Category Archives: Corona Virus

By Sarah Roebuck Corrections1

NEW YORK CITY A report released by the Vera Institute of Justice shows that the number of people incarcerated remains on the rise.

The increase is primarily driven by significant growth in local jail populations, as efforts to reduce incarceration due to the COVID-19 pandemic have been reversed, according to the People in Jail and Prison in 2022report. The report analyzes incarceration trends in federal, stateand local facilities from 2019 to fall 2022, using the most recent available data.

At the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the total number of incarcerated individuals in the United States dropped from 2.1 million in 2019 to 1.8 million by mid-year 2020. Local jail populations neared full recovery by mid-year 2021, while state and federal prison populations continued to decline, resulting in an overall incarcerated population of 1.76 million individuals. However, the latest data shows a rebound in both jail and prison populations, bringing the number of incarcerated individuals to 1.82 million.

Infall2022, the number of individuals in local jails was 24% higher than in mid-2020, the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although jail populations have not yet reached 2019 levels, they did grow by 7% between mid-year 2021 and fall 2022.

On the other hand, state prison populations remain 8% lower than in mid-2020 and 15% lower than in 2019. They experienced only a slight increase of 1.3% between 2021 and 2022. The federal prison population is also 1.8% lower than in mid-2020 and 9% lower than in 2019. However, the recent trend shows relatively rapid growth, with a 3.3% increase between mid-year 2021 and fall 2022.

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Report: Incarcerated populations up 4% post-COVID - CorrectionsOne

NEW YORKThe national average for gross revenue at ECP locations decreased last week, June 12 18, when compared with the previous week at a rate of -1 index point. That places gross revenue at a level 7 index points above where it was at this point in time (Week 25) when compared with last year (2022), 11 points above the same period in 2021, 10 points above 2020, and 17 points above 2019, according to Jobsons most recent Practice Performance Tracker.

All optical sales categories were down or flat last week when compared with the previous week, at rates of -1 index point for gross revenue, 0 index points for exams/refractions, 0 index points for frame units, -1 index point for lens pairs and 0 index points for contact lenses. When comparing last weeks optical sales with the same period last year, all categories were up besides one, ranging from the highest increase of 7 index points for gross revenue to the only decrease of -1 index point for contact lenses.

With all optical sales categories decreasing or remaining flat last week, only one of the categories still reached a level above an average week in 2019the index baseline assigned a value of 100 for this Optical Business Tracker. These ranged from a high of 116 index points for gross revenue to a low of 95 index points for contact lenses.

The other three categories reached 99 index points for exams/refractions, 98 index points for frame units and 98 index points for lens pairs. The other categories increased at rates of 5 index points for exams/refractions, 4 index points for frame units and 4 index points for lens pairs.

Jobson Optical Research selected 1,500 optical locations that have been operating and reporting their sales to its partners, GPN and ABB Analytics, since 2019. The index has been rebased to an average week in 2019. Going forward, this new index base will be used as an arbitrary benchmark and assigned a value of 100.

Click here to view the complete Jobson COVID-19 Performance Tracker

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The National Average for Gross Revenue at ECP Locations Decreased for the Week of June 12 18, Jobson's Latest ... - Vision Monday

The Intelligence Community Equal Employment Opportunity and Diversity (EEOD) Office is responsible for the overall management of the ODNI EEO and Diversity Program, and provides IC-wide oversight and guidance in developing, implementing, and measuring progress in EEO, diversity, and inclusion.

The IC EEOD Office is committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all employees and applicants based on merit and without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, sexual orientation, and physical or mental disability.

Applicants or employees who believe they have been discriminated against on the bases of race, color, religion, sex/gender (sexual orientation and gender identity), national origin, age, disability, genetic information (including family medical history) and/or reprisal for prior participation in the EEO process may raise their concerns to the IC EEOD Office.

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ODNI Releases Report on the Potential Links Between the Wuhan ... - Office of the Director of National Intelligence

For three years, the U.S. government has been tied in knots over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, frustrated that Chinas hindrance of investigations and unwillingness to look critically at its own research have obscured what intelligence agencies can learn about whether the virus escaped from a lab.

Inquiries during the Trump and Biden administrations have yielded no definitive answers. The Energy Department and the F.B.I. favored the theory that a laboratory leak may have caused the pandemic. Five intelligence bodies considered theories of natural transmission that the coronavirus developed naturally and was transferred to humans at an animal market or other location more likely. But the C.I.A., the nations leading spy agency, would not make an assessment with even a low level of confidence.

This week, intelligence agencies are expected to release declassified material on what they have learned about Covids origins, a subject of intense interest and scrutiny among American lawmakers. But people briefed on the material say there is no smoking gun, no body of evidence that sways the intelligence community as a whole, or top C.I.A. analysts, that a lab leak was the more likely origin of the pandemic than natural transmission, or vice versa.

