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that can be transmitted human to human. so often when they first maybe spill over into people, all that the illness just stops with that one person, or maybe just in that family. still terrible, but maybe not even enough to get diagnosed or noticed by the public health system or clinicians. and so when we start to see human to human transmission, and the doctors can start to pick it up, that is when we notice it. the

problem with that is it's already maybe too late. and we had a mpox you probably remember mpox this past year, kind of the same situation. we knew about mpox, but we didn't really know how the transmission would happen and that things had been evolving and changing. so what we're trying to do is really change that whole process of waiting for people to get sick with deadly viruses and instead understand what deadly viruses are out there and how we can protect ourselves, equip communities and clinicians doct, doctors with the informationnfon that those viruses are there and even start to work with our partner cepi, to develop vaccine pipelines so that from the first time we noticed, there's a risk that this could infect people and go human to human, especially respiratory, with latent or or non clinical asymptomatic carriers, we want

to have a vaccine ready within 100 days. >> okay. so tell us more about this tool that you have spillover i understand it's in a second version now to identify pathogens. you know how does it work. how does it assess risk. where does your data come from. >> so we identified that there. and i don't want to scare people. but there are so many viruses out there. on the order of half a million viruses circulate right now in different hosts that have the ability to spill over and infect humans. the vast majority of those won't make us sick, but they can infect us. and so what we developed was a tool where we could risk rank those viruses and decide which ones should be on the clinicians. differential diagnosis list, which ones should be able to be tested for by your doctor, and which ones should have pipelines for vaccines optimized. so what we ranked a huge portion of new viruses identified by the research community and we then,

made this web tool where people could add viruses, researchers could add viruses as they found them, and public health practitioners could look at the risk in their area and decide which things to share. what we found with the first iteration is that we were barely scratching the surface. as i mentioned, of those 500,000 viruses. and so now we're using machine learning and big data science to bring in every virus that anyone has discovered and put into the public databases, like genbank. >> like you're reading my mind. i'm sorry, i'm i lost your audio here. i'm not sure if it's just me. oh, no. oh there. you're back. okay, no, i think it's just my earpiece. but i was about to ask you if i is going to be a game changer in doing this work. >> absolutely a game changer. so that's the big difference now, is that we're using ai to not only bring all those viral sequences that are in the public domain into this system and rank

all these viruses, but also we need a lot of information about the risk factors. so we're trying to develop the ai that can read all the scientific publications and bring the information on the risk factors that are most important into the system. and we were going to expand from just wildlife hosted viruses to domestic animal hosted viruses and even vector borne, like the mosquito borne viruses that we know are, again, coming to our neighborhood because of climate change. all right. >> i apologize for looking funny here. i'm trying to hold my earpiece in so i can hear. keep hearing you. so i see you have an index. kind of like a risk factor. are there things that we can do to minimize this kind of risk of transmission of the crossover spillover? because you mentioned there was some environmental factors, right. like where we live, where we're building, where the population is and our interactions with the animal world. >> yeah, absolutely. so first

and foremost, we need to live in harmony with our surroundings. so many of us, we live in this beautiful bay area where, you know, we recreate outside and we have just amazing opportunity cities, but we need to keep our distance. we should keep our distance from the wild animals. that's good for them and their conservation, because we actually carry diseases that they can catch from us. so when you see a stranded sea lion or you see a very friendly pelican, please do not feed these animals. don't go up to them. don't feed the raccoons in your neighborhood. so limit your and your family's contact with any kind of fluid or airborne, kind of, situation. you just, you need to protect yourself. and it's good for them, too, second to that, we need to really be thinking about how we design communities, using the most sustainable architecture and,

and design, thinking about how water flows from our communities. and there's been so many advances in that over this last period. but we need to keep advancing both for our species survival, not just from pandemics, but from climate change as well. >> yeah, i think we got time for one more question. so i'm just going to ask you what are the biggest lessons that we learned from covid? >> well, i think the biggest lesson is the one that i'm most worried about. we learned that we weren't prepared, and i think that everyone got so fatigued because covid was so deadly and went on so long, and it was traumatic and nobody wants to think about it anymore, or that our systems are actually reverting back exactly to where they were before covid, which means we'll just again be sitting ducks for the next one. instead said we have to use big data. we have to use science, but use it in a very safe, ethical and careful way. but to give us the information we need

about what risks are out there so that we can prepare and not be just sitting victims and putting ourselves at risk for disease being locked down, and the mental health impacts and societal impacts that come with that, as well as societal impacts to our economy and everything else. >> all right, uc davis vice provost of grand challenges jonna mazet, who leads the spillover team. thank you so very much. appreciate it. >> thank you. >> chances are, if you've driven on highway 101 during commute hours, you've encountered someone using those express lanes, but without paying the toll. officials admit it is a big problem. we'll talk with the san mateo county transportation au

