Fogbow

The Allegheny County Health Department is no longer releasing daily COVID case numbers, a change signaling a shift in how the agency is monitoring the pandemic in the region.

Acknowledging factors that complicate the accuracy of official case counts, Dr. Debra L. Bogen, director of ACHD, announced at a March 16 press conference that the health department has begun to move away from viewing case numbers as a primary metric to assess the extent of community spread of COVID-19.

“As our case data becomes less usable because more and more people are, fortunately, able to test themselves at home, we are less able to rely on that as a source of information,” Bogen said at the press conference, “and hospitalizations lag so we can’t use that in real time.”

“We are really switching from trying to prevent all cases to trying to prevent severe outcomes — hospitals and deaths — and trying to protect the health care system so that they can do the other important work out there,” Bogen told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on March 17.



Wastewater is a wonderful opportunity to look at our population as a whole and how much virus we are shedding into our sewershed,” said Bogen. She added that ACHD has been collecting samples of the county’s wastewater three times a week and sending them to a Fla. lab for analysis, although they plan to develop local testing capacity.

ACHD hopes wastewater monitoring can help bypass some of the problems presented by official COVID testing data. In contrast to official case numbers, which require individuals to go out and get a COVID test in order to make it into health department data, individuals don’t have to opt into wastewater monitoring. Wastewater also captures the viral shedding of asymptomatic people, who may never think to get tested for COVID in the first place.

WaPo Covid Newsletter wrote:The latest

Florida and other Republican-led states are trying to use federal covid aid to finance tax cuts. The $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package was meant to help states fight the pandemic, shore up local economies and prepare for a potential recession. Congress explicitly told states not to use the funds to subsidize tax cuts or make up for reductions in tax revenue, because once the federal funds dried up there would be budget shortfalls with no easy fix. States have challenged that rule in court – and most of them have won.

A luxury nursing home in West Palm Beach, Fla., that diverted the first available coronavirus vaccines away from vulnerable people to wealthy donors in December 2020 agreed to pay $1.75 million to settle legal claims against it. “Do not be weak be strong you have the opportunity to take advantage of everyone who needs the shot and figure out what they have and what we can go after,” the nursing home’s CEO wrote in a text to the fundraising team, according to the Justice Department. The company, MorseLife Health System, denied the allegations levelled by the Justice Department, but agreed to settle “to avoid the expense and distraction of protracted litigation.”

Fauci to be deposed in lawsuit from Missouri’s Schmitt claiming free speech violations

Daniel Desrochers
Tue, November 22, 2022 at 7:51 PM·2 min read

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt will depose Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, on Wednesday, as part of an ongoing lawsuit that accuses the Biden Administration of coordinating with social media companies to stifle free speech.

The deposition is part of a May lawsuit filed by Schmitt, who was elected to the U.S. Senate earlier this month, and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry that attempts to show the Biden Administration violated the first amendment by working with social media companies to limit speech, particularly around COVID-19 and elections.

“Since we filed our landmark lawsuit, we have uncovered documents and discovery that show clear coordination between the Biden Administration and social media companies on censoring speech, but we’re not done yet. We plan to get answers on behalf of the American people. Stay tuned.”

The Department of Justice and the Republican attorneys general have gone back and forth for months over what records needed to be released and whether certain figures — like Fauci and former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki — should have to produce emails or be deposed, though both requests were granted by a District Court judge in Louisiana.



https://www.yahoo.com/news/fauci-depose ... 01489.html