Covering COVID-19 is a each day Poynter briefing of story concepts concerning the coronavirus and different well timed matters for journalists, written by senior college Al Tompkins. Sign up right here to have it delivered to your inbox each weekday morning.

The New York Times explores the lonely days across the suburban workplace parks vacated by companies that after needed pastoral landscapes however now worth distant work.

Suburban workplaces constructed between the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Eighties had been already struggling earlier than the pandemic, with their growing older mechanical techniques and the altering tastes of millennials. A youthful technology needs extra city workplaces, actual property builders say, or no less than suburban workplaces that really feel extra city, with sidewalks and someplace totally different to eat lunch on daily basis. But now layer on distant work, “and this might finish it off,” panorama structure scholar Louise Mozingo stated.

Far from downtowns, there’s a totally different type of vacancy in suburban settings that had been already remoted and flippantly populated by design. From the surface, it’s laborious to know that the twentieth ground of a skyscraper has gone vacant. In a suburban workplace park, the indicators aren’t so inscrutable.

Some of the now-vacant workplace parks across the nation might be repurposed into warehouses, faculties and reasonably priced housing. In some areas, because the Times factors out, a majority of workplace park area is critically outdated and not wanted as workplace area:

(According to) Jones Lang LaSalle information, emptiness charges within the first quarter of this 12 months had been greater for suburban workplaces than for the central enterprise district in Chicago, Charlotte, Detroit, Philadelphia, Tampa and Washington. The agency estimates that 57 p.c of suburban workplace area nationwide is so previous as to be functionally out of date. In the New Jersey suburbs of New York, that determine is 72 p.c, among the many highest within the nation.

Office emptiness charges nationwide will not be as excessive at the moment as throughout the warmth of the pandemic, in fact, however they haven’t recovered both.

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Office emptiness charge (Statista)

Nashville, Miami and Charlotte are seeing strong demand for office space whereas West Coast cities are seeing the largest declines.

An article by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania says:

Wharton actual property professor Joseph Gyourko stated it’s too early to foretell precisely how the demand for workplace area will decline as a result of business leases usually final 5 to seven years. But it’s clear that when these leases lastly expire, the market won’t be the identical.

“I strongly suspect what will result is a move to concentration, a flight to quality,” he stated throughout an interview with Wharton Business Daily. (Listen to the podcast above.) “Over the next few years, as tenants start to rethink space needs and their leases rollover, they’ll go into better buildings, and the [worse] buildings will be in trouble.”

Fortune reports:

Between 10% to 30% of COVID-19 sufferers are anticipated to develop lengthy COVID, in response to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office. That means as much as 23 million individuals within the U.S. could have already developed lengthy COVID as of February. Moreover, Brookings Institution research suggests over 1 million staff are out of the workforce at any given time due to lengthy COVID.

The monetary burden of that’s immense, ranging between $386 billion and $511 billion, in response to a report released last month by the Solve Long Covid Initiative. “There is no realistic scenario in which the long Covid impact on American systems, workplaces, and families is small,” Solve’s report finds.

Despite the excessive prevalence of lengthy COVID, workplaces are largely unprepared to take care of the onslaught. Almost half of staff (45%) report that their employers weren’t accommodating towards staff experiencing long-COVID signs, in response to survey findings released in April by Power, a affected person platform for medical trials. The survey, carried out in March, polled 1,000 Americans who contracted COVID-19—42% of whom skilled long-COVID signs.

The Fortune story factors out {that a} dozen states guarantee some form of paid sick leave. And “five states — California, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island — require employers to offer short-term disability coverage.”

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Travelers queue up on the south safety checkpoint in the principle terminal of Denver International Airport, Thursday, May 26, 2022, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)

If you need a easy, fast (and mistaken) reply, don’t look right here. But if you wish to spend a couple of minutes actually understanding why Transportation Security Administration traces are so lengthy, why airways are canceling so many flights and why funds airways are much less chaotic than others, then The Atlantic has just the article for you.

Around 30 million vacationers are expected to use extraordinarily discounted public transit tickets in Germany this summer season. The authorities provided tickets good for journey throughout the nation for lower than $10 a month. It received’t be the quickest strategy to get round, however it is going to be so much cheaper than driving. The authorities stated it was an anti-inflation, anti-high fuel costs and anti-climate change transfer.

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Bathtub rings present how low Lake Powell ranges have dropped Wednesday, June 8, 2022, in Page, Ariz. (AP Photo/Brittany Peterson)

Look at this story lead from Politico:

California and 6 different Western states have lower than 60 days to drag off a seemingly unattainable feat: Cut a multi-way deal to dramatically cut back their consumption of water from the dangerously low Colorado River. If they don’t, the federal authorities will do it for them.

Here is the issue:

Supplies at Lake Mead and Lake Powell are dangerously low, holding simply greater than 1 / 4 of their whole capacities — and threatening the dams’ capability to generate electrical energy and supply water to its almost 40 million customers. At its highest degree, within the Nineteen Eighties, Lake Mead might have submerged the Empire State Building as much as its prime ground. Now, water ranges have dropped by almost 200 toes, or 20 tales, exposing a stark white “bathtub ring” across the rocky partitions of the perimeter.

