today on getting answers, easing traffic congestion by widening freeways. is that the answer? new research sheds light on that age old question. new progress in an effort to honor bruce lee, the legendary international martial arts star who made his mark in san francisco. but first 300 people possibly exposed to measles in northern california as the virus one thought eradicated, makes a comeback. you're watching. getting

answers. i'm kristen sze. thanks for joining us. uc davis medical center has contacted the people who may have been exposed by a child who was at the hospital last week with the viral illness. this as the cdc wrestles with an outbreak nationwide that's hit 17 states, including california. joining us live now is abc seven news contributor doctor alok patel. doctor patel, it's great to see you. >> good to be here with you as well. not so great to be talking about a disease that we eliminated in the united states in the year 2000, i know okay, so let's talk about how many cases we know there was 17 states affected, but how many cases? >> how many in california. >> so right now we're approaching almost as many cases as we had for all of last year. we're starting to see a little bit more than 50 cases. but the one concerning feature is we don't know how many more exposures there have been or how many more that we're going to see throughout the rest of this year. very concerning trend. >> okay. let's talk about what happened in davis. right. this kid came in in the e.r. with it, how many people you know

directly, like close to the child. how close do you have to be to get it? >> so measles is one of the most contagious diseases we've ever known, to the point where if you have measles or if someone does and they're around other people who are susceptible, such as people who are not vaccinated, including people who can't get vaccinated, maybe they're immunocompromised on chemotherapy or young children, 16 to 18 people can be infected from one person. the virus can live on surfaces or even in the air for several hours. >> i was just going to say, is it airborne? does it require contact at all? >> it is airborne. okay, we all had a unfortunate lesson in airborne viruses throughout covid. measles is the same way. in fact, measles was looked at as kind of the gold standard for what can go wrong with airborne viruses. when we were first talking about that possibility with covid. >> so we're looking at some pictures. talk to us about the symptoms, should you have it. >> so the first symptom, which can show up about seven days after exposure, could mimic any other similar cold, fever, runny nose, coughing child or anyone might feel generally miserable after a few days. there's a

telltale white spot that may appear inside the mouth of some children. a few days after that. kids usually get. anyone usually gets that symptomatic rash, which is obviously in textbooks. that flat, bumpy red rash usually starts in the head and moves downwards. >> so does it go away on its own and what are the possible outcomes? >> supportive care. it really is the gold standard for taking care of measles. that means rest, hydration, making sure kids are doing well. now, if a child is not vaccinated, you can get the vaccine within 72 hours after getting the measles and it can reduce your risk of getting severely ill. but if a kid is not vaccinated, such as a young baby, and gets the measles, or is exposed, isolation is really what you need to be doing for up to 21 days. that's a difficult reality for a lot of parents out there. >> 21 days, 21 days. how long you could be contagious to other people, how long you could be contagious if you if you are exposed to and get the measles to make absolute sure that you're not spreading this incredibly contagious virus to others, to tell you the truth, i

haven't even thought about this ever because i know when your kid's born, i think by one year or a year and a half, you're getting the you're starting the schedule for getting the mmr and getting the vaccine right. >> i want to start with the first thing you just said. you just said, i haven't thought about this in a long time. that is because vaccines work and have worked. 1963 we got a measles vaccine. before that, millions of people got the measles every year. about 50,000 people were hospitalized, mostly young children, several hundred children died. about 1 in 20 kids got pneumonia. about 1 in 1000 kids got encephalitis or brain swelling. and if that did not kill a child, it could leave children permanently disabled. so the vaccines have been so successful that people now have completely forgotten about the risk of measles and aren't afraid of it. >> during all this time, what was the percentage of kids getting the measles vaccine in america? >> so 95% is the threshold to make sure that we are breaking that potential chain of transmission. in recent memory, we have been able to hit 95% in 2018, we're around 95. that dropped to 92% in 2020. obviously, a lot of this had to

do with shutdowns. we have not come up past 95% in all states. so even in california, where you actually do have a mmr, that's measles, mumps, rubella vaccine requirement to enter kindergarten, not every school in this state where it is mandatory meets that threshold. >> okay, but i don't understand. i have kids, i know you have to get your mmr to go to school to enroll your child in school. so the 5% who are not getting it or whatever percentage that's not getting it for their kids, what are they doing? just homeschooling. >> so unfortunately there's some loopholes here. there's homeschooling that happens. there are some charter schools that have been audited by california department of public health for having a lower than desirable threshold. there are some schools that are below 90, some even below that, some below 75% of getting full vaccines. and also, even though sb 277 several years ago got rid of the personal or religious exemption to get these vaccines, there's still a potential to get a medical exemption. and there have been cases in which people have gotten fraudulent medical

