662 more state cases and 30 deaths
Senators miss session after rapid positives
Maryland health officials on Tuesday reported 30 more people died from the coronavirus, while the state added 662 new cases.
The daily tallies bring Maryland’s COVID-19 death toll to 7,580 and its and case count to 377,628 almost a year after the health department began to track the illness in March.
While the rate of new infections and deaths continue to decline, the state is escalating its vaccination campaign.
More than 1.1 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered across Maryland since mid-December, according to the health department. Almost 747,000 people have received their first shot, while 365,732 have received both doses. That means about 12% of the state’s roughly 6 million residents has some protection from the vaccine, while about 6% has been fully vaccinated.
Vaccinators administered 25,565 doses over the last 24 hours, the health department reported Tuesday. About 9,580 people received their first immunization, while some 15,985 received their second shots. Both federally approved vaccines call for two doses to protect against severe illness.
An average of 29,096 doses have been administered daily in Maryland over the last seven days, an increase in the average rate reported Sunday: 27,604.
Some of the state’s smaller counties have given first doses to the largest share of their populations.
Almost 22% of residents in Kent County, Maryland’s least populated county with about 19,000 people, have received their first shots. Farther south on the Eastern Shore, Worcester County has given preliminary immunizations to about 19% of its 52,000 people. And about 18.6% of Talbot County’s 37,000 residents have gotten their first doses.
Only about 6.2% of the residents of Prince George’s County, Maryland’s second most populated jurisdiction with about 909,000 people, have received their first doses — the lowest figure in the state. Maryland health officials have cited vaccine hesitancy for the Washington suburb’s low marks, though lawmakers have pushed them for more answers.
Prince George’s neighbor, Charles County, is the only other jurisdiction in the state that’s given first doses to less than 10% of its population of 163,000. However, 1,083 Charles County residents received a dose of the vaccine over the last 24 hours, an increase of 5.66% — the second highest day-over-day increase in Maryland.
On the Eastern Shore, Queen Anne’s County saw the biggest day-over-day gain at almost 7% as 683 people received a vaccine over the last 24 hours. About 10,000 people have received an immunization in Queen Anne’s, which has about 50,000 residents.
In the Baltimore metropolitan area, Anne Arundel County recorded the largest 24-hour increase in vaccinations, up 4.9%, with 4,826 immunizations. Some 103,345 of Anne Arundel’s roughly 580,000 residents have gotten a dose of the vaccine.
Baltimore County, with about 830,000 people, Maryland’s third most populous jurisdiction, has given vaccines to about 179,000 people — the second highest mark in the state. Some 3,194 residents received an immunization over the last 24 hours.
Meanwhile, Baltimore, with about 590,000 people, has administered a shot to almost 96,000 residents. Almost 2,000 people got a dose over the last 24 hours.
During the same 24-hour window, some 12,550 COVID-19 tests were completed throughout the state — the second lowest number of tests returned in a day this month in Maryland.
The state’s average testing positivity rate over the past week declined to 3.9% Monday, down from 3.91% Sunday. The rate has declined every day since Feb. 8 and is about half the 7.39% reported a month ago.
About 978 people remained in Maryland hospitals because of COVID-19 Tuesday, 14 fewer than a day earlier. Some 258 patients required intensive care, down 18 from the day before.
Positive results from “several” rapid coronavirus tests at the State House complex kept a number of senators off the chamber floor Tuesday morning and in a precautionary quarantine as lawmakers awaited the results of more accurate tests.
Senate President Bill Ferguson announced the positive results to the Senate chamber and said public health officials have begun extensive contact tracing of anyone potentially exposed to the virus.
Six of the Senate’s 47 members missed the chamber’s 11 a.m. floor session, although it wasn’t clear how many of those missing received positive results, how many were quarantining as a precaution because they were a close contact of a potential case or whether any missed the session for other reasons.
However, two of them, Sen. Shelly Hettleman and Sen. Susan Lee, told The Baltimore Sun that they were asked to quarantine as a precaution because they’d potentially been in contact with someone who tested positive Tuesday on a rapid test.
Lee said they weren’t told who tested positive, but she was happy to take additional precautions.
“I’d rather be safe. You have to take that extra step to be careful, that’s good,” said Lee, a Montgomery County Democrat. “You don’t want to harm any other people around.”
