 You're tuned into the COVID-19 Community Report here on KDRT 95.7 FM in Davis, California. I'm Autumn Lab A. Renaud and today is Friday, May 22nd. We're sharing local news and resources, focusing on what's impacting Davis and nearby cities in Yolo County during the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning next week, the show will air live at noon on Tuesdays only. You can catch many other public affairs and music programs live on the air on K-Dirt or streamed and archived at KDRT.org. Today is episode 20. If you find yourself tuning in for the kind of local content and perspectives we highlight on the COVID-19 Community Report or appreciate the many ways that Davis Media Access and KDRT provide support and leadership in our community, then please visit our website, DavisMedia.org. We'll get you there and to KDRT and everything else and click the donate button. Give us some likes and follows on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram as well where you also find lots of local information and resources and thank you. My guest today is Dr. Jana Mazette of One Health Institute at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and we will get to that interview in just a few minutes. So much local news this week. Yolo County received the okay from the state to reopen additional businesses including retail and indoor dining at restaurants. The Yolo County Board of Supervisors will delineate the public health guidelines for this next level of reopening at its regular meeting next week so don't go looking for those openings to be in place this weekend. And while the California State University announced last week that it's moving to online only instruction for the fall, the UC is planning for at least some in-person classes. University of California President Janet Napolitano said Wednesday that every UC campus will be open and offering instruction this fall despite the coronavirus outbreak that shuttered campus activity across the state. The question will be how much of that instruction is in person versus how much is done remotely. Napolitano said she anticipates that most if not all of our campuses will operate in some kind of hybrid mode. The pandemic has caused a $1.2 billion loss system-wide from the time the campus is shut down in the middle of March through the end of April and not to mention the collateral damage to businesses and communities the students had to vacate such as Davis. In another big announcement this week, UC will no longer require students to submit SAT or ACT test scores as part of its admissions process. The UC Board of Regents voted unanimously Thursday yesterday in a historic decision likely to have national ripple effects. Instead, the nine UC campuses plan to develop by 2025 a new standardized test for California residents that will better reflect what students learn in school and mitigate racial biases and inequities the critics say the SAT and ACT exacerbate. Yolo County is designated a state testing site for COVID-19 and that testing is available in Woodland through May 30th and then moves to West Sacramento until June 20th. This is not antibody testing to be clear, but it's a test for COVID-19 and it's available by appointment only. The how-tos for getting these appointments and what you need to do once you get there are many and necessarily very particular in an effort to keep people safe. You can get more info at 888-634-1123 or by visiting Logistics Health in Incorporated at lhi.care.covidtesting and the county announced this week that Dr. Ron Chapman will retire from his position as public health officer effective June 30th. Dr. Chapman retires after 35 years of service the past five in Yolo County. Yolo County's deputy health officer Dr. Mary Ann Limbos will serve as interim until a permanent health officer is hired. Dr. Limbos has worked for the Yolo County since June 2016 and has provided significant leadership during the COVID-19 crisis as well. I've interviewed her on this show. But from all of us to Dr. Chapman I'd like to say thanks for your leadership through the pandemic and your participation here at Davis Media Access as always YoloCounty.org for all county related COVID-19 info. Let's take a minute for music before our interview. All right, Dr. Jonna Mazette is an American epidemiologist and executive director of the University of California Davis One Health Institute at the School of Veterinary Medicine where she is professor of epidemiology and disease ecology. She focuses on global health problem solving especially for emerging infectious disease and conservation challenges. She is a leader in the field of One Health which she'll tell us about and is versed in microbial and pandemic threats. And she is the global director of the Predict Project, a viral emergence early warning project that has been developed with the United States Agency for International Development's Emerging Pandemic Threats Program. