Six months after it announced its first case, New Jersey — one of the nation’s earliest hard-hit areas — has now reported 15,978 confirmed and probable deaths attributed to the coronavirus and 193,422 known cases out of more than 2.96 million administered tests.
That’s after state officials on Friday reported seven more deaths and 478 new cases related to COVID-19.
In addition, the state’s rate of transmission increased to 1.03, jumping above the key mark of 1 for the first time in a week, indicating the outbreak is expanding again. It’s the seventh straight day the rate has risen.
But hospitalizations for the virus fell below 500 for the first time in three days.
Of the newly reported deaths, three occurred Sept. 2, one Aug. 29, and four in June that were just recently confirmed, officials said. Of the state’s total deaths, 14,195 are lab-confirmed and 1,783 are considered probable.
“Six months ago today — although it seems like 60 years ago — we received confirmation of our first case of coronavirus in New Jersey,” Gov. Phil Murphy said Friday during his latest coronavirus briefing in Trenton. “We’ve experienced a lot together over these past six months. And we still have a long road to travel.”
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“Trump has taken over VOA, Radio Free Europe, etc…planting loyalists, firing critical journalists. He can’t do that with Stripes so he’s just…zeroing out the budget.”
The plan for dissolution, due by September 15, should include a “specific timeline for vacating government-owned/leased space worldwide,” he wrote, and “the last newspaper publication (in all forms) will be September 30, 2020.”
The Pentagon in February proposed cutting all of the newspaper’s funding — roughly $15.5 million annually — to reallocate those dollars toward other high-profile programs, such as space, nuclear and hypersonic systems, [Defense Secretary Mark Esper] said at the time. The Senate version of the fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act does not contain funding for the paper; lawmakers will convene this fall to develop a joint version of the bill.
“We trimmed the support for Stars and Stripes because we need to invest that money, as we did with many, many other programs, into higher-priority issues,” he said during a news conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels, following DoD’s $740 billion budget submission to Congress. Stars and Stripes is published in print and online.
While the paper, which is distributed to U.S. troops stationed at bases worldwide, maintains editorial independence, it receives federal funding as part of the Pentagon’s Defense Media Agency. About $8.7 million of the subsidy comes through operations and maintenance (O&M) funding, and about $6.9 million from contingency operations funds, Stripes said. The remainder of the Stripes annual budget comes from advertising, subscriptions and sales.
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At a glance (vs. a week ago) Pennsylvania: cases ↑, positivity rate ↔ Philadelphia: cases ↑, positivity rate ↑
Pennsylvania’s rolling average is 802 new cases/day, 23% higher than a week ago. The state has recorded 137k positives out of 1.70M tested. The average statewide positivity rate over the past week is 3.0%, one-tenth of a point higher than a week ago. [health.pa.gov]
Philadelphia is averaging 117 new cases/day (up 26% from a week ago) out of about 2,660 daily tests. The average positivity rate is 4.4%, more than a point up from a week ago. Philly has recorded 34.3k cases out of 325k residents tested. [phila.gov]
In the city, 1,759 people are known to have died of COVID-19, with a rolling average of 1 person lost each day. Statewide, there have been 7,712 related deaths. The average of 14 lives lost daily is the same as a week ago. [phila.gov]
Health Commissioner Farley said colleges probably account for rising case counts in Philadelphia and across the state. He recommended students move back to wherever they stayed over the summer, to decrease neighborhood density. [@billy_penn]
Weekly reports from the Pa. Dept. of Health are missing death data for up to 100 of the state’s 693 nursing homes. Officials say they’re working with care facilities to fix the reporting process. [Spotlight PA]
The city joined a long line of state and local litigants alleging Big Oil knew burning fossil fuels caused climate-related problems like sea level rise.
Dusk in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from the Empire State Building in Manhattan. Credit: Gary Hershorn/Getty
The city of Hoboken, New Jersey, filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking damages from ExxonMobil and other major oil and gas companies for misleading the public about the harmful climate-related impacts such as sea level rise they knew would be caused by burning fossil fuels.
The city cast itself as a prime example of an oceanside community “at the forefront of climate change,” as Mayor Ravi Bhalla said in announcing the lawsuit.
Less than five miles from midtown Manhattan in New York City, Hoboken is uniquely vulnerable to sea level rise, according to the lawsuit filed in Hudson County Superior Court. It set forth nuisance, trespass and negligence claims, as well as violations of the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act.
“As America’s fifth-densest city, its residents and infrastructure are integrally connected to its 1.5 miles of coastline,” the lawsuit said. “More than half of Hoboken’s residents, half of its schools and all of its hospitals, rail and ferry stations, and hazardous waste sites are within five feet of its high tide line.
“Sea level rise therefore threatens major sections of Hoboken with flooding at high tide.”
