Even as COVID-19 cases drop and hospitalizations show signs of plateauing in hard-hit pockets of the United States, the still-rising death toll from the Omicron variant highlights the trail of loss that follows every virus surge.
Coronavirus deaths hit an 11-month high on Sunday, climbing 11% in the past week when compared to the prior week,according to a Reuters analysis.
COVID-19 fatalities are a lagging indicator, meaning their numbers usually rise a few weeks after new cases and hospitalizations.
The Omicron death toll has now surpassed the height of deaths caused by the more severe Delta variant when the seven-day average peaked at 2,078 on Sept. 23 last year. An average of 2,200 people a day, mostly unvaccinated, are now dying due to Omicron.
That is still below the peak of 3,300 lives lost a day during the surge in January 2021 as vaccines were just being rolled out.
“It will be a while until we see (a) decrease in death as very sick people with COVID remain hospitalized for a long time,” said Wafaa El-Sadr, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia University in New York City.
As Omicron surged in December and earlier this month, hospital systems from New Jersey to New Mexico buckled under the sheer number of patients brought in by the apparently less severe but highly infectious variant, prompting the federal government to send military medical aid to six states.
“More infectious variants tend to run through a population very rapidly,” said El-Sadr in an email. “Even if such new variants cause less severe disease (particularly among those vaccinated and boosted), we will likely still see increase in hospitalizations and deaths due to vulnerability of unvaccinated and unboosted.”
COVID-19 hospitalizations are still setting records in some states including Arkansas and North Carolina. Nationally they are now under 147,000, compared with a peak of 152,746 on Jan. 20, the Reuters tally shows.
Cases nationally are down by 12% in the last seven days compared with the prior seven, the analysis found, prompting some health officials to strike a cautiously optimist tone on the trajectory of the pandemic.
“It’s certainly reached its peak in certain regions of the country,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease official, said in an interview with MSNBC on Monday. “I believe that in the next few weeks we will see – as a country – that it is all turning around.”
U.S. COVID-19 data often lag a few days behind the actual state of affairs and paints an imperfect picture.
Positive findings from the now ubiquitous at-home tests are not included in the official case count, while hospitalization counts often do not differentiate between patients who are receiving treatment for COVID-19 and others who test positive while in the hospital with other issues.
On Monday, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that it was dangerous to assume Omicron would herald the end of COVID-19’s most acute phase, and exhorted nations to stay focused to beat the pandemic.
The Omicron wave scrambled the hopes of Americans for a gradual transition into a post-pandemic reality and re-ignited tensions around masking and vaccines in schools and workplaces, exposing once again the deep political fault lines cracked open by the health crisis.
On Sunday, large crowds rallied in Washington, D.C., in opposition of COVID-19 mandates, some holding signs that read “people call the shot, not the government.”
Virginia’s new Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin is facing a lawsuit from seven school boards seeking to stop his order that would make masks optional in school as of Monday.
A spokesperson for Youngkin, vowing to fight the lawsuit, said on Monday, “We are disappointed that these school boards are ignoring parent’s rights.”
Tom Hanks penned a guest essay for The New York Times on Friday in which he called for the truth about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre to be taught in schools.
Calling himself a “lay historian” who studied history in high school and community college in Oakland, California, Hanks notes that his education, in which he learned about the Emancipation Proclamation, the Ku Klux Klan and Rosa Parks’ heroism, did not include the Tulsa massacre.
“I never read a page of any school history book about how, in 1921, a mob of white people burned down a place called Black Wall Street, killed as many as 300 of its Black citizens and displaced thousands of Black Americans who lived in Tulsa,” Hanks writes.
The actor notes that this experience is common, due to history being “mostly written by white people about white people like me, while the history of Black people — including the horrors of Tulsa — was too often left out.”
Hanks emphasizes that the truth about Tulsa, and the violence against Black Americans by white Americans, has typically been “systematically ignored, perhaps because it was regarded as too honest, too painful a lesson” for young white students.
