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A World Without Sports

The Conversation
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A World Without Sports

Lars Dzikus, University of Tennessee

Baseball’s opening day came and went. The Olympics have been postponed. Football in the fall? Don’t count on it.

With COVID-19 infections and deaths rising each day, the cancellation of live sporting events might seem like an afterthought. But in the coming weeks and months, their absence will undoubtedly be felt.

This isn’t the first time sports have been put on hold. During previous crises and conflicts, sports have been stopped. But in the past, the reprieve was brief; sports went on to act as a way to bring Americans together, helping them persevere and, ultimately, heal.

This time’s different.

An American ‘religion’

Sports are so important to so many of us that some have likened them to a modern religion, replete with rituals, saints and shrines.

“Sports are more than games, meets and matches,” sociologist Jay Coakley has observed. “They’re important aspects of social life that have meanings going far beyond scores and performance statistics.”

Research suggests that watching sports can benefit physical well-being. Fandom can also be linked to psychological benefits such as an increased sense of belonging. When spectators experience social connectedness to other fans, it can reduce negative emotions, like depression and isolation.

Enduring – and emerging stronger

For these reasons, sports, during times of crisis, often act as a salve.

At the onset of the Civil War, baseball was less than two decades old, and the first two years of the war hit the young sport hard. As several players enlisted and others focused on civilian war efforts, many clubs folded or played reduced schedules.

Still, as historian George Kirsch has noted, baseball “endured the trial of civil war remarkably well, persisting and even progressing under trying circumstances.” Union soldiers brought the game to the battlefield, playing to stay fit and get some much-needed distraction. In the process, they exposed many of their fellow countrymen to the game for the first time. After the war, baseball’s popularity boomed.

Sports went on to endure both World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic.

A baseball player dons a face mask. George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images

The ranks of college football players, for example, were vastly depleted, with many student-athletes going into active duty. Others joined the newly established Student Army Training Corps on their campuses and were often kept out of practices and games. Still, the games went on, with freshmen permitted to fill the rosters.

Overseas, in Europe, millions of American troops continued to engage in baseball, football and boxing behind the front lines as a respite from the drudgery of trench warfare. Sports and athletics, according to historian Steve Pope, became “central components of military life.”

The first wave of the flu arrived in the U.S. in the spring of 1918, but the second, stronger wave hit right at the onset of the college football season.

Given the shortage of players due to the war, discussions to cancel the 1918 season were already underway when the flu returned.

Michigan had played only one game when the governor shut down public gatherings. A game against rival Michigan Agricultural College – now Michigan State – was postponed for concerns that “prolonged cheering at the games would weaken the throats of the spectators, thus making them more susceptible to the disease.” Nationwide, hundreds of college games were canceled.

Nonetheless, as flu cases subsided in November 1918, Michigan was able to play four more games. Undefeated Michigan and Pitt were titled co-champions, despite having played only five games each.

Bringing the country together

Following the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, some wondered whether it was even appropriate to hold sporting events. Then President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent the so-called “green light letter” to Major League Baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis in January 1942.

In it, Roosevelt wrote that “it would be best for the country to keep baseball going.” The people, he added, “ought to have a chance for recreation.” The 1942 season went on as scheduled. Women’s-only baseball leagues also became popular during this period. At its peak in 1948, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League attracted close to 1 million spectators.

More recently, 9/11 presented a major challenge to sports. As sporting events could present perfect targets for terrorists, security concerns and costs skyrocketed.

On the day of the attacks, Major League Baseball immediately postponed all 15 games; over the next six days, 91 games were canceled. The last time the league had canceled games without a player strike had been D-Day in 1944.

Yet games resumed on Sept. 17, and the World Series was played in November. The Super Bowl was also pushed back, but went on as planned.

According to sports scholar Rebecca Kraus, baseball’s return, in particular, “provided an emotional release, sense of hope and a place for the community to gather in its time of need, thus fulfilling its role as the national pastime.”

President George W. Bush throws the first pitch of Game 3 of the 2001 World Series.

E-sports into the void?

The current sports stoppage, however, is unprecedented. It touches every level of every game, in every country in the world, from the Olympics down to pickup basketball.

In the battle against the coronavirus, sports cannot be relied upon. In fact, sports are among the culprits: Officials have discovered that a February soccer match in Milan, Italy, led to a massive outbreak that accelerated the spread of the virus.

In all of this, there’s an important point to consider. We’re still processing the many jarring changes to our routines. And when sports return in a year or two, our perception of this strange hiatus will have certainly changed.

We might marvel at how quickly sports bounce back and pick up right where they left off. At the same time, when sports do resume, who could blame fans for being wary about attending games?

Sports shouldn’t be taken for granted. In the great scheme of things, organized sports are a relatively recent phenomenon – less than 200 years old in the United States. Who knows what sports will look like 50, 100 or 200 years from now. Starting at about 776 B.C., the ancient Olympic Games lasted for 12 centuries. Today they’re long gone.

Could, over time, the steady threat of global calamity also relegate our current conception of sports to ancient history?

Already, one relative newcomer to the sporting scene has filled a void. Despite some initial hiccups, televised e-sport tournaments are still being held as planned.

With 1.3 million viewers following a virtual race, the recent inaugural eNASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational Series on Fox Sports became the most-watched e-sport competition in American television history.

