October, 2020 | últimas notícias

How to spot a red or blue ‘mirage’ in early election night results – CNN

Washington (CNN)Election night will be an unusual experience this year. Early results that pop up shortly after the polls close might look very different from the final outcome, because of unprecedented levels of mail-in ballots and early voting due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Related interactive: Mail-in ballots: When every state starts counting

CNN’s Jennifer Agiesta, Stephanie Becker, Aaron Cooper, Annie Grayer, Sarah Jorgensen, Caroline Kenny, Ashley Killough, Pamela Kirkland, Adam Levy, Katie Lobosco, Jason Morris, Sara Murray, Bob Ortega, Leslie Perrot, Taylor Romine, Devon Sayers and Gregory Wallace contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/30/politics/red-blue-mirage-election-results/index.html

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LAPD Responds To Car Show In Downtown Los Angeles – CBS Los Angeles

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Federal Documents Show Which Hospitals Are Filling Up With COVID Patients : Shots – Health News – NPR

The ICU at Tampa General Hospital in Tampa, Fla., was 99% full this week, according to an internal report produced by the federal government. It’s among numerous hospitals the report highlighted with ICUs filled to over 90% capacity.

Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty

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Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty

The ICU at Tampa General Hospital in Tampa, Fla., was 99% full this week, according to an internal report produced by the federal government. It’s among numerous hospitals the report highlighted with ICUs filled to over 90% capacity.

Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty

As coronavirus cases rise swiftly around the country, surpassing both the spring and summer surges, health officials brace for a coming wave of hospitalization and deaths. Knowing which hospitals in which communities are reaching capacity could be key to an effective response to the growing crisis. That information is gathered by the federal government — but not shared openly with the public.

NPR has obtained documents that give a snapshot of data the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services collects and analyzes daily. The documents — reports sent to agency staffers — highlight trends in hospitalizations and pinpoint cities nearing full hospital capacity and facilities under stress. They paint a granular picture of the strain on hospitals across the country that could help local citizens decide when to take extra precautions against COVID-19.

Withholding this information from the public and the research community is a missed opportunity to help prevent outbreaks and even save lives, say public health and data experts who reviewed the documents for NPR.

“At this point, I think it’s reckless. It’s endangering people,” says Ryan Panchadsaram, co-founder of the website COVID Exit Strategy and a former data official in the Obama administration. “We’re now in the third wave, and I think our only way out is really open, transparent and actionable information.”

The documents show that detailed information hospitals report to HHS every day is reviewed and analyzed — but circulation seems to be limited to a few dozen government staffers from HHS and its agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health, according to distribution lists reviewed by NPR. Only one member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Admiral Brett Giroir, appears to receive the documents directly.

“Our goal is to be as transparent as possible, while still protecting privacy,” an HHS spokesperson wrote in an email to NPR. “HHS and the White House Coronavirus Task Force utilize hospital capacity data to gain greater insights into how COVID-19 is spreading and impacting the population, and to better inform response efforts like staff deployments and supply shipments.”

What data is being collected and shared internally?

The daily reports show county, city and hospital-level details, as well as national analyses that HHS does not post online.

A page from a report shared internally to HHS staffers presents hospital data from Oct. 27, including a list of cities where hospital and ICU beds are filling up.

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For instance, the most recent report obtained by NPR, dated Oct 27, lists cities where hospitals are filling up, including the metro areas of Atlanta, Minneapolis and Baltimore, where in-patient hospital beds are over 80% full. It also lists specific hospitals reaching max capacity, including facilities in Tampa, Birmingham and New York that are at over 95% ICU capacity and at risk of running out of intensive care beds.

In reviewing the analysis obtained by NPR, Panchadsaram says the local and hospital-level data HHS is collecting would be very useful to researchers and health leaders. “That stuff isn’t easy to find at a national level,” he says, “There’s no one place [publicly] you can go to get all that data.”

Hospitalization data is invaluable in looking ahead to see where and when outbreaks are getting worse, says Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington: “Right now, as we head into the fall and winter surge, we’re trying to put more emphasis on predicting where systems will be overwhelmed.”

But what’s missing for this kind of planning, he says, is “exactly the information” that appears in the internal report.

NPR has reviewed several of these reports generated in the past month. They present trends in hospital utilization, including increases in ventilator usage, along with a growing number of inpatient and ICU beds being occupied by COVID-19 patients. The October 27th report showed that all three measures have increased by 14%-16% in the past month.

