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Today's News (2020/6/24): COVID-19 edition
Way too much of this.
----- 1 -----
King County could be in Phase 2 for a while
COVID-19 deaths are slowing in the state's largest county, but rising cases and contact tracing issues remain concerns.
by Hannah Weinberger
June 23, 2020
https://crosscut.com/2020/06/king-county-could-be-phase-2-while
Dr. John Lynch wasn’t surprised when he learned that King County had been approved to move to Phase 2 of Gov. Jay Inslee’s “Safe Start” reopening plan.
“The fact that we moved into this modified Phase 1 a couple of weeks ago made me think that we're going to move to Phase 2 in a reasonable time frame,” says Lynch, who has been guiding much of King County’s coronavirus response since January as the director of the University of Washington Harborview Medical Center’s infection control team.
But it remains unclear whether King County residents and the medical system are truly prepared for broadened freedoms and the risks they bring — especially as cases rise and contact tracing efforts lag behind.
“For the foreseeable future, there will always be risk and uncertainty when moving forward with additional social, recreational, work and business-related activities in the community,” Dr. Jeff Duchin, King County’s health officer, said via email Thursday. “For this reason it is critical that the public, business owners and other organizations that sponsor activities understand the seriousness of the ongoing risk and take all possible precautions to prevent COVID-19 transmission in workplaces and other settings as we move forward. As we apply to carefully increase the activities that we all want to do, this is a time to double down on, not relax, COVID-19 prevention measures.”
With King County making progress toward minimizing coronavirus infections, and county residents increasingly concerned about financial and economic disaster, the Washington State Department of Health approved the 2.2 million-person county’s application to move to Phase 2 on Friday, June 19. The approval, effective immediately, came exactly two weeks after the county entered Phase 1.5, an intermediary step in the four-stage program meant to guide counties toward safe economic and social activity while mitigating infection and death under the coronavirus pandemic.
In the week leading up to Phase 2, the number of coronavirus cases increased by 47% in King County, Duchin said, with 113 more new cases in the week of June 12 to 18, compared with the previous weeklong period. Hospitalizations and deaths remained flat.
“We’re not talking about thousands of cases,” he said on a media call Friday, but he did call the increase “concerning.” “There’s a balance we need to strike between how much we can do and how safely we can do it,” he said, “so I don’t want to be at a point where I regret that we’ve opened up the community too much.”
----- 2 -----
Washington’s police accountability law doesn’t work, say families of people killed by officers
By Nina Shapiro, Seattle Times staff reporter
23 June 2020
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/washingtons-police-accountability-law-doesnt-work-say-families-of-people-killed-by-officers/
The families of three people killed in Washington came together Tuesday to express anguish at their loss and to say what they think needs to be done to bring accountability and stop more deaths at the hands of law enforcement.
Initiative 940 was a particular sore spot for relatives of Shaun Fuhr, Manuel Ellis and Charleena Lyles. The initiative, passed in 2018, was supposed to bring independent investigations of law-enforcement killings and ensure communication with families of those who died.
In reality, it has not, they said.
“I don’t even know what justice is anymore,” said Katrina Johnson, a cousin of Lyles, a pregnant, mother of four who was shot seven times by Seattle officers in 2017 after she called about an attempted burglary and, police say, came at them with a knife.
Lyles may have been going through a mental-health crisis, but, her cousin said, it should not have condemned her to death.
Those who spoke at a news conference, put on by the Alaska Oregon Washington State Area Conference of the NAACP, also called for swifter investigations and prosecutions of officers, demilitarization and defunding of police, and firings of local officials they think have not made good on their promises of police accountability.
“This man is at home, and he’s not been charged,” said Jason Fuhr, referring to the Seattle police SWAT officer who in April shot Fuhr’s son in the head while he was holding his baby daughter. Police said they had received a call from a woman who said she was beaten by her boyfriend, Fuhr, who had then taken off with the child.
But Fuhr said his son was shot while he was running away from police, and he didn’t see why it took months to investigate what happened. “If it had been me or anybody else, we’d be in jail immediately,” Fuhr said, referring to the SWAT officer.
----- 3 -----
4 Severely Ill Migrant Toddlers Hospitalized After Lawyers Visit Border Patrol Facility
The kids were unresponsive, feverish and vomiting, yet receiving no medical care, according to lawyers.
headshot
By Angelina Chapin
22 June 2020
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/four-severely-ill-migrant-babies-hospitalized-after-lawyers-visited-border-patrol-facility_n_5d0d3bbce4b07ae90d9cfe4f
Four toddlers were so severely ill and neglected at a U.S. Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas, that lawyers forced the government to hospitalize them last week.