In fact, senior intelligence officials remain more convinced than ever that the agencies are not going to be able to collect a piece of evidence that solves the puzzle. Local and national authorities in China, U.S. officials say, destroyed some virus samples and used up others in research, all of which might have helped answer the questions over Covids origins. But those officials also caution against overstating the importance of the destroyed samples.

American intelligence officials also believe the Chinese government impeded the international communitys efforts to better understand the coronavirus in the early months of the outbreak and refused to gather other information that could have aided the investigation. In essence, there appears to be no secret to steal now.

Chinese officials, according to American intelligence assessments, are either convinced the virus was caused by natural transmission or do not want to investigate further out of fear that it could hurt their international reputation if, for example, evidence emerged that would illustrate sloppy practices or unsafe experiments at one of their labs. In 2021, China also sought to influence an investigation by the World Health Organization, angering the Biden administration.

The declassified material is unlikely to satisfy the debate over Covids origins. Some lawmakers and experts have argued that Chinas failure to open its labs up to outside investigators is evidence of a cover-up and suggests the coronavirus may have leaked from a lab accidentally.

A Government Accountability Office report released last week highlighted the Wuhan Institute of Virologys failure to provide information to the National Institutes of Health on research it had done on potentially dangerous pathogens. The report found that U.S. government funding had gone to the Wuhan lab, one of the labs that has been a focus of investigations into Covids origin. The lab had exceeded the safety threshold in some research, but the N.I.H. or its contractor had not properly monitored the work, the report said.

The report raised questions about the effectiveness of government restrictions designed to prevent scientists receiving U.S. funding from creating more deadly viruses, but it did not provide evidence that the Wuhan lab had made a more dangerous coronavirus, much less the pathogen that caused Covid.

Recent news reports have unearthed new information about researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology who became sick in 2019. The news reports suggested that one of them could be patient zero. The information about the sick workers was first discovered at the end of the Trump administration. By August 2022, however, intelligence analysts had dismissed the evidence, saying it was not relevant. Intelligence officials determined that the sick workers could not tell them anything about whether a lab leak or natural transmission was more likely. Intelligence agencies view the information about the cases neutrally, arguing that they do not buttress the case for the lab leak or for natural transmission, according to officials briefed on the intelligence.

U.S. officials also caution that their intelligence collection is imperfect. Before the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention were not a priority collection target for American intelligence agencies. And China quickly locked down sources of information that might have been able to provide evidence.

Further complicating the picture is intelligence collected by U.S. agencies that illustrated a high level of tension between local officials in Wuhan and leaders in Beijing, particularly at the start of the pandemic. Local officials, trying to save their jobs and cover up the seriousness of the pandemic, obscured what was happening in Wuhan. Chinese officials have not acknowledged such tensions.

To protect their methods of gathering information, U.S. officials declined to discuss how they had collected intelligence on Chinese officials or their discussions about the Covid pandemic.

American officials say it is still possible that some new evidence comes to light, something like a trove of data a scientist has hidden away or a new source of information to help provide more insight. But as more time passes, that becomes less likely, especially as memories fade or sources move out of reach.

As an intelligence matter, officials said, the trail has run cold.

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U.S. Intelligence Agencies May Never Find Covid's Origins, Officials ... - The New York Times

The virus that drove the Covid-19 pandemic most likely emerged from a laboratory leak but not as part of a weapons program, according to an updated and classified 2021 US energy department study provided to the White House and senior American lawmakers, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.

The departments finding a departure from previous studies on how the virus emerged came in an update to a document from the office of national intelligence director, Avril Haines, the WSJ reported. It follows a finding reportedly issued with moderate confidence by the FBI that the virus spread after leaking out of a Chinese laboratory.

The conclusion from the energy department which oversees a network of 17 US laboratories, including areas of advanced biology would be significant despite the fact that, as the report said, the agency made its updated judgment with low confidence.

Conflicting hypotheses on the origins of Covid-19 have centered either on an unidentified animal transmitting the virus to humans or its accidental leak from a Chinese research laboratory in Wuhan.

The spread of Covid-19, just one in a line of infectious coronoviruses to emerge, caught global health bodies unawares in early 2020. It has since caused close to 7m deaths worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, and disrupted trade as well as travel.

Former US president Donald Trump politicized the issue, calling it the China virus, triggering a racialization of a pandemic that his Democratic successor Joe Biden has sought to avoid. But political polarization remains under the surface of efforts to establish its origins.