[You need to understand the coronavirus pandemic, and we can help. Read The Conversation’s newsletter.]

Lars Dzikus, Associate Professor in Sport Studies, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Capital One Arena, home of the Washington Capitals, sits empty. AP Photo/Nick Wass

Millions of Essential Workers Are Being Left Out of COVID-19 Workplace Safety Protections, Thanks to OSHA

ProPublica
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Millions of Essential Workers Are Being Left Out of COVID-19 Workplace Safety Protections, Thanks to OSHA

Even as the federal worker-safety agency has been inundated with complaints, it has rolled back safety standards and virtually eliminated non-health care workplaces from government protection.

by Michael Grabell, Bernice Yeung and Maryam Jameel April 16, 7:52 p.m. EDT

As news emerged that the novel coronavirus was infecting hundreds of workers in meatpacking plants, Gregoria Rivas began worrying that her chicken processing facility in North Carolina wasn’t doing enough to protect workers like her from the virus.

There was no social distancing, she said. Everywhere she went at the Case Farms plant, there were dozens of workers crowded into a small space. In the locker room, where everyone put on their uniforms. On the cutting line, where she spent eight hours slicing chicken breasts. In the cafeteria during lunch. Even at break time, when workers lined up to use the bathroom.

“I tried to bring my own face mask that I had bought at the pharmacy, but they wouldn’t let me wear it,” said Rivas, 31. “When they wouldn’t let me wear my own mask, I went to the nurse’s station at the plant, and they said there were no masks available.” (Mike Popowycz, vice chairman of Case Farms, said it’s taking the pandemic “very seriously” and has taken several measures to protect workers.)

So Rivas said she called the state’s Department of Labor with the help of a local worker’s center.

Rivas is far from alone. Nearly 4,000 workers from across the country have gone to the federal agency that polices worker health and safety with concerns that their employers haven’t done enough to protect them from the coronavirus as of April 3, according to records obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Some 27% of the complaints to OSHA came from the health care industry, from workers on the front lines of providing COVID-19 care. Another 72% came from other types of employees, with large quantities from manufacturing and retail workers, with the remainder listed as unknown.

Even as OSHA has been inundated with COVID-19-related complaints, the agency has issued a series of guidelines that roll back safety standards and virtually eliminate non-health care workers from government protection.

That poses a serious risk to millions of essential workers, many of whom live paycheck-to-paycheck, safety advocates say. Dozens of workers, including meat cutters, supermarket greeters, airport screeners and bus drivers have died as the disease has spread.

And it raises significant questions as President Donald Trump and several governors lay out plans to reopen the economy.

“Workers are getting sick and dying, and the government agency that they have turned to for 40 years to protect them from everything from chemicals in the workplace to unguarded machines to the H1N1 pandemic has said, ‘Sorry, you’re on your own,’” said Debbie Berkowitz, a former top OSHA policy adviser now at the worker-oriented National Employment Law Project.

A spokesperson for the Department of Labor, OSHA’s parent agency, said in a statement: “Since the emergence of COVID-19, OSHA is taking swift and decisive action to protect workers in high-risk industries.” The statement continued: “OSHA has a number of tools it can use to protect workers from workplace hazards caused by COVID-19. … However, OSHA is providing enforcement discretion to help employers comply with OSHA requirements during the challenging times the pandemic has created and to help ensure that PPE [personal protective equipment] is available in workplaces — including healthcare facilities — where it is needed most.”

The government has received a raft of complaints from non-medical workers in an array of non-medical industries.

More than a dozen employees at an Intel computer chip fabrication plant in Oregon filed reports with the state worker protection agency saying they weren’t able to maintain a 6-foot distance from their co-workers. “You have to be literally 2 inches from someone’s face or body,” said Brent Macias, one of the employees who filed a complaint and developed coronavirus symptoms. A spokesperson for Intel said the company is taking steps to implement social distancing at its manufacturing sites, such as staggering shift changes and limiting activities that require close proximity.

In Florida, 35 fast food workers at the Orlando airport filed a complaint with the federal OSHA claiming that their employer, HMSHost, sometimes failed to offer hot water to wash their hands and provided them with little protective gear. “They were not helping us,” said Maria Gonzalez, a cashier who made $11.21 an hour before being furloughed in late March. “They were not doing anything — no training, no gloves, no masks, no hand sanitizer — pretty much nothing to protect us.” At least one HMSHost employee at the airport has tested positive for COVID-19, according to a union organizer who spoke with the ill worker. (Spokeswoman Sheila Bliss said HMSHost has implemented protective and safety measures that go beyond recommendations by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Our associates and travelers remain our greatest concern and we will take all recommended measures to protect them,” she said.)

Over the past two weeks, OSHA and the CDC have issued a series of guidelines and directives that have weakened protections for front-line workers outside the medical field. For example, the CDC released guidance on April 8 that critical workers who’d been exposed to the coronavirus could return to work as long as they don’t have any symptoms and wear a mask. The guidance came despite comments just three days earlier from the government’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, that 25% to 50% of the people with the virus may be asymptomatic. (Everyone else who has been exposed is advised to self-quarantine for 14 days.)

This was followed by directives from OSHA. Last Friday, the agency announced that it would not require employers outside health care, emergency response or corrections to investigate whether COVID-19 cases among employees are work-related unless multiple people in the same vicinity get sick.