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they get half price as well, but a three person vehicle would would pay no fee. no, no fee at all. >> got it. so i understand cheating has become i don't know if it's rampant, but it certainly has become a problem. and the main type of cheating is people fudging. how many people are in the car? explain to us how the toll is collected, how that's registered and how people can cheat. not that we're encouraging people to, of course, so to use the ex lanes, you need to have a fast track account, and a fast track transponder, to get the discounts. so it's called a fast track flex, and it's on the honor system. so an individual would select either one, two, or three on that fast track flex

transponder where they would, you know, it's basically declaring the occupancy of the vehicle, if you don't have a transponder in your car, and you have your vehicles license plate registered with, fast track, you would just pay the single occupant fee, so, so, you know, while we hope that most people are, being honest, when traveling in the express lanes, we do know that there are individuals who are erroneously setting their fast track transponder to, to three to get that free toll. erroneously, accidentally, intentionally. >> who knows? but i know what you're talking about. i've seen it, too, because sometimes you look and you go, are there three people in the car? because it did flash three, but i'm pretty sure i'm counting one, maybe there's a really tiny person in there, but, so let me ask you what can. before i ask you what can be done, i do want to know what is the cost to the system that this is

happening. do we have an idea how many trips are cheetah trips, so to speak, and how much money that's costing? >> it's hard to determine exactly how many people are cheating because we don't take photos of inside the inside of people's vehicle. so the only mechanism we have to determine if individuals are cheating is, is the california highway patrol , you know, in the last quarter, about 40% of, the users of the express lanes, you know, declared that they were a three plus person vehicle, but the chp, through their enforcement, you know, made about nearly 700 contacts, of drivers in the in the last quarter. and 45% of those were, hov occupancy violations. so so can i just ask you, other than cheating the system out of some money? >> right. the toll is there an effect on traffic? as in, that lane is supposed to go fast, but suddenly it's moving about the speed of normal traffic in the

other lane, currently, we're not seeing any degradation of the speed in the express lanes, so because you did tell me that was one of the original reasons for having them. >> yes, yes, so, yeah, currently there is no degradation in the speed there. you know what we look for is, you know, our express lane users getting at least a ten mile per hour benefit throughout the length of the express lanes, and then the lower limit is, you know, as long as they're meeting a 45 mile per hour speed limit in the most congested areas, you know, they're working as designed. so currently, you know, we haven't seen speeds fall below 45mph, even in the most congested segments. for example, the 101 92 interchange, and generally throughout most of the day, you know, speeds are ten miles per hour above, you know, the general purpose lanes next to

next to the express lane. >> all right. so no doubt you do want to stop the cheating. and i'm wondering what are the solutions then. because from what i heard you say, it sounds like chp enforcement is, you know, one of the few ways we have right now and that cameras don't capture what's inside the vehicle. so you can't say, oh, there's actually only one person or two. not three. >> yeah, correct, yeah. the california highway patrol is our primary enforcement mechanism right now. and that's the same for all the express lane operators, you know, in california and around in the bay area, in the bay area, the metropolitan transportation commission, is wrapping up a pilot program whereby, carpool lane and express lane users, you know, can use an app to declare occupancy of the vehicle. and that app would essentially scan the vehicle using the phone's camera to determine how many people are in the car. and that could be correlated against the fast track transponder. if

you're setting it to three, the app would determine if you had three people in the vehicle, and if it's if it does, then you're you know, it knows that you're not cheating, so we're hoping that the mtcs pilot program worked well, and, you know, and there's other technologies and other app providers that are, you know, looking at similar types of technologies to declare occupancy, you know, before you get in the express lane, you know, to really, you know, cut down on the cheating. >> all right. peter, i do know that there are plans in the works to maybe possibly explore expanding those lanes. so i'm sure you want to get a handle on the cheating situation. so, peter skinner, san mateo county transportation authority executive officer thank you so much for coming on. thank you for sharing that with us. bye bye. those sidewalk planters, now common in some san francisco neighborhoods, are about both beauty and functionality. but with some neighbors using them to deter homeless encampments. our media partner, the san francisco standard, says the city is cracking down on the

