CLEVELAND — Barbara Fulker and James Gavin of Cleveland feel lucky to be alive. After a suspect van plowed into their home during a Cleveland police chase in July 2019, the couple is now left with $30,000 in repairs.

The senior couple told News 5 they live on a fixed income and couldn't afford homeowners insurance.

So far, the City of Cleveland has told them it's not responsible for helping with repair costs due to "sovereign immunity," which absolves the city of liability in situations involving emergency services like police, fire, or EMS.

To make matters worse, the couple said four months after the accident, the city issued them a citation, fine, and court hearing for the unfinished repairs.

The couple said too often they're forced to use a narrow wooden ramp to get into their home.

“It was a van speeding, and they lost control of the van and ran into the house and the steps," Fulker said. “I was very scared and very shocked. I really couldn’t believe it.”

“I called several times, and I left so many messages, never got a callback, they won't help us."

“I told them we couldn’t afford to have this fixed, especially not in 30 days. We don’t have that kind of money. We still don’t have it.”

Fulker has now challenged the candidates for the vacant Ward 4 Cleveland city council seat to help them find a solution.

Candidate Deborah Gray told WEWS if she's elected, she'll propose legislation that could grant repair assistance to homeowners dealing with police chase-related property damage by amending what can be covered by the Cleveland Moral Claims Commission.

While candidate Erick Walker told WEWS if he is elected in November, he'll explore a city-based homeowners insurance assistance program for qualifying low-income families and seniors on a fixed income, which could help with these types of damage claims.

News 5 also reached out to the Cleveland Mayor's office about this case, and it responded immediately. The city said it'd contacted several city departments to see if anything could be done to help the couple repair their home.

Joe Pagonakis at WEWS first reported this story.

There's a renewed push to reform qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that protects police officers, along with some others, from civil lawsuits.

In Congress, Sen. Justin Amash of Michigan proposed a bill to eliminate qualified immunity entirely. It has bipartisan support.

Understanding why qualified immunity was established could help inform a vision for the future.

Imagine a scenario where you're walking down the street and someone clearly violates your rights. The rule of law says they should be held accountable and you'd expect that they would. But can the same be said about police officers who violate a person’s rights?

Qualified immunity protects public employees, like police officers, from being held personally liable for knowingly violating someone else’s rights, as long as the officer didn’t break any “clearly-established” laws in the process.

Critics argue qualified immunity tilts the scales of justice and makes it hard to hold officers accountable for crimes they admit to committing.

The legal path that led to qualified immunity started with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1871. Congress declared that every American has the right to sue any public employees who violate their rights.

Then, in the late 1960s, a Supreme Court ruling would start morphing the concept into what we know today.

It was 1967 when the court granted exceptions to police officers accused of violating rights if they acted in good faith and believed their actions were within the law. Another ruling, in 1982, shifted the burden entirely to the citizen, requiring they prove the officer’s actions broke a “clearly-established” right.

That means presenting a case where the Supreme Court found an official guilty of the same “particular conduct” under the same “specific context” as is being alleged. Without it, the officer is protected from liability.

The Supreme Court granted one exception for a particularly cruel case in 2002.

In June 2020, the Court declined to take up a petition asking it to re-examine qualified immunity. The order was unsigned, and Justice Clarence Thomas was the only one to write a dissent.

He wrote the “qualified immunity doctrine appears to stray from the statutory text.”

Justice Thomas and Justice Sonia Sotomayor have urged the court to take up the doctrine multiple times in the past. In 2018, Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg joined in a dissent authored by Justice Sotomayor. It said that the way the Court previously ruled on qualified immunity had established “an absolute shield for law enforcement officers.”

We’re in this between time: where schools are setting policy for the upcoming year. Many are ditching mask mandates even though COVID-19 vaccines aren’t available for elementary school-aged kids.

For mom Terrysa Armstrong, being careful is top of mind. 

"My teenager is vaccinated but my children aren't, obviously. So, you know, what are they going to bring home to their grandparents or to me?" she said.