Then on Monday, OSHA issued an enforcement directive detailing its approach to handling COVID-19 complaints. Medical workers, who have been heavily affected by the virus, have been prioritized. At least 88 U.S. health care workers have died from COVID-19, according to an unofficial list kept by the website Medscape.

But OSHA said it would not formally handle any complaints about the coronavirus from other essential workers. Instead, the agency will send a letter to the employer, which then has five business days to notify the agency about how it has addressed the complaint. The memo notes that these complaints “will not normally result in an on-site inspection.” The agency said it would “consider” an inspection if it believes the response is inadequate.

“It totally excludes everybody but health care,” said David Michaels, former OSHA director in the Obama administration. “Everyone else is told that there is nothing that OSHA could do.”

But Ed Foulke, who oversaw OSHA from 2006 to 2008, said the agency is correct to establish priorities when there are limited resources and inspectors are working from home. “This is an unprecedented event and the reasonable approach is to say, ‘Where is the greatest need?’” he said.

“OSHA clearly cares” about non-medical workers, Foulke said. “An inspector can’t be sent out for every complaint. You can’t do it. You have to be realistic.”

Still, the Trump administration’s approach differs from how other infectious diseases have been handled in the past, from the hepatitis B outbreak in hospitals and the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s to H1N1 and the Ebola virus in more recent years, according to longtime industry professionals. In each of those cases, OSHA issued more forceful enforcement guidance and carried a stronger public presence. Now, the agency isn’t even on the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

For example, during the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009, OSHA took additional steps to safeguard worker health, including issuing a directive that required employers to abide by CDC guidance. By contrast, OSHA’s COVID-19 memo states that inspectors should consult CDC guidance and grants them latitude to use discretion even when an employer’s measures are not as protective as what the CDC recommends.

In addition, during H1N1, OSHA laid out specific scenarios that could result in violations under the general duty standard, detailing the nitty-gritty of sneeze guards and the setup of “airborne infection isolation rooms.” Today, the Trump administration provides no such guidance for inspectors; in fact, it emphasizes the high legal bar for inspectors to cite employers under the standard.

“It’s written to make it much more difficult to issue citations,” Michaels said. “It gives the employers certain outs as to why they’re not following CDC guidelines.”

There have been no inspections resulting from COVID-19 complaints, said one OSHA employee — at least not in the OSHA region the employee works in. The OSHA staffer added that the agency could be more proactive in its response to these complaints. “It seems a lot of it is providing workers with information but not trying to address the particular issues people are raising,” the employee said. “We should be more forceful and direct in our interactions with the employer.” The OSHA employee asked to remain anonymous because the worker is not authorized to speak with reporters.

OSHA is limited in how it can respond because it doesn’t have a regulation it can enforce that’s directly related to airborne infectious diseases. (OSHA notes that there are eight regulations that may apply to coronavirus, including provisions related to hand-washing, personal protective equipment and an employer’s general duty to provide a safe workplace.)

But there are ways OSHA could have been more active, former agency officials and worker advocates say.

For example, an infectious disease standard was being drafted, but was never completed, during the Obama administration. It was shelved when Trump took office, according to federal rule-making documents.

In late January, as the coronavirus was spreading in China and beginning to arrive in the United States, Democratic congressional aides met with Department of Labor staff to urge them to issue a compliance directive and temporary emergency standard to protect health care workers.

Such a standard could easily be adapted to confront COVID-19, but Labor Department leaders questioned the need, a congressional aide who was at the meeting said. “There wasn’t a whole lot of consciousness about what was going to be coming down the line,” the aide said. “I think they weren’t taking the disease seriously and they certainly weren’t interested in enforcing.”

As COVID-19 cases began to multiply in early March, unions petitioned Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, requesting an emergency standard for health workers. And House Democrats began drafting language to insert into a coronavirus response bill that was rapidly working its way through Congress. The legislation would have required health care employers to implement an infectious disease exposure control plan. But the American Hospital Association said the provision would be “impossible to implement” because of the shortage of N95 respirator masks and would dramatically reduce the number of patients hospitals could treat. Congress stripped it from the bill.

Meanwhile, as America’s health care system began raising red flags about the shortage of safety gear, OSHA started issuing the first of several directives, rolling back standards intended to protect doctors and nurses. In mid-March, the agency suspended annual fit testing for N95 masks in an effort to conserve equipment.

As recorded cases reached the thousands, it issued a packet of tips for employers but emphasized that its recommendations were not enforceable.

In early April, as the supply shortage became ever more critical, OSHA relaxed other rules, allowing for the extended use and reuse of N95s and for respirators certified in other countries.

“Some of these, you are dealing with a crisis situation, they are moving to address the lack of equipment,” said Peg Seminario, former health and safety director of the AFL-CIO. “But every one of these is rolling back existing protections and requirements. It’s not putting out something new or more.”

The agency has been diminished in resources and leadership under the Trump administration, and former OSHA officials say that has dulled the agency’s response to COVID-19. “Their ability to deal with this virus is made even weaker by a lack of resources because the Trump administration has shrunk the agency to the point that they have no ability to respond,” said Berkowitz.

At the start of the year, OSHA had 862 federal inspectors, the lowest number in the agency’s history, according to data NELP obtained from the agency.

With OSHA playing a passive role, some governors have issued their own worker-safety mandates. On Sunday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order requiring employers to provide essential workers with masks to wear when they interact with the public. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy went further, ordering retail businesses to cut their maximum occupancy in half and install barriers between workers and customers.