landscapin

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your fst application. your solution is at plexadum trial.com. or call the number on your screen. >> you may have noticed large planters along sidewalks in some parts of san francisco. in many cases, they were placed by businesses or residents to try to prevent tents or drug dealing from popping up. but our media partner, the san francisco standard, reports the city is cracking down, inciting owners of these planters. its new article explores whether they are hostile architecture or just planters. joining us live now is dave acosta, senior reporter at the standard, who wrote the story. >> hey, david, how are you doing? i'm good. >> thanks. give us a brief recent history of these sidewalk planters. >> yeah. the planters have come to symbolize kind of the intensity of san francisco's debate around homelessness. a lot of residents, business owners, have installed these large steel troughs that have, some effect in, in deterring people from setting up, camps

on the sidewalk and basically, it's become this big debate over whether they are considered to be, hostile architecture or if they're just another form of gardening in the city. >> yeah. okay. so there are two sides to this. give us a little bit more on what each side thinks the other is actually trying to do here, and what they think about the planters. >> well, residents say, you know, their hands are kind of tied. this is one of the only things that they have, in their toolbox to kind of address the issues that are happening underneath their apartments or their buildings or their businesses, i've had residents tell me they haven't been able to sleep until these planters came in. and now all of a sudden, you know, they're they're able to sleep and they're not hearing screaming all night. but then advocates for homeless people are saying that, you know, it's actually just displacing people to another, another part of the city and kind of just making the

situation worse for those people who are vulnerable and living on the street. right. >> i mean, without passing judgment, judgment. it's one of those situations, i guess, where both can be true. but i guess the neighbor, the city was kind of okay with it for a while, right? didn't they even give permission to neighbors in the castro to do this? so but now they're citing people. what's going on? >> it was kind of weird because these started popping up. there's over 100 of them on venice avenue, but they were popping up all over the city and i would reach out to the department of public works, which usually oversees that type of thing, and they wouldn't even know who set them up. and they seem to take kind of a laissez faire attitude towards it, just, you know, it's not blocking the right of way in most cases. so we're going to leave it be, and now that's starting to change, right? >> i mean, i guess technically sidewalk belongs to the public, right? not to you. so you don't get to just plop a big thing there. but why did things start changing and what are the

reasons they're giving the neighbors or the businesses for citing them, so it turns out there is actually a permit that residents and business owners are supposed to be applying for in order to install these planters. it sounds like the permit was a very clunky, expensive, weird bureaucratic process that just nobody was doing. so supervisor myrna melgar authored this legislation that, it makes the permit easier, she says, and also makes it free to install these planters. you do have to pay for the planters and the installation and all that, but the permit itself is free and kind of in preparation for that, because of backlash from advocates, the city has started cracking down on some of the planters that were blocking the sidewalks. or, there wasn't actually live plants inside of them. so >> oh, i see, all right. so how long do owners of these planters without live plants inside them have to remove them? and what happens if they don't? >> yeah, the notices say they have 30 days and if they don't,

then the city will do it and charge the owners for that maintenance. >> got it. okay. what are some other ways, david, that neighbors and businesses are possibly using to try to prevent encampments in their neighborhood? >> yeah, i feel like we've seen all types of ways, some, kind of silly, like there's a building on venice that started blasting the star wars theme song, and then there's others that, you know, could be argued are considered hostile, like there was a building downtown that was allegedly, using sprinklers to get tents to move, and spraying the people who were living there, there's been boulders. those were very controversial. all uh- residents have just started taking matters into their own hands. yeah. >> and as long as the issues remain, i imagine we'll keep seeing these, ideas or solutions. all right. david acosta, thank you. so much. you can check out more of the san

francisco standard's other original reporting on their website, sf standard .com. abc7 will continue to bring you more segments featuring the standard city focused journalism twice a week here on getting answers. we'll be right back, let's see if triple-a can take us somewhere fun. let's go somewhere. sandy. let's go somewhere magical. but first, let's get this fixed. >> triple-a, your membership to go. hi. hey h >> nice to meet you. hi. follies here. hear the yell? back to school. >> there's some amazing. i can tell that we are gonna be friends. >> the breaded and spicy tempura and made with cayenne. but most importantly, there. >> back there. back order a 20 piece spicy chicken mcnuggets for just $7. order ahead in the mcd app. >> bada ba ba ba. >> this is your invitation to

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