Around 24% of U.S. hospitals are using more than 80% of their ICU capacity, based on reporting from nearly 5,000 “priority facilities,” and more hospitals have joined their ranks in recent weeks.

A page from a report shared internally to HHS staffers shows the rising percentage of hospital ICUs that are at or above 80% capacity. It reflects data as of Oct. 27.

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A page from a report shared internally to HHS staffers shows the rising percentage of hospital ICUs that are at or above 80% capacity. It reflects data as of Oct. 27.

HHS

Researchers say observing these trend lines can help the nation know how to prepare for surge and be ready to intervene before systems become overwhelmed.

Daily hospitalization numbers in particular are key measures for tracking pandemic hotspots, Murray says, because they reflect the number of severe COVID-19 cases in a community.

“The best possible measure of where we are in the pandemic, and the one we would want to anchor modeling to, is daily hospitalizations,” he says, which give an early warning of deaths that will likely follow.

Panchadasaram’s data-tracking site COVID Exit Strategy pulls state-level hospital capacity estimates from HHS when they’re updated, which generally happens once a week. In reviewing the reports obtained by NPR, Panchadsaram says it’s clear vital data is flowing into HHS daily. “But sharing with the public seems to be an afterthought,” he says.

Gaps in transparency for state and local leaders

HHS tells NPR that more than 800 state-level employees have access to the daily hospitalization data it gathers, but only for their own state, unless another state grants them permission to view its data.

Without a larger view into national or regional data some states, like Tennessee, which has eight bordering states, are missing out on valuable regional data, says Melissa McPheeters, who directs the Center for Improving the Public’s Health through Informatics at Vanderbilt University.

“Hospitals in Tennessee serve patients who are from Arkansas and Mississippi and Kentucky and Georgia and vice versa, and so we’re a little bit blind to what’s going on there,” she says. “When we see hospitals that are particularly near those state borders having increases, one of the things we can’t tell is: Is that because hospitals in an adjacent state are full? What’s going on there? And that could be a really important piece of the picture.”

Lisa M. Lee, former chief science officer for public health surveillance at CDC, now at Virginia Tech, says the federal government could help states work together across borders.

“It’s very challenging for states to get the multi-state view of things,” she says. “It’s just a lot easier when there’s a knowledgeable third-party who can pull the data together, make them consistent across states and actually tell the story of what the information shows.” Typically, she says, this role would be fulfilled by the CDC, but the agency was stripped of its role in collecting COVID-19 hospital data in July.

This kind of visibility into data could help policymakers decide how best to curb the spread of the virus. McPheeters and colleagues at Vanderbilt put out a report this week that found that Tennessee counties without mask mandates had more rapid increases in hospitalizations. That kind of analysis and insight would be possible at a much larger scale if HHS shared more granular hospitalization data, she says.

It could influence behavior among the public, says Lee. “The neighborhood data, the county data and metro-area data can be really helpful for people to say, ‘Whoa, they’re not kidding, this is right here,'” she says. “It can help public health prevention folks get their messages across and get people to change their behavior.”

A page from a report shared internally to HHS staffers shows a list of health care facilities where beds are filling up, reflecting data as of Oct. 27.

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A page from a report shared internally to HHS staffers shows a list of health care facilities where beds are filling up, reflecting data as of Oct. 27.

HHS

A controversial data switch

Experts who reviewed the internal documents for NPR say that even for the limited group of federal employees who get them, the daily reports are not as useful as they could be.

“We’re so focused on counting things but not contextualizing them,” explains McPheeters. A community hospital might become overwhelmed at a different point than a big academic hospital, and without that context, she says, it’s impossible to tell: “Is 75% [full] a good thing or is 75% a bad thing?”

Health data experts NPR consulted had ideas on how to improve the analysis. For instance, Panchadsaram suggested that some of the county-level charts, currently presented as raw numbers, would be more useful if analyzed per capita. “You really need to adjust it to the number of people [in an area] to get a sense of where things are being overwhelmed,” he says.

And the quality of the underlying data is a concern. Health experts say the data quality was compromised by a controversial shift in data collection from CDC to HHS in July, and that the issues with data quality have not been fully resolved.

Hospitals have had to adjust to onerous new reporting requirements, and the hospital data is no longer checked and analyzed by seasoned epidemiologists and other experts at CDC.