exemptions to say, we're not getting our kids the vaccines. >> i'm sure that's probably on the increase because there were fraudulent covid vaccination cards as well. so people started thinking they could just fake it. >> vaccine hesitancy is kind of seen as very painful resurgence in a few recent years. >> so. so what is your advice to parents? >> my advice to parents is absolutely get your children vaccinated. all the mandatory vaccines can absolutely save lives. the reason that we don't talk about these is because they work so incredibly well. and think about this if there was any situation when i said, hey, there's a 1 in 20 chance of your child getting pneumonia, 1 in 1000 chance of your child getting brain swelling, parents would run from that risk. absolutely. kids do not need to be getting the measles shots. >> sure. all right, doctor patel, i want to talk about something else. as you know, this is the first work day after we changed to daylight saving time. >> i have a toddler. i know this very well. >> yes. you lost an extra hour of sleep. you're probably losing plenty already, but we sprang forward an hour or so. i guess a lot of people are acting kind of tired today. is that normal? what are what are what's

happening to our bodies? >> so it's absolutely normal. in fact, we just moved from standard time where you actually have an extra hour of light in the morning to daylight savings time in spring or spring forward, where you have an extra hour towards the end of the day. but you lose an hour of daylight in the morning, right? according to the american academy of sleep medicine, what we're experiencing right now is actually worse for our body's internal clocks. then the winter standard time, primarily because our bodies are not following the light pattern of the day as best as it should be during winter. so in the morning, if you wake up and it's still dark outside, there is that feeling of grogginess. there is that feeling of taking some more time to get alert and losing that extra hour that has repercussions. >> okay, so can we talk about what we can do then to compensate, if you will. like, let's say you wake up, you're kind of groggy. you're still kind of tired, but you got to get moving. what do you do? >> totally. i think an important thing is to kind of make sure that we're focusing on our sleep hygiene. going to bed at sleep hygiene, sleep hygiene. it's a fancy pants firm. you're going to bed at a consistent time. you're really shooting for that

7 to 9 hours. but in the morning, try going outside. try getting some fresh air. try getting some activity, some exposure. if it's still dark outside. if you are suffering from seasonal affective disorder, which can also happen in spring, the darkness is hitting you. you can get one of those uv lights 10,000 lux, about 30 to 45 minutes in the morning. that bright light will wake you up. oh, okay. >> you know what, though? even though you have that issue of not having light in the morning and maybe that's got a negative effect on you, what about having that extra day light at the end of the day? surely that's got to lift you up when you can go running. still go outside after work. >> okay, so in terms of living and having fun and work and play, that is a good thing. but that also that extra hour at the end of the day can throw off people's nighttime sleeping patterns because you might be out and active until 7:00 pm. for example, right? all of a sudden it takes a few more hours to calm down and go to bed. and so that also can throw off sleeping patterns, which is a big warning when people talk about nighttime bed routines. and now that's been pushed back an hour later. >> okay, so how short terme, though, are these negative effects, so to speak? right.

there must be a reason we do it like we derive longer terme benefits. maybe i mean, even from a physical sense, not just economic sense. >> so we do have research to believe that the effects are felt up until we switch back? no, because of how disrupted our sleep is and how hard it is to get back onto our normal pattern, especially if the light throws off your sleep routine and i'm glad you mentioned long terme benefits, because daylight savings time was initially initially thought of by ben franklin years ago at world war one, who was really pushing forward because people said, hey, we'll save energy because there's more light. now we believe that it actually uses more energy because people are more active later in the day. and i'm not really sure that there is a long terme benefit to this at all. >> wow. okay, so should this be taken into consideration as lawmakers consider whether they should stay on standard time or maybe stay on daylight saving time, or stop it with the back and forth? i would like stopping it with the back and forth. >> so as a doctor, i'm not going to dive into the legislation of all this. people can read up on this sunshine protection act. sunshine. that is what it's called to make daylight savings time permanent. okay. what i would do is focus absolutely on

your your sleep schedule, make sure it's routine, and you want to make sure that if you're having trouble falling or staying asleep, that you talk to a health care professional because we cannot, regardless of what time we're on, what time zone we're in, lose light of the fact that sleep is one of the most important things for our overall health, health and happiness. health and happiness. good sleep. >> yes, doctor patel, thank you so much. it was great to see you always. all right, all right. coming up next, should highways in the bay area be widened to ease congestion? would adding lanes reduce your time sitting in traffic? coming up next, a

south san francisco to san francisco to add an extra express lane. they'll be looking into whether widening highways

