Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
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Michael Edward Morrisette, age 61, passed away from complications of Covid-19 on February 14, 2022 at Torrance Medical Center. He was surrounded by family and at peace with his end, which came after six grueling months in the Intensive Care Unit struggling to overcome odds that eventually became overwhelming. Some people affect the lives of the public in very public ways, elected to office or presiding over large corporations. Others are no less influential although they may not have names that...
March 3, 2022 - Health officials have moved forward the date for ending the mask mandate in Los Angeles county, removing the mask requirement for most situations starting Friday, March 4. Masks have been required indoors ever since March of 2020, two years ago. For a brief period during the spring of 2021 the fully vaccinated were allowed to take their masks off in indoor situations. But the Delta variant surge starting in the late spring put an end to that indulgence. The modified Health Order...
March 2, 2022 - A traffic study done by local business owners shows that the removal of Parking Structure 3 from use has already caused considerable traffic backup in the downtown area during peak retail and entertainment hours. This outcome was predicted by earlier traffic studies by the same company. The Parking Network (TPN) conducted a parking and traffic study for the weekend of the Super Bowl, February 12 and 13. While this might seem like an outlier regarding traffic and parking needs,...
March 3, 2022 - Yesterday the California Court of Appeal ruled against a property owner's group to allow the City of Santa Monica to demolish Parking Structure 3 on 4th Street in downtown Santa Monica. The parking structure has been a bone of contention between merchants, property owners, and residents on the one hand and the social-justice-minded Santa Monica City Council on the other. The city government intends to demolish the garage, which holds 336 parking spaces, and build supportive...
February 25, 2022 - At her weekly press briefing on Thursday, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, PhD, MPH, MEd, Director of Public Health for the County of Los Angeles made the case that wealth, rather than vaccine status, appeared to be a causal factor regarding Covid-19 case rates, hospitalizations, and deaths. In a series of three stunning slides, Ferrer showed that unvaccinated wealthy people were less likely to catch Covid, get hospitalized, or die compared to fully vaccinated poor people. An unvaccinated...
February 24, 2022 - Data from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health show that last week the vaccinated were 6.3% more likely to catch Covid-19 than the unvaccinated. This is at least the second week in which numbers dipped the wrong direction for proponents of the idea that it is the unvaccinated who are the main transmitters of the virus. Here are the raw numbers: Total fully vaccinated population: 7,185,622 (71.8% of the county population) Total number of new infections week...
February 23, 2022 - Los Angeles County Health Department officials today announced they would allow establishments that verify vaccination status or require negative PCR tests of the unvaccinated to have customers and workers remove their masks indoors. Masks have been required at all indoor locations since March of 2020, except for a brief period last spring after the vaccines became available to the general public. Then vaccines proved to be less effective at preventing infection than...
February 18, 2021 - As the Omicron surge subsides, Los Angeles County Public Health officials are trying to put the brakes on a rapid relaxation of emergency restrictions. While officials now no longer requires masks at outdoor mega-events or on school playgrounds, they will still be required indoors until an estimated mid-March date. Vaccination mandates remain in place for certain categories of workers and certain venues with no end date even mentioned. County health department data, however,...
2/15/22: It took Santa Monica Police less than two days to identify and locate a suspect who allegedly downed a female bicyclist at Chelsea Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard during a nighttime crash. At about 2:08 am on February 13, police were called to help a 16-year-old female bicyclist who'd been hit by a car. The reporting party told officers the vehicle had fled the scene via 23rd Street, traveling north. Santa Monica Fire Department personnel took the victim to a local hospital where she...
February 10, 2022 - According to data released today by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, the vaccinated population contracted Covid-19 at a rate more than 10% higher than the unvaccinated during the week between February 3 and February 10. Number of vaccinated individuals: 7,131,679 (71.2% of the county population) Total number of new infections this week: 52,044 Number of infections in vaccinated people: 42,651 82% of the new infections were in vaccinated people during the...
February 10, 2022 - On the same day the city was told they could not immediately demolish Parking Garage 3 in downtown Santa Monica, they closed the garage, cordoning it off to cars. The garage has been a bone of contention between the city government and downtown business owners since the city decided a new affordable housing project would be better on the site adjacent to the Third Street Promenade than 336 spaces of parking that had existed there for decades. The business owners believe the...
2/15/22: At their meeting tomorrow, the Audit and Finance Committee for Downtown Santa Monica, Inc. will discuss hiring a "communication firm to handle board communication and crisis management." DTSM is the quasi-governmental agency that assesses business owners in the downtown and Third Street Promenade area fees that are supposed to be used to promote "economic stability, growth and community life within this unique neighborhood." Six of DTSM's 13 board members are appointed by the city...
