How losing sleep really disrupts your body clock | Morning Newsletter

Happy Sunday! If you’re feeling a little sluggish this morning, it’s not just you. We’ve sprung forward an hour for daylight saving time. Experts say losing just one hour of sleep might worsen what experts call “social jet lag” and can disrupt your sleeping patterns, too. But on the bright side, we’ll be seeing a little more sunshine in the afternoon and evening hours.

And this week, I chatted with news columnist Maria Panaritis about how her reporting led to the confirmation that Philly’s suburban counties have been undersupplied COVID-19 vaccine doses.

— Lauren Aguirre (@laurencaguirre, morningnewsletter@inquirer.com)

Each week we go behind the scenes with one of our reporters or editors to discuss their work and the challenges they face along the way. This week we chat with news columnist Maria Panaritis about her work covering the undersupply of vaccines for Philly’s suburbs.

How did you find out about Philly’s suburbs being undersupplied vaccine doses? And what data did you have or find to back it up?

I had been noticing chatter for weeks on social media and elsewhere about one thing: Suburban Philadelphia supposedly was being shortchanged COVID-19 vaccine. I thought this interesting, especially given how incredibly populated I knew these counties were, how frozen their economies and schools had been for a year, and how labyrinthine the vaccine registration appeared to be. So many people I knew and saw were posting proud, if not also disturbing, selfies on social media holding vaccination cards and saying they’d nabbed a jab one, two, three hours away from Bucks, Chester, Delaware or Montgomery Counties. Meanwhile, others I knew — people in their 80s — were stuck at home with no word on when or how the day would come for them. The Inquirer’s considerable reporting on vaccination efforts in Philadelphia had left me wondering just what was real beyond the city, in 2.5-million-strong suburbia, and what was old-fashioned panic-griping.

I watched a Chester County Commissioners’ press conference. Please, they asked the Pennsylvania Department of Health from a podium in West Chester, send us more vaccines. I watched the broadcast via video conference at my kitchen table. I asked Inquirer data aficionado and colleague Chris Williams what sort of numbers he’d amassed — Chris had been working with reporters on COVID-19 coverage for some time. I wanted a snapshot of vaccine flow into the counties, I explained. Vaccine doses by population. Chris told me he had just uploaded recent Pennsylvania Health Department data doing just that. I was stunned a few hours later to see what he’d pushed out of his machine: Incredible disparities. Shocking ones.

Delaware County, which I had reported at the start of COVID had one in 10 people living in poverty, was ranked in the 50s out of 66 counties to which state officials were supplying federal vaccines. I knew Delco. If true, this was terrible for its residents. All other collar counties appeared undersupplied by wide margins, too, compared to some of the more rural places in Pennsylvania.

I spent the next 36 hours calling as many officials as I could to understand the distribution pipeline and their experiences. Along the way, I obtained a copy of a similar data crunch that, I learned, had been done a few weeks earlier as several suburban counties lobbied the state unsuccessfully for both answers and more vaccines for their residents. Clearly, something was amiss. I wrote a column about 2.5 million people being underserved.

How has the response been since your initial reporting?

The day after my first of three columns ran, members of Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation told me they cited the article in a meeting with Pennsylvania’s health secretary. They reportedly were requesting many more vaccines and answers for the suburban region. County governments also referenced the reporting over the next week and a half in communications with constituents and in news releases as their frustrations with the state’s vaccination rollout became increasingly public.

My reader email and voicemail has been overloaded with appreciative, grateful messages and tips from readers across the region, including Philadelphia, which was not a focus of my reporting. Hundreds and hundreds and still coming in. It has been gratifying to hear a refrain that has been hard to come by in recent years in this increasingly dangerous business of mine: “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for fighting for us.”

What do you hope people learn from this situation? What is a big takeaway?

I couldn’t yet say, because I don’t yet feel I know enough about the vaccination situation. I’m still working on that from a journalistic standpoint.

I hope people, however, are humbled by the power of the press. It is a compelling case for why local news subscriptions should be part of many more people’s monthly budgets, alongside their Netflix, Comcast, or Amazon Prime subscriptions. We don’t cost much, and we look out for you.

Many people probably don’t realize that columnists do reporting, too. Can you explain how you approach your job and your writing?

I have sought, since becoming a columnist a few years ago, to not strictly write opinions in my regional column. Everyone seems to have one in every channel of life. If I’m not clicking on straight opinion pieces, if I’m tired of hot takes, I imagine that so, too, are many readers who, unlike the passionately polarized, are still looking for a way to form a position about a tough issue.

Besides, I spent two decades of my career as a hard-news reporter, including doing investigations. It’s part of my DNA at this point to report, to break news. I believe reported columns carry a particular power given how they allow for both, the disclosure of new information and exposition on American life, with the columnist’s liberty to do so with the kind of perspective that straight-news, beat reporters don’t have. I believe there are many Americans in this polarized time who crave being truly informed more than they crave being lectured to. I try to deliver a fused product to hopefully leave readers with something that stays with them for a while.

What’s something you wish more people understood about your job?

It takes a lot of personal sacrifice to do this job, especially nowadays. It is, however, a vocation whose power to touch lives is awesome when you consider it is done not by tech- or financial-sector billionaires but a band of devoted thinkers, listeners, and word-folks pounding on computer keyboards instead of stock-trading terminals.

What do you do in your free time for fun?

Free time? What’s that?

Email Maria Panaritis at mpanaritis@inquirer.com and follow her on Twitter at @panaritism.

Believe it or not, we are a year into the pandemic. And as frustrating as that sounds, this SpongeBob reference lifted me up a little, so I hope it does for you, too. Thanks for sharing, @gerardrunsphilly!

Tag your Instagram posts or tweets with #OurPhilly and we’ll pick our favorite each day to feature in this newsletter and give you a shout-out!

The stress and trauma of the past year can affect our ability to form clear memories. So it’s essential to think about how we will tell our story of the pandemic. Our memories of our lives this year — and the lives lost — will shape how other people think of this time. Trauma impacts how we encode, consolidate, and recall our memories of the pandemic. What we choose to remember will impact what we do going forward, so it’s important to be intentional about telling our stories.

Here are some tips from experts on how to record your experiences for the future.

Do you love or hate daylight saving time and why? We’ve officially set our clocks forward an hour, so we asked our Instagram followers about their thoughts and feelings about the time switch. Here are a few of their answers:

😴 “I like when sun sets are later, but miss the extra hour of sleep.”

⏰ “We should never set clocks back.”

👍 “Gimme all the ☀️!!!”

👎 “Daylight Saving Time is no longer necessary or an energy saver. It’s all downsides.”

🤔 “Change it. This year has taught us we can adapt to anything. We should try new things.”

Be sure to follow us at @PhillyInquirer so you can participate the next time we ask a question!

Gucci has a “Philly Vs. Everybody” shirt for $390. But who has that kind of cash? Luckily, there’s several local artists who have Philly gear of their own for much more reasonable prices. We’ve featured five of them here, including the shirt above from Flygirrl.