The daily trend documents circulated at HHS include this disclaimer: “This analysis depends on the data reported by hospitals. To the extent that the data is missing or inaccurate, this analysis will also reflect those issues.”

According to HHS data posted on Monday, just 62% of the nation’s hospitals reported all the required information last week.

But greater transparency, even of incomplete data, can be invaluable in a crisis, experts say.

HHS told NPR that since it took over collecting hospital capacity data, it has “consistently displayed state-level hospitalization data to help inform the public about COVID-19 prevalence in their communities.”

But public health experts say the state level data isn’t detailed enough — and since the government is putting the effort into generating more granular daily analyses, it should share them.

“Even though they’re collecting all these things and putting so much effort behind it, it gets blocked when it tries to get out of the door,” Panchadsaram says.

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/10/30/929239481/internal-documents-reveal-covid-19-hospitalization-data-the-government-keeps-hid

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UPS Locates Contents of Tucker Carlson’s Package After He Said Incriminating Biden Documents Went Missing – Newsweek

United Parcel Service (UPS) reportedly located the contents of Tucker Carlson‘s misplaced package on Thursday, shortly after the Fox News host said he had obtained incriminating documents about Joe Biden‘s family that were subsequently lost en route to California.

A UPS spokesperson confirmed that company employees found and identified Carlson’s missing parcel by midday on Thursday, less than 24 hours after Carlson said it was missing on Fox News, according to reports from multiple news outlets.

“After an extensive search, we have found the contents of the package and are arranging for its return,” the spokesperson reportedly said. “UPS will always focus first on our customers and will never stop working to solve issues and make things right.”

During a segment that aired Wednesday as part of his Fox News program, Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson said a source sent confidential documents concerning Biden’s family to the network at the beginning of the week.

“We believe those documents are authentic, are real and damning,” he told viewers, intimating later that the documents pertained to the presidential nominee’s son Hunter Biden and his business dealings in China and the Ukraine.

Similar claims, which resurfaced in the final weeks leading up to Election Day, leveraged accusations against the former vice president in connection with Hunter’s supposed business deals. The validity of these accusations has been questioned, given the timing of their release and the absence of source testimony or definitive evidence to support them.

On Wednesday, Carlson recounted Fox producers’ efforts to dispatch the Biden documents via a cross-country shipment to California. He did not name the shipping company explicitly during the segment but said that “the Biden documents never arrived in Los Angeles” as planned. He said subsequent correspondence with the mail carrier confirmed the package was stalled at a sorting facility without the documents inside.

“Tuesday morning we received word from the shipping company that our package had been opened and the contents were missing,” Carlson said, adding, “Those documents have vanished.”

He continued, “As of tonight, the company has no idea and no working theory about what happened to this trove of materials, documents that are directly relevant to the presidential campaign just six days out.”

Carlson’s remarks about the alleged Biden documents and missing package drew widespread scrutiny, as many wondered why a news organization would risk sending classified documents through the mail before photocopying the pages for safekeeping. Others asked why Fox News would decide to mail the documents when they could have been scanned and sent digitally.

Newsweek reached out to UPS and Fox News for further comment but did not receive replies in time for publication.

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Source Article from https://www.newsweek.com/ups-locates-contents-tucker-carlsons-package-after-he-said-incriminating-biden-documents-went-1543323

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Live Updates: 2020 presidential race, Biden vs. Trump – Fox News

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Trump touts record-shattering GDP growth amid surging COVID numbers

Fox News chief White House correspondent John Roberts has the latest on ‘Special Report’

The presidential race is entering the final stretch between President Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden, with the election just four days away.

Biden and Trump are both scheduled to hold events in Minnesota on Friday, a day after the two candidates took aim at each other and courted the dwindling ranks of undecided voters at campaign stops in Florida on Thursday.

Meanwhile, filmmaker Michael Moore on Thursday said he doesn’t believe that the polls showing the former vice president leading Trump, are accurate.

Follow below for more updates on the 2020 presidential race. Mobile users click here.

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/live-updates-2020-presidential-race-biden-vs-trump

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O’Brien: Trump put an end to Obama-Biden ‘leading from behind foreign policy’ toward China – Fox News

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How American foreign policy has changed under President Trump

National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien explains on ‘The Story’

President Trump successfully ended Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s foreign policy of “leading from behind,” especially when it comes to American interests in Asia, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien told “The Story” Thursday.

