Has coronavirus changed your day to day? Tell us here

A few of you have asked us why we haven’t shared the names of people who died after contracting coronavirus.

It’s a good question.

Those who have died are protected under HIPAA, or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which ensures an individual’s health records remain undisclosed to the general public.

We’re all fixed on the numbers right now. How many cases in my county? What is the death toll in California? Will we have enough test kits?

It’s easy to miss humanity when we’re working from home, practicing social distancing by staying away from large gatherings or seeing little more than the numbers on the nightly news.

It’s also likely we also miss our coworkers, rooting for our favorite sports team or familiar routines like going to church or the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade.

If you’d like to share how your day-to-day life has changed, in ways large or small, we are listening. If you’d like to share how you’ve talked with your kids about coronavirus, we’d like to hear from you. If you’re creating new routines, tell us.

We’ll collect and share out your thoughts, which means you could be published. Here’s a link where we are collecting your responses, or see the form below.

You can also share your thoughts by logging into our new commenting platform, which can be found at the bottom of this story.

Now, here’s what our daily coverage of COVID-19 entails at The Sacramento Bee.

Breaking news: Updates on actions, cases and community reaction on a local and state level. This includes declarations of state and local emergencies and quarantines, new cases and important health information. Our starting point is that we will get you the latest news as quickly as we can. We report what we know and we’re honest about what we don’t know.

News you need: From high school sports cancellations to what the local yoga studio is doing to ensure sanitary conditions to the availability to hand sanitizer at local stores, coronavirus is having an impact on our daily lives.

Context and accountability reporting: We want to ensure new developments are presented as part of a whole picture. What are local agencies are doing to support you in response to the virus and do they have the funding to do so?

We have advised reporters, videographers and photographers who are in the field to be mindful of guidelines offered by health officials. We don’t want to expose our reporters, and we want to be sensitive to the needs of the community as well.

Our task is a little more complicated with visual journalists working in an arena that is suspected of having some exposure because they sometimes work closely with their subjects. A mic is a physical object, touched and attached. So we have stuck with the guidelines of six feet of distance and talked through procedures with those in the field. We will do more video slideshows and fewer interviews with mic’d subjects.

What you won’t see from us: jargon or overwritten headlines. A national magazine recently published a story with the title “You’re likely to get the coronavirus.” We are working hard not to alarm while at the same time accurately report on what’s happening in Northern California. We will describe what’s happening using words that regular people will understand - community spread or community transmission? Both mean the same but one is more clear.

You’ve told us you trust your local news organization more than the national media, and we appreciate the opportunity to be here for you. Our role is to provide you with credible, accurate and confirmed information -- in stories, photos, videos, on social media, via newsletters and more.

The news is changing rapidly, and we want to make it easier to stay informed. Please download our mobile app to receive notifications for breaking news stories.

You can also sign up for a daily coronavirus email newsletter that collects all of the critical daily news in one place. Sign up at sacbee.com/coronavirusnews.

Thanks as always for reading.

Lauren Gustus is editor of the Sacramento Bee and West Region Editor for McClatchy.

This story was originally published March 12, 2020 at 11:01 AM.