Utah hospitals are preparing for the worst-case scenario: Rationing care in ICUs for a rising number of COVID-19 cases

If there’s one thing I’m proud of in this unprecedented year of COVID-19, it’s been the work I’ve contributed to The Salt Lake Tribune’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.

I shared a byline in the Sunday paper on Oct. 25 with Erin Alberty on a story that MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow called “horrifying”: The dire warnings from Utah’s hospitals that in the next week or so, given the rise in COVID-19 cases in the state, they may have to ask the state’s permission to start rationing care.

A paragraph from the article:

“The chief medical officers were very clear: They were asking us to be prepared for that,” said Joe Dougherty, spokesman for Utah’s Division of Emergency Management. A spokesperson for Herbert said Friday, “We are not there yet, but we are too close, uncomfortably close.”

To be fair, Erin did the bulk of the work on the story; I just helped out here and there.

I’ve done a lot of that in the past week. On Friday, my colleague Leia Larsen and I teamed on a story — she covered a news conference where health care workers described the dire situation, while I tallied up the daily numbers, which included a new single-day record. On Thursday, I helped out covering Gov. Gary Herbert’s weekly news conference, where state officials again implored Utahns to wear their masks and practice social distancing.

We have a great team of reporters at The Salt Lake Tribune. I consider myself lucky to be in their company.

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More coronavirus-related stories I’ve written in recent weeks:

• The Utah Symphony announced on Oct. 12 that Thierry Fischer, its principal conductor and musical director, has extended his contract to August 2023. The move is to ensure continuity while the symphony searches for his successor — a search made more difficult by the pandemic.

• Utah’s haunted houses are still open this Halloween season — though they’ve had to change their practices in light of COVID-19.

• Festival of Trees, Utah’s annual Christmas event, will move into Vivint Smart Home Arena for 2020 — though most fans will see it online, as organizers plan a virtual event because of COVID-19.

• Trans-Siberian Orchestra, the combination of rocking Christmas music and laser lights that’s a hit with Utah audiences, isn’t touring this year because of the pandemic — but the group is planning a streaming concert on Dec. 18.

Collin Kartchner, Utah activist who urged parents to get their kids off of social media, dies at 40

Collin Kartchner’s death was a shock to many who knew him in Utah — a list that included the state’s attorney general and the first lady.

Kartchner, who launched the “Save the Kids” charity and spoke to hundreds of groups every year in his campaign to get parents to keep their children off of social media, died unexpectedly Tuesday, at the age fo 40.

Read the Tribune’s obituary for Kartchner, at sltrib.com.

Remembering James Redford, the documentary filmmaker and environmental activist — and son of movie icon Robert Redford

It was a bit of a shock to hear that James Redford had died.

Redford, known to many as Jamie, was best known as the son of Robert Redford, the movie icon and filmmaker. But Jamie Redford, who died Oct. 16 at the age of 58, was a filmmaker and activist in his own right, with a string of documentaries, many of them focusing on the environment and health and where the two met.

James Redford also was a longtime survivor of a liver transplant, which inspired his first movie, “The Kindness of Strangers” (1999), and the forming of a foundation to raise awareness of organ transplants.

Read James Redford’s obituary here, at sltrib.com.

Jay Warren talks about his first album, 'Give Love,' and bringing R&B to Utah

If you think the words “Utah” and “R&B” are about as incongruous as “Utah” and “jazz,” let me introduce you to Jay Warren — who might just change your mind.

The 29-year-old R&B singer, who lives in Salt Lake City, recently released his first album, “Give Love” — and, thanks to a savvy pre-order campaign that drew on his devoted fan base, the album hit No. 1 on the Apple Music Store’s R&B charts.

In an interview, Warren describes his musical journey, his songwriting style, and how he came to be a big Lionel Richie fan. Read about him here, at sltrib.com.

Filmmaker Erika Cohn talks about 'Belly of the Beast,' her film that exposes modern-day eugenics in California's prisons

The year 2010 was momentous for Erika Cohn, the documentary filmmaker who was born and raised in Salt Lake City — because it’s when two different movies she made had their origins.

She had started work on “In Football We Trust,” the documentary she co-directed about young men in Utah’s Pacific Islander community who saw playing football as a way to improve their lives. The movie premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, and went on to play on PBS.

The other took longer to come together, but now it’s here: “Belly of the Beast,” an exposé of forced sterilizations in California’s biggest women’s prison — and a profile of the activists who have fought to change the laws that allowed the practice to continue.

Read about Cohn’s new movie here, at sltrib.com.

Filmmaker Jim Cummings talks about making a werewolf movie in Utah, and working with the late, great Robert Forster

If you’re making a werewolf movie that’s set in a ski town, filmmaker Jim Cummings has a tip: Make it in Utah.

Cummings made “The Wolf of Snow Hollow” in Kamas, Utah, just east of Park City, because “it felt like this mountain resort town. … I realized we could shoot 99% of the movie in these several-block radiuses.”