O’Brien told host Martha MacCallum that under the president’s predecessor, America had “turned a blind eye to Chinese unfair trade practices.

“It turned a blind eye to Chinese intellectual property theft of all of our great innovations,” O’Brien added. “It turned a great blind eye to China hollowing out the American Midwest and our manufacturing capability.”

The adviser referred to Trump as the “first president in my adult lifetime” to recognize the threat from Beijing, and respond with tariffs and consequences for intellectual property theft.

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O’Brien said Trump has adopted Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” model of building up the military during a period of noninterventionism, letting the world to see the military capacity of the United States as a warning.

“All I can do is look at what we faced when Trump came into office and what President Trump has done,” he said, “and it’s been pretty spectacular what the president has done with respect to China.”

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/robert-obrien-trump-foreign-policy-obama-biden

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Hawaii mail-in ballots have already surpassed entire 2016 voter turnout | TheHill – The Hill

Voter turnout for the Nov. 3 election in Hawaii has already surpassed the state’s total voter turnout in 2016, with less than one week to go before Election Day.

The Aloha State has returned 457,294 ballots according to Honolulu Civil Beat, putting the state’s voter turnout at 55 percent.

According to the U.S. Elections Project, the state is now at 104.5 percent of its total 2016 voter turnout.

The 2020 number also breaks the state’s last record for votes cast in a general election, which was set in 2008, according to Honolulu Civil Beat.

A record number of people in the U.S. are expected to vote early and vote by mail due to the public health concerns caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Multiple states have been setting early voting records.

In Texas for example, more than 8.5 million people have voted since Oct. 13, which is 94 percent of all the votes cast in the 2016 general election.

Maryland also broke a statewide record for a single-day early voting record. On the first day of in-person voting Monday, more than 161,000 people cast their ballots, upending the record of 140,000 in-person ballots cast on the final day of early voting in 2016.

Florida and Alabama have also broken their own records this month in terms of early voting and mail-in ballots.

More than 80 million Americans have already voted early in the Nov. 3 election, according to the U.S. Elections Project, representing 58.6 percent of all votes cast in the 2016 general election.

Source Article from https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/523451-hawaii-mail-in-ballots-have-already-surpassed-entire-2016-voter-turnout

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‘No Pandemic Exception To The Constitution’: Court Rejects Minn. Ballot Extension – NPR

Mail-in ballots waiting to be processed by election workers in Salt Lake City, Utah.

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Mail-in ballots waiting to be processed by election workers in Salt Lake City, Utah.

George Frey/AFP via Getty Images

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has sided with Minnesota Republicans in a dispute on mail-in ballots, deeming that absentee votes received by mail after 8 p.m. and in person after 3 p.m. should be separated from other ballots.

The move means that the fate of those later-received ballots will likely fall in the lap of another court, which could eventually declare the votes invalid.

This ruling reverses an extension by Secretary of State Steve Simon to accommodate voters who may have been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.

The ruling came down to a vote of 2-1 on the three-person panel.

“The rule of law, as established by the United States Constitution and the Minnesota Legislature, dictates these rules must be followed notwithstanding the Secretary’s instructions to the contrary,” the assenting judges wrote in explaining their decision.

“There is no pandemic exception to the Constitution.”

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2020/10/29/929341533/no-pandemic-exception-to-the-constitution-court-rejects-minn-ballot-extension

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Arizona’s new COVID-19 cases surpass 1K for 3rd straight day; upward trends continue – The Arizona Republic

Arizona reported more than 1,000 new COVID-19 cases for a third day in a row, and the state reported 13 new known deaths on Thursday as upward trends continued.

The past several weeks have seen relatively higher daily case reports as the virus spreads at its fastest rate in Arizona since June, although case numbers are still well below where they were at during the summer peak.

Arizona’s reproduction rate for the SARS-CoV-2 virus was at 1.16 on Thursday, the same as in early June, according to rt.live, a tracking website created by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger using data from the COVID Tracking Project.

The reproduction rate refers to the average number of people who become infected by an infectious person. If it’s above 1.0, COVID-19 will spread quickly. From late June to early September, Arizona’s reproduction rate was at or below 1.0, meaning infections slowed. Since then, it has gradually increased.

Identified COVID-19 cases in Arizona rose by 1,315 on Thursday to 242,480, and known deaths were at 5,918, according to the daily report from the Arizona Department of Health Services.