Twenty-two states run their own occupational health and safety agencies for public and private workers, with federal approval, which are required to match or exceed federal regulations and directives. Some of them appear to be taking a more aggressive approach. In Oregon, where there have been nearly 2,800 COVID-19-related complaints to date, about a dozen inspections have been conducted across a variety of industries. The state agency is also conducting “spot checks” to ensure that employers who received and sent letters in response to a complaint are following through.

But a patchwork approach to keeping workers safe might not bode well for the plans to reopen businesses. In recent days, many of the largest outbreaks have been at work, highlighted by the spread of the disease to more than 600 workers at Smithfield Foods’ pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

That could raise the prospect of the disease reigniting if more precautions aren’t taken, according to public health experts. “Until there’s a real discussion about how workers beyond hospitals are going to be protected,” Michaels said, “I don’t see how we can be talking about bringing workers back.”

And that discussion could mean a lot for workers like Gregoria Rivas.

In North Carolina, Rivas said she received little help from the state’s OSHA when she called to voice her concerns around the possible spread of COVID-19 at Case Farms. On the other end of the phone line, Rivas said, an inspector took down her complaint but told her there wasn’t much the agency could do because it doesn’t have specific regulations for infectious diseases. The agency had made recommendations to businesses, but it had no power to enforce them, the inspector said.

(Natalie Bouchard of North Carolina’s Department of Labor said the agency investigates every complaint. In a statement, she confirmed the state has no occupational safety standard concerning COVID-19 but added that “it is the employer’s duty to provide each employee with a ‘place of employment free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious injury or serious physical harm to his employees.’”)

Discouraged by the response, Rivas, who has a 2-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter, decided to quit rather than risk infection. “I thought I was going to receive some answers that would reassure me,” she said. “But from what I understood, it didn’t matter what was happening, whether it’s a pandemic or not, the plant was going to continue working as normal.”

Do you have access to information about how the government is protecting — or not protecting — essential workers from the coronavirus that should be public? Email bernice.yeung@propublica.org.

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#MSStaysHome: Mississippians adapt to coronavirus era

Mississippi Today
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#MSStaysHome: Mississippians adapt to coronavirus era

Once the coronavirus reached Mississippi, officials began to take steps to slow the spread of the virus – urging social distancing, limiting public gatherings, closing schools and nonessential businesses – culminating in Gov. Tate Reeves’ shelter-in-place order.

Mississippians are adapting to a new reality. Here, readers share images showing how they are dealing with social distancing and quarantining during the COVID-19 pandemic. View a slideshow of submitted photos below.




Want to join #MSStaysHome?

Submit your photos to Eric Shelton here. Be sure to include where you live and where the photo was taken, the name of the person who took the photo, what’s happening in the photo and how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting you.  

The post #MSStaysHome: Mississippians adapt to coronavirus era appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi’s only abortion clinic still open, but a legal battle could be on the horizon

Mississippi Today
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Mississippi’s only abortion clinic still open, but a legal battle could be on the horizon

Rogelio V. Solis, AP

Jackson Women’s Health Organization clinic

The sole abortion clinic in Mississippi is open and accepting appointments while fully complying with state orders about COVID-19, according to an organization that represents the clinic in legal matters.

The Jackson Women’s Health Organization became a focal point of the state’s coronavirus response this week after Gov. Tate Reeves signed an executive order banning all elective and non-urgent surgeries and procedures until April 27. Reeves said the move is intended to slow the spread of the virus and preserve protective gear for health workers.

But the order raised questions about how elective surgeries are defined and whether that definition includes abortions.

Specifically, the executive order states that licensed health care professionals and facilities, “shall postpone all surgeries and procedures that are not immediately medically necessary to correct a serious medical condition of, or to preserve the life of, a patient who without immediate performance of the surgery or procedure would be at risk for serious adverse medical consequences or death, as determined by the patient’s physician.”

In addition, the order states that it would not apply to procedures that do not “have the potential to deplete the hospital capacity, medical equipment or PPE needed to cope with the COVID-19 disaster.”

It was not immediately clear how abortions fit into the governor’s order. When a reporter pressed Reeves at a recent press conference on whether his order explicitly applies to abortions, Reeves only repeated the phrase, “It shuts down all elective surgeries.”

A spokeswoman for the nonprofit Center for Reproductive Rights, which has represented the Jackson clinic in lawsuits about recently passed anti-abortion laws, confirmed that the facility continues taking appointments. The center’s attorneys declined to comment further. Calls to the clinic, located in Jackson’s Fondren neighborhood, were not returned.

The Mississippi State Department of Health had already asked clinics to postpone elective surgeries and non-urgent appointments in mid-March to, “protect patients and health care professionals by minimizing potential exposure to COVID-19 and preserving valuable protective equipment.” But, at the time, the agency advised that clinicians were responsible for determining the necessity of each procedure.

Meanwhile, as states across the U.S. started preserving hospital beds and personal protective equipment for COVID treatment, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology issued a statement urging states against lumping abortion care with other procedures.

Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America

Gov. Tate Reeves and Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs speak to the media about the coronavirus during a press conference at the Governor’s Mansion in Jackson, Miss., Thursday, March 26, 2020.