The new actuality will drive the area to shift away from a water supply upon which it has relied for hundreds of years, and, in some instances, make robust selections which can be positive to ripple nationwide — akin to whether or not to proceed alfalfa farming for cattle feed or change to extra drought-hardy crops. The phrases specified by the approaching weeks might provide a brand new blueprint for a way America adapts to the more and more tough realities of local weather change.

At the identical time, the Utah Department of Natural Resources and United States Geological Survey introduced this week that the Great Salt Lake reached a historic new low degree. The Salt Lake Tribune says an ongoing drought means lake ranges will fall all summer season.

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This Feb. 16, 2017, file picture exhibits new child infants within the nursery of a postpartum restoration middle in upstate New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)

Axios included a story I had not heard about known as “baby bonds.” The concept is for states and even the federal authorities to grant infants a bond, like a financial savings bond, at delivery that will develop because the youngster matures to provide them a monetary begin on life. It could sound on the market, however some states are engaged on the thought, Axios says:

In D.C., qualifying infants begin with $500 and obtain as a lot as $1,000 for annually their mother and father’ earnings doesn’t exceed thrice the federal poverty threshold.

I had forgotten (if I ever knew) that Hillary Clinton suggested $5,000 baby bonds when she ran for president in 2007. Her concept was that the kids might use the bond to pay for faculty once they turned 18. Clinton’s concept was estimated to value $20 billion a 12 months. Sen. Cory Booker floated an identical concept when he ran for president in 2019.

The Harvard Kennedy School’s terrific Journalist’s Resource column this month focuses on how journalists can cowl the difficulty of loneliness. It won’t sound very like a information matter till you dig into the analysis that claims loneliness is connected to almost as many deaths as smoking. Let me provide you with just a few different tidbits from the column to get you :

Neuroscience and research of isolated animals recommend that when left untended loneliness triggers an immune response within the physique, sparking cycles of inflammation that may result in a wide range of sicknesses, starting from despair and nervousness to hypertension, diabetes, stroke, and coronary heart illness. The resultant state of hypervigilance is related to shifts in character and decision-making and places individuals at greater danger for cognitive impairment and dementia.

Research means that 15-30% of the general population is chronically lonely. In the U.S., earlier than the pandemic, about 19% of adults over age 55 had been “frequently” lonely, in response to information from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), which is taken into account the gold commonplace of consultant surveys and is carried out biennially on the University of Michigan.

Contrary to narratives suggesting a rising charge of loneliness amongst seniors, the prevalence of self-reported “frequent loneliness” amongst older adults within the U.S. remained comparatively flat from 1998 to 2016, in response to a latest analysis by James Raymo, a demographer and sociology professor at Princeton University.

Polling information means that the rate of loneliness among older adults spiked throughout the pandemic, however youthful individuals appear to have suffered from loneliness at even higher rates on account of social distancing.

The column offers particular recommendation for journalists who wish to cowl this matter:

Tips for Reporters Covering Loneliness Among Older Adults

  1. Know the distinction between social isolation and loneliness. Social isolation is outlined as an goal lack of social contact, whereas loneliness is the subjective need to have extra or higher-quality social connections than one is at the moment experiencing. Some individuals may be socially remoted with out feeling distressed, and others can really feel lonely regardless of having common social contact; it’s uncommon for individuals to expertise each on the similar time. Research means that power social isolation and power loneliness are related to destructive well being outcomes, however in numerous methods.
  2. Seek sources exterior of well being care. Clinicians know methods to handle issues inside the confines of the well being care system, however loneliness is a social problem addressed by a wide range of different group stakeholders. Senior facilities, nonprofit assist applications, arts organizations, public social companies companies, and others have been confronting and dealing laborious to deal with the issue of loneliness for many years.
  3. Tell private tales. Because the expertise of loneliness is private and varies on the particular person degree, it’s essential to speak to people who find themselves experiencing it, as this may also help to scale back stigma and spur coverage change. Home meal-delivery companies and different native nonprofits serving seniors may be good beginning factors for locating sources.
  4. Explain the place individuals can go for assist. Many older people who find themselves lonely in addition to those that care about seniors experiencing loneliness don’t know the place to show. Urging readers, viewers and listeners in these conditions to achieve out to a trusted member of the family, doctor or group assist employee is useful, as are lists of assets, such because the Eldercare Locator.
  5. Check your bias. Because loneliness is common, individuals usually suppose again to their very own experiences for context, however that may unknowingly introduce bias into the dialog. People have a tendency to recollect what helped them overcome a particular bout of loneliness and consider the identical resolution could be useful to others. However, as a result of social wants and circumstances range a lot, there is no such thing as a universally efficient intervention for loneliness.

I’d add just a few different ideas.

Avoid stereotypical pictures of seniors sitting in rocking chairs staring out of home windows. People may be busy and nonetheless lonely.

Find examples of people that have used their loneliness to jump-start themselves into motion. Here is one of my favorite stories from Steve Hartman (CBS) a few man who determined to color his city that badly wanted a makeover. And my good friend Boyd Huppert tells us the story of a retired decide who was lonely so he built a backyard pool so neighbors would come by.

Do you need proof of whether or not individuals will watch tales like this? The story concerning the decide was the most-watched story on KARE-11’s web site in 2017.

Inspire us with nice tales of excellent individuals. We want that proper now.

We’ll be again subsequent week with a brand new version of Covering COVID-19. Are you subscribed? Sign up right here to get it delivered proper to your inbox.

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