vox--2020-11-13--What will Thanksgiving look like this year? We asked a turkey farmer.

Minnesota family farms raise about 45 million turkeys every year , more than any other state in the US .
John Zimmerman , owner of P and J Products in Northfield , Minnesota , is a small part of that equation .
His farm produces 4 million to 5 million pounds of turkey each year , all of which is packed up and delivered to grocery stores , schools , cruise ships , and military bases around the country .
Like every other industry , the turkey business was hamstrung by the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic .
Consumer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have been notoriously vulnerable to Covid-19 outbreaks .
With a very strange Thanksgiving on the horizon , Zimmerman and his colleagues are gearing up for their biggest trial of the year .
Americans want a