Hanks goes on to write, “It seems white educators and school administrators (if they even knew of the Tulsa massacre, for some surely did not) omitted the volatile subject for the sake of the status quo, placing white feelings over Black experience — literally Black lives in this case.” He asks readers to consider how different one’s perspective might be if the Tulsa massacre were taught to students as early as the fifth grade. “Today, I find the omission tragic, an opportunity missed, a teachable moment squandered.”
He adds that, in addition to predominantly white schools omitting the Tulsa race massacre in their education programs, the entertainment industry also did not take on the subject in films or television shows until recently, in projects such as Watchmen and Lovecraft Country. He notes that historically based fiction entertainment “must portray the burden of racism in our nation for the sake of the art form’s claims to verisimilitude and authenticity.”
Considering whether schools today should teach students about Tulsa, Hanks simply says yes. Though he goes further and calls for “the battle to whitewash curriculums” to end. Hanks acknowledges that America’s history is “messy,” but knowing the truth makes people “wiser and stronger.”
Toward the end of Hanks’ essay, he writes that 1921 is “the truth, a portal to our shared, paradoxical history.”
It’s an example of how the debate over critical race theory has reached public schools in Florida, with the history professor accusing Gov. Ron DeSantis of creating “a climate of fear.”
J. Michael Butler, a history professor at Flagler College in St. Augustine, was scheduled to give a presentation Saturday to Osceola County School District teachers called “The Long Civil Rights Movement,” which postulates that the civil rights movement preceded and post-dated Martin Luther King Jr. by decades.
He said that he was shocked to learn why the seminar had been canceled through an email Wednesday but that he wasn’t surprised because educators feel increasingly intimidated over teaching about race.
Less than 24 hours before Butler was informed of the cancellation, a state Senate committee advanced legislation Tuesday at the behest of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to block public schools and private businesses from making people feel “discomfort” when they’re taught about race. DeSantis also wants to empower parents to sue schools that teach critical race theory.
“There’s a climate of fear, an atmosphere created by Gov. Ron DeSantis, that has blurred the lines between scared and opportunistic,” Butler said in a phone interview.
“The victims of this censorship are history and the truth,” Butler said. “The end game is they’re going to make teaching civil rights into ‘critical race theory,’ and it’s not.”
A spokeswoman for DeSantis, Christina Pushaw, denied the allegation and pointed out that DeSantis had nothing to do with the local Osceola County controversy — one of the most tangible examples of how the debate over critical race theory has reached public schools in Florida.
“Critical Race Theory and factual history are two different things. The endless attempts to gaslight Americans by conflating the two are as ineffective as they are tiresome,” she said in an email. “So just to be clear, mixing up ‘teaching history’ with ‘teaching CRT’ is dishonest.”
Between local classrooms and the halls of the state Capitol, public school administrators have been left to navigate tricky education politics intensified by state and national forces.
DeSantis — an early opponent of what he called critical race theory, or CRT, who also fined school districts over Covid mask mandates — is running for re-election and is widely seen as a 2024 GOP presidential contender. Although there’s scant evidence that CRT is taught in Florida public schools, DeSantis pushed the state school board to bar it anyway and then called on legislators to enshrine it in state statute during the lawmaking session that began two weeks ago.
Other potential Republican White House hopefuls, like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, have also crusaded against CRT and school mask mandates, issues that helped propel Glenn Youngkin to the governor’s mansion in Virginia last year.
CRT was developed in the 1980s as a graduate-level academic framework to highlight and quantify the impacts of structural racism, including disparities among Black people and white people in policing and prosecution. It was rarely something likely to be discussed in a high school classroom.
But the term has often been misapplied as a shorthand for the notion that white guilt was being taught in K-12 schools in lessons about slavery, civil rights and discrimination, all core elements of the nation’s story long before the advent of critical race theory in law and graduate schools.
The debate over the teaching of racial history in education began to boil over in 2020 amid parental unrest over Covid lockdowns, distance learning for children and “anti-racism” trainings. And last year, organizations like the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, which produces model bills for Republican causes, held webinars that warned that teaching what they called critical race theory in schools is un-American.
