Planned portal will not include all offering vaccines, only mass sites
Golf star undergoes leg surgery after crashing SUV
Two months into the effort to vaccinate the public against COVID-19, the administration of Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan reversed course and said it would launch an official, though limited, waitlist to ease the frustrating hunt for scarce doses.
The Republican governor decided against a preregistration system last year before vaccine began arriving and turned aside recent calls for a one-stop site, repeatedly saying it could become “a single source of failure.”
The state instead allocated shares of the vaccine to hospitals, county health departments, pharmacies and others, allowing them to sign up people using their own systems. The resulting balkanized system has frustrated many of those seeking a vaccine and prompted criticism from state and federal lawmakers from Maryland.
The newly planned state site, scheduled to launch sometime next month, wouldn’t incorporate all the places offering vaccines, only the state’s mass sites. It would leave out pharmacies, health centers, hospitals and other sites, prompting observers and other lawmakers to offer only limited praise.
“That’s a step in the right direction, there’s no doubt about it,” said U.S. Rep. Anthony Brown, a Democrat who is sponsoring a bill that would set up a national website and offer grants to states to develop state-level vaccine appointment booking websites.
“Since the governor has the
“There may be ways to reduce the math to 90 minutes and find ways to calibrate it so that you can have a shortened assessment that captures similar information,” Li said.
Some school board members said they were concerned about the time needed for the English test, particularly because many students who go back to in-person classes will only be in school two days a week.
Salmon said she would consult with the department’s technical advisory committee for assessments to see if the tests could be shortened, but said she could not promise changes. Testing details are expected to be brought before board at its March meeting, shortly before the two-month testing window opens.
Schools would be able to give the standardized tests as late as the first week in June.
In a statement Monday evening, the U.S. Department of Education made clear that states must give the annual tests in reading and math, but encouraged them to ask for waivers to shorten the tests, delay them or make other accommodations.
Salmon supports continuing testing because she believes it can yield valuable information about how students have done during the pandemic and could provide some guidance to schools and the state about gaps in learning that individual students have because of the pandemic.
“We may find out some really interesting data on how students are doing. We may find out that students are doing well. I am going to remain optimistic that we will see some positive data as well,” Salmon said.
However, the testing issue has become controversial with school leaders.
Stacy A. Shack, Baltimore County’s director of assessment, speaking at the state school board meeting, said the testing would take precious time away from in-person instruction this spring just when teachers are trying to reestablish normal relationships with their students.
Teachers, and the unions representing them, have called for a hiatus in testing.
And the Anne Arundel County School Board wrote to Salmon and the state school board president Monday asking to delay testing, saying students are craving time with teachers and friends, and don’t want to spend hours taking tests.
“Our next steps should not include state testing that is inequitable, creates more lost instructional time, is a burden on our schools and, above all, provides data that will essentially be meaningless given that we will test only approximately one-third of our students,” the letter said.
Until Tuesday, many educators believed only students coming to in-person classes would be taking the tests.
However, Salmon told the school board that the social media rumors were false: Everyone would take the test. When a school board member asked what measures would be taken to make sure parents weren’t helping their children during the test, Salmon said they would have to trust that people were honest.
“We are going to have to assume that everyone is going to be on the straight and narrow,” Salmon said.
However, she said she would be working on additional security measures with the technical advisory board.
“Kids across the state have a lot to worry about already and this just adds to the burden,” said Joe Kane, president of the Baltimore City school system’s Parent Community Advisory Board. “This has been an opportunity to be creative in how we approach educating children. When are we going to say ‘No, this is not working for our school district?’ When are we going to push back and say ‘This is where we draw the line?’ ”
During the first few months of the COVID crisis last year, I thought media was doing a poor job of humanizing the tremendous fear, pain and loss Americans were suffering from COVID-19. But by April, camera crews were making their way into emergency rooms and pandemic wards to show us the horror that we had mostly only been told about by front-line medical workers and people sitting at anchor desks. A CNN report by Miguel Marquez late in March that showed us a hellish landscape of horribly sick patients on gurneys in a hospital’s crowded hallways coughing and gasping for breath was the breakthrough report. I hailed it hoping that seeing would be believing for most viewers.
And yet with a president saying at the time how he wanted the economy back up by Easter and exclaiming how “beautiful” it would be to have “packed churches” for that Sunday, millions continued to ignore masks and social distancing and party straight into Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. Remember those beach scenes of people drinking, dancing and standing face to face inches apart with no masks?
As we surpassed the mind-boggling milestone of 500,000 deaths this week, I have been asking myself why some people still don’t seem to get the horror of where we are with this pandemic even today as others scramble desperately to get a vaccination. Are the media to blame? If so, how? That’s the column I thought I would be writing for today.
