Survivor

Rays of sunshine warmed Ravi Turman’s skin and a spring breeze rippled over her body as she left the hospital, proving to Ravi that she was indeed alive.

Ravi’s survival had been very much in doubt at times over the 15 days she spent at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital.

She had arrived in grave condition on the night of March 22, struggling to breathe as her lips turned blue. Then within hours, both of her lungs collapsed and a ventilator had to breathe for her. A test confirmed what her team already suspected: she had COVID-19.

Ravi’s doctors gave her a 50% chance — at best — of ever getting off the ventilator and surviving.

She faced especially bleak odds because Ravi, 51, has some underlying health issues including diabetes and high blood pressure. Ten years ago, she had uterine cancer and had had to have dozens of lymph nodes removed. Plus, she’s African American. COVID-19 has been sickening and killing African Americans at an alarming rate across the U.S. Doctors don’t know exactly why African Americans are faring so poorly during the pandemic. One contributing factor may be that a greater percentage of African Americans have conditions like diabetes, heart problems and hypertension. Bringing sunshine to others

Ravi’s name means sun in Sanskrit and she believes she survived her ordeal with COVID-19 to bring a little sun to others.

“There’s not a lot of hope out there for anyone getting the virus, but if I survived, anyone can survive,” Ravi said. “Don’t be dismayed by what you hear, just because we are getting it. There is hope.”

In addition to bringing comfort to African Americans and

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Thinks She Lived to Give Others Hope

By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon, UCHealth Photo by Cyrus McCrimmon for UCHealth

people with underlying health conditions, who are justifiably frightened about COVID-19, Ravi’s sunny attitude cheered her nurses and doctors.

Against the odds, she was the first person in her COVID19 Intensive Care Unit (ICU) to make it off the ventilator and to once again breathe on her own.

“She surprised us,” said Dr. Josh Douin, the anesthesiologist who made the call to “extubate” Ravi, removing her breathing tube and detaching her from the ventilator.

“She’s spunky. She had a strong will to live and to leave the hospital,” Douin said.

“She was our first victory. It was really a morale boost for the team to see that we could get people through to recovery. We’ve had some losses too, so it’s been great to have victories.”

Dr. Julie Winkle cared for Ravi the day after she was extubated. Ravi was weak still and her throat was too sore to talk, but when Winkle let Ravi know she was the first person in the ICU to get her breathing tube out, Ravi flashed a beautiful smile and celebrated.

“She raised her hands over her head. She was pumping her fists in the air,” Winkle said. “Her personality came through. She just has this innate feistiness and she used it to get better.” A newcomer to Colorado and a bout with a new virus

Ravi is a minister and loves to sing, dance and revel in life. Before moving to Colorado a couple of months ago from Indiana to be with her 29-yearold daughter, Ana Caldwell, Ravi served a small congregation at Impact Christian Church.

“My focus is just being a positive light for anyone. It doesn’t have to be about shoving the Bible down someone’s throat. It’s just being a positive light. I was in the hospital a long time. I got to see the nurses and the doctors and you could see that they were tired, but they were trying to be upbeat. I would hold their hand and look them in the eye and tell them, ‘Thank you for helping me.’”

She came to Colorado for Christmas to be with Ana and ultimately decided to stay.

Ravi started working at the Colorado Department of Local Affairs. She doesn’t drive, so she took two buses and a train to get to her job. Ana believes that’s how her mom became exposed to the new coronavirus, which by early March was circulating throughout Colorado and the U.S. A cold that never got better

At first, Ravi thought she just had a bad cold. But the cough grew worse and she had a fever that wouldn’t break. Ravi’s boss encouraged her to see a doctor, but it was the weekend and Ravi hesitated to go to the hospital.

“I had some shortness of breath, but I brushed it off because I’m still new to Colorado. I thought, ‘It’s just me.’ Indiana is below sea level and moving here was a big change,” she said.

On Sunday evening, March 22, she was Face Timing with her 81-year-old mother, Doris Davis, a former jazz singer and retired paralegal and project director for Indiana Legal Services, Inc. Davis lives in Indiana.

Davis noticed that her daughter’s face had a purplishblue tint to it.

“You’ve got to go to the hospital. You get in the car and go to the hospital now,” she told her daughter.

Ana took her mom to the ER at University of Colorado Hospital and sat with her as long as she could. Then, hospital workers took Ravi up to the ICU, where she soon became nonresponsive as her lungs collapsed.

Ravi remembers almost nothing from the first 10 days of her hospital stay.

Her team kept Ravi’s family up to date and the outlook was pretty grim.

