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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Pittsburgh is one of 10 cities chosen to join the Natural Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC) Food Matters Regional Initiative, an effort designed to prevent food waste, rescue food surplus and recycle food scraps.
The initiative will help Pittsburgh increase food waste awareness by producing educational materials, conducting a “food audit” and encouraging composting, according to the city’s urban agriculture and food policy planner Shelly Danko+Day.
The NRDC “Food Matters” team selected nine other cities alongside Pittsburgh — Baltimore; Jersey City, New Jersey; Philadelphia; Washington, DC; Nashville, Tennessee; Asheville, North Carolina; Atlanta; Memphis, Tennessee; and Orlando, Florida — to advance regional food waste prevention.
Pittsburgh had a 21% food insecurity rate before the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), Danko+Day said. Now, she said the city estimates the rate has probably increased to about 35%.
NRDC will team up with each city to develop a baseline understanding of the amount of food waste generated, NRDC city lead Madeline Keating said in an email. The group will also provide technical help to build strategies that improve larger food systems and support climate goals, according to an NRDC blog post.
One of the initiatives that Pittsburgh will focus on through the partnership will be a food audit, inspired by similar audits completed by NRDC in Baltimore and Denver. Such an audit will involve sorting through the trash of a local community center within a given week, dividing it into categories and then measuring what they find, Danko+Day said. Based on what is gathered, the city can gain insights about how to prevent or maximize the waste found.
“That’s another data point that (shows) we’re not out of the woods yet,” Gov. Phil Murphy said while announcing the latest numbers during an unrelated event in Iselin.
At the same time, the state’s rate of transmission ticked up for the sixth straight day, with the latest mark sitting at 0.99 — just below the critical benchmark of 1, which determines whether the outbreak is expanding or shrinking.
Murphy did not detail when the newly reported deaths occurred.
The new figures come a day before the six-month mark since the Garden State announced its first COVID-19 case.
In that time, the state has reported just under 193,000 positive tests out of more than 2.9 million administered tests. That’s the eighth-most cases in the U.S.
Out of those, New Jersey has reported 15,971 deaths related to the virus — 14,188 lab-confirmed and 1,783 considered probable. That’s the second-most coronavirus deaths in the country.
More than 33,900 residents have recovered, according to Johns Hopkins University, though that number is likely much higher.
New Jersey’s latest transmission rate is up from 0.96 announced Tuesday. The number has increased incrementally in recent days after declining for more than a week.
Any number above 1 means each newly infected person, on average, is spreading the virus to at least one other person. Any number below 1 means the virus is decreasing.
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The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which hold enough frozen water to lift oceans 65 metres, are tracking the UN’s worst-case scenarios for sea level rise, researchers said Monday, highlighting flaws in current climate change
Mass loss from 2007 to 2017 due to melt-water and crumbling ice aligned almost perfectly with the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change’s (IPCC) most extreme forecasts, which see the two ice sheets adding up to 40 centimetres (nearly 16 inches) to global oceans by 2100, they reported in Nature Climate Change.
Such an increase would have a devastating impact worldwide, increasing the destructive power of storm surges and exposing coastal regions home to hundreds of millions of people to repeated and severe flooding.
That is nearly three times more than mid-range projections from the IPCC’s last major Assessment Report in 2014, which predicts a 70-centimetre rise in sea level from all sources, including mountain glaciers and the expansion of ocean water as it warms.
Despite this clear mismatch between the observed reality of accelerating ice sheet disintegration and the models tracking those trends, a special IPCC report last year on the planet’s frozen regions maintained the same end-of-century projections for Greenland, and allowed for only a small increase from Antarctica under the highest greenhouse gas emissions scenario.
“We need to come up with a new worst-case scenario for the ice sheets because they are already melting at a rate in line with our current one,” lead author Thomas Slater, a researcher at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds, told AFP.
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Water utility Suez North America said Sept. 2 it plans to spend more than $600 million over four years on new mains, treatment plant improvements and other projects across northern New Jersey.
The total includes $135 million in spending slated for 2020 on 170 projects in 68 municipalities.