The children, all under age 3 with teenage mothers or guardians, were feverish, coughing, vomiting and had diarrhea, immigration attorneys told HuffPost on Friday. Some of the toddlers and infants were refusing to eat or drink. One 2-year-old’s eyes were rolled back in her head, and she was “completely unresponsive” and limp, according to Toby Gialluca, a Florida-based attorney.
She described seeing terror in the children’s eyes.
“It’s just a cold, fearful look that you should never see in a child of that age,” Gialluca said. “You look at them and you think, ‘What have you seen?’”
Another mother at the same facility had a premature baby, who was “listless” and wrapped in a dirty towel, as HuffPost previously reported.
The lawyers feared that if they had not shown up at the facility, the sick kids would have received zero medical attention and potentially died. The Trump administration has come under fire for its treatment ― and its alleged neglect ― of migrants who have been crossing the southern border in record numbers. The result is overcrowded facilities, slow medical care and in some instances, deaths.
----- 4 -----
Cory Doctorow #BLM
twitter.com/doctorow
24 June 2020
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1275795289408823296
[THREAD]
Las Vegas was one of the first US cities to re-open and it was among the most aggressive, thanks largely to its idiot mayor Carolyn Goodman, who says businesses should make up their own protocols and the market will decide what's adequate.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/23/riot-baby/#carolyn-goodman
1/
[THREAD CONTINUES AT LINK]
----- 5 -----
‘Coming back and biting us’: US sees virus resurgence
By JUAN A. LOZANO
and NOMAAN MERCHANT
24 June 2020
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/china-tames-new-outbreak-but-elsewhere-virus-cases-surge/
HOUSTON (AP) — A coronavirus resurgence is wiping out two months of progress in the U.S. and sending infections to dire new levels across the South and West, with administrators and health experts warning on Wednesday that politicians and a tired-of-being-cooped-up public are letting a disaster unfold.
The U.S. recorded a one-day total of 34,700 new COVID-19 cases, the highest level since late April, when the number peaked at 36,400, according to the count kept by Johns Hopkins University.
While newly confirmed infections have been declining steadily in early hot spots such as New York and New Jersey, several other states set single-day records this week, including Arizona, California, Mississippi, Nevada, Texas and Oklahoma. Some of them also broke hospitalization records, as did North Carolina and South Carolina.
“People got complacent,” said Dr. Marc Boom, CEO of the Houston Methodist hospital system. “And it’s coming back and biting us, quite frankly.”
----- 6 -----
AltUSDA
twitter.com/altusda
24 June 2020
https://twitter.com/altusda/status/1275845798949990401
[THREAD]
"Emails shared by ProPublica with The Storm Lake Times document Tyson insisting that virus victims return to work before the prescribed waiting period..." https://stormlake.com/articles/2020/06/24/trump-directs-assault-our-town
[NEXT]
At the same time, Iowa Gov Kim Reynolds, "warned that unemployment benefits would be cut off to those who did not report for work in potentially unsafe conditions."
[NEXT]
Basically Tyson Foods and twitter.com/IAGovernor gave workers the following choice: "your money or your life."
[LINK TO FULL STORY AS ABOVE:
https://www.stormlake.com/articles/2020/06/24/trump-directs-assault-our-town
]
----- 7 -----
Fact check: Trump claimed he was left 'no ventilators.' His administration just confirmed he had more than 16,000
By Daniel Dale
Updated 1:00 PM ET, Wed June 24, 2020
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/24/politics/fact-check-trump-16000-ventilators-stockpile-obama/index.html
Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump's administration has confirmed that Trump has been wildly inaccurate when he has claimed he inherited "no ventilators" from the Obama administration.
Ventilator figures released for the first time by the Department of Health and Human Services this week definitively debunk Trump's narrative about how his team was left "empty cupboards" in the national stockpile.
A spokesperson for the department said there were 16,660 ventilators available in the stockpile in March for immediate use -- far more than the 10,760 ventilators the Trump administration has actually ended up distributing during the coronavirus pandemic as of Tuesday.