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me, Adam. You're a bit of a rock star. It actually seems like you've spent your career preparing for just this moment in time. Well, ideally I was preparing my whole life and working really hard to never have this moment. So, unfortunately we're here and I wish we weren't but that doesn't make all the preparations invalid. They've been super helpful and we've seen how much the global workforce that we've been able to support has really been able to respond and be heroes in the terrible tragedy. So you are an expert in a field called One Health and you head an institute bearing that name. Let's start with defining what that means. Sure. So One Health has a couple of central tenets. One is that we bring all of the brilliance that different disciplines have to offer together to work on problems. So instead of the academic historical way of doing business of everybody going into their lab or their team and work on one small little piece of the puzzle, we actually bring those people together. So collaboration is key and what do we collaborate on back to the other central tenet? Well, we collaborate on those big audacious problems that are really focused at the nexus of human, animal, plant and environmental health and zoonotic diseases are those diseases that can go between animals and people like this terrible COVID-19 disease is a perfect example of where we really need the One Health approach in order to get ahead of them and then solve and address them when they happen. So it's about interconnectedness but with really good data and analysis to back it up. Absolutely. So it's the data but also what we do with the data, how we analyze it, how we put it into action so you need the policy makers, the economists, the social scientists that we sometimes can leave out when we're thinking again just you know I'm an epidemiologist, I work on patterns of disease in population, animal and human populations. I may not have in my early career thought enough about the dynamic of people's choices and how they make those choices and the impact on their social well-being and mental health and all of those things we know now are so important. So how does this One Health approach, how does that knowledge inform predicting future outbreaks? Well we know that the majority of emerging infectious diseases arise from animal population and the reason for that is that you know when we say an emerging infectious disease that means as people we haven't seen it before, it's new to us and so it is in the animal populations and specifically and most importantly in the wildlife population where we see the majority of those organisms that turn out to be human pathogens spilling over and making us sick. So from a One Health perspective you can't just think about the human health side, if you do you wait every time until you have an outbreak and then you try to figure out what it is, waste weeks to months and then oh my goodness we don't have diagnostics, we don't have therapeutics, we don't have you know vaccines. If you only focus on the animal side you might find a lot of microorganisms, they have their microbiome and it's hard to know whether those viruses for this purpose are pathogenetic to other species other than the ones they evolved in. So obviously you need the human and animal side. On the environmental side you really need to think about the drivers for those connections that cause exposure risk. So we definitely know that as we alter land use and we push out into new environments because we're almost eight billion, we're forecasted to be nine and a half billion people on this beautiful blue globe very soon that we are going to take up more and more land and we're going to use the resources of the land differently. Those activities that we do really stress our systems and they put us at risk for exposure because we're going into new places, meeting up with new species. But also the stressors on the systems make us a little more susceptible and it makes those other hosts the wildlife specifically more likely to be shedding or releasing virus that can be transmissible to people into that environment. So all these things working together are critically important to understand. Sure, because if you radically transform an environment say by clear cutting a rain forest you're going to affect every system and every living being within that and then they're going to be stressed and their behavior is going to change either intentionally or not as a result. One of the most... And we know for bats specifically that causes them to increase their reproductive rate. And we also know because of all this decade long work we've done with the predict project that reproductive period especially when the dams or the bats mothers are weaning their pups or their bat babies that's when we see the majority of virus transmission and the exposure risk. So we don't want to increase their reproductive rate for more virus into the environment. So interesting. You just mentioned the predict platform so let's talk about that for a minute and help our listeners understand what that effort is about. Sure. So for now almost 11 years we have at UC Davis had the honor of leading an international consortium 35 countries all around the world working to build up the system to be able to identify viruses early preferably before they spill over or at their sources of spillover and be ready to respond. In this unfortunate case we hadn't been working in the area where it appears the SARS coronavirus 2 started so we hadn't pre-identified that virus but we had been working all around that area had identified many coronaviruses a hundred more than a hundred actually coronaviruses about a hundred of them knew to science and we were certainly waiting the flag and saying hey let's get ready let's have systems in place to be able to respond right away and be able to monitor and start to understand which ones of these are the highest likelihood of causing human disease. That didn't happen political wills needed as well as the science but what did happen was that the predict team in China and Southeast Asia and Africa were trained and ready to use our platform to detect virus so those were the first people that were called in to help identify the virus and identify introduced cases into countries like Thailand and Nepal and even in Africa to rule out COVID-19 and some of the people traveling from China and Asia into the countries with colds and other symptoms to say