Some jury trials have resumed in NJ, but picking jurors is done online for now
By Raven Santana, NJ Spotlight News
In-person jury trials have resumed in some New Jersey counties, but defense attorneys are fighting to suspend them again. The reason? Concerns that system’s way for picking a jury unfairly excludes minority and senior citizen jurors because the plan relies heavily on access to technology. It took six months to ramp up in-person criminal trials due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Will this dispute derail the proceedings entirely? Raven Santana reports in video above.
A reporter for nj.com interviews doctors who have answers to questions we all might haveabout the disease
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, left, and Rudy Giuliani, center, an attorney for President Donald Trump, listen to President Donald Trump, left, during a news conference at the White House, Sunday, Sept. 27, 2020, in Washington. Trump and Christie have since tested positive for the coronavirus. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) APAP
On Saturday, Gov. Chris Christie tweeted that he had tested positive for COVID-19, and on his doctor’s advice, had “checked” himself into Morristown Medical Center, a hospital close to his home in Mendham.
Christie, 58, who likely contracted the virus after days of mask-less, prolonged contact President Trump and his inner circle during the previous week, wrote that he had only “minor symptoms” and was “feeling good.”
But soon after he tweeted, people started asking questions on social media. When should people infected with the virus seek hospital care? Can anyone “check into” a hospital like he said he did?
A spokesman from Morristown Medical Center would not comment on the governor’s condition Tuesday. Christie’s twitter account has been quiet since Saturday night. Although he called Star-Ledger columnist Tom Moran Monday morning, Christie declined to discuss his prognosis.
To answer these questions, NJ Advance Media spoke to Daniel W. Varga, chief physician executive for Hackensack Meridian Health, and Michael Cascarina, president-elect of the New Jersey Academy of Family Physicians. Neither doctor is involved with the governor’s treatment.
Q: Can people “check themselves into a hospital?” Don’t they need permission from their doctor first?
A: No, people don’t check in to a hospital like a hotel. But doctors make “direct admissions” to the hospital all the time, Varga and Cascarina said. It not only spares the patient a wait in the emergency room, it expedites the care a doctor feels is necessary.
It’s likely “Gov. Christie’s physician just said, ‘I am going to call over and arrange an admission. Go and present yourself to the admitting area and I’ll get you in,’ ” Varga said.
Q: Why would someone be admitted to the hospital so soon after diagnosis?
A: The most serious symptom of COVID-19 is shortness of breath, both doctors agreed.
If the patient has other risk factors, the urgency of hospital care increases.
“Age is probably the biggest risk factor — people over 50 and especially over 65,” Cascarina said. People would be considered high risk if they had a history of heart disease, obesity, diabetes and a chronic lung disease, such as asthma, he said.
Christie checks at least three of those boxes — he is 58 years old and has long struggled with weight issues. The governor underwent lap band surgery in 2013. Christie was hospitalized in 2011 – less than two years into his first term as governor – at Somerset Medical Center in Somerville after suffering an asthma attack on a particularly humid day.
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By Marguerite Holloway, New York Times Photographs by George Etheredge
Bear and Melissa LeVangie spent much of their childhood aloft, in a then-forested area of Massachusetts. “Our mother would say, I don’t want to see you until it is dark,” said Bear LeVangie. “We would climb an 80-foot — it seemed like a 100-foot then — white pine and hang out and not think twice about it.”
The twins still spend much of their time in and around trees: Both are arborists, which is akin to being tree doctors. Both are seeing a surge in demand for arborists because the region’s trees are faring so poorly.
“I would never have anticipated how fast things are declining,” said Melissa LeVangie, who works for Shelter Tree, a tree care supply company, and is tree warden, or caretaker, for the town of Petersham in central Massachusetts.
As climate change accelerates, the trees in the Eastern forests of the United States are increasingly vulnerable. For many arborists, the challenges facing trees are reshaping and expanding the nature of their work. Many said they are spending more time on tree removal than ever before — taking down dead or unhealthy trees, or trees damaged or felled by storms.
“We are a heavily treed state,” said Kristina Bezanson, an arborist and a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “We are having more tree problems that require lots of arborists, and there is a shortage of arborists.”
Many New England towns are verdant, and the area is roughly 75 percent forest — forests that have generally grown back twice, after clearing by colonists for agriculture and after logging for timber in the early 1900s. To the untrained eye, it looks good: lots of green.
Not to the trained eye.
Kristina Bezanson at the Bridge Street Cemetery in Northampton, Mass.
To spend time with tree experts is to remove one’s green-tinted glasses and to see Oz as it really is. Many species — including ash, oak, maple, hemlock, elm, and white pine — have their own particular pest or disease threatening them. And there are more pests and diseases on the horizon, including insects like the spotted lanternfly and infections that weakened trees cannot fight off.