And those 16,660 available ventilators "did not include any acquired by the current administration," the spokesperson said, speaking on behalf of the department but on condition of anonymity. The total number of ventilators available for immediate use in January 2017, when Trump took office, "would not have been much different" than the 16,660 available in March of this year, the spokesperson said.
----- 8 -----
Weijia Jiang
twitter.com/weijia
24 June 2020
https://twitter.com/weijia/status/1275757725004292096
The Trump event in AZ was the exact opposite of what Dr. Fauci recommended under oath just a few hours before it started:
"Plan A: Don't go in a crowd. Plan B: If you do, make sure you wear a mask.”
Fauci also said he and the President have not spoken in 2.5 weeks. Our latest:
[QUOTED TWEET]
CBS This Morning
twitter.com/CBSThisMorning
24 June 2020
https://twitter.com/CBSThisMorning/status/1275753293541789697
Dr. Anthony Fauci told Congress yesterday the coronavirus is not going to disappear. He said the next few weeks will be critical, as cases surge across the country. But at a rally in Arizona, President Trump once again claimed the virus is going away.
twitter.com/Weijia explains.
----- 9 -----
John Aravosis
twitter.com/aravosis
24 June 2020
https://twitter.com/aravosis/status/1275854598146871296
[THREAD]
Floridians angrily claiming masks are the work of the devil because “they want to throw God’s wonderful breathing system out the door.”
[EMBEDDED VIDEO AT LINK - it's a _lot_ of different conspiracy theories. Masks are deadly. Masks are satanic. The degrees held by the medical professionals testifying are fake.]
[NEXT]
The thing is, I doubt these women just made this stuff up out of thin air. Someone TOLD them that masks are dangerous. Someone told them that masks fly in the face of “God’s will.” Is this a Republican thing, a Fox News thing, a Trump thing, a church thing, or what?
- King County could be in Phase 2 for a while
- Washington’s police accountability law doesn’t work, say families of people killed by officers
- 4 Severely Ill Migrant Toddlers Hospitalized After Lawyers Visit Border Patrol Facility
- ‘Coming back and biting us’: US sees virus resurgence
- Las Vegas was one of the first US cities to re-open and it was among the most aggressive, thanks largely to its idiot mayor Carolyn Goodman, who says businesses should make up their own protocols and the market will decide what's adequate.
- ‘Coming back and biting us’: US sees virus resurgence
- Tyson Foods and twitter.com/IAGovernor gave workers the following choice: "your money or your life."
- Fact check: Trump claimed he was left 'no ventilators.' His administration just confirmed he had more than 16,000 [EDITOR'S NOTE: Trump hasn't met with anyone on the coronavirus task force for weeks. I had a story but I lost it.]
- Floridians angrily claiming masks are the work of the devil because “they want to throw God’s wonderful breathing system out the door.”
----- 1 -----
King County could be in Phase 2 for a while
COVID-19 deaths are slowing in the state's largest county, but rising cases and contact tracing issues remain concerns.
by Hannah Weinberger
June 23, 2020
https://crosscut.com/2020/06/king-county-could-be-phase-2-while
Dr. John Lynch wasn’t surprised when he learned that King County had been approved to move to Phase 2 of Gov. Jay Inslee’s “Safe Start” reopening plan.
“The fact that we moved into this modified Phase 1 a couple of weeks ago made me think that we're going to move to Phase 2 in a reasonable time frame,” says Lynch, who has been guiding much of King County’s coronavirus response since January as the director of the University of Washington Harborview Medical Center’s infection control team.
But it remains unclear whether King County residents and the medical system are truly prepared for broadened freedoms and the risks they bring — especially as cases rise and contact tracing efforts lag behind.
“For the foreseeable future, there will always be risk and uncertainty when moving forward with additional social, recreational, work and business-related activities in the community,” Dr. Jeff Duchin, King County’s health officer, said via email Thursday. “For this reason it is critical that the public, business owners and other organizations that sponsor activities understand the seriousness of the ongoing risk and take all possible precautions to prevent COVID-19 transmission in workplaces and other settings as we move forward. As we apply to carefully increase the activities that we all want to do, this is a time to double down on, not relax, COVID-19 prevention measures.”
With King County making progress toward minimizing coronavirus infections, and county residents increasingly concerned about financial and economic disaster, the Washington State Department of Health approved the 2.2 million-person county’s application to move to Phase 2 on Friday, June 19. The approval, effective immediately, came exactly two weeks after the county entered Phase 1.5, an intermediary step in the four-stage program meant to guide counties toward safe economic and social activity while mitigating infection and death under the coronavirus pandemic.