no these people don't have it so the teams were able to help their countries so early even before we had full sequence and a good diagnostic test and now they are still helping providing technical assistance around PPE, knowledge around coronaviruses, infectious disease prevention and control in their countries and diagnostic so we're proud that our team is helping to kind of be like the global immune system and attacking the problem for most countries where our teams were working early before the problems were totally out of control in their countries. Yeah it's kind of mind blowing. I read that this consortium you've been talking about the work's been carried out in more than 35 countries and the sheer number of viruses you all have identified to someone who is is not you know scientifically minded it was stunning to read about that. Yeah about 1200 viruses we identified the majority of those are new to science but some of them the ones that aren't new to science the discoveries that we made around those are just as important because we identified things like Ebola and Marburg virus which is an incredibly deadly virus in the same filovirus family as Ebola we identified some of those in areas where they didn't know they occurred so where they knew Marburg was deadly and caused the outbreaks in East Africa all the way across the continent they didn't know that they had Marburg virus and we were able to find it make sure their clinicians knew that if they saw any strange cases that Marburg should be on their differential diagnosis list they should be able to test for it and do surveillance because they had the actual pathogen in their country. So we really feel again this is again like that global immune system making sure the system knows something's coming and I guess the clinicians in the laboratories are kind of like if they had antibodies right they're ready. Yeah and so we're really again really really proud of that. The other thing is that our ability to detect these novel viruses and start to rank them for their likelihood of spillover and and then going human to human spread causing epidemics and pandemics. We recognize that it was that we were just scratching the surface that we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg and what we really needed to do was build a powerful global coalition of countries, agencies, NGOs, universities like ours that are willing to work on this problem and we now know that we can do it we can identify virus early and ahead of time and we just need to work together to find all the virus in the world and get governments to be prepared and ready for them. So it sounds like along with the climate crisis and I'm sure there's a relationship here between the outbreak of viruses and climate. This is the work really of the century ahead and we're going to have to you know up our game in terms of preparing for rapid response and as you've said understanding and being able to evaluate how some viruses are more risky than others. I think so if we don't came on us we'll just be in the same situation over and over and over again and I know that I never want to see families including my own devastated by something like this again. Right. Let's talk a little bit about the recent let's say it was May 2nd UC Global Health Day which was a virtual conference but I was very interested by some of the description of this that it focused on topical insights related to COVID-19 including animal to human transmission of viruses and resulting pandemics which we've been talking about and gender and socioeconomic disparities and I also know that you presented at that and if you could talk a little bit about what your angle was there too. Yeah absolutely. Well one of my points was certainly around those of the viruses that are yet to come which we've just talked about a bit more. Also about how important biodiversity and conservation is how important bats are that people need to understand you know how to live safely with animals so that we don't get ourselves in this situation so talk about that but on the parts that we haven't talked about much today gender racial equity mental health I really believe that the economic disruption as well as the isolation that we are seeing with this terrible pandemic there are next pandemic right? So the poverty and the terrible depression that's resulting for many from isolation or worry around economics is equally important to the health and disease and deaths that we're seeing from the disease. So we really need to again have our systems prepared not just for infectious diseases but for the rest of the consequences that go along with that. Actually if we were prepared enough for the infectious side we could prevent which is what I'm all about right? Preventing the infectious disease which also prevents the mental health and the economic disruption. So these are all big parts of it also we are acutely aware that folks who tend to have less of a voice in our society are being disproportionately affected. So certainly hourly workers wage workers tend to be both the ones that lose their jobs first in these economic crises but also the ones that are asked to work in maybe what could be perceived as more risky circumstances than others. So it makes sense that those folks are the ones that we are seeing more in the hospital or coming down as cases. I think what's devastating is we're also seeing a higher proportion among those cases of people hospitalized in ICUs and severely debilitated and potentially dying in those ethnic backgrounds that tend to be underrepresented in society and maybe don't have the best access to healthcare or all the information about how to protect themselves. So this is going to put a sort of shine a light on racial and gender disparities. We know that women are bearing the brunt of a lot of the isolation because women tend to be doing more of the homeschooling and doing more of the childcare while also trying to do their jobs from home. So I know there are a lot of really wonderful fathers. I'm not trying to say that it's not that folks aren't all pulling their weight, but the data show us that there are disparities there. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right about the next wave that's coming too. And I know you're also a mom. Something I've been thinking about is we have millennials who are the generation of kids raised after 9-11 and we know how that shaped their lives. Now we have a generation of kids take this year's high school classes and college graduates who can't celebrate those milestones in traditional ways and whose very formative years in school this year has been twisted and shaped in unimaginable ways. So I can only imagine what we'll be staring down the barrel of as time progresses. Yeah, it's tragic. I mean, for maybe us people, I'm in my early 50s. For me, you know, thinking about, you know, your high school graduation or your college graduation is not seemingly a shattering thing, but when your frame of reference is you work so hard for your entire life and your whole perception is getting to some of these milestones and missing out on all of those amazing touch points in life like prom and, you know, state championships of, you know, sporting teams and your, you know, your graduation is significant and for the millennials it's really significant. I have four millennials sheltering with me. My two adult daughters and their partners are all here with me and my husband which is a silver lining. I have an access to my adult children and their partners in an intense and lovely way that I would have never had if this hadn't happened, but I also can see what they're going through and as you mentioned, you know, they've had to already go through a lot including economic hardships, finding jobs and now many of them are also losing their livelihoods or having to cut their pay. They're, you know, they're just facing a lot of stressors and their population that have already faced stressors in their young lives so it will shape our future, all of these issues. Yeah, and it comes back to just how interconnected everything is and everyone is. We're about out of time so let me just end by asking you what comes next for you in your work. Well, that global coalition I mentioned is really what I think I need to focus on for the future and we're calling that the Global Virome Project. People can find out more at globalviromeproject.org, all one word, and we really believe that it is possible to get ahead of these viral issues and understand them and be ready for them and there are people all over the planet that want to help with that. We need support, but we also need political will and that means all citizens sort of understanding and getting behind this idea that we can, we can find viruses, we can be ready for them, we can put the systems in place to be ready to detect and diagnose anything that comes our way so that we can control things at their source rather than let them get horribly out of control. So that's I think the future. It won't be just me. It's going to need to be, you know, thousands of people all over the world working for this and we welcome participation and support. All right, well, yours is an important perspective and we're lucky to have you here at UC Davis and the Veterinary School. Thank you so much for sharing your time and your knowledge with us today. Have a great weekend. All right, take care. This is Dr. Jana Mazette of the One Health Institute, UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and what, I said it earlier, but what a rock star. Boy, she's doing important work and I appreciate the connection she drew to what we're facing socially and as communities, as families, as individuals. So let me, on that note, let me wrap up with a couple of announcements here. This spring sees a lot of schools and communities missing out on those milestones that mark important transitions. The Davis community will rally together from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Next Friday, May 29th, for the class of 2020, Davis celebration and pickup event, a safe and social distancing event. It will include cap and gown pickup for seniors. Organizers are working with local law enforcement to shut down 14th Street. Intendively, there will be a route for elementary school families to drive through the North Davis Elementary Lot, junior high families in the library a lot, and high school families through the VETS Memorial Lot, waving and flashing signs and having a good time while being safe. It will be followed by a community-wide celebration with businesses and residents cheering our graduates on. A program of recorded music and shout-outs will air from 10 a.m. to noon here on Caterd and Davis Media Access will be out documenting the event. You want to get involved? You can email DavisPickupCelebration at gmail.com for more info or to get involved. And finally, I'm going to encourage you to go to davisfenixco.org. The Davis Pride celebration had to be canceled this year, but they have a plan for rainbows and joy throughout the month of June. There's more I can say there, but I'm running out of time. So, davisfenixco.org. Thanks for tuning in. I will be back next Tuesday with Ryan Collins, the Homeless Outreach Coordinator for the City of Davis and Sebastian Ognate, Editor for the Davis Enterprise. From the KDRT studio, I'm Autumn Labbe Renaud and this has been the COVID-19 Community Report.