“They told us she had a 50- 50 chance. They didn’t really know, but they were going to try some things and see if they could help her breathe better,” Doris said. ‘I heard their hearts breaking’

Ravi has few memories from her time on the ventilator, but she distinctly remembers once feeling like she was slipping away.

“I was getting ready to leave,” Ravi said.

There was no dread about dying at first. Then, Ravi felt a powerful sensation.

“I could feel my mother’s heart breaking and I could hear my daughter’s heart breaking and that brought me back,” Ravi said. “There was a dark day when they told my daughter that it could go either way. And I guess it was that same day.”

Ravi has two sisters and one brother. Decades ago, her mom lost a baby boy, who was three years older than Ravi. He was born with a hole in his heart and died at three days old. Today, babies with those types of heart problems survive. But there was no cure then.

Even in the haze of her coma, Ravi didn’t want her mom to suffer the tragedy of losing a child a second time.

“It brought me back,” Ravi said. A critical turning point

Dr. Douin didn’t expect Ravi to be his standout patient.

“She had very severe lung injury. It was remarkable that we were able to extubate her,” he said.

But, he and his team were able to take her off the ventilator and allow her to use a CPAP or Continuous Positive Airway Pressure machine to force oxygen into her lungs. Ravi has sleep apnea and was used to using the C-PAP.

“She did very well,” Douin said.

He credits Ravi’s attitude as much as the medical care she received.

“She had a strong will to leave the hospital and that helped her quite a bit,” he said.

Douin said he and his colleagues are seeing a number of patients of color — both African Americans and Latinos — who are becoming critically ill from COVID-19.

He doesn’t think they are more susceptible to getting the virus, but rather that patients with many underlying illnesses may have weaker immune systems than healthier patients.

“It happens that African Americans have higher rates of hypertension (high blood pressure) and diabetes. Long-standing socioeconomic discrepancies likely also are playing a role,” Douin said. “Those are our best guesses as to why we are seeing so many non-white patients.” Resurrection

It is not lost on Ravi that she essentially came back to life just before Easter, the holy season when Christians celebrate resurrection and rebirth.

Someday, perhaps Ravi will have a new congregation and she will preach about the time when she came face to face with a historic plague, and for some reason that she still doesn’t fully understand, she survived.

“I really do think I’m here for a purpose. And part of it is to tell my story,” she said. “I have things yet to do. I’m a daughter. I’m a sister. I’m a mother. It just wasn’t my time.”.

The image is familiar, even mundane, to most of us now: a dozen or more faces peer out against various backgrounds –some real, some green-screened – talking and planning across many miles. Together, apart.

But it was an unprecedented group that first gathered on April 1 – in more ways than one. First, the faces were of journalists from newsrooms from across Colorado, who in previous years have been more accustomed to competition than collaboration. Second, the group was finding unity in a common purpose – how working together could help each of them reach more Coloradans with accurate, timely, potentially life-saving updates and rigorous reporting in the unprecedented time of COVID.

Since that first Zoom call less than a month ago, nearly 100 journalists representing over 40 newsrooms across the state have joined the Colorado News Collaborative – which now includes the state’s largest and smallest newspapers, radio and television stations, digital news outlets, and professional journalism associations. A major factor prompting each to join the COLab, as it’s called, is a common need to figure out how to do more with less.

Why? While online news traffic is surging due to reader demand for trustworthy local news and information, Colorado’s newsrooms themselves are running on fumes.

Some of this isn’t new: With Google and Facebook gobbling up more than 60 percent of local digital ad revenue annually, the number of journalists in Colorado has declined by 44% between 2010 and 2018, and nearly one in five Colorado newspapers has closed its doors since 2004.

Last fall, the Colorado Media Project reported that at least 30 Colorado counties — most of them rural — have been left with only a single source of original local journalism.

Now, with local advertising plummeting to historic lows, the COVID crisis is already further expanding Colorado’s news deserts, reshaping the local news landscape in ways it may never recover.

The formation of the Colorado News Collaborative is a bright spot in these dark days. Participating newsrooms are joining forces to coordinate coverage to avoid duplication and maximize resources; cover more stories about people and communities statewide that are currently going untold; collaborate across newsrooms on data-driven accountability journalism; and facilitate wider distribution of stories, in both English and other languages, in order to better serve the public.

Today and throughout the coming week, in front-page newspaper stories and broadcast features across Colorado, COLab partners are releasing their first major collaborative storytelling project: COVID Diaries Colorado.

On April 16, the deadliest day to date in the U.S. coronavirus pandemic, scores of reporters from across Colorado set out to find how people were coping. They found stories of grit, ingenuity and hope. You can find some of their stories in this publication, and all of them are online at http://colabnews.co.