“While most abortion care is delivered in outpatient settings, in some cases care may be delivered in hospital-based settings or surgical facilities. To the extent that hospital systems or ambulatory surgical facilities are categorizing procedures that can be delayed during the COVID-19 pandemic, abortion should not be categorized as such a procedure. Abortion is an essential component of comprehensive health care,” the statement reads.

“It is also a time-sensitive service for which a delay of several weeks, or in some cases days, may increase the risks or potentially make it completely inaccessible. The consequences of being unable to obtain an abortion profoundly impact a person’s life, health, and well-being.”

Most abortions in the state happen early in the first trimester and most are medicine-induced — through pills — rather than surgical. More than 90 percent of abortions in Mississippi in 2016 were performed before 14 weeks of gestation and 65 percent were before 9 weeks, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent data.

More than a quarter of abortions in the U.S. are medically delivered rather than surgically, while almost two-thirds of Mississippi’s abortions are delivered this way.

In recent years, the clinic has been at the center of several efforts of Mississippi’s Republican-led Legislature to more heavily restrict abortion in the state. Most of the bills have been struck down by federal courts because they violate the constitutional right to abortion granted under Roe v. Wade.

Reeves, who has championed anti-abortion legislation throughout his political career, has called for abortion access to be restricted during the coronavirus pandemic. In late March, Reeves vowed that his administration would take “whatever action we need to protect not only the lives of unborn children but also the lives of anyone who may contract this particular virus.”

Anticipating legal challenges, U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves intervened shortly after the governor announced his order.

Judge Reeves, who previously blocked the state’s six- and 15-week abortion bans that are still winding through the federal courts, sent a letter to attorneys for the state and the clinic asking the state health officer to clarify whether elective surgeries apply to abortions.


Judge Reeves Abortion Elective Letter 4 11 20 (Text)

Reeves — no relation to the governor, the judge noted in his letter — pointed to a similar order in Alabama, which would have also prohibited abortions. A federal judge there ruled that the state could not block abortions after Alabama’s health officer clarified that doctors should have ultimate discretion over a procedure’s necessity.

Thomas Dobbs, Mississippi’s top health official, told reporters Tuesday that he had not received Judge Reeves’ letter, adding the executive order applies to all ambulatory surgical centers. The health department regulates these 75 centers across the state, which specialize in same-day outpatient surgeries such as some knee surgeries, cataract procedures and biopsies. Dobbs added that his agency is preparing to issue guidance to these facilities about elective procedures.

“We’ll send out some guidelines that basically make sure that they (ambulatory surgical centers) understand what’s in the executive order and we will send them to every regulated ambulatory surgical center and expect for them to comply. That should be forthcoming pretty soon and we’re going to be evenhanded with everyone who falls under that regulatory scheme,” Dobbs said Tuesday.

The Jackson Women’s Health Organization is not licensed as an ambulatory surgical center, but as an abortion facility.

In 2012, the clinic sued the state to reverse several targeted regulations, including an “admitting privileges” requirement that abortion providers have a formal relationship with a local hospital to admit patients during an emergency. The clinic sued claiming the restriction was medically unnecessary and unconstitutional. Reproductive rights advocates and medical experts have called admitting privileges regulations harmful and restrictive, noting procedures with higher complication rates, like colonoscopies and liposuction, are not always restricted in the same way as abortion. They also cite that abortion has comparatively low complication rates.

The admitting privileges law was ultimately struck down. The case also renewed attention to restrictions conflating clinics’ licensure that was previously ruled unconstitutional. Jackson Women’s Health is not licensed as an ambulatory surgical clinic but does have to meet “minimum standards of operations” of such facilities. The clinic’s lawyers are still challenging the licensing mandate in the state’s ongoing federal legal lawsuits.

Should litigation follow Gov. Reeves’ executive order, a recent case from Texas might foreshadow the outcome.

After abortion-rights groups sued over that state’s pandemic abortion ban, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately ruled Monday that medication abortions, which are not considered procedures, could continue. Surgical abortions would be prohibited except for women who would not be able to have an abortion under Texas’ 20-week ban if they delayed the procedure.

The Jackson clinic does not perform abortion past 16 weeks, so the courts may have to sort out whether women in Mississippi would be granted a similar exception.

Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America

Attorney general candidate Lynn Fitch speaks during the Madison and Hinds County Republican Women candidate forum at The Lake House in Ridgeland, Miss., Monday, August 26, 2019.

Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, whose office represents state agencies in legal matters, interprets the 5th Circuit decision as upholding state’s rights to block abortions currently, telling Mississippi Today via email she is prepared to defend the state.

“The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has just recently ruled that abortions should not be afforded a blanket exception to a Governor’s directive to prohibit non-essential services and conserve (personal protective equipment) and other resources needed to meet the health and safety needs of the people,” she said.  “And I am prepared to defend our order just as strenuously in court.”

The post Mississippi’s only abortion clinic still open, but a legal battle could be on the horizon appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Marshall Ramsey: The Life Preserver

Mississippi Today
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Marshall Ramsey: The Life Preserver

A tour of Mississippi: Belzoni

Mississippi Today
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A tour of Mississippi: Belzoni

Color your way through Mississippi with me! Click below to download a coloring sheet of Belzoni.

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Legislators could grapple with expanded early voting when session resumes

Mississippi Today
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Legislators could grapple with expanded early voting when session resumes

Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America

Sen. David Blount speaks to Getty Israel during a committee meeting about Medicaid at the Mississippi State Capitol Tuesday, February 4, 2020.

