Dear friends,
In spite of the flood emergency in New York City, it is a beautiful morning. I had to get outside to see it for myself. The Prospect Park lake also got out of bed this morning:
Together, they extended the protection from eviction until January 15, 2022 and brought the language of the law into compliance with the recent Supreme Court ruling, which requires that landlords have a mechanism for challenging a tenant’s claim of hardship.
The extension gives the state more time to disburse rent relief funds, a process that has been recently improved but is still very late out of the gate.
This is good news, especially since there are so many other threats to life and health the US right now. There are catastrophic wildfires, flash floods, over a million people without power in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, and of course, there’s the pandemic. If you’re Black or brown, throw in police profiling and violence and structural inequality in health care.
For people in Texas who wish to terminate a pregnancy, things just got a lot more difficult. Under the abortion-restriction law that became effective yesterday, people whom members of the public believe are assisting those seeking abortions are subject to lawsuits. Even if the suit is without merit, their legal expenses will not be covered. In addition, the law blocks access to abortion after the sixth week of a pregnancy, and
most patients will have to travel 20 times the distance to a clinic than they would prior to its implementation.
[W]hile it may not look like it, paying out of pocket and traveling is also considered an abortion restriction. For undocumented clients in deep South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley, Border Patrol checkpoints—those not even physically established at the border shared with Mexico—can endanger undocumented patients.
The Supreme Court, in a move of supremely bad judgment, declined to block the legislation in an unsigned 5-4 opinion. All four justices in the minority filed opinions. Justice Sotomayor noted that the Court had
“rewarded the state’s effort to delay federal review of a plainly unconstitutional statute, enacted in disregard of the court’s precedents, through procedural entanglements of the state’s own creation.”
The people who are working to assist Texans seeking reproductive health services will do so at tremendous risk.
Support the Frontera Fund, which “makes abortion accessible in the Rio Grande Valley by providing financial and practical support regardless of immigration status, gender identity, ability, sexual orientation, race, class, age, or religious affiliation and builds grassroots organizing power.”
Two public health doctors have written a piece that is helpful for thinking about how we live with the Delta variant. They begin by asking a surprisingly tricky question: What are our COVID-safety goals?
This reveals the crux of the problem in the United States. It’s not just the C.D.C., but everyone — including us public health experts — who is not always connecting our advice or policy recommendations to clear goals.
They raise other tricky questions, and point out that we will still have to face these questions when the Delta surge has passed, whenever that is.
What if the stated goal is simply, “Kids need to be in school, period.”
If the goal is to minimize severe disease, some states with high vaccination rates might already be there. Low-vaccination states would still have work to do before loosening restrictions. Treating the country as a whole just doesn’t make sense right now because of the widespread differences in vaccination rates.
Imagine if our public discourse about the pandemic focused on identifying our goals.
It appears that many New York City classrooms have failed to meet ventilation standards for in-person instruction, in spite having been cleared for use by the DOE. The issue is that some classrooms rely only on windows for ventilation, and open windows do not guarantee the safety minimum of 3-4 air-exchanges per hour.
[M]ore than 1,500 classrooms are either in the midst of upgrades, which the Department of Education says are ongoing, or have been taken out of use.
Consult the map of city schools that shows the proportion of "operational" classrooms that get fresh air only from windows.
The DOE is outfitting window air-conditioning units and central HVAC systems with MERV-13 filters, which are effective at capturing airborne particles, including viruses. A survey from earlier this year indicates that 80 percent of classrooms have A/C units or centralized HVAC.
There are also concerns about the quality of the Intellipure air-purifiers that the city has purchased for schools, some of which do not use HEPA filters.
Richard Corsi, dean of the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science at Portland State University, said purifiers without HEPA filters are “largely unproven, and that’s the kindest I could be.” An independent study of the effectiveness of the Intellipure devices by a team of researchers at the Illinois Institute of Technology found that it would rank ninth out of 12 products they’ve tested this year.
According to the city’s database of municipal contracts, the DOE has five contracts totaling $64 million for air purifiers.
Contact Comptroller Scott Stringer to inquire about the process amending these contracts. Here is a ready-made message.
Whether we’re operating at the local, state, national, or global level, we need to be constructive. A sobering essay in the Times calls attention to the failure to pull together to solve problems.
The world’s decision makers have given us a staggering demonstration of their collective inability to grasp what it would actually mean to govern the deeply globalized and interconnected world they have created.
I want to acknowledge our new governor, as well as activists and advocates and legislators who helped to make New York the first state to take effective action to prevent mass evictions.
In another constructive move, Hochul has given Kathryn Garcia a key management job in her administration, as director of state operations. Garcia will have
a broad portfolio, overseeing everything from disaster and storm response to the day-to-day management of the state.
Have a good day!
with love,
L