In the week leading up to Phase 2, the number of coronavirus cases increased by 47% in King County, Duchin said, with 113 more new cases in the week of June 12 to 18, compared with the previous weeklong period. Hospitalizations and deaths remained flat.
“We’re not talking about thousands of cases,” he said on a media call Friday, but he did call the increase “concerning.” “There’s a balance we need to strike between how much we can do and how safely we can do it,” he said, “so I don’t want to be at a point where I regret that we’ve opened up the community too much.”
----- 2 -----
Washington’s police accountability law doesn’t work, say families of people killed by officers
By Nina Shapiro, Seattle Times staff reporter
23 June 2020
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/washingtons-police-accountability-law-doesnt-work-say-families-of-people-killed-by-officers/
The families of three people killed in Washington came together Tuesday to express anguish at their loss and to say what they think needs to be done to bring accountability and stop more deaths at the hands of law enforcement.
Initiative 940 was a particular sore spot for relatives of Shaun Fuhr, Manuel Ellis and Charleena Lyles. The initiative, passed in 2018, was supposed to bring independent investigations of law-enforcement killings and ensure communication with families of those who died.
In reality, it has not, they said.
“I don’t even know what justice is anymore,” said Katrina Johnson, a cousin of Lyles, a pregnant, mother of four who was shot seven times by Seattle officers in 2017 after she called about an attempted burglary and, police say, came at them with a knife.
Lyles may have been going through a mental-health crisis, but, her cousin said, it should not have condemned her to death.
Those who spoke at a news conference, put on by the Alaska Oregon Washington State Area Conference of the NAACP, also called for swifter investigations and prosecutions of officers, demilitarization and defunding of police, and firings of local officials they think have not made good on their promises of police accountability.
“This man is at home, and he’s not been charged,” said Jason Fuhr, referring to the Seattle police SWAT officer who in April shot Fuhr’s son in the head while he was holding his baby daughter. Police said they had received a call from a woman who said she was beaten by her boyfriend, Fuhr, who had then taken off with the child.
But Fuhr said his son was shot while he was running away from police, and he didn’t see why it took months to investigate what happened. “If it had been me or anybody else, we’d be in jail immediately,” Fuhr said, referring to the SWAT officer.
----- 3 -----
4 Severely Ill Migrant Toddlers Hospitalized After Lawyers Visit Border Patrol Facility
The kids were unresponsive, feverish and vomiting, yet receiving no medical care, according to lawyers.
headshot
By Angelina Chapin
22 June 2020
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/four-severely-ill-migrant-babies-hospitalized-after-lawyers-visited-border-patrol-facility_n_5d0d3bbce4b07ae90d9cfe4f
Four toddlers were so severely ill and neglected at a U.S. Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas, that lawyers forced the government to hospitalize them last week.
The children, all under age 3 with teenage mothers or guardians, were feverish, coughing, vomiting and had diarrhea, immigration attorneys told HuffPost on Friday. Some of the toddlers and infants were refusing to eat or drink. One 2-year-old’s eyes were rolled back in her head, and she was “completely unresponsive” and limp, according to Toby Gialluca, a Florida-based attorney.
She described seeing terror in the children’s eyes.
“It’s just a cold, fearful look that you should never see in a child of that age,” Gialluca said. “You look at them and you think, ‘What have you seen?’”
Another mother at the same facility had a premature baby, who was “listless” and wrapped in a dirty towel, as HuffPost previously reported.
The lawyers feared that if they had not shown up at the facility, the sick kids would have received zero medical attention and potentially died. The Trump administration has come under fire for its treatment ― and its alleged neglect ― of migrants who have been crossing the southern border in record numbers. The result is overcrowded facilities, slow medical care and in some instances, deaths.
----- 4 -----
Cory Doctorow #BLM
twitter.com/doctorow
24 June 2020
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1275795289408823296
[THREAD]
Las Vegas was one of the first US cities to re-open and it was among the most aggressive, thanks largely to its idiot mayor Carolyn Goodman, who says businesses should make up their own protocols and the market will decide what's adequate.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/23/riot-baby/#carolyn-goodman
1/
[THREAD CONTINUES AT LINK]
----- 5 -----
‘Coming back and biting us’: US sees virus resurgence
By JUAN A. LOZANO
and NOMAAN MERCHANT
24 June 2020
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/china-tames-new-outbreak-but-elsewhere-virus-cases-surge/
HOUSTON (AP) — A coronavirus resurgence is wiping out two months of progress in the U.S. and sending infections to dire new levels across the South and West, with administrators and health experts warning on Wednesday that politicians and a tired-of-being-cooped-up public are letting a disaster unfold.
