Kristin. Cdc coming out with recommendations very strongly, i should say, just in the last 24 hours. Basically fullon backing schools reopening across the country. I want to ask you, did you take a look at that and how different is this from past cdc guidelines . I think what was notable about it was the sort of of one stand, the loudness of the recommendation instead of a moderate recommendation. I think that took a lot of people by surprise. Given the conversations weve been having in various communities about whether we should open or not open, and speaking to the epidemic across the u. S. In fact, some people think its almost like two countries in terms of, you know, one part of the country is low covid, the other part of the country is high covid. I was kind of expecting them to point out all the factors in the study that suggest that the opening could be done safely and for certain populations, kids under a certain age, but then with caveats, where studies point in the other direction that local communities should consider. But i didnt see the second part. Did i miss something . There was a line in there that was speaking to maybe not being applicable to all communities. But its a very soft line. I agree with you that, you know, it seemed a little less balanced than were used to, so i think that took a lot of people by surprise again. The other thing is we should consider this is coming tat when the cdc stopped getting data directly from hospitals, right . Wasnt it only a week or two ago when the white house ordered that all Hospital Data go directly to the department of human services, kind of bypassing the cdc . What does that mean in terms of how we evaluate what the cdc is saying now . Well, i think twe all know d power. A lot of people are worried that with no second set of eyes looking at the data that the interpretation comes before the data rather than seeing the data and then interpreting it. So i think thats always you can frame the data and not disaggregate it. Some important things like race, ethnicity, impact from covid, looking at transmissions in various populations, even looking at how many cases are in different states because its a reason that the data people use to distribute remdesivir based on data. So data is power, after all. All right. Well, let me ask you this. Cdc is now saying kids should go to school unless transmission is uncontrolled. Is it uncontrolled now . And again, how do we define that . Thats really tough. I think you have to start from a place different people have different rubrics. Other people have said, you know, maybe we should look at cases in the population and if its above 25, thats an indication that things are in the red zone. At the end of the day, it really matters. Everybody will have a different answer because it really depends on your individual risk calculus and everybody has a different idea of what risk is. So again, you know, at the end of the day, an intelligent leader will give what Society Needs for our community. I should mention you referred to the Surgeon General saying the 10 test Positivity Rate is a good number to use and open the school. California is at 7. 5 , so if we went by his suggestion, then we could, in fact, open here. But as you said, there are many other things to look at. Lets try to break it down and zoom in a little tighter on the data. Can we talk about the situation with covid and kids . I understand the last study out of south korea that kind of breaks down covids impacts on kids under 10 and teens and tweens. Talk about that. I really think 10 is a magic number for increased risk. 10 years of age, that is. Below 10, there is some transmission from about 5 . Above 10, they kind of act like adults, and thats up to 20 transmission, meaning in the south korean study they looked at about 65,000 people in total. They looked at positive cases and they have tons of great contact tracers there. They looked into their households and the question was, how many of these young people who had known covid transmitted it to people in the household. So they swabbed everybody in the household. Thats how they came up with the numbers. In the young kids who had covid, about 5 of the household ended up being positive and asymptomatic. In the older individuals, like 10 to 19, about 20 of the people in the household were positive when they swabbed everyone. It shows transmission in younger kids is less than the risk in older kids. But if you have a million cases in the community, that 5 might be higher in numbers dependig on the community you look at. Based on that, if we can keep the community numbers under control, doesnt that suggest that it is perhaps the right move for the governor to make for this variance that you can apply for for the schools to apply to their county and saying for Elementary Schools and were only talking about Elementary Schools, even if your county is on the watch list, you could still open if you can do these things safely . That seems to offer some hope for parents for kids under 10 and it seems the science suggests that can be done, right . Even amongst my colleagues, its such an emotional issue because weve been doing this for months and months and months, and then all of a sudden we have a thing, omg, where do i get child care, do i have to make a new bubble with a friend to have some supervised kids doing zoom, zoom fatigue in kids. So i think and kids have social needs, like you said. And i think its a big issue for kids, particularly younger kids. So if theres a way in which we can do it safely, i think a lot of people would be happy. How risky is the School Environment compared