Recently Wisconsin Republican Robin Vos appeared decked out in full and much coveted medical personal protection equipment at a polling place. A video of Vos, the speaker of the state assembly, saying those voting and working at the polls at last week’s Wisconsin election faced “very minimal exposure,” has garnered considerable national attention.

Ironically, Vos was among the officials arguing the ongoing coronavirus pandemic should not be a reason to delay the election or to expand mail-in voting to protect the safety of Wisconsin voters.

For Mississippians, the video could portend the November general election. Everyone hopes that by November the state and country will have returned to a semblance of normalcy and that concerns about the coronavirus have subsided. But if they have not, Mississippians could face more voting obstacles than many in other states because Mississippi has some of the nation’s most restrictive regulations on absentee and early, in-person voting.

When the Legislature returns from its coronavirus-forced recess – presumably in May – Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, hopes lawmakers will take up and pass a proposal to expand the early voting options, at least during emergency situations such as a pandemic.

“Nobody knows what the conditions will be in November,” Blount said recently. “Everything might be OK. That would be great, but we need to listen to the health care experts. If things are not normal, we need to have safety precautions in place so everybody can vote and vote safely.”

When serving as secretary of state and overseeing elections, current Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann briefly endorsed no-excuse early voting and online voter registration. Hosemann endorsed the concepts based on the recommendations of a bi-partisan elections task force he created in 2014. But the proposals were blocked by the Republican legislative leadership and Hosemann’s support waned.

But Hosemann, who now presides over the Senate, said recently it might be time to revisit the issue.

“Significant cybersecurity and other concerns in recent years caused us to exercise caution in changing the absentee laws or allowing online voter registration,” Hosemann said. “The current COVID-19 crisis, however, is causing us to take a second look at these laws and other statutes which may need to be revised and updated.”

Gov. Tate Reeves, who has dealt with the coronavirus, tornadoes and other crises during his first three months in office, indicated recently that issues in November are not currently high on his list of priorities.

“As we move through the summer into the fall, we will do everything we possibly can to ensure that every Mississippian who wants to vote has the opportunity to vote,” Reeves said.

Speaker Philip Gunn, R-Clinton, echoed similar sentiments.

“While that is something to be taken into consideration at the appropriate time, right now the focus is on getting past the health crisis as well as addressing the needs of Mississippians affected by the Easter Sunday storms that devastated parts of our state,” Gunn said.

But if the expansion of early voting  is not addressed during a resumed 2020 session, the governor would have to call a special session before the election to expand early voting.

“None of us know what the conditions will be in November,” Blount reiterated.

He said there is a bill alive in the Senate dealing with absentee voting issues that he believes could be amended when the session resumes to deal with the possible emergency. In its current form, the bill makes changes to the state absentee voting law to prevent people who vote early from changing their minds and then voting on election day.

Mississippi is among nine states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, that do not allow some form of no-excuse early voting.  And according to Represent Us, a national non-profit promoting mail-in voting, Mississippi is one of only eight states not to have taken at least temporary action to allow mail-in voting. Neighboring Alabama is one of the latest to have taken such action.

Under current law in Mississippi, people who will be away from their home area on election day, the disabled, those over the age of 65 and a few other groups are allowed to vote early.

Blount said that should be expanded at least in case of an emergency like the pandemic. He also said perhaps more locations for in-person, early voting should be provided. Currently, in-person early voting, which also is confined to those away from home on election day, older voters and the disabled, is allowed only in the local circuit clerks’ offices.

Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson, who opposed no-excuse early voting during his successful election campaign in 2019, said whether to expand early voting because of the pandemic is a decision for the Legislature.

“As for our November plans, we’ve been studying the right approach and our office has asked for input from our circuit clerks and (local) election commissioners,” he said. “We’re a bottom-up state, meaning our elections are handled on the local level, so I did not want to make a decision without asking those on the frontline of our election operations for their thoughts and ideas.”

Watson pointed out that the governor has postponed a Republican runoff election for the U.S. House District 2 post that was scheduled in March and has rescheduled a state House election called to fill a vacated seat.

In postponing the special House election on March 30, Reeves said, “The health and well-being of all Mississippians must and always will be our top priority. We are closer to the beginning than the end of this outbreak, and conducting an election at this time would unnecessarily put our poll workers and voters at risk. We must protect our rights as Americans to a free and fair election, but not at the expense of the health and safety of our people. Stay home, stay healthy.”

The post Legislators could grapple with expanded early voting when session resumes appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Older Adults Learn How To Spot Fake News Thanks To Literacy Workshops

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Older Adults Learn How To Spot Fake News Thanks To Literacy Workshops

Older generations haven’t had access to digital literacy education — these workshops are changing that

We hear a lot these days about “fake news,” but research shows that older adults genuinely struggle with being able to identify what stories are true versus what stories are fabricated. During an election year, being able to make this distinction is incredibly important. To that end, digital literacy workshops are quickly sprouting up all over the country, designed to help people of older generations understand the importance of fact-checking.

According to an NPR story, workshops like “How to Spot Fake News,” sponsored by a nonprofit called Senior Planet, are teaching older adults how to check sites like Snopes and FactCheck.org to determine if the stories they’re reading are based in fact or false propaganda.