Cummings directed, wrote and stars in the movie, playing the chief deputy sheriff in a small snowy town where someone — he can’t bring himself to say something — is killing women quite gruesomely. The movie follows as Cummings’ character becomes increasingly unglued by the stress of solving the mystery, and keeping the strain from affecting his aging father, the sheriff.

The dad is played by Robert Forster, in the gruff character actor’s final role before his death last year. Forster had directed films before, so “he was really just this champion of us and doing it yourself.”

Read more about the movie here, at sltrib.com.

Meet Nels Elde, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Utah and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship

If you can explain what an “evolutionary geneticist” is, you should probably be eligible for a MacArthur Fellowship. If you are one, like Nels Elde at the University of Utah, than the fellowship is apparently a shoo-in.

Elde was one of 21 people who received the fellowships — sometimes called a “genius grant” — in early October. I interviewed him the day the announcement was made, and he talked about his work and what he plans to do with the money — $625,000, paid out over five years.

Science, music and optimism: How Utah Symphony and Utah Opera brought back live music amid the COVID-19 pandemic

The show must go on, the saying goes — but as the COVID-19 pandemic continues around the world, figuring out how to make the show happen safely has been a monumental challenge.

I wrote two stories about how Utah Symphony and Utah Opera are working to welcome audiences — much smaller than capacity — to Abravanel Hall and Capitol Theatre, respectively. It’s meant changing repertoire, shortening programs, and leaving empty rows in the audience.

It’s also meant employing science. Two chemical engineers from the University of Utah studied the airflow on the stages of both venues, creating computer modeling to figure out the best configuration for musicians so the droplets and aerosol particles they exhale — and could carry the coronavirus — are expelled from the stage and not allowed to linger.

Read about the Utah Symphony’s opening here, and Utah Opera’s opening — and the engineers’ work — here, both at sltrib.com.

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Here are more stories I’ve written about the COVID-19 pandemic in the last month:

• Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes attended — without a face mask — a campaign rally for President Donald Trump on Sept. 13, in a warehouse outside of Las Vegas. Reyes, who is running for re-election, was criticized for it by his Democratic challenger, Greg Skordas. Such rallies have come under even more scrutiny since Trump himself contracted the virus.

•  On Sept. 18, the state of Utah for the first time recorded more than 1,000 cases of COVID-19 in a single day — part of a surge of cases in the state over the last month. Since then, the state has gone over 1,000 a day eight more times. (For updates on COVID-19 in Utah, read my colleagues’ work at sltrib.com/coronavirus.)

• The Eccles Theater announced that the national touring production of “Hamilton” was pushing its December/January run in Salt Lake City back to next July — an appropriate time to be considering our Founding Fathers.

• The Slamdance Film Festival, the upstart kid brother to the larger Sundance Film Festival, announced it will skip Park City next January. Instead, it will hold a two-week online festival in February.

Ballet West addresses systemic discrimination in the dance world, by providing tights and shoes to match their performers' skin tones

It makes sense that as Americans were confronted with examples of systemic racial discrimination, we’d get around to the world of ballet — which has had a white bias for decades.

Consider what are sometimes called the “white ballets” — “Swan Lake” and “Giselle” are the best known — where the main character is depicted as pale white, even ghostly. For years, the tradition has been for dancers to wear white tights and pointe shoes, and sometimes even wear body makeup to achieve that white coloring, no matter what the dancer’s actual skin tone is.

Ballet West this week announced that would be changing. The Salt Lake City dance troupe, one of the more respected ballet companies in the country, will no longer use the historic “paling” body makeup to lighten a dancer’s skin tone — or, in fact, allow make-up that reflects any skin tone other than the dancer’s own. Also, the company will provide tights and shoe ribbons that match the dancer’s skin tone, and dye pointe shoes and canvas flat shoes to match the dancer’s skin tone.

Read up on these policy changes here, at sltrib.com.

Joe Redburn, founder of two of Salt Lake City's iconic gay bars, dies at 82

Obituaries are, by nature, somewhat sad to read — because the subject is someone who has died, leaving behind friends and relatives who are saddened by their loss.

The obituary for Joe Redburn is even sadder, because of the circumstances of his death: Alone in a South Salt Lake City homeless shelter.

Redburn was a talk-radio host from the late ‘60s through 1993, back when liberal voices matched conservative ones on the airwaves. He was also openly gay, at a time when that could get a person fired or worse. And he launched two bars — The Sun in 1973, and The Trapp in 1991 — that became iconic hangouts for Utah’s LGBTQ community. (The Sun was destroyed in 1999 by a tornado, long after Redburn sold it; The Trapp, now The Sun Trapp, still thrives, under different ownership.)

But in later life, something happened to Redburn. Friends said he had health and financial problems, and at the end of his life he was experiencing homelessness.

I got to talk to people who knew Redburn, as well as people who know Salt Lake City’s queer history and the issues that elderly LGBTQ people face. They’re all in the obituary I wrote for Redburn, here at sltrib.com.