While There are Over 1000 Deaths in U.S. Each Day for Past 10 Days, in NYC coronavirus infection rate drops below 1% as deaths plummet:
New York’s coronavirus infection rate fell below 1% Wednesday as the state continues to stave off a second wave of the deadly respiratory illness. Gov. Cuomo said only 636, or 0.87%, of the more than 70,000 test results that came back Tuesday were positive as hospitalizations fell by four patients to 564 people statewide.
“Our progress is thanks to the hard work of New Yorkers - even after two and a half months of reopening, the numbers have continued to go down,” the governor said in a statement.
The falling infection rate in the Empire State comes as the city passed a significant milestone: three days without a reported COVID-19 death. The state recorded just four deaths from the virus on Tuesday, Cuomo said. Another four New Yorkers of COVID-19 on Tuesday, the governor said.
Meanwhile...
At least 1,252 new coronavirus deaths and 53,633 new cases were reported in the United States on Aug. 5. Over the past week, there have been an average of 56,966 cases per day, a decrease of 14 percent from the average two weeks earlier.
As of Thursday morning, more than 4,832,300 people in the United States have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 158,500 have died, according to a New York Times database.
Dr. Oxiris Barbot’s departure came after escalating tensions with City Hall.Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times N.Y.C. Health Commissioner Resigns After Clashes With Mayor Over Virus
New York City’s health commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, resigned on Tuesday and voiced her “deep disappointment” with Mayor Bill de Blasio’s handling of the pandemic, renewing scrutiny of his leadership during the crisis just as the city faces pressing decisions about how quickly to reopen schools and businesses.
Dr. Barbot’s departure came after escalating tensions between City Hall and top city health department officials, which had begun at the start of the coronavirus outbreak in March, burst into public view and raised concerns that the feuding was undermining crucial public health policies.
.The mayor’s new health commissioner is Dr. Dave A. Chokshi, a former senior leader at Health + Hospitals, the city’s public hospital system.
Dr. Chokshi, who has also worked for health department in Louisiana and as a health adviser to the United States secretary of Veterans Affairs, received praise from the former surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, who called him an “extraordinary public health leader who both sees the forest and the trees.”
Current and former health officials said the departure of Dr. Barbot reflected Mr. de Blasio’s history of distrust in his health department. From early in the coronavirus outbreak, he has clashed with the department on testing, public messaging and how quickly to shutter schools. Mr. de Blasio has been faulted for resisting calls to close down schools and businesses, which some epidemiologists believe worsened the outbreak.
Some public health officials had bristled at the mayor’s decision to place the city’s contact-tracing program inside Health + Hospitals. The health department has performed such tracing for decades; the public hospitals have not. Dr. Barbot disagreed with the move, but kept her disapproval private.
Perhaps the most consequential debate inside City Hall over the coronavirus came during the second week in March. The city had a small number of positive cases, but its public health system was flashing a warning about the unchecked spread of a flulike virus.
Dr. Barbot and one of her top deputies began urging more restrictions on gatherings. Mr. de Blasio for a time sided instead with Dr. Katz, who had been advising City Hall against ordering shutdowns.
Some officials inside the health department talked about quitting that week, or staging a walkout to force action. Eventually, top officials and the mayor agreed on the need to lock down the city to stop the spread of the virus. Mr. de Blasio ordered schools closed on March 15.
Outside of the administration, some blamed Dr. Barbot for the delays and confusion, citing her shifting public statements on the virus from late January to early March. A few elected officials called for her to be fired in early April.
On March 4, with COVID-19 cases emerging in Westchester County, Barbot dismissed the threat of infection by casual contact, saying, “There’s no indication that being in a car, being in the subways with someone who’s potentially sick is a risk factor,” the letter notes.
At a City Hall press conference on March 5, with “only four confirmed cases” in NYC, Barbot said the city was urging people who arrived from certain countries with rising cases to self-isolate, but everybody else without symptoms should not have to quarantine.
The turmoil at the top of the city’s health agency worsened in May over the mayor’s decision to locate the city’s contact-tracing efforts within its public hospital system and not in the health department.
Under Health + Hospitals, the city’s contact-tracing program got off to a rocky start. Lacking the capability to hire and manage 3,000 new workers, it outsourced much of the day-to-day management of the call center at the core of its operations to Optum, a billion-dollar subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group.
So far, fewer than half of New Yorkers who have tested positive for the coronavirus — some 20,000 people since the program began on June 1 — have shared their contacts.
“Right now, cases are popping up all over the place and we are not linking them to known contacts except in a small proportion of cases,” Dr. Neil Vora, the director of the trace effort, said at an internal town-hall-style meeting for tracers last month, a recording of which was provided to The Times.
Even with the new tracing program, the health department has been called on to handle more intricate aspects of so-called disease detective work, particularly in group settings like homeless shelters and nursing homes. That expanded to include restaurants and other social gatherings last month.