At the local level, school board members like Terry Castillo in Osceola County said she has gotten unprecedented attention from parents over the debate.
“School districts in Florida are in a precarious position as we navigate the anti-CRT administrative order which has little guidance yet promises to have strong consequences if not implemented,” she said in a written statement that pointed out how “school boards have been punished for going against the governor’s orders regarding mask mandates.”
Castillo said she was initially unaware that Butler’s seminar had been canceled and that she was informed by the school district’s superintendent, Debra Pace, that the administration initially wanted to postpone it because of concerns about the spread of Covid.
But as the discussion intensified in Tallahassee, Castillo said, Pace also became concerned about the particulars of Butler’s lecture about the history of civil rights.
According to an email Pace sent Wednesday to “social science educators” scheduled to attend the event, a copy of which was shared by Butler and independently verified by NBC News, the school district wanted a committee to review his presentation.
“I’m sorry we are unable to offer the planned professional development,” Pace wrote.
“We needed an opportunity to review them prior to the training in light of the current conversations across our state and in our community about critical race theory,” she continued, saying the district had received only a summary document of his presentation.
“I am mindful of the potential of negative distractions if we are not proactive in reviewing content and planning its presentation carefully,” Pace wrote, adding that the seminar couldn’t be immediately rescheduled because of other conflicts.
Pace didn’t respond to a request for comment in writing, nor did she provide an original copy of her email as requested. She didn’t dispute the copy furnished by Butler.
Butler said he hadn’t shared his full presentation with the school district. In the presentation, which he provided to NBC News, Butler doesn’t mention the theory, nor structural racism or anti-racism.
Butler said he learned why the presentation was canceled from the email, which was forwarded to him by one of the teachers who had been signed up to attend. The teacher locked his or her Twitter account out of fear of being exposed for speaking out.
Grace Leatherman, the executive director of the National Council for History Education, or NCHE, a national nonprofit group, said that her organization sponsors a seminar program in partnership with the county district and that it is funded through a grant with the Education Department.
She said in an email that the organization was informed Wednesday that the seminar couldn’t take place because the materials had to be reviewed. She added that the seminar was part of the series her organization is doing in the district and that it couldn’t be moved.
“The district clarified that the event could be held later subject to editing of materials. NCHE will not continue with this event, but does look forward to continuing our long-standing commitment to Osceola County teachers,” Leatherman said.
In a subsequent phone interview, Leatherman said that while the cancellation wasn’t due to the district’s request to edit material, “simply, obviously, we don’t want our presenters to need to feel they need to edit or self-edit their work.”
“We don’t think that’s appropriate,” she said.
Butler said a council employee also informed him that local administrators felt the topic had set off CRT “red flags” at the school district. Leatherman said the district told NCHE the seminar could not take place because Butler’s materials needed to be reviewed, but could be held at a later date subject to editing — logistically, however, it was not feasible for the NCHE to reschedule.
Butler said: This is all fact-based instruction. This is not theory-based. This is not indoctrination.”
Butler said he believes that the legislation being debated in Tallahassee is too vague and that it “makes it so that any topic that falls under the rubric can be labeled as potentially critical race theory.“
“And the end result is that any teacher training any educational program can be canceled, postponed, stonewalled so that it never happens,” he said.
The bill’s sponsor, Republican state Sen. Manny Diaz Jr., said in a text message that the law wouldn’t really prohibit teaching critical race theory; rather, he said, it would prescribe “the teaching of accurate and objective history on all the topics listed.”
“I think part of the confusion” over teaching basic civil rights history “is the confusion that has been created about what is or isn’t CRT,” Diaz said.
Florida school district cancels a professor’s civil rights history seminar for teachers, citing concerns over “critical race theory” — even though his lecture had nothing to do with the topic. https://t.co/ps6TXziHRz
South Florida authorities are investigating the origin of anti-Semitic flyers that were distributed overnight in Miami Beach and Surfside neighborhoods, police said Sunday.