Many trees are also stressed by bouts of drought or intense rain, by rising temperatures and changing season length, by extreme weather — by all the various manifestations of climate change — as well as by air pollution and by invasive plants choking or displacing them. The list of threats is long, synergistic, and growing rapidly, which means that trees do not have sufficient time to recover and adapt.
Bear LeVangie pointed to a fungus on a maple tree, a sign of decay.
Even a quick tour of a New England-picturesque town common can reveal a lot about the deteriorating condition of the region’s trees. On a morning in late summer, the LeVangies inspected several trees in Petersham, where, since 2014, Melissa LeVangie has been warden — a position every municipality in Massachusetts has been required to have since 1899. When she can’t make it, her twin checks on the trees. Bear LeVangie works for Eversource, traveling a circuit of 35 towns in Connecticut, overseeing trimming and pruning crews and looking for “hazard trees,” including those that are dead or dying.
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The New Jersey attorney general has requested troves of documents from the Paramus and Menlo Park veterans homes in a far-reaching investigation of their high death tolls during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a state records review has increased total coronavirus deaths at the two state-run facilities to 190.
The addition of 47 “probable” deaths due to COVID-19 at the two New Jersey veterans homes means that nearly a third of the residents at each home died of confirmed or probable cases of COVID-19. Two nurses’ aides, one at each of the homes, also died.
Thirty-nine previously uncounted deaths at the Menlo Park Veterans Memorial Home make its 101 resident deaths the highest now reported at a New Jersey nursing home and the highest among state-run veterans homes nationwide. There were 300 residents at the home on March 13, when the homes closed their doors to visitors on orders from health officials.
At the Paramus Veterans Memorial Home, an additional eight probable deaths attributed to COVID-19 by the state Health Department increase its total to 89. Before the pandemic, the home had 312 residents. The number of probable deaths at each home was released this week after NorthJersey.com and the USA TODAY Network New Jersey asked for them.
“Having one-third of the residents die in our veterans homes is tragically unacceptable,” Sen. Joe Vitale, D-Middlesex, said in an interview Wednesday. “Someone has to be held accountable for this.” In August, Vitale held a hearing on the deaths at the homes.
Many residents of nursing homes throughout the state died without being hospitalized or tested for COVID-19. Information on their death certificates allows examiners within the Communicable Disease Service at the state Health Department to determine whether the death should be attributed to the novel coronavirus.
Across the state, 1,787 deaths have been identified as “probable” coronavirus deaths after such reviews. March and April saw many more deaths statewide than would be typical in a normal year, and the reviewers looked at medical records for symptoms related to COVID-19, as well as possible alternative causes of death.
The news confirms what many front-line staffers and families of residents have said since the pandemic’s first days: that the number of COVID-19 deaths at both homes had been undercounted.
Some have suggested the lack of testing may have been deliberate.
“If you’re not testing residents, you conveniently do not have a COVID death on your tally sheet,” said Paul da Costa, a lawyer representing dozens of families of veterans home residents who plan to sue the Menlo Park home.
“I always knew more than [62] Menlo Park residents had passed from the COVID because so many veterans died at JFK Medical Center like my Dad,” she said.
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Linggas tanks have begun capturing and purifying waste nitrous oxide gas from the Henan Shenma Nylon Chemical Company in central China.
The nitrous oxide, a byproduct of nylon manufacturing, is nearly 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The amount recycled equals emissions from 400,000 cars.
A Chinese industrial gas company recently took a noteworthy step toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions from chemical plants in China by capturing and reusing waste gas from the production of nylon.
Linggas, a company based in Beijing that sells industrial gasses used in electronics manufacturing, began capturing and purifying waste nitrous oxide gas at a rate of 6,000 tons per year from the Henan Shenma Nylon Chemical Company in central China on September 15, according to a Linggas company official.
Nitrous oxide, the “laughing gas” long used by dentists, is also a climate super-pollutant, nearly 300 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Chemical plants that manufacture adipic acid, a key ingredient in the production of nylon and polyurethane, release vast quantities of nitrous oxide as an unwanted byproduct. The nylon and polyurethane the plants produce is used in everything from car parts to running shoes.
Adipic acid manufacturing in China, where eleven chemical plants—including Henan Shenma’s—now produce nearly half of the world’s supply, generates hundreds of thousands of tons of nitrous oxide per year, the vast majority of which is likely emitted into the atmosphere.
A recent InsideClimate News investigation found nitrous oxide emissions from adipic acid plants in China may equal the greenhouse gas emissions of approximately 25 million automobiles, more than all the cars in California, Beijing and Shanghai combined. That is equal to 1.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions between now and 2035, a figure that nearly matches the additional emissions resulting from major climate policy rollbacks initiated under the Trump administration over the same time period, according to a recent analysis by the Rhodium Group.
Eliminating the emissions of 6,000 tons of nitrous oxide per year would have a greenhouse gas impact equal to taking nearly 400,000 vehicles off the road for the same time period, according to the U.S. EPA’s greenhouse gas equivalencies calculator.
