Dear Bay Area and KQED audience,

Empty BART cars, traffic on the Bay Bridge backed up ONLY to the overpass, daily lines to get into Costco and Berkeley Bowl, and neighbors stepping up to provide support for the less fortunate in our community.

The Bay Area is in the midst of an unprecedented shift in life cycle right now, where we will have to come together as a community and prepare ourselves for a different world. This moment is incredibly challenging and distressing.

But, already, it has been inspiring.

My church, while shifting to streaming worship on Facebook, has also started reaching out to homeless and outreach groups to see how we can help. A neighborhood near mine has organized a co-op home-schooling program. And I see folks down the street dropping off groceries to an elderly couple down the block.

I believe the change in life we are experiencing will change us for the better, if we as a community choose to rise to this moment.

At KQED, we’ve been changing everything, too. Most of us have been working from home ... but, honest to goodness, we've been working. Additionally, a small team of KQED journalists is continuing to work from our San Francisco studios to make sure our audio and video content is available 24/7 in this critical time. That team deserves all our credit, and our real acknowledgement that the work they are doing is the definition of an essential service.

Our constantly updated live blog from the News and Science teams has become a key source of the most relevant news to our community.

As so many kids are now home from school and stuck at home, KQED Education has an important role to play in supporting equitable access to education in the Bay Area during this crisis. In collaboration with PBS and PBS SoCal/KCET in Los Angeles, the Education and TV teams are developing a rapid response plan to support teachers, students and parents experiencing school closures.

If you didn’t hear it, the California Report Magazine team combined forces with Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and CapRadio in Sacramento, taking a look at what went right and what went wrong in the first weeks after COVID-19 arrived in California, along with a moving, emotional profile of a Lyft/Uber driver taking "whatever she can get" amid this crisis.

Producers and journalists from KQED and CapRadio, with a huge assist from the California Collaborative Newsroom, aired a statewide radio special right after the president's press conference that got callers and commenters from across the state, including from San Diego, Oakland, Citrus Heights and even farther afield.

The digital team and our Bay Curious podcast team have been using this moment to answer questions from our community and neighbors during the crisis. At last count, we had received over 1,500 questions that we are trying to figure out how best to answer. That reporting and engagement will keep driving a lot of our coverage during the coming weeks.

And we haven't even talked about the folks covering the news in our newscasts unit (including a whole lot of expanded newscasts and the special coverage produced by our weekend news team), the work by our segmented audio and voice team to get our critical reporting into more platforms and in front of more audiences, the amazing multitude of angles and shows that the Forum crew has managed to cover, the special episodes produced by the KQED Newsroom team with a last-minute guest hosts, our deeply reported and up-to-the-minute schools coverage by our education reporting team, the incredible way our arts team has been keeping tabs on all the cancellations and closures of the arts amid the crisis, not to mention this incredible meditation on the power of the arts.

And there is just so much more we've been doing that has been as critically important as everything mentioned here.

Oh ... and if you need a break from the coronavirus stress ... but still want to grapple with the big issues, download the first episode of season 2 of Truth Be Told, which asks, "How are black Americans expected to overcome and thrive in this country without the necessary mechanisms of healing?"