to other things we allow now or have allowed . Eating at a restaurant, the gym, compare the School Environment. I think the School Environment could be less risky depending on your configuration of the physical space. One example, in denmark they actually opened up the streets and had kids meet. They cut the size of the class by 50 , which is the same as doing the alternate school day thing. They had the kids out in the street, although people are worried that maybe the kids would be distracted and look at the clouds or something. But that might be an idea. If you have an outdoor, you know, Basketball Court or something, you know, the outdoor environment being less risky than indoors, maybe people are thinking maybe my school district, i can set up a big tent. That would be less risky than being in a cooped up classroom. Great ideas, but honestly we have four weks to get it done. Were end of july at this point, so its going to be tough. Two quick questions for you. We have less than a minute. Los angeles superintendent just said the key to reopening schools in covid19 testing. However, that may cost about 300 per student to do it regularly. Is that realistic . Do we have the capacity even to do that even if we had the money . I think its going to be tough because we already heard from dr. Ghaly a few days ago that regular people are having problems lining up to the tests, having problems getting test results back in time. So unless they oil that system up i can imagine swabbing kids constantly doing brain biopsies, they have better ways of doing testing, like saliva testing skpinand i hope that coo kids. When i see something new in your office, i got to ask about it. You have a couple stuffed animals there. What is that maroon thing . This is covid. Ordinary carh, okay. What is that for . I want to, like, make covid more humane. Sometimes i put a mask on it. Ah, okay. That is your parting message, isnt it . Yes, exactly. Wear your mask. Ill bring out my aloha mask. I love it. Anything aloha is good by my book. Doctor, thank you as always. Great conversation and information. Have a great weekend. See you again soon. Bye. Take care. Well take a break and be right back with more. This time well talk to you about how we can look at cell phone data and figure out what peop im alex trebek here to tell you about the Colonial Penn program. If youre age 5085 and looking to buy Life Insurance on a fixed budget, remember the three ps. The three what . The three ps . What are the three ps . The three ps of Life Insurance on a fixed budget are price, price, and price. A price you can afford, a price that cant increase, and a price that fits your budget. Im 54 and i was a smoker but quit. Alex, whats my price . You can get coverage for 9. 95 a month. 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As you know, Governor Newsom this month rolled back some reopenings like no more indoor dining. And now state senator steve glazer we should go a step further back to essential trips out only, like when we first looked down. Is that the answer . A company that uses data to make marketing decisions has analyzed cell phone data and has eyeopening conclusions. Joining us now talk about it is ben kaplan, ceo of top data. Ben, how are you . Im doing very well. Thank you for having me. Its super interesting to look at the data because, actually, what we can look at is publicly aailable anonymous cell phone data. So you look at it. They cant say main takeaway . One of the first things you realize is that social interactions are highly, highly correlated. The number of social interactions for the average person with the number of covid cases we see about two to four weeks later. So the way we measure this is essentially we can see for an extended interaction, that means that that cell phone gps signals stay close to each other for five minutes or more. This isnt walking by someone on the jogging trail. This is extended interactions together. Got it. You can see that the more that increases yes. You can see that the more that increases, then about two to four weeks later, it is highly correlated with the number of cases we have. To give you an idea, nationally versus california, currently about now in the bay area we have about 2. 9 interactions per day for the average person. By the way, ben, this is what were looking at. I want to give a little context. The red line is the number of human interactions. You can see it toelgttally took nose dive during the stayathome order and it dropped to one interaction a day. Ben, it does look like in may when we started to have the phase one reopening and then a couple weeks later the phase two reopening that we started to see that start to climb, the human interactions, right . What are we at now . Yes. It starts to climb overall all over califonia and the bay area is about around that 2. 9 interactions per day right now. In l. A. County, its actually four interactions per day. Whats interesting is there seems to be a critical number. Somewhere between 2. 5 and 3 interactions per day where things get out of control. So what weve been able to see, though, is we actually can control whether things are manageable or not manageable. When were at that low, one or two interactions per day level, we see cases really taper down. The minute we start getting 2. 5, 2. 