Covering COVID-19 is a daily Poynter briefing of story ideas about the coronavirus and other timely topics for journalists, written by senior faculty Al Tompkins. Sign up here to have it delivered to your inbox every weekday morning.

This is the daily update from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Is there a threshold that we must reach for people to care?

(CDC)

Most of the Northeast, half of Florida and parts of nearly every state are in moderate- or high-risk zones right now, and that is using the CDC’s new tracking software based on hospitalizations and deaths, not just on new cases.

(CovidActNow.org)

I did a little bit of traveling last week. I had to get a COVID-19 test to enter the U.S. from Canada. I paid $38 for a person in Asia to watch me stick a swab up my nose and show her a negative test over the phone. Nobody at U.S. immigration asked to see it, and I do not know if anybody looked at the document I uploaded to the airline. They must have millions being uploaded daily, so it is hard to believe it is anything more than a computer checking to see that something has been uploaded.

Before we got on a tour bus in Vancouver, a driver yelled to a crowd of 100 people, “Has everybody been vaccinated?” The crowd yelled “yes.” He asked if anybody felt sick. The crowd yelled “no.” And that was that.

Viruses that took time off during the pandemic are back with a vengeance

The seasonal flu is spreading way out of season. Stat reports four virus outbreaks that are causing summertime concern:

The past two winters were among the mildest influenza seasons on record, but flu hospitalizations have picked up in the last few weeks — in May! Adenovirus type 41, previously thought to cause fairly innocuous bouts of gastrointestinal illness, may be triggering severe hepatitis in healthy young children.

Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, a bug that normally causes disease in the winter, touched off large outbreaks of illness in kids last summer and in the early fall in the United States and Europe.

And now monkeypox, a virus generally only found in West and Central Africa, is causing an unprecedented outbreak in more than a dozen countries in Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Australia, with the United Kingdom alone reporting more than 70 cases. The U.S. has identified nine monkeypox cases.

The disruption of normal virus cycles, in part, seems to be linked to how children interact with each other. Children often spread viruses and, while they were at home, they spread them less. And babies born during the pandemic may carry fewer immunities.

Resident physicians unionizing after COVID-19 overload

We will find out today whether 1,300 resident physicians and trainees voted to unionize at three Los Angeles hospitals. Kaiser Health News notes, “Since March, residents at Stanford Health Care, Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, and the University of Vermont Medical Center have unionized.”

Kaiser says the key issues are work schedules, lack of protective gear, low staffing and pay:

The average resident salary in the U.S. in 2021 was $64,000, according to Medscape, a physician news site, and residents can work up to 24 hours in a shift but no more than 80 hours per week. Although one survey whose results were released last year found that 43% of residents felt they were adequately compensated, those who are unionizing say wages are too low, especially given residents’ workload, their student loan debt, and the rising cost of living.

Should journalists show graphic images from mass shootings to stir the public?

People visit a memorial outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Monday, May 30, 2022. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)

Maybe it is partly out of frustration that there is no easy solution to stopping America’s gun violence that some journalists are asking whether it makes sense to publish graphic images of the children who died from gunfire. The argument is that just as images of war can stir the public to act, maybe it is time to awaken the public to a reality it has been shielded from until a mass killer unloads in their town.

This is not a new idea. Far from it. In 2019, just before the 20th anniversary of the shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, I introduced you to some teens from Columbine and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida who asked journalists to publish graphic images of dead students. The teens even signed permission cards saying if they died in gunfire, please use the crime scene images.

I wrote in 2019 and still believe today:

Even if students place a sticker on their IDs or driver’s licenses saying they want photos of their death made public, that is not the reason to publish. Take the student’s wishes into consideration, but don’t stop there.

There should be a journalistic purpose for the image to be published. If, for example, there is any question about what occurred — if the images prove an official version of the incident to be untrue, if the images illustrate a truth that the public would not have known from the descriptions of the scene — then the graphic images may be newsworthy, and they could be ethically published.

I am concerned that publishing graphic images would reward shooters’ intentions. In Buffalo and New Zealand, the shooters livestreamed the massacres expressly to show the brutality.

Without a doubt, graphic images of death can stir the public. As I pointed out in 2019, “Graphic images of death involving Emmett Till became a catalyst for the civil rights movement. The graphic image of Kim Phuc, hit by napalm, showed the horrors of the Vietnam War. Other images from Syria and Somalia have shown children as victims.”

In 1929, journalists told the story of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, using graphic images of bullet-riddled gangsters shot down during the Prohibition gun battles in Chicago. Back then, the battle was about Prohibition, and the bloody photos prompted the public to consider its cost. The gangsters used Thompson submachine guns, “Tommy guns,” in that and other shootings of the era. In 2018, The New York Times put that weapon into today’s context:

One of the first portable and fully automatic firearms, the “Tommy gun” was a weapon of war that missed its moment, produced too late to serve in World War I. Its manufacturer, facing ruin, tried to market the gun as a self-defense weapon, aided by the fact that the Thompson was so novel the law had yet to catch up with it. In those days, Chicagoans could buy a Tommy gun more easily than they could a handgun.

The Thompson found eager buyers among the criminal class, who appreciated its lethality and the ease with which it could be concealed. Like today’s AR-15, the Tommy gun enabled many of the era’s most heinous crimes — from the murder of a Chicago prosecutor, William McSwiggin, in 1926 to the killing of four lawmen in what became known as the “Kansas City Massacre” of 1933. But while the Thompson empowered gangsters to kill more people more quickly, it hadn’t created this crime wave — it had merely amplified it.

In 1932, President Franklin Roosevelt said he was determined to do something about the gun crimes of the day. The “War on Crime” led to America’s first gun control law, the National Firearms Act of 1934. It did not ban machine guns but did heavily regulate and even license them. Subsequently, machine guns were rarely used in crimes, and that is still the case today, nearly nine decades later.

In 2019, Chicago Magazine made two other observations worth considering. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929 was, at the time, the worst mass killing in U.S. history to occur on that day of the year.

It lost that distinction on February 14th, 2018 when 17 students were murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. That shooting did lead to a federal ban on “bump stocks,” which enable a semi-automatic weapon to fire at the rate of a machine gun, but there has been no legislation to regulate the weapons themselves, nor is there likely to be.

On Monday, President Joe Biden suggested Congress should ban assault weapons. Chicago Magazine writes:

Guns also occupy a different place in American cultural than they did in the 1920s. The National Rifle Association, for instance, helped write the National Firearms Act of 1934. The association’s president told Congress, “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” At that time, the NRA was primarily concerned with marksmanship and gun safety.

Here are three thoughtful articles on the debate over publishing/airing graphic images from shooting scenes:

• “From Sandy Hook to Uvalde, the Violent Images Never Seen” (The New York Times)
• “We cannot sanitize these killings” (Vanity Fair)
• “Temple’s journalism dean thinks we should see the carnage of the Texas school shooting” (Philadelphia Magazine)

13 mass shootings in US over Memorial Day weekend

On Saturday, Sunday and the federal holiday on Monday, there were at least 13 mass shootings. Eight people died and 56 were injured. Since the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, there have been at least 61 mass shootings involving four or more victims.

Pay attention to Hurricane Agatha, which could become Alex

This early season storm is passing through Mexico today and might regenerate in the Gulf of Mexico in the next 24 hours. Forecasters say there is a 30% chance the storm will not play out after clearing Mexico.

It could redevelop into the Atlantic basin’s first named storm. If formed, that storm would be called Alex.

(National Hurricane Center)

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