Meet the volunteers at Philly’s COVID-19 testing site; regional job losses are ‘total annihilation’ | Morning Newsletter

The United States now has the most coronavirus cases in the world. And, locally, New Jersey announced a huge spike in cases yesterday, and President Donald Trump has declared the state a major disaster area. In Philadelphia, officials ended negotiations over using the former Hahnemann University Hospital as a quarantine facility. For the latest information, visit Inquirer.com/coronavirus.

Relief might be on the way, though. The House is expected to pass the coronavirus stimulus bill today, which includes individual checks, billions for small businesses, and more.

— Josh Rosenblat (@joshrosenblat, morningnewsletter@inquirer.com)

Big employers in the Philadelphia area have announced more than 15 times as many layoffs so far this month than in all of March last year. That’s a microcosm of the massive job losses across the state and nation. Major employers have announced over 4,000 layoffs since the start of March in Philly and the surrounding Southeastern Pennsylvania counties, according to the state Department of Labor and Industry. That’s compared with just 270 layoffs announced by those businesses last March.

Those cuts offer just a glimpse of the total job losses in the region because smaller employers are not required to file reports about staffing cuts, according to a Philadelphia attorney. In Pennsylvania alone, there were about 645,000 new unemployment compensation claims in the 10 days after Gov. Tom Wolf shut down the state earlier this month.

Several dozen members of Philadelphia’s medical reserve corps are helping staff at the COVID-19 testing site located in tents in a parking lot of Citizens Bank Park. They’re part of an all-volunteer group of medical and nonmedical professionals who act as backup for the city health department during health crises.

“I wanted to be able to help my community," Elise Dorr-Doryneck said. She was one of the first to sign up when Philly’s branch launched after the Sept. 11 attacks. She doesn’t have days off anymore, splitting time between her day job as a nurse at Jefferson Health and a volunteer at the testing site. My colleague spoke with Dorr-Doryneck and others who are on the front lines of the fight to slow the pandemic.

Health officials in New Jersey and Pennsylvania are working on guidelines doctors may be forced to use in deciding which critically ill patients will get access to lifesaving technology and which will not. The biggest issue is access to ventilators that could potentially help thousands of ill patients breathe long enough to recover from the coronavirus.

New Jersey is crafting a triage policy that assesses patients’ conditions and prognosis to determine treatment priorities. Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine declined to call the guidelines a “triage policy." Instead, she called the situation a “crisis of standard care” and that physicians and health systems will still exercise their judgment.

Well said, @jamieamalea. It’ll be nice to have baseball back — whenever that might be.

Tag your Instagram posts or tweets with #OurPhilly and we’ll pick our favorite each day to feature in this newsletter and give you a shout out!

“But unlike traditional wars, this battle extends outside of the battlefield. These soldiers do not sleep in trenches; they return home each night. Their babies need to nurse. Their partners may be soldiers who also need relief.” — write internist Fatima Syed, primary care physician Deep Shah, and oncologist Ravi Parikh about the battle physicians, nurses, and other “front-line soldiers” are facing as they head into “war” against the coronavirus.

Whenever I’ve had to make trips to the store in the past couple of weeks, two things have stuck out to me: First, there’s never any toilet paper, and, second, I can’t find flour or yeast!

The coronavirus pandemic might be leading folks to get that bread (literally, as opposed to the figurative meaning of bread as money). My colleagues are no different.

Restaurant critic Craig LaBan baked Pizzeria Beddia’s dough recipe last week.

If you’re an advanced home baker already, you can take the extra step of milling your own flour. My colleague Grace Dickinson lays out how to do that.

And, you can still help out your local bakeries, too. Food writer Mike Klein reports that you might be able to call a local bakery and ask to buy ingredients. And LaBan shares which Philly bakeries are offering ways for you to still get their fresh bread and other treats. (That includes personal fave Essen Bakery’s “Babkamobile.")

Madis Pihlak is a 66-year-old retired professor from Penn State who’s on a one-man mission to clean up trash and help save sea life. Pihlak spends his days picking up trash in his Blue Bell Hill neighborhood in Philly with his short-handled grabber and recycles what he can. “People look at me like I’m odd,” he said. “Having the grabber makes me look more official, and not like a street person recycling stuff.”