Some in the right-wing media are to blame. Remember Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume mocking then-presidential-candidate Joe Biden on Twitter in May for wearing a mask — mockery that Mr. Trump, who did not wear a mask in public events at the time, then shared with millions? COVID had already killed 97,000 Americans, but wearing a mask was still apparently a laughing matter to some in right-wing media and Mr. Trump.
Fox, OAN and Newsmax do share blame for spreading the former president’s misinformation, disinformation and lies about the pandemic. If you want to blame the media for the inability or unwillingness by some Americans to get their heads around this horror, you can certainly blame the right-wing media all you want.
But that is not true of most of the mainstream media, which not only tried to report one of the biggest and most challenging stories of the last 100 years, but also to sort out some of the confusion Mr. Trump generated on an almost daily basis when he was using press sessions at the White House podium as a substitute for campaign rallies. Remember Mr. Trump sharing his crackpot speculation about injecting a disinfectant into our bodies to kill the virus?
But CNN, MSNBC, PBS and the commercial networks of NBC, CBS and ABC have been all in on reporting COVID. The “Frontline” series on PBS has done outstanding documentaries not just on the impact of the disease in terms of hospitalizations and deaths. In “COVID’s Hidden Toll,” it looked at how the virus was affecting workers in the fields and packing houses of California who work without safety protections and live in a constant state of dread. In “Growing Up Poor in America,” “Frontline” looked at the special hardships COVID inflicted on those who were already struggling economically before the pandemic hit, such as families whose children didn’t have a computer or the internet connections necessary to continue their educations when schools closed.
The strong coverage isn’t only at the national level. The Sun has a Page One story and a variety of other reports on COVID virtually every day online and in the print edition. And the reports are not just handout and press-conference journalism in which the governor or mayor announces something and it makes it straight into the paper or online without further reporting or context. A story Monday about Gov. Larry Hogan announcing vaccinations at M&T Bank Stadium quoted him hailing it as a “another milestone toward ending this pandemic,” but it also reported that the website was immediately overwhelmed and unable to book appointments.
The mainstream media is doing its job. If you cannot get your head around the enormity of 500,000 dead from this virus and the lethal possibility of that figure ultimately including you and someone you love, that’s on you. Don’t blame the mainstream media if you are getting your COVID analysis from Fox’s Sean Hannity instead of CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Try making better media choices.
Tiger Woods was seriously injured Tuesday when his SUV crashed into a median, rolled over and ended up on its side on a steep roadway in suburban Los Angeles known for wrecks, authorities said. The golf superstar had to be pulled out through the windshield, and his agent said he was undergoing surgery for “multiple leg injuries.”
Woods was alone in the SUV when it crashed into a raised median shortly before 7:15 a.m., crossed two oncoming lanes and rolled several times, authorities said at a news conference. No other cars were involved. The 45-year-old was alert and able to communicate as firefighters pried open the front windshield to get him out.
The airbags deployed, and the inside of the car stayed basically intact and that “gave him a cushion to survive the crash,” Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva said. Both of his legs were seriously injured, county Fire Chief Daryl Osby said.
They said there was no immediate evidence that Woods was impaired.
The crash happened on a sweeping, downhill stretch of a two-lane road through upscale Los Angeles suburbs. Sheriff ’s Deputy Carlos Gonzalez, who was the first to arrive at the wreck, told reporters that he sometimes catches people topping 80 mph in the 45 mph zone and has seen fatal crashes there.
“I will say that it’s very fortunate that Mr. Woods was able to come out of this alive,” Gonzalez said.
Woods was in L.A. over the weekend as the tournament host of the Genesis Invitational at Riviera Country Club. He was to spend Monday and Tuesday filming with Discovery-owned GOLFTV.
Woods, a 15-time major champion who shares with Sam Snead the PGA Tour record of 82 career victories, has been recovering from Dec. 23 surgery on his lower back. It was his fifth back surgery and first since his lower spine was fused in April 2017.
The SUV he was driving Tuesday had tournament logos on the side door, indicating it was a courtesy car for players at the Genesis Invitational.
This is the third time Woods has been involved in a car investigation. The most notorious was the early morning after Thanksgiving in 2009, when his SUV ran over a fire hydrant and hit a tree. That was the start of revelations that he had been cheating on his wife with multiple women. Woods lost major corporate sponsorships, went to a rehabilitation clinic in Mississippi and didn’t return to golf for five months.
In May 2017, Florida police found him asleep behind the wheel of a car parked awkwardly on the side of the road. He was arrested on a DUI charge and said later he had an unexpected reaction to prescription medicine for his back pain. Woods later pleaded guilty to reckless driving and checked into a clinic to get help with prescription medication and a sleep disorder.