Researchers found Facebook users 65 and over posted 7 times as many articles from fake news websites, compared to adults under 29.

A workshop called “How to Spot Fake News” is teaching these folks how to fact-check stories — and identify disinformation.

One participant, 86-year-old Marlene Cianci, is delighted at how simple it to do. “It’s right there!” she exclaims. “Just a two-step thing and there it was!”

A Princeton study about fake news and who shares it concluded that, of those participating, only three percent of people aged 18-29 shared links from fake news sites, compared with 11 percent of those older than age 65. Critically, the association with age appears to be independent of respondents’ ideological or partisan affiliations. And, rather than contribute to already stagnant societal ageism, workshops like these seek to solve the problems at hand by tailoring digital literacy lessons to its audience.

“If seniors are more likely to share fake news than younger people, then there are important implications for how we might design interventions to reduce the spread of fake news,” said Andrew Guess, an assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Research also shows that confirmation bias, the tendency to interpret or mold new information in a way that confirms prior-held beliefs, grows stronger with age. Isolation can be a factor, too, meaning seniors are more likely to be alone, perusing the Internet and hitting the share button, per NPR. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, people 65 and older will soon be the largest age group in the United States. That age group also tends to have the highest voter turnout.

Jonathan Nagler, a professor of politics at NYU and a co-director of New York University’s Social Media and Political Participation Lab, says that “these findings suggest that teaching digital literacy in schools — no matter how beneficial that might be for other reasons — is unlikely to fully address the sharing of fake news if such sharing is more prevalent among older citizens.”

This is why workshops designed to help older adults are critical, especially this year. The study outlines the correlation between digital media literacy and other skills that are directly related to social media sharing behavior. Many local libraries all over the country offer workshops and classes like this, free of charge to the community.

“Susceptibility to any kind of fraud or deception is not unique to older adults, although research suggests that emotions play a strong role in older adults’ behavioral intentions,” Katelyn Frey, Ph.D. student and instructor in the Adult Development and Aging program at the University of Akron, says. “When designing media literacy interventions for this population, assessing emotional states while perusing digital content may be a useful strategy. I believe these workshops could be useful for people of all ages.”

NASA’s Plan to Build a Base Camp on the Moon Sounds Like Sci-Fi, But It’s Real

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NASA’s Plan to Build a Base Camp on the Moon Sounds Like Sci-Fi, But It’s Real

NASA’s Plan to Build a Base Camp on the Moon Sounds Like Sci-Fi, But It’s Real

If we’re ever going to make Elon Musk’s vision of colonizing Mars a reality, we first need to figure out an essential component of the plan: how to get there. After all, it’s somewhere between 34 and 140 million miles away from Earth. The moon is barely spitting distance closer, relatively speaking—but it’s a start. More importantly, it’s the place most similar to Mars that humans are currently able to reach (in that it’s barren, desolate, and not Earth).

That’s just one reason NASA is planning to build a new lunar base camp. In a report released last week, the agency laid out its multi-phase plan for what it’s calling the Artemis program, which will be the core of its spaceflight and exploration endeavors for the next decade. Artemis’s goals cover three domains: low-Earth orbit, the moon, and Mars.

It all starts with robots. In 2021, two robotic missions will deliver scientific and commercial payloads to the moon. In one of the project’s more meta aspects, a robotic mission will also deliver a new robotic lunar rover. It’s called the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER, thank goodness for acronyms), and it has the word “polar” in it because this is all going to be based at the moon’s south pole, somewhere near the 12-mile-wide by 2-mile-deep Shackleton Crater. VIPER and other lunar rovers will wander around the moon’s surface looking for resources humans will need in order to spend any significant amount of time there, like oxygen and water.

Speaking of putting humans on the moon—which is slated to happen in 2024—here’s how it would work. Four astronauts at a time would fly in an Orion spacecraft to the planned Gateway space station (sort of like the moon’s version of the International Space Station, and SpaceX will be one of various contractors bringing cargo to it). After uncrewed and crewed flight tests—Artemis I and II, respectively, whose flight distances will together total almost a million miles—Artemis III will be the mission that finally lands people on the moon.

Once they’re there, NASA envisions astronauts staying on the moon for up to a week at a time to start. The south pole base camp they’ll dock at will include a lunar terrain vehicle (if you’re picturing a moon version of an ATV, you’re probably not too far off) for them to move around in, and a “habitable mobility platform,” essentially a much larger pressurized vehicle on which astronauts could stay for 45 days at a time.

Once operations on the moon are expanded and astronauts can stay there for longer (will we ever end up with something resembling the 2019 film Ad Astra, where arrivals to the moon are greeted with a strip mall complete with McDonald’s?), the Mars piece of the Artemis plan would kick in.

Just as robots will deliver robots to the moon before humans go there, the same would subsequently happen on Mars: robots first, humans later.

One idea is for a four-person crew to live on the Gateway station for a few months to simulate an outbound trip to Mars, with two of those crew members then traveling to the lunar surface while the other two stay on the Gateway. After the two moon explorers return to the station, all four crew members would hunker down for another multi-month stay there to simulate the return trip to Earth. And you thought being shut in your house for a few weeks was bad…

And here’s one final detail to know about project Artemis. In a (hard-won) nod to gender equality, the program was named after the Greek goddess of the hunt and the moon. In Greek mythology, Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo, for whom the first moon missions were named (and memorialized by Tom Hanks for those of us who weren’t alive at the time). NASA chose the name Artemis as a gesture of inclusion; the agency intends to land the first woman on the moon as part of this multi-faceted project.