The U.S. recorded a one-day total of 34,700 new COVID-19 cases, the highest level since late April, when the number peaked at 36,400, according to the count kept by Johns Hopkins University.
While newly confirmed infections have been declining steadily in early hot spots such as New York and New Jersey, several other states set single-day records this week, including Arizona, California, Mississippi, Nevada, Texas and Oklahoma. Some of them also broke hospitalization records, as did North Carolina and South Carolina.
“People got complacent,” said Dr. Marc Boom, CEO of the Houston Methodist hospital system. “And it’s coming back and biting us, quite frankly.”
----- 6 -----
AltUSDA
twitter.com/altusda
24 June 2020
https://twitter.com/altusda/status/1275845798949990401
[THREAD]
"Emails shared by ProPublica with The Storm Lake Times document Tyson insisting that virus victims return to work before the prescribed waiting period..." https://stormlake.com/articles/2020/06/24/trump-directs-assault-our-town
[NEXT]
At the same time, Iowa Gov Kim Reynolds, "warned that unemployment benefits would be cut off to those who did not report for work in potentially unsafe conditions."
[NEXT]
Basically Tyson Foods and twitter.com/IAGovernor gave workers the following choice: "your money or your life."
[LINK TO FULL STORY AS ABOVE:
https://www.stormlake.com/articles/2020/06/24/trump-directs-assault-our-town
]
----- 7 -----
Fact check: Trump claimed he was left 'no ventilators.' His administration just confirmed he had more than 16,000
By Daniel Dale
Updated 1:00 PM ET, Wed June 24, 2020
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/24/politics/fact-check-trump-16000-ventilators-stockpile-obama/index.html
Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump's administration has confirmed that Trump has been wildly inaccurate when he has claimed he inherited "no ventilators" from the Obama administration.
Ventilator figures released for the first time by the Department of Health and Human Services this week definitively debunk Trump's narrative about how his team was left "empty cupboards" in the national stockpile.
A spokesperson for the department said there were 16,660 ventilators available in the stockpile in March for immediate use -- far more than the 10,760 ventilators the Trump administration has actually ended up distributing during the coronavirus pandemic as of Tuesday.
And those 16,660 available ventilators "did not include any acquired by the current administration," the spokesperson said, speaking on behalf of the department but on condition of anonymity. The total number of ventilators available for immediate use in January 2017, when Trump took office, "would not have been much different" than the 16,660 available in March of this year, the spokesperson said.
----- 8 -----
Weijia Jiang
twitter.com/weijia
24 June 2020
https://twitter.com/weijia/status/1275757725004292096
The Trump event in AZ was the exact opposite of what Dr. Fauci recommended under oath just a few hours before it started:
"Plan A: Don't go in a crowd. Plan B: If you do, make sure you wear a mask.”
Fauci also said he and the President have not spoken in 2.5 weeks. Our latest:
[QUOTED TWEET]
CBS This Morning
twitter.com/CBSThisMorning
24 June 2020
https://twitter.com/CBSThisMorning/status/1275753293541789697
Dr. Anthony Fauci told Congress yesterday the coronavirus is not going to disappear. He said the next few weeks will be critical, as cases surge across the country. But at a rally in Arizona, President Trump once again claimed the virus is going away.
twitter.com/Weijia explains.
----- 9 -----
John Aravosis
twitter.com/aravosis
24 June 2020
https://twitter.com/aravosis/status/1275854598146871296
[THREAD]
Floridians angrily claiming masks are the work of the devil because “they want to throw God’s wonderful breathing system out the door.”
[EMBEDDED VIDEO AT LINK - it's a _lot_ of different conspiracy theories. Masks are deadly. Masks are satanic. The degrees held by the medical professionals testifying are fake.]
[NEXT]
The thing is, I doubt these women just made this stuff up out of thin air. Someone TOLD them that masks are dangerous. Someone told them that masks fly in the face of “God’s will.” Is this a Republican thing, a Fox News thing, a Trump thing, a church thing, or what?