Hettleman, a Baltimore County Democrat, said she’s received both doses of the vaccine, but health officials instructed her to quarantine nonetheless after the possible exposure because it hadn’t been 14 days since her second shot.
Ferguson’s chief of staff, Jake Weissmann, declined to say how many rapid tests came back positive or whether those testing positive were senators or staffers “out of respect for privacy.”
The rapid tests are a valuable tool because of the speed of the results, but are less accurate than traditional polymerase chain reaction tests. Ferguson said he’d been in touch with the Anne Arundel County Health Department and expected to receive the PCR results Tuesday night.
Maryland senators are required to take rapid tests for coronavirus at least twice a week under the chamber’s protocols, which are aimed at limiting the risk of an outbreak during the legislative session in Annapolis. Other measures include plexiglass shields that surround senators’ desks in the chamber, a 2-hour time limit on floor sessions and conducting many committee meetings virtually.
There is no similar testing requirement for the House, although many members also submit regularly to tests. Over the past two months, a few members of the House of Delegates have gone into precautionary quarantines, but so far no delegates have tested positive on a PCR test, said Alexandra M. Hughes, chief of staff for House Speaker Adrienne A. Jones.
The legislature offered vaccines to members, who qualify under a “continuity of government” provision, in a private clinic at the Miller Senate Office Building. It’s not known how many received the shots.
The Senate moved forward Tuesday with its business, Ferguson said, but “we will make adjustments immediately and accordingly” if further tests confirm any infections among senators or staff members at the General Assembly.
“This is what we planned for. From the very outset, this was about risk mitigation,” Ferguson, a Baltimore Democrat, told his fellow senators. “All of the plans and operations that we put together were built around the possibility, and the challenges of trying to legislate in the midst of a pandemic, and so we will continue to err on the side of health and caution.”
He said he believed the Senate’s operations will be able to continue in a situation with the least risk to those involved and pledged to “update everyone as soon as we have additional information.”
Baltimore City Councilman Ryan Dorsey calls the local police union a “racist brotherhood” and the union president “psychotic” and says he has no interest in engaging the city chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police in any kind of dialogue.
That language is shocking, vicious and counterproductive, but followers of Dorsey on Twitter are used to his rants on cops and, specifically, the FOP. In fact, the 3rd District councilman appears to relish being a constant critic of the union. On Saturday, after Mike Mancuso, the FOP Lodge 3 president, responded to Dorsey’s incendiary tweet, calling it “disgusting and mindless,” the councilman came back with this: “Wild how no matter how many times and ways I make clear I think FOP is a racist organization of bullies somehow they always react like it’s the first time, and in the most outraged way ….”
What set Dorsey off this time? He didn’t respond to my requests for comment, but it’s easy to discern the source of his ire from his tweets: The FOP’s resistance to police reform and police enforcement of marijuana laws. In a tweet on Friday, Dorsey denigrated what the police called a “significant drug seizure” of 627 grams (or 1.38 pounds) of marijuana and $4,419 in cash from suspects on Cumberland Street in West Baltimore, an area known for drug dealing and violence. In October, a 27-yearold man named Lamont Randall was killed in the same block as the marijuana bust. In December, I wrote about another shooting that occurred just a block away.
On Feb. 17, the Baltimore Police Department reported the Cumberland Street bust and the arrests of four people, posting on Twitter and Facebook photographs of the marijuana. Two days later, Dorsey mocked the bust. “This is not a ‘significant drug seizure.’ This is a bunch of weed,” the councilman tweeted, adding the hashtag “copaganda” — a blend of “cop” and “propaganda.”
Dorsey has a point about the inflated characterization of the bust. But he seemed to be suggesting it was a waste of police resources to be arresting anyone for having marijuana, even in an area where violence accompanies drug sales. And then there’s the fact that having 627 grams of weed is still against the law, something referenced in a Twitter response from one of Dorsey’s 3rd District constituents, Warren Banks: “If you have a problem with it, maybe you should get someone in Annapolis to change the law making Marijuana legal. Instead of bashing cops for enforcing laws that the legislators have yet to change.”