Global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions from cars, trucks, electric utilities and other industrial processes has caused the sea level to rise by nearly a foot in and around Hoboken, which is considerably more than the average around the world, the lawsuit said, adding: “Multiple additional feet of sea level rise are projected in the coming decades as a result of fossil fuel use.”
The number of high tide flood days has already more than doubled since 2000, the lawsuit said, while climate change also threatens the city with more frequent and severe flooding from storm surge during coastal storms.
Other defendants named in the lawsuit include BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell and the American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas trade association.
“The climate harms masked by defendants’ half-century of deception have now slammed into the shores of Hoboken,” the lawsuit said.
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ByLaura Smythe – Reporter, Philadelphia Business Journal
Philadelphia has not changed its plan to allow modified indoor dining and indoor movie theaters to reopen Sept. 8, city officials said Thursday, the same day Temple University announced it will move about 95% of fall semester courses online after a Covid-19 outbreak among students.
The Department of Public Health confirmed 166 additional cases of Covid-19, marking the second day in a row the city has seen high new case counts after 235 were announced Wednesday.
Some affected people in the case surge were tested last week and are now being identified as Philadelphia residents, Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley said. A complete count of cases associated with the Temple University outbreak isn’t available, he noted, as some instances are reported with a student’s home address outside of the college area.
Farley still believes much of the increase across the city in the past week is linked to Temple’s outbreak, following a statewide and national trend in coronavirus surges tied to college campuses, he said. Based on data from the week ending Aug. 28, Philadelphia has an average of 108 new Covid cases per day with a 4.1% positive testing rate.
A demonstrator holds a sign in support of the U.S. Postal Service during an Aug. 22, 2020, protest outside Baltimore’s main post office facility on Fayette Street. It’s the site of the Baltimore Processing & Distribution center, where an audit found 68,000 pieces of political mail sat untouched for five days during the runup to the June 2 primary. (Karl Merton Ferron/Baltimore Sun)
An audit of U.S. Postal Service performance during this year’s primary election season has found 68,000 pieces of political mail sat untouched at a Baltimore mail processing facility for five days ahead of the June 2 primary.
The audit published Monday says the mail, sent May 12, “sat unprocessed” for five days before being discovered by management at the facility.
Baltimore was in the midst of several contentious political races at the time, including those for mayor, comptroller and City Council president. Numerous candidates for those offices spent thousands of dollars on campaign mailers in an attempt to sway voters in close primaries.
Ballots destined for those voters also were in the mail stream during the window when the political mail sat at the facility, but the audit specifically stated the delayed pieces were not ballots. “This was First-Class campaign mail from a political candidate,” according to a footnote in the report.
“That might be the reason why I didn’t get a lot of votes,” Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young quipped Wednesday when asked about the audit at a news conference.
Young placed fifth in the Democratic race despite his incumbency and sizable spending.
The evaluation was performed by the Postal Service’s inspector general in an effort to look for improvements that could be made ahead of the November election. Seven postal service areas across the country were examined including Baltimore; Brooklyn, New York; Charleston, West Virginia, and Portland, Oregon.
The Postal Service has faced intense criticism from Democrats across the country who fear disinvestment by the agency could create problems with what is expected to be a largely vote-by-mail election this fall due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Widespread delays already have been reported with Postal Service deliveries — including in the Baltimore area — as a result of cost-cutting measures and a change at the system’s helm. Earlier this year, new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy imposed significant overtime restrictions for employees of the service, which has long lost money.
In late July, the Postal Service warned 46 states, including Maryland, that the states’ deadlines for voters to make absentee ballot requests might not provide “sufficient time” for the ballots to be mailed to voters and then arrive at election offices with the required Election Day postmark.
The Maryland elections board voted last month to move that deadline to Oct. 20, although that is still is one day short of the 15 days before Election Day that the postal service says is the minimum time span.
Numerous problems were reported with Maryland’s June primary, which was the state’s first attempt at a largely vote-by-mail election, but none were blamed on the Postal Service. Ballots were delivered fewer than two weeks before the primary to voters in Baltimore City and Montgomery County because they were not mailed by May 8, as election officials had said they would be.
State election officials were effusive in their praise for the Postal Service at the time, which arranged overnight shipments to ferry the ballots from Minnesota to Maryland.
“The Postal Service has been amazing,” the state’s deputy administrator of elections, Nikki Charlson, said in May. “They have been driving trucks through the night.”
Former Maryland deputy attorney general Thiru Vignarajah’s mayoral campaign spent heavily on sending out multi-page, glossy mailers outlining detailed policy proposals ahead of the primary.
”We were really proud of our mail program and it’s certainly disappointing to hear that it may not have gotten through,” said Vignarajah, a Democrat who finished fourth.
“It is really disturbing that the postal system has become a political football,” Vignarajah said.
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