75, 3 interactions per day, then suddenly things start going up. When you hit a critical number, then you see really exponential growth in the covid cases. Ben, we have about one minute left. I want to show people this other graphic because thats looking at alameda. Alameda county is one of the bay area counties where weve seen kind of a recent spike and weve had more rollbacks. Show me whats going on here because i see a blue line. That indicates the distance traveled also measured by cell phone. And then the red line, which is human interactions, which we talked about. But talk to me about what this is also showing and the yellow bars, of course, the vertical ones are the number of covid cases, which we see, you know, spiking in the past couple of weeks. The distance traveled, that blue line, is life returning back to normal. Ideally, if the economy reopens and people are going about their day, we should see it go back up to normal. But the key is that there needs to be a gap. Distance traveled increases, but the number of interactions stays low. Thats what we want to see over time. So the ability to maximize that gap sort of says life can return to normal, but people wont get sick. That becomes key. What the struggle is when both start trending up and then together we dont expand the gap, then it gets very difficult for the economy to reopen. I see that. It is surprising to me looking at this that the distance traveled is pretty much back to normal. Before the pandemic started. That is really interesting. I wonder where people are going and where theyre driving to. Sure. Thats another story. Jennifer wants to know what do you mean by interactions . I know you covered that in the beginning, but maybe define that a little more clearly for us as well. Sure. Interactions is basically two people being close together for five minutes or more. We can see that with anonymous cell phone data because we see two gps signals together that are there together for a long period of time. Interactions is the opposite of social distancing. We do a lot of social distancing, interactions are down. If we dont do so well on social distancing, the interactions go up. And i think one of the really surprising things too is that it looks like from the data, the number of social interactions on average per person per day really is the critical determinant of the number of cases. Now, other things can mitigate that. For instance, if more people are wearing masks, then maybe you get a little bit more buffer zone and you can interact a little bit more. Right. Right now if covid19 doesnt mew take the as fast, its a little bit more contagious now than before, but the key is the social interaction. Ben, i have to say this has been really eyeopening and interesting. No doubt policymakers are studying those graphs now. I appreciate your time. Take good care. Thank you so much. When we come back, well talk about how airlines are now cracking down on not wearing masks. But what else . 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Senior travel correspondent for sf gate. Com, Chris Mcginnis joins us to get answers. Good to see you. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely. A lot to talk about. Lets start with masks. Mask rules are being tightened up on airlines. Tell us whos mandating what right now. Yeah, that was definitely the week of the masks. Not only the president was talking about it, but its really hitting the travel industry hard. So what happened this week is that the airlines cracked down on mask usage on planes. Now, before they had asked people nicely to wear masks, they had suggested it, but they didnt mandate it. What happened this week is theyve all pretty much come out and mandated it and said there are no exceptions. So on delta, for example, if you dont want to wear a mask and you say you have a medical condition, then delta makes you have an interview with a doctor to make sure youre telling the truth. Another airline, southwest, has come out and said there are no exceptions anymore. If you dont want to fly with a mask on, dont fly southwest arlines. Theyre coming down really, really hard on this. I think thats a good thing. We did write about a woman flying American Airlines who refused to wear a mask and was asked to get off the plane, which she did. And the entire plane broke out in applause when she did. So i think the airlines have most passengers on their side right now with this decision. Yeah, attitudes are definitely changing. He, i was going to fold in this question later, but since its about hawaii, im going to cut it in queue. Is traveling to hawaii with covid testing requirements realistic this year . I think theres a lot to dissect there because they were going to start lifting the quarantine and then they put that off. They were going to have people come in with covid tests proving theyre negative, but they changed that. So whats happening there . Yeah, like everything that has to do with the covid crisis, everything keeps changing. You know, a lot of people thought that they would be going to hawaii on august 1st. Good thing theyre not going now because theres a hurricane on the way to hawaii. In a way, its a blessing theyre not there on august 1st. But the governor decided to push the back to september 1st. Theres still a lot of questions as to whether or not thats going to happen. I saw the ceo of Alaska Airlines wondering openly whether or not the september 1st deadline for the covid test to get into hawaii situation was going to happen. So i dont know. It just all depends on the numbers. If things start to get better, we might be able to go to hawaii, but theyre being careful down there and so far theyve done a good job keeping the virus at bay. Which countries are accepting americans right now . Almost none. This week the big news was the bahamas barred americans explicitly. If youre canada or european, you can get into the bahamas. But now americans are no long