The mayor said on Friday that outbreaks in schools would also be handled by the health department, in coordination with the city’s new corps of contact tracers.
Mr. de Blasio has pointed to court delays and bail reform to explain the surge in gun violence. But the N.Y.P.D.’s own numbers tell a different story.
Brooklyn has seen some of the worst gun violence in recent weeks.Credit...Justin Lane/EPA, via Shutterstock[/caption]
The mayor and commissioner have cited a range of causes that they have portrayed as outside their control: the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, as well as measures approved by the State Legislature, including one that eliminated cash bail for many defendants.
But a confidential analysis of police data, conducted by city officials but not released to the public, offers little if any evidence to back up their claims. In fact, the analysis, obtained by The New York Times, suggests the state’s new bail law and the mass release of inmates from city jails in recent months because of the coronavirus outbreak played almost no role in the spike in shootings.
Of the 1,500 inmates let out of Rikers from March 16 to April 30, only seven had been rearrested on a weapons charge by mid-July, according to the confidential analysis.
Nearly 2,000 people who in July had open gun cases were allowed to go home to await trial, but only about 40 of those defendants were arrested on another weapons charge while they were out, the analysis said.
Instead, the analysis points to a different possible reason for the wave of shootings: The number of arrests for gun crimes has plummeted.
While murders and shootings have surged, reports of other major crimes have actually fallen in recent months. Still, the spike in gun violence has stirred deep fears that the city might be sliding back to an era of random violence on the streets. Recent shooting victims have included a two teenagers going to play basketball and a baby boy.
New York City is not alone. Shootings have skyrocketed in major cities across the country, and that surge has led to intense political fights over whether efforts to rein in the police, including the Defund the Police movement touched off by the killing of George Floyd, are playing a role.
On Sunday, another 19 people were shot in New York City, one fatally. Through the first seven months of this year, shootings were up 72 percent over the same period last year and murders rose 30 percent, even as reports of other violent crimes like rape, assault and robbery fell.
In mid-May, gun arrests citywide began to drop precipitously, the city analysis of police data shows. During the week of May 24, there were 113 gun arrests. During the week of June 7, there were 71 such arrests. By the week of June 28, there were only 22.
Over the same period, the data shows, shootings started rising. During the week of May 24, there were 23 shootings; in the week of June 7, there were 40. In the week of June 28, the number of shootings spiked to 63.
At a new conference on Tuesday, Mr. de Blasio said the city had deployed more officers to troubled precincts, and gun arrests were beginning to rise again. During the week ending on July 27, arrests for firearms climbed up back up to 54, the police said.
The city’s own analysis suggests the bail law, which allows many defendants accused of nonviolent crimes to be released before trial without posting bail, had little to do with the rise in violence. It notes that shooting incidents stayed relatively stable for more than four months after the legislation was passed.
The analysis also indicates that the courts are processing gun crimes at close to the same rate as before the pandemic. According to the Police Department’s data, there were 2,181 unresolved gun cases in July — slightly fewer than the 2,285 gun cases that were open in December 2019.
Similarly, the courts handled 642 gun and murder arraignments from October 2019 to December 2019. Between April and June of this year, they handled 819 gun and murder arraignments — and all of them were conducted remotely by video.
“The way we are processing arrests has not changed at all,” said Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., the Manhattan district attorney. “In May, the volume and severity of the arrests we were handling was the same as it was in January. We’re open.”
Still, Michael LiPetri, the Police Department’s chief of crime control strategies, said that the virus’s effects on the criminal justice system were being felt on the streets.
Early in the pandemic, Chief LiPetri said, many suspects arrested on gun charges who in the past would have been asked to post bail were instead released without bail to stem the spread of disease in jail.
So far this year, he said, 40 percent of all gun suspects were released on their own recognizance, compared to only 25 percent last year, and about 35 percent had bail set, compared to 55 percent last year.
The large number of people being sent home to await trial, even with a serious gun charge, he said, had created a permissive atmosphere, especially among gang members who the police believe are driving the wave of shootings.
“When people get arrested and then get out, their crew members start feeling comfortable carrying firearms,” he said.
Chief LiPetri acknowledged the number of gun arrests had dropped off, saying that the force was stretched thin because of the pandemic and the need to redeploy people to cover protests.
In the past month, he said, the department has started moving robbery detectives to work on violent crime and has shifted more than 300 officers in administrative positions to precincts with high numbers of shootings.
A dispute over Postal Service funding complicates the U.S. stimulus impasse as talks continue.
Top lawmakers remained nowhere close to an agreement on Wednesday for a new economic rescue package amid the recession, and appeared to be growing increasingly pessimistic that they could meet a self-imposed Friday deadline.
A dispute over funding for the United States Postal Service has joined expanded unemployment benefits and aid to state and local governments on the list of issues dividing Democratic leaders and the Trump administration.
“I feel optimistic that there is a light at the end of the tunnel,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said after hosting another round of talks in her Capitol Hill office with Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary; Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff; and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, the minority leader. “But how long that tunnel is remains to be seen,” Ms. Pelosi added.