Both Pfizer and Moderna are wrapping late-phase clinical trials for their COVID-19 vaccine shots in kids ages 5 to 11 and plan to file for FDA emergency authorization by December. Johnson & Johnson says they have four pediatric studies planned this fall, too. But nothing will be ready for the start of the school year. 

"At the end of the day, children and staff and students need to feel safe," said Dr. Moira Inkelas, co-investigator with the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.  

Without vaccines, scientists are still trying to find how to prevent COVID-19 from spreading in schools. 

Inkelas is helping lead California’s research for the National Institutes of Health. But some of that work will only look back on this year once it’s done. Over the next two years, the NIH will spend $33 million comparing how different school districts’ plans of masking and testing drove infections.

"This is all a human endeavor. And so we're trying to interpret the science, trying to help school districts think about what steps they can put into place. And then, of course, the pandemic is also changing day-to-day," Inkelas said.

Congresswoman Kim Schrier was a pediatrician before turning to politics. She’s been pushing for mass testing after seeing how successful it was in her own district in Washington state but notes those programs come with a cost. 

"The test that we have now available over the counter cost twelve dollars each. And there is no way that is practical to do on a once or twice or three times a week basis. That is just not financially doable," she said.

But some schools are already ditching the masks despite the fact the CDC hasn’t updated its guidance. It still recommends schools have universal masking.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said kids shouldn’t have to wear masks or socially distance in schools this fall, because the state's virus positivity rates have dropped. 

So are students and teachers at risk? Dr. Frank Esper with the Cleveland Clinic says right now, that depends where you live, and your school district’s plan.

"There's still going to be some risk. Even if you went to school and had masks and social distancing and everything, it's still not zero. But it's very reassuring that children, especially the smallest children, do not seem to spread this virus as readily as adults do," he said.

And for parents like Armstrong, making up for what was lost in last year’s virtual or hybrid learning, is crucial.

"My daughter, she's going into middle school and she got great grades just last year, but I know that she is behind," she said.

This story was originally reported by Lindsey Theis on Newsy.com.

EVANSTON, IL — Is it possible you were infected with a mild form of COVID-19 and didn’t know it? How robust is your body’s immune response to the vaccine, and how will we know whether we’ve reached herd immunity? A new home antibody test could unlock the answers to those questions using a drop of blood.

With a single finger prick, scientists are hoping to measure coronavirus immunity levels across the population.

“There are a lot of people right now, because of limited vaccine supply, who don't know the level of immunity that they have,” explained biological anthropologist Thom McDade.

McDade and a team of scientists at Northwestern University developed the home antibody test that doesn’t require a hospital or clinic visit.

“One of the innovations of this approach is that allows people to collect samples from themselves in the comfort and privacy and safety of their home,” he said.

This test doesn’t tell you if you have COVID-19 when you take it. Instead, it focuses on neutralizing antibodies, which can actually measure how robust of an immune response you actually have following an infection.

“If you've been exposed previously, but might have had a mild or asymptomatic case, how much immunity do you carry forward and how much protection you have against subsequent re-infection from another exposure?”

The test itself is simple. A few drops of blood are added to a commonly used filter paper then sealed in a plastic bag and mailed off to the lab. There, the sample is mixed with a buffer agent that replicates infection and measures neutralization of the virus with a score of 1 to 100.

“If you have 100 percent neutralization that means high levels of neutralizing antibodies that are blocking that interaction between the virus and your receptors,” said McDade.

The investigators are already using the test in a 10,000-person study. That could help them understand community spread and how much protective immunity has developed.

“That could be people who have never exposed people who are exposed and asymptomatic and we can also use it to test the effectiveness of vaccines,” said McDade. “There might be people who have immunocompromised condition or who are older who might not generate as robust an immune response following vaccination and that would be useful information.”

With nothing proprietary about the process, following peer review, McDade said it could be made widely available with existing infrastructure and supplies and could help measure herd immunity.

It’s still not clear whether this test can measure the effectiveness of neutralizing antibodies against emerging variants, but researchers say it could be modified for specific variants as needed.