The energy departments updated findings run counter to reports by four other US intelligence agencies that concluded the epidemic started as the result of natural transmission from an infected animal. Two agencies remain undecided.

US officials, the Journal said, also declined to expand on new intelligence or analysis that led the energy department to change its position. They also noted that the energy department and FBI arrived at the same conclusion for different reasons.

The CIA remains undecided between leak and natural transmission theories, according to the National Intelligence Council study. But while the initial 2021 report did not reach a conclusion, it did offer a consensus view that Covid-19 was not part of a Chinese biological weapons program.

The national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, acknowledged on Sunday that there are a variety of views within US intelligence agencies on the issue.

Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other, and a number have said they just dont have enough information to be sure, Sullivan told CNN.

But he said that the Biden administration has directed repeatedly every element of our intelligence community to put effort and resources on getting to the bottom of this question.

Sullivan added that Biden had specifically requested that the National Laboratories under the energy department be brought into the assessment. He wants to put every tool at use to figure out what happened, Sullivan said.

Right now there is not a definitive answer to emerge from the intelligence community on this question, he added, referring to eight of 18 agencies along with the National Intelligence Council that have looked in Covid-19s origins.

A previous report by the energy departments Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in May 2020 concluded that a lab-leak theory was plausible.

The updated, five-page NIC assessment, the Journal reported, was done in light of new intelligence, further study of academic literature and consultation with experts outside government and comes as Republicans in Congress press for more information.

A spokesperson for the energy department wrote in a statement that the agency continues to support the thorough, careful, and objective work of our intelligence professionals in investigating the origins of Covid-19, as the president directed.

Chinese officials have disputed that Covid-19 could have leaked from its labs, among them the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products.

According to the initial US 2021 intelligence report, Covid-19 first circulated in Wuhan, China, no later than November 2019, when three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology reportedly involved in coronavirus research were sick enough to seek hospital care.

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Covid-19 likely came from lab leak, says news report citing US energy ...

Roman Pilipey/EPA-EFE A general view of Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, in January 2021. File Photo by Roman Pilipey/EPA-EFE

Feb. 26 (UPI) -- A classified report from the U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic was likely caused by a leak from a lab in China.

The report's conclusions were made with "low confidence" but come after other U.S. agencies have suggested that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan where the first cases were reported.

Such reports from U.S. agencies are made on a three-tier scale based on the quality of intelligence assessments are made on, from low to high confidence. A low confidence finding means there is either not enough information or the information is not consistent enough to make a firmer determination.

The news was first reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by The New York Times and CNN.

"The Department of Energy continues to support the thorough, careful, and objective work of our intelligence professionals in investigating the origins of COVID-19, as the President directed," an Energy Department spokesperson told CNN.

Officials who spoke to The New York Times did not disclose what new intelligence the U.S. Energy Department had acquired that had led the agency to its determination.

The Energy Department's report comes after the FBI also determined with a higher confidence rating that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a report in October 2021 that four other intelligence agencies determined with low confidence that the initial COVID-19 infection "was most likely caused by natural exposure to an animal" infected with the virus, most likely a bat.

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday that divisions between the intelligence agencies remains and that the administration of President Joe Biden would share more information to Congress when it is obtained.

Theories that the virus may have leaked from the Wuhan lab have been made since the emergence of COVID-19 in 2020.

However, prominent health officials including Dr. Anthony Fauci - who served as the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases -- pushed back on such "conspiracy theories."

Fauci, who also served as the chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, has played a key role in the United States response to the COVID-19 pandemic during Biden's administration and that of his predecessor, former President Donald Trump.

"Fabrications, conspiracy theories and outright lies are becoming commonplace from radical fringe groups as well as from people who you would hope would know better -- and you know who they are," Fauci said during a graduation speech at a New York City college last year.

"Yet segments of our society have grown increasingly inured by such falsehoods while the outrage and dissent against this alarming trend have been relatively muted and when voiced are regularly castigated."

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Classified Energy Department report finds lab leak likely cause of ...

Mayor Kirk Watson tests positive for COVID-19  KEYE TV CBS Austin

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Mayor Kirk Watson tests positive for COVID-19 - KEYE TV CBS Austin

Biden's plan for ending the emergency declaration for COVID-19 signals a pivotal point in the pandemic 4 questions answered  The Conversation Indonesia

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Biden's plan for ending the emergency declaration for COVID-19 signals a pivotal point in the pandemic 4 questions answered - The Conversation...

Study finds one habit can significantly lower your odds of getting sick from COVID-19  KATU

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Study finds one habit can significantly lower your odds of getting sick from COVID-19 - KATU

How will life change once the COVID-19 emergency ends?  KFOX El Paso

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How will life change once the COVID-19 emergency ends? - KFOX El Paso