actually eases traffic congestion. a uc davis researcher looked into this age old question, and joining us live now is susan handy, professor of environmental science and policy at uc davis and author of the book shifting gears to shed light on the study. professor handy, thanks for joining us. >> happy to be here. >> all right, so let's just first put it out there. traffic congestion is bad here in the bay area. transportation analyst company inrix found drivers lose 97 hours a year sitting in traffic in this region. so conventional wisdom says if three lanes aren't enough, well, let's make it four. but has that worked? >> well, you tell me. i mean, that's the strategy we've been trying for the last century. and we, you know, we continually widen the highways and within a few years, we're back to where we started. so, there's a really robust body of research that says that widening highways is, at best a short tum solution to

congestion. but it's not going to it's not going to get us out of our congestion problem. long terme. >> all right. in a way, this is a simple economic issue isn't it? supply and demand. can you explain it to us through that lens? >> yeah. so you know what happens when we widen the highway? well once we're done with the miserable years of congestion, traffic flows more, more smoothly. once that new lane is open. that's in effect reducing the cost of driving. what do people do when we reduce the cost of something they want more of? they buy more of it. and that's essentially what's happening on our highways. we add capacity, we reduce the effective cost of driving because we make things go a little bit faster, and people make choices that lead to more driving. in total, they may make trips that they wouldn't have made otherwise. they may choose

more distant destinations than they otherwise would have. they may shift out of art or caltrain and get back in their car. they may choose to live farther from work than they they did before. so all of those adjustments lead to a net increase in what we call vehicle miles of travel, so that within 3 or 4 years, the roadway is just as congested as it was before the new lane is added. >> all right. so then if we accept the position that the goal is to have fewer cars and driving out there polluting to help the environment, to cut down on people wasting their lives away behind the wheel. it sounds like to me you're saying, well, we just have to make driving a more expensive alternative so people don't choose it, so they choose something else. is that can we boil it down to that? yeah well, that's exactly right. >> if the if the goal is to reduce congestion and then as you said, the state also has policy that says we need people to drive less if we're going to meet our environmental goals, then the answer really is to make driving more expensive. and

this is a strategy that's been adopted in other parts of the world and has succeeded as a way of managing, peak hour congestion. all right. >> so we've seen more of that, right? we've seen more of that in the bay area. those express lanes right. we've got them on 101, i think, in the east bay. but so drivers pay to use that special lane and then the price varies depending on how crowded the freeway is. but does that punish the poor? >> well, that's that's one of the concerns that gets raised any time we talk about pricing. now, i do want to distinguish between, what are called these managed lanes or high occupancy toll lanes. the lanes that people can choose to buy into that's providing an alternative to, to being stuck in traffic. but a real pricing strategy would price the entire, freeway. the best example we have of this is the bay bridge and the other

bridges, where everybody crossing the bridge pays a toll. so yes. what what do we do about lower income households who who have no choice, really, but to drive? so there there are ways we can address that, for one thing, if we price highways, we're raising revenues that can be used to pay for alternatives, to improve transit alternatives, possibly even to invest in affordable housing that makes it possible for people to live closer to their work, but the other thing we can do is, is simply subsidize travel for lower income households to make up for the tolls, that we're imposing. >> but let's talk about, you know, the fact that the solutions that you're proposing, whether it's improving greatly, expanding transit or building housing close to where people live, all those things take time. how do you get people to make choices for today or tomorrow based on something that's going to happen in ten years? >> yeah, well, it is a bit of a

chicken and an egg problem, right? we can't expect people to drive less if we don't make it possible for them to drive less. and there's a lot of work we have to do to really improve those alternatives, but the longer we wait, the more problem we have. so you know, in fact, the bay area has been working hard on this for, for quite some time. and the, the alternatives to driving have improved over time. i grew up in the bay area and things are a lot different than they were when i was a kid, but yes, we do have a lot more work to do. and i think the, you know, the truth is we are paying now, in the form of our time, as you said, we're, you know, a lot of us are losing time, stuck in traffic. so do you want to pick your time or do you pay with money? and. >> well, i mean, as they say, time is money. but, professor susan handy, thank you so much for coming on to share some of

your insights with us as this debate continues throughout the region. appreciate it. yeah. >> my pleasure. >> who is san francisco's most famous native son? high up on that list is the late martial arts superstar bruce lee. now, half a century after his death, a new effort to memorialize him in the are living in the moment and taking ibrance. ibrance with an aromatase inhibitor is for adults with hr positive, her2 negative metastatic breast cancer as the first hormonal based therapy. ibrance plus letrozole significantly delayed disease progression versus letrozole. ibrance may cause low white blood cell counts that may lead to serious infections. ibrance may cause severe inflammation of the lungs. both of these can lead to death. tell your doctor if you have new or worsening chest pain, cough, or trouble breathing. before taking ibrance, tell your doctor if you have fever, chills, or other signs of infection, liver or kidney problems, are or plan