You can read all the specifics of project Artemis here.

Image Credit: NASA

By Vanessa Bates Ramirez

This article originally appeared on Singularity Hub, a publication of Singularity University.

Pop-Up Coronavirus Labs and a 5-Minute Test Take Aim at the Testing Void

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Pop-Up Coronavirus Labs and a 5-Minute Test Take Aim at the Testing Void

Pop-Up Coronavirus Labs and a 5-Minute Test Take Aim at the Testing Void

Two and a half months after the first confirmed novel coronavirus case in the US, the virus has invaded the country’s east and west coasts and is quickly making its way into the center of the country. As the case tally swells and hospitals brace themselves for surges, one factor has remained stubbornly, ludicrously constant: we don’t have enough tests.

In fact, far from simply not having enough tests, we have a massive and debilitating shortage of them. Widespread testing was a key piece of the strategy used by countries most successful in combating the virus, like Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. If we knew who was sick and who wasn’t, or where the infection clusters were located, we’d be able to more selectively shut down the economy rather than using the blanket approach we’re currently employing. We’re essentially making decisions in an information vacuum when we should be making them based on thorough analytics.

But there’s hope this could soon change. Academia and private industry have moved to fill the testing void, with two particularly encouraging developments announced this week. Here are the details.

Pop-Up Labs

Jennifer Doudna is widely considered the “founder” of gene editing technique CRISPR. She’s now leading a pop-up testing lab at UC Berkeley that’s pulling together over 100 scientists and volunteers from Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute and nearby institutions.

To be able to test patient samples, labs and scientists need to meet federal requirements under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) program. Thanks to an acceleration of the certification process by the FDA, the lab should be fully certified by next week, and can start testing patient samples at that time.

The team will use a polymerase chain reaction test (more on that later) run on machines that can analyze over 300 samples at a time. They plan to process 1,000 tests per day to start, eventually going up to 3,000 per day. Estimated time from receiving patient samples to having a definitive diagnostic is a mere four hours, aided by robotic sample handling and automated test-running.

Given that California currently has the country’s biggest testing backlog, Doudna and her team have their work cut out for them. Similar labs have popped up at Harvard/MIT, the Mayo Clinic, University of Iowa, University of Washington, Ohio State University, and other locations around the country.

Abbott Labs’ 5-Minute Test

Illinois-based Abbott Labs’ ID NOW platform—a toaster-sized machine that quickly analyzes patient samples to detect illnesses—is already used in urgent care clinics and emergency rooms across the country. Normally used to detect conditions like strep throat or the flu, the system was cleared to test for Covid-19 by the FDA last week. A week prior, the company also launched Covid-19 testing on a platform that’s used in hospitals and labs.

Abbott has a test delivery target of 50,000 per day, and with positive results showing up within 5 minutes and negative results within 13 minutes, it’s the fastest test we’ve seen; compared to the 7-day turnaround time of the initial test produced by the CDC, this seems quasi-miraculous. Between its two platforms, Abbott plans to produce a total of five million tests in April.

Is that enough for what we need to effectively fight this virus and get society up and running again as soon as possible? Not even close. According to the Washington Post, as of March 28 the US was testing at a rate of 2,249.9 tests per million people; South Korea was at more than triple that rate with 7,576.7 tests per million people.

But Berkeley’s, Abbott’s, and all the other tests springing up from research centers and private companies are something—which is better than the gaping void of nothing we’ve had up until now.

Virus Detection 101

So how do these tests work? What happens during the minutes or hours it takes for a sample to be analyzed and a diagnosis produced?

In brief, the tests are looking for viral genetic material, and if it’s present, they use chemicals to multiply it and make it detectable in a fail-safe way. Picture the coronavirus as a pincushion full of needles. Chemicals called reagents are added to a patient sample, and these reagents get past the needles and cause the pincushion to crack open, releasing the virus’s RNA.

Adding an enzyme to the RNA causes it to convert to DNA, which is then replicated using additional reagents, enzymes, and temperature changes in a process called polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Two DNA strands become four, which then become eight, and the cycle continues until there are around 100 billion copies of the viral DNA. Each time a strand is copied, a fluorescent probe appears; a sample glowing with fluorescence, then, is unmistakably full of viral DNA—and that means a positive test result (and immediate isolation of the person who was just tested!).

Hurdles to Clear

Despite this commendable work by scientists and a necessary loosening of government regulations, it’s unfortunately likely that testing shortages will continue. We’ve never before been in a situation where so many people needed to be tested so quickly, and thus demand for items like reagents and swabs is far outpacing the supply chain’s ability to deliver.

In addition, the tests discussed here can only detect Covid-19 in people who have the virus at the time of testing; in other words, a different test (called an antibody test) is needed to identify people who had mild or asymptomatic cases of the virus—these people could be immune without even knowing it.

There’s no easy answer to this virus, a fact we’ve become painfully aware of over the past few weeks. But if all we can do is take baby steps towards a solution, it should comfort us to know that the best scientific minds among us are doing just that.

Image Credit: Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay

By Vanessa Bates Ramirez

This article originally appeared on Singularity Hub, a publication of Singularity University.

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