News and Views

This is the fifth in our series aiming to show how day to day life in certain businesses has changed due to the restrictions caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Co-Host Jim Scripps is a professor at Sierra Nevada University. We talk about how his teaching has had to change.

This is the fourth episode in our series about how the coronavirus outbreak has affected the way business is done. The Washoe County School District unveiled its plans to roll out online and remote learning for students beginning on Monday due to the schools being shut down in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak. Kris Hackbusch is the principal of Reno High School. He’ll discuss the plans for online and remote learning as well as the challenges that come with it.

This is the third episode in our series about how the coronavirus outbreak has affected the way business is done. Stephanie Hanna is a mortgage banker with Synergy Home Mortgage who has three elementary school aged boys and now finds herself working from home with the whole family around. She talks about what that’s like and how the coronavirus outbreak has affected the process of home loans. You can learn more about Stephanie at stephaniehannaloans.com.

We veer a bit off the mission of this series with a unique opportunity that we couldn’t pass up. While our guest is not part of a Reno business, she provides information that is helpful in understanding how institutions are handling this outbreak. Crystal Phares, M.D. is a resident physician in the emergency room of several Seattle hospitals. She shares with us how things have changed, and what the coronavirus outbreak looks like in Seattle. Crystal is a graduate of the University of Nevada, Reno’s School of Medicine and a former nurse with close to a decade in the health care field. She discusses how procedure has changed for seeing patients who present with COVID-19 symptoms, and how the traffic through the emergency room has changed since the outbreak began.

The first in what we hope is a diverse series about how local business has been affected during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. We hope to cover not just that things are bad, but how each business that continues to operate has had to change they way they operate. Bob Conrad is the publisher of thisisreno.com, a small local news site. Bob discusses with us how the site has had to change how things work. With the state of Nevada being effectively shut down to the gathering of crowds, a key source of advertising—local bars and restaurants—has dried up. We discuss how this has changed This is Reno. We also discuss what Bob has seen in his role as journalist in the response of local government.