will take anyone who is eligible, regardless of whether they are a Providence patient. Tuttle said patients from North Idaho, Montana, Eastern Washington and Oregon can participate as well.
Tuttle, whose specialty is kidney medicine, knows firsthand how COVID affected kidney function. She remembers the team using the last dialysis machine at Sacred Heart in the midst of a particularly bad COVID wave to keep a patient’s kidneys functioning while they were being ventilated.
She warned that the impacts of long COVID might not be obvious to everyone, and some organs failing are potentially “silent killers” in the background if they are not detected early.
“If somebody has had COVID, and they’re not feeling right, I would recommend that they see their primary care provider and have a physical and some lab work done,” Tuttle said. “Kidney failure doesn’t make you feel bad until you’re nearly dead.”
Long COVID can impact anyone who tested positive for the virus, including those who had relatively mild symptoms, Tuttle said.
“People who think they had a cold or even had COVID twice and it was no big deal, they could still get long COVID,” she said.
To see if you are eligible for the RECOVER consortium study, visit isbscience.org/pnwrecover and if you are eligible, you can fill out this survey to indicate your interest in participating. Arielle Dreher can be reached at (509) 459-5467 or at arielled@ spokesman. com.
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KREM
Spokane Fire Chief Brian Schaeffer said he expects firefighters to be on the scene until noon on Thursday.
SPOKANE, Wash. — Spokane fire crews responded to a third alarm fire in downtown Spokane early Thursday morning. The fire has since been contained but the scene is still active.
Monroe Street is currently blocked off due to the fire and Lincoln is expected to be impacted as well.
Spokane Police Chief Brain Schaeffer told KREM 2 that the fire was reported at 4:22 a.m. near Railway Avenue in downtown Spokane. Crews that arrived on scene reported seeing fire and heavy smoke in the alley near the Carlyle Apartments.
Schaeffer said the fire and smoke were coming from a storage facility and parking garage near the apartments. He added that heavy combustibles were inside the facility, but no people were inside.
The fire was eventually upgraded from a second alarm to a third alarm, according to Schaeffer.
Crews were able to isolate the fire to that building. Schaeffer said there was slight extension into a building near the storage facility, but crews were able to stop it before it spread even further.
The fire did not make its way to the Carlyle Apartments, where Schaeffer said some high-risk individuals live. All residents were evacuated to ensure they were not injured.
It is still not known what caused the fire.
Schaeffer said he expects firefighters to be on the scene until noon on Thursday. KREM 2 crews on the scene reported at least two dozen first responder vehicles.
Schaeffer said those who drive through or work in the downtown area should expect delays and factor in extra time.