On the Senate floor, Mr. Schumer called for the Postal Service to fix mail delays that have resulted from cutbacks that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy put in place during the pandemic. Democrats and voting rights groups have charged that the cuts are part of a deliberate effort by President Trump to undermine the service in order to interfere with mail-in voting that will be critical to a safe election in November. Democrats have called for $3.6 billion in the aid package to ensure a secure election, including broader mail balloting, but Republicans are opposing the funds.
Other outstanding disputes include whether to appropriate hundreds of billions of dollars to help states and local governments avoid laying off public workers as tax revenues fall, and whether to reinstate a $600 per week unemployment supplement from the federal government to laid-off workers.
Democrats are pressing to extend the payments, which lapsed last week, through January. Republicans on Tuesday countered with a plan to resume them at $400 per week through Dec. 15, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions who insisted on anonymity to describe them. Democrats declined the offer, they said.
Mr. Trump on Wednesday again suggested that he would act on his own to impose a federal eviction moratorium and temporarily suspend payroll tax cuts if an agreement could not be reached. He also reiterated his opposition to a critical Democratic proposal to send more than $900 billion to state and local governments whose budgets have been devastated by the recession.
“We have some states and cities — you know them all — they’ve been very poorly run over the years,” he said. “We’re not going to go along with that.”
More than 53,720 cases and 1,250 deaths were reported on Wednesday in the United States. The U.S. Virgin Islands set a daily case record, and Florida became the second state after California to pass 500,000 confirmed infections.
A volunteer receiving an injection as part of a Covid-19 vaccine trial.Credit...Hans Pennink/Associated Press[/caption]
Health experts ask the F.D.A. to make vaccine deliberations public.
A letter signed by nearly 400 health experts on Wednesday night urged the Food and Drug Administration to conduct full safety and efficacy reviews of potential coronavirus vaccines before making the products widely available to the public.
The group called on Dr. Stephen Hahn, the F.D.A. commissioner, to be forthcoming about the agency’s deliberations over whether to approve any new vaccine, in order to gain the public’s trust.
“We must be able to explain to the public what we know and what we don’t know about these vaccines,” noted the letter, which was organized by the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest. “For that to happen, we must be able to witness a transparent and rigorous F.D.A. approval process that is devoid of political considerations.”
More than 30 experimental coronavirus vaccines are in clinical trials, with several companies racing to have the first product in the United States ready by the end of the year. The federal government has promised more than $9 billion to companies for these efforts to date. But many people are highly skeptical of these new vaccines, and might refuse to get them.
Kenya’s unusual approach to the school problem: Cancel the year and start over.
For Kenyan students, 2020 is turning out to be the year that disappeared.
Education officials announced in July that they were canceling the academic year and making students repeat it. They are not expected to begin classes again until January, the usual start of Kenya’s school year.
Experts believe Kenya is the only nation to have gone so far as to declare the entire school year a washout.
“It’s a sad and great loss,” said Esther Adhiambo, 18, who had expected to finish high school and enroll in university this year. “This pandemic has destroyed everything.”
The decision to scrap the academic year, taken after a monthslong debate, was made not just to protect teachers and students from the coronavirus, but also to address glaring issues of inequality that arose when school was suspended in March, said George Magoha, the education secretary. After schools closed, some students had the technology to access remote learning, but others didn’t.
But while the goal was to level the playing field, researchers say it might just widen already-existing gaps. Once schools reopen, the two sets of students will not be on the same level or able to compete equally in national exams, education experts said.
The decision affects more than 90,000 schools and over 18 million students in pre-primary through high school, including 150,000 more in refugee camps, according to the education ministry. Universities and colleges are also closed for physical classes until January, but can continue holding virtual instruction and graduations.
Helicopter footage of partygoers gathering at the hillside home in the Beverly Crest neighborhood was broadcast on local news outlets on Monday.Credit...KTLA5[/
Los Angeles will shut off water and electricity at houses that host large parties
Eric M. Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, said on Wednesday that the city could cut off power to homes or business that host large gatherings in defiance of public health guidelines.
Large gatherings in private homes are banned under Los Angeles County’s public health orders because of the pandemic, but there have been a number of reports of parties in recent weeks. One party that drew a large group to a mansion on Mulholland Drive on Monday night devolved into chaos and gunfire after midnight, leaving five people wounded, one of whom later died, the authorities said.
“Some research has shown that 10 percent of people cause 80 percent of the spread,” Mr. Garcetti said. “These super-spreader events and super-spreader people have a disproportionate impact on the lives that we are losing, and we cannot let that happen like we saw on Mullholland Drive on Monday night.”
Teachers returned to a Georgia school district last week. 260 employees have already gone home to quarantine.
Gwinnett County’s teachers and school administrators are hardly alone in dealing with the fallout of an early outbreak as they try to launch a digital-only return.
Trump and his spinners are suddenly freaking out about Florida. Here’s why.