The number of patients hospitalized statewide for known or suspected COVID-19 cases rose slightly on Wednesday to 874 from 871 on Tuesday. Wednesday’s total is the highest number reported since Aug. 26. At the peak of Arizona’s surge in July, the number of hospitalized patients suspected or confirmed to have the virus exceeded 3,000.

The number of patients with suspected or known COVID-19 in intensive care units across Arizona was at 186 on Wednesday, down slightly from Tuesday’s total of 188. Friday’s 191 ICU beds in use was the highest level since Sept. 9. The level is far below what it was in July, when ICU beds in use for COVID-19 reached 970.

The number of Arizonans with confirmed and suspected COVID-19 on ventilators was at 95 on Wednesday. In mid-July, as many as 687 patients across the state with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 were on ventilators.

Thursday’s dashboard shows 86% of inpatient beds and 86% of ICU beds in use, which includes people being treated for COVID-19 and other patients. COVID-19 patients were using 10% of all inpatient beds and 11% of ICU beds. Overall, 29% of ventilators were in use.

Percent positivity, which refers to the percent of COVID-19 diagnostic tests that are positive, has gone up slightly, which many health experts consider an early indicator of a spike in illnesses.

WATCH LIVE: Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey to give COVID-19 update

Of known test results from last week, the percent positivity was 6%, up from 5% the week prior, according to the state, which has a unique way of calculating percent positivity. Before the past two weeks, percent positivity was at 4% for six weeks straight, according to state data.

Johns Hopkins University calculates Arizona’s seven-day moving average of percent positives at 9.8% on Thursday, up from 9.3% on Wednesday. It shows the state’s percent positivity had reached a relative plateau and is now trending slightly upward.

A positivity rate of 5% is considered a good benchmark that the spread of the disease is under control.

The Arizona Department of Health Services on Tuesday released a video that notes a 57% increase in weekly new cases from September’s numbers and tells state residents to “remain vigilant” about following COVID-19 prevention practices like physical distancing and wearing a mask in public.

What you need to know about Thursday’s numbers

Reported cases in Arizona: 242,480.

Cases increased by 1,315 or 0.54% from Wednesday’s 241,165 identified cases since the outbreak began.

Cases by county: 156,736 in Maricopa, 28,067 in Pima, 13,735 in Yuma, 11,937 in Pinal, 6,410 in Navajo, 5,243 in Coconino, 4,371 in Mohave, 3,965 in Apache, 3,021 in Santa Cruz, 2,961 in Yavapai, 2,171 in Cochise, 1,945 in Gila, 1,197 in Graham, 620 in La Paz and 101 in Greenlee, according to state numbers.

The rate of cases per 100,000 people is highest in Yuma County, followed by Santa Cruz, Navajo and Apache counties. The rate in Yuma County is 5,973 cases per 100,000 people. By comparison, the U.S. average rate is 2,645 cases per 100,000 people, according to data released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Navajo Nation reported 11,462 cases and 575 confirmed deaths as of Wednesday. The Navajo Nation includes parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

The Arizona Department of Corrections said 2,636 inmates had tested positive for COVID-19 as of Wednesday, including 995 in Tucson; 40,973 inmates statewide have been tested.

A total of 762 prison staff members have self-reported testing positive, the state corrections department said. Eighteen incarcerated people in Arizona have been confirmed to have died of COVID-19, with 10 additional deaths under investigation.

While race/ethnicity is unknown for 30% of all COVID-19 cases statewide, 31% of cases are Hispanic or Latino, 26% are white, 6% are Native American, 3% are Black and 1% are Asian/Pacific Islander.

Laboratories have completed 1,745,662 diagnostic tests for COVID-19, 10.2% of which have come back positive. That number now includes both PCR and antigen testing. The percentage of positive tests had increased since mid-May but began decreasing in July. Last week it was at 6%, up from 5% the week prior and 4% for six weeks before that. The state numbers leave out data from labs that do not report electronically.

ADHS has begun including probable cases as anyone with a positive antigen test, another type of test to determine current infection. Antigen tests (not related to antibody tests) are a newer type of COVID-19 diagnostic test that use a nasal swab or another fluid sample to test for current infection. Results are typically produced within 15 minutes.

Source Article from https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-health/2020/10/29/arizona-coronavirus-update-oct-29-new-cases-surpass-1-k-3rd-straight-day/6070369002/

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