Miami Beach police increased patrols in neighborhoods and religious institutions following the first report received shortly after 7 a.m., Ernesto Rodriguez, the department’s spokesperson, told Miami Herald via email.
The anti-Semitic flyers appear to have beeen distributed by the Goyim Defense League, or GDL — a loose network of anti-Semites and white supremacists with leaders in Forida, New York, California and Colorado, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Read the full article. The GDL last appeared on JMG in November 2021 when an alleged member was charged with torching a Texas synagogue. Last May, members of the group filmed themselves driving around Miami’s Coconut Grove with “Hitler Was Right” displayed on their van.
This morning hundreds of homes in our community found plastic bags outside their homes filled with a hateful anti-Semitic flyer and small pebbles. @MiamiBeachPD is actively investigating to determine their origin. As a precaution we’ve increased patrols in our neighborhoods and… pic.twitter.com/5bx0RvnRoD
Stalking the stage while brandishing a tomahawk at the rally, McKay declared that “World War IV” is underway and warned doctors and nurses that if they “have the courage to kill our people, you better have the courage to stand in a direct crosshairs of Patriot Streetfighter because this is now going to happen.”
Following his remarks at the event, McKay sat down for an interview with David Scarlett of the program “His Glory” where McKay explicitly threatened violence.
“I’m going to name names—show pictures where I can—these are the nurses, doctors involved in murdering these people, and I’m going to start pushing these people into the public eye,” McKay said. “Let’s see how they like that battlefield.”
“We can’t allow the enemy or anybody to use our virtues against us,” he continued. “I don’t allow anybody to use the semantics of language or use my virtues against me. This is war. It’s gonna get bloody, and I’m going to get ugly too; no less ugly than any 1776 preacher that dropped his Bible on the lectern, grabbed his muzzle loader or musket, and went out and put balls and bullets inside people and watched blood flow on a battlefield. That’s what they had to do. That’s the name of Christ.”
“It’s an evil enemy,” McKay declared. “Any of the minions, including the doctors and nurses who were part of it—knowingly or unknowingly, that’s not for me to sort out—but they need to know what’s coming next. And that’s the only other battle that I can see in my future now coming up after what happened to Cirsten W.”
Donald Trump’s pick to become Arizona’s top elections official raised more campaign cash in 2021 than his two potential Democratic opponents combined — a sign of MAGA-world’s deep engagement in taking over under-the-radar positions in charge of running battleground state elections.
State Rep. Mark Finchem, whom Trump endorsed for Arizona secretary of state in September of last year, has made the former president’s lies about the 2020 election results a cornerstone of his campaign.
Having failed to prevent certification of the 2020 election, Trump and his followers are targeting state and local offices that will be involved in running the next presidential election, boosting loyalists who cast doubt on the 2020 vote and pouring energy into races that typically see little engagement.
Arizona Representative Mark Finchem called the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville a “Deep State” operation facilitated by the media and Democrats in a 2017 blog post on his campaign website.
He has described himself as a member of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government militia movement, and sponsored legislation that would allow Arizona to ignore U.S. Supreme Court rulings.
In the August 15, 2017, blog post, Finchem denied that members of the American far-right were behind the violent “Unite the Right” rally, where one person was murdered and dozens injured by a neo-Nazi who rammed his car into a group of counter-protesters.
At the QAnon ‘Awaken America’ Conference in Dallas, man in audience asks panel including Michael Flynn, and AZ Senators Wendy Rogers and Mark Finchem, which govt agencies should be disbanded “in light of the Maxwell/Epstein trial.” They responded: FBI, CIA, NSA and CDC. pic.twitter.com/qIIiGcpyKl
Now, in AZ and other states, Trump loyalists are being installed in state electoral positions. The AZ SoS seat is also on the ballot. One GOP candidate, Mark Finchem, is a member of the Oath Keepers & argued Arizona's votes should be given to Trump. pic.twitter.com/fEBvA7Wi71
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