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warrior, a streaming series based on lee's concept and executive produced by his daughter, and it's giving a boost to an effort to install a bruce lee statue in san francisco chinatown. joining us live now to talk all about it, mark young, co-founder of stand with asians, and jeff chen, bruce lee, superfan and collector. hey, mark. hey, jeff. >> hi, christian. hey, kristin. >> are we in the mecca of bruce lee? otherwise known as your home? jeff, is that your collection? >> yeah, it's, we're we're in the bruce lee room. it's a top,

top secret place. i had to have mark's sign a form. i'm not going to disclose, the address. >> okay, i think that's a good idea, because that's some valuable and so historical stuff. but jeff, tell us about this project. what is your vision and hope with regard to bringing a statue to san francisco of bruce lee, well, this all started in, 1996 when i heard a news report about frank sinatra getting honored by his, city of birth. and, at that time, i said to myself, i think bruce lee is more famous than frank sinatra, but because being, just a regular collector, is basically who, you know, so in 1998, i was able to, meet with a with a city official that kind of navigated me, and we were able to get a, plaque for the chinese hospital where bruce lee was born, which was good, the only problem is that most people said, bruce lee deserves

to have more than just a plaque. so so, so after that, in the back of my mind, i said, we need to get a statue. and, and here we are now. >> in fact, we're looking at pictures of some other statues and other cities that you've already efforted to get them. so if we get one in san francisco, i guess it would be in portsmouth square. is that the idea? and do you have like a design, a vision for what pose it would be, we are working on getting, the best sculptor that we can. and, also, of course, trying to select the, the best pose, we don't want to be accused of being a copycats because, in la, they already have the nunchuck pose. in hong kong, they have a sidekick and, and a fighting pose. so. so we need to discuss this. and of course, shannon lee, bruce's daughter, wants to, make sure that that we, give all our ideas to her so she she can have the

final say, mark, i'm seeing pictures of you with some of the statues, and i saw a picture of you with them. i think the folks from. i'm not sure if that was shannon didn't look like shannon to me, but, talk to me about why this is so important in this era that we are currently in. >> that's right. that was, shannon lee on the left, and olivia, actress from warrior. i'm like, this this picture is actually, it's jeff. and with shannon lee, daughter of bruce lee and ceo of the bruce lee, group of companies, and linda lee caldwell, which is, the widow of bruce lee, shannon's mother, i think this project, as far as my personal connection, is that, my father is actually from the same village that bruce lee is from, which is kentucky. and, when, bruce's father was a famous opera singer, he used to perform at the sunset theater on grand avenue. my great grandfather used to go there and watch him perform. and so bruce, was eventually born at chinese hospital in san francisco. like

jeff was saying. and i think it would be so meaningful for the city to honor, our native son in this way. and in terms of the location, i think portsmouth square, aside from it being the original town square of san francisco that even predated the 1906 earthquake, it's hosted thousands of events, not just for the city, but for chinatown and about, this location being our shared history, our shared unification of our community, cultural awareness and appreciation would be, you know, mean so much to the community to have bruce lee's, presence here, not just for our generation, but for future generations, maybe for the younger folks. >> how would you summarize his impact? right, becoming an international superstar through the unique skills that he had. what did that mean to chinese americans and asian americans during that time? and even now, i think a bruce lee statue would

be perfect. for the for the current time, because of the anti-asian hate, going on, the fact that there that san francisco is currently taking down statues that are perceived, racist, bruce lee was definitely not a racist person. he actually brought people together of all races, during a time where chinese could only teach chinese the art of kung fu, bruce lee defied tradition and he taught whoever he wanted. in fact, his very first student was a black man, so we want the statue to, to also bring, visitors and tourism to, to chinatown because, chinatown's, currently on the rebound after the, the covid and everything, and we want especially for, for the younger generation to pass by

the statue and maybe ask mom and dad who is that man? and hopefully mom and dad can say that, well, this man is a worldwide international chinese-american superhero who happened to be born here in san francisco. chinatown. >> yeah. all right, we're absolutely out of time. but, mark, real quickly, for those interested in supporting this project, where can they go, they can go to our instagram at stand with asians. >> all right. mark young and jeff chen, thank you so much for coming on today. good luck. >> thank you. thank you. >> all right. real quickly with the tax deadline looming, seven on your side is helping you get ready. so they're hosting a tax chat on friday. you can get your questions answered by tax professionals by sending them in. now go to abc7 news.com. click seven on your side and find the form right there. then watch us friday here

ex tonight, several developing stories as we come on. powerful and deadly winds slam the east. power outages, trees on homes. and the winds now coming tonight. also news coming in, a deadly bus accident, colliding with a tractor trailer. multiple children and adults did not survive this. and the passenger jet that suddenly dropped in midair. first tonight, more than 50 million americans on alert at this hour. philadelphia to new york to boston. wind gusts reaching 50 miles per hour. and the winds have turned deadly now. a tree down on a home, nearly 4,000 f c