So now if you’re sufficiently inspired, and wondering: How can we support these dedicated local journalists — among the short list acknowledged as essential workers by Governor Jared Polis — in this challenging time?

Most subscription-based newsrooms have already taken down their paywalls to allow free, full access to their COVID-19 coverage.

So for readers who have room in their budgets, now is the time to sign up for a subscription to your local newspaper, to show that you value the hard work that your local journalists — your neighbors — are putting in each day. Nonprofit and public-benefit newsrooms are also hoping that local readers and philanthropists will donate generously, to demonstrate they agree that independent reporting on local news is an essential service.

As Coloradans, many of us are rallying to support our local restaurants, retail outlets, and service workers — let’s add local newsrooms to our list of worthy causes.. Editor’s note: Melissa Milios Davis is acting director of the Colorado Media Project and vice president for informed communities, Gates Family Foundation.

Local News Collaboration in the

Time of COVID Op-Ed by Melissa Milios Davis

Zoom Bombing Basic Cyber hygiene can effectively help combat this problem By Thomas Holt Russell

In the last two months, the use of video conferencing software such as Zoom, Skype, Cisco Webex Meetings, and Microsoft Teams have skyrocketed due to concerns of the coronavirus. The coronavirus has caused government lockdowns and social distancing. Companies were forced to dustoff their work-from-home policies and send employees home with little or no security train

ing. Millions of Americans now have to work, learn, and collaborate from home. In an article on the techcrunch.com website, it was stated that during the week of March 14 to 21, downloads for business conference apps topped 62 million.

This increased amount of video conferencing activity has also attracted the attention of a group of people that are coming uninvited into those meetings and creating havoc for organizations. Some of these individuals and organizations are struggling with the applications for the first time while trying to communicate during the pandemic outbreak.

In just a short amount of time, this phenomenon has gained a name, Zoom Bombing.

According to securityboulevard.com, “Zoom Bombing is when an unauthorized person or stranger joins a Zoom meeting/chat session and cause disorder by saying offensive things

COMING IN MAY 2020

and even photobombing your meeting by sharing pornographic and hate images. Imagine if your young kids are participating in an online school meeting, and suddenly it is interrupted in that manner. Well, unfortunately, is has happened numerous times.”

The FBI is busy taking reports of hackers intruding on Zoom video conferences and making xenophobic statements, racial slurs, as well as showing pornographic photos, and hate images. Some of the incidents that have occurred include: •Trolls have broken into several AA meetings, disrupting several times and mocking participants. •An Orange County School district sent a letter out to all of its teachers, imploring them to use the “waiting room” option on Zoom. This was after an individual gained access to the video conference and exposed himself to students participating in the video conference. •At the University of Texas, a Zoom meeting that included Black students had to be cut short after an intruder entered the meeting and started using racial slurs.

The good news is that standard cyber hygiene can solve most of those problems that have occurred. The bad news is that many of the people using Zoom do not practice or have not been trained on standard cyber hygiene. Hackers are having a field day because of this lack of experience and cyber training.

If you are going to use Zoom, here are some minor practices that can make your video conference safer: •Don’t make meeting public; Two options to use;

1. Require a meeting password 2. Use the waiting room feature

•Do not share a link to the meeting on an unrestricted publicly available social media post. Only provide attendees with the link. Denver Urban Spectrum — www.denverurbanspectrum.com – May 2020

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•Manage screen sharing options – in Zoom change screen sharing to host only. •Use the updated version of Zoom. The latest version is Jan 2020. •Inspect the list of participants •Disable Join Before the Meeting setting – host should control it from the very beginning •Lock the meeting, so once your session has started, no one else should join.

Some employees have not received proper cybersecurity training from their organizations. There are thousands of documents on the Web that outline best practices when it comes to securing your digital presence for yourself and your organizations. Following these rules will help you remain safe while on a network. Nothing is 100% hack-proof, but these practices are essential to help prevent intrusion. Here is a list of organizations and their list of the best cybersecurity practices:

1. FBI Cyber Awareness PDF, file:///Users/trussell/Movies/Cyber %20Awareness%20508.pdf

2. Norton Best Cybersecurity Practices for Employees, https://us.norton.com/internetsecurity-how-to-cyber-security-bestpractices-for-employees.html 3. Center For Internet Security (CIS), https://www.cisecurity.org /cybersecurity-best-practices/

In the coming weeks video teleconferencing use will only increase. Since Zoom Bombing can be effectively curtailed by following simple rules and making the proper settings, you will have the ultimate control over the safety of your video conference. . Editor’s note: Thomas Holt Russell is the Cyber Education Program Manager for the National Cybersecurity Center. He received the 2020 Cyber Education Administrator of the Year award and wrote the book Binary Society.