February 10, 2022 - In a comparison between 5 weeks during last winter's Covid-19 surge and the current now-ebbing surge, while there were far more infections this winter, there were a far large number of deaths last winter. In a span surrounding each surge's peak, there were 24% fewer deaths overall this year and only 10% of the number of deaths per case. Using the following statistics, taken from the LA County Department of Public Health, it is necessary to conclude that the Omicron variant...
February 4, 2022 - Demolition has once again been stayed for Parking Garage #3 in downtown Santa Monica. Following the dismissal on a technicality of a lawsuit brought by the Santa Monica Bayside Owners Association against the demolition, the City of Santa Monica hastily scheduled demolition of the structure for February 14, ten days from now. The city reportedly did not give proper notification to the Air Quality Management Board of the demolition, nor did they have a separate Environmental...
February 3, 2022 - Vaccines to protect against Covid-19 became available to the general public in April, 2021. Since than over 7 million residents of Los Angeles County have taken the full dose of some form of the vaccine. The initial promise was a protection of 95% or greater from infection by Covid-19. We thought it would be interesting to see how that promise has panned out and what the true effectiveness is in instituting vaccine mandates that exclude unvaccinated individuals or require them...
February 3, 2022 - When asked if there was a public health justification for vaccine mandates, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, PhD, MPH, MEd, Director of Public Health, did not even try to answer the question. "The vaccines work," she said. "They provide the most protection we can get." This is not a reason to impose mandates, even if what she meant was that vaccines work to protect against death. The only justification for a vaccine mandate is if it reduces infection. They do not, as data from the Los...
February 2, 2022 - Squalid conditions downtown and on the Third Street Promenade appear to be causing much of the vacancies in retail spaces visible there today. The downtown and Promenade area were already ailing before the lockdowns of 2020, with an increasing presence of vagrants who appeared to need drug rehabilitation or mental health services. But once the Covid-19 lockdowns closed all retail businesses that weren't labeled essential and after the riot on May 31, 2020, the situation...
February 4, 2022 - The Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 first appeared in Los Angeles County in early December. As of late January, it comprises 99.9% of sequences sampled. This variant has proven to be at least an order of magnitude less deadly than the previous variant that caused last winter's surge. In a comparison of the same six weeks between December 8 and January 18, there were 10 times fewer deaths this winter. The overall death rate - for the unvaccinated -...
UPDATE: LA County Department of Public Health has explained that deaths are regarded as from Covid rather than the underlying condition if any non-accidental/traumatic death occurs less than 30 days of a positive covid test (used to be less than 60 days until recently). January 27, 2022 - Health officials at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health sporadically release statistics regarding whether deaths listed as from Covid involved underlying conditions. They do not give such data...
January 28, 2022 - Of the Covid deaths tabulated by the LA County Department of Public Health over the last two weeks, 80% are noted as involving underlying conditions. Now health officials have admitted that they do not actually know if these individuals died from the fact they had Covid or from the underlying condition. As long as the death was not from a traumatic accident, the "Covid" label is applied based solely on whether or not the death occurred less than 30 days from a positive Covid...
1/21/22: Staff for the City of Santa Monica released a report this month titled "Overview of Homeless Outreach and Hygiene Services" in response to requests from some city councilmembers for a comprehensive report on what is being done to address homelessness, how much it is costing, and what effect it has had. None of the requested information is addressed in full in the January 6 staff report. Measures to address homelessness increase a complex web of different types of outreach teams, some...
January 21, 2022 - Matters can always change over the next few weeks, but a comparison of the same 6-week period spanning the New Year shows 10 times less deaths for the number of Covid-19 cases this winter over last winter. The surge of Covid-19 occurred over the same basic period of time last year as this year. Using a span of 6 weeks, approximately the length of time it could take a Covid-19 patient to move from diagnosis to death, the following numbers were recorded by the Los Angeles...
January 11, 2022 - On Saturday evening about 5:30 pm, Santa Monica police officers were conducting a routine patrol of the Santa Monica pier when they approached a group standing near a pickup in Parking Lot 1 North. The pickup truck was loaded with the vending carts that are illegal to operate on the pier, lacking pier licenses and health permits. A male in the group near the truck lifted his arms and the police officers noticed the black handle of a handgun protruding from above the male's...
January 14, 2022 - While the rate of the vaccinated contracting Covid-19 remained somewhat below the rate of the unvaccinated contracting the disease, 36% more of the vaccinated caught Covid last week compared to the previous week. On Thursday, the county hit a new record, with 45,584 new Covid cases. The percent of the vaccinated population who'd contracted Covid was 1% on September 30. That percent has steadily been increasing. As of January 8, 4.6% of the vaccinated population had caught...
January 11, 2022 - Health officials at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health have only recently released statistics regarding whether deaths listed as from Covid involved underlying conditions. They do not give such data every day. Over the last week, LACDPH officials specified on five days how many of the deaths listed as from Covid involved underlying conditions: January 4: Of 24 deaths, 20 individuals had underlying conditions January 5: Of 27 deaths, 18 individuals had...