The effort to repeal the Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights, led by reform-minded state Sen. Jill Carter of Baltimore, has been subject to several amendments, leaving a bill that, in Carter’s words, “completely guts the concept of repeal.” For Dorsey, that’s apparently another reason for FOP scorn — and for not speaking to Mancuso or any representative of the union, including its former president Bob Cherry.
“Last week @BobbyCherryJr asked me to meet with him and his racist brotherhood’s psychotic president,” Dorsey tweeted on Saturday morning. “This week they lobbied to gut @jillpcarter’s LEOBR repeal. I haven’t the least interest in suffering these people. I’m totally fine having nothing to do with them.” That tweet prompted a response from Mancuso, who called Dorsey’s comments an insult to police officers who are members of the FOP. “We deserve Mr. Dorsey’s support, not his hate and ridicule,” Mancuso said, adding that the councilman’s “immature behavior” warranted censure by the City Council.
I doubt that’s going to happen. I emailed all of Dorsey’s colleagues on City Council Monday and Tuesday to ask for their reactions to his tweets, but received no response. Not one. Asked about Dorsey’s comments at a news conference on Monday, Mayor Brandon Scott said only that he had spoken separately to both Mancuso and Dorsey over the weekend, but did not divulge what was said.
At the same news conference, Police Commissioner Michael Harrison said he had called Dorsey on Saturday, told him that he had painted the police force with a “broad brush,” and that a unifying message was needed in the Baltimore crime fight.
With that, Dorsey took to Twitter again, this time to belittle Harrison for trying to stick up for officers who were offended by Dorsey’s rant but who won’t publicly disagree with their union or “disavow [its] white supremacy.”
And “even more ridiculous,” Dorsey added, “is that it’s only a matter of time before [the FOP] is lambasting [Harrison] again in Mancuso’s next Trumpian screed.”
Next month marks two years since Harrison became commissioner, and the FOP has been critical of him since shortly after he took the job. Mancuso has frequently complained about what he considers weak leadership, an “untenable” crime-fighting plan and not enough officers in the ranks. His tone almost always seems angry or confrontational.
Same with Dorsey, when the subject is cops. The thing is, he’s a smart and creative guy who seems to really care about his constituents and the quality of their lives in Baltimore. Elected in 2016, he’s been part of the most productive and progressive City Councils in memory.
He and like-minded reformers think the FOP is too powerful and uses its power to protect bad cops. But the language Dorsey chose for this particular fight is way over the top, especially in light of the strides being made toward reform under the police department’s consent decree with the Justice Department. Just 10 days ago, the department reported that it had implemented a new “stops, searches and arrests” policy, another step toward eliminating the unconstitutional policing documented in a scathing Justice Department report in 2016.
Dorsey might think he’s only criticizing the union but a union is made up of the men and women who serve the citizens of Baltimore, thousands of them in his district. Do they want their city councilmen at constant war with the cops? I might be wrong, but I doubt it.
The Baltimore City school system will begin weekly, voluntary testing of its staff and students for COVID-19 in March, even when they are not showing symptoms and are unaware of any exposure to the virus.
The new testing would mean Baltimore City will offer some of the most comprehensive screening among Baltimore-area school districts. The city is already administering tests to those who come to school with symptoms. The tests are collected by a University of Maryland Medical Center mobile lab that visits schools to pick up the kits.
Under the latest screening plan, students and staff will test themselves using PCR tests, which are considered the gold standard for COVID-19 testing. Elementary and middle school students will use a short swab in the inside edge of their noses.
All the tests will be pooled according to their classrooms, and processed by a company. The results for the pool will be given to city schools. If the pool test is positive, all the students and staff will be notified and will have to quarantine. Families will be invited to come back for an individual test.
High school students and staff will give themselves a saliva-based test. Test tubes with the samples will be sent to a mobile lab funded by American University and located at and operated by Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C.
The test is completed in minutes at the schools and results come within eight hours through a phone app that will allow parents and staff to get the results. Details about the screening will be available on a website that launches Wednesday.
The city school board approved a $5.7 million contract with Ginkgo Bioworks Inc. for the pool tests for elementary and middle schools and a $9.5 million contract with ShieldT3 to process the saliva tests.
“The addition of no-symptom COVID19 screenings to our comprehensive protocols and mitigation strategies gives us another layer of protection that students and staff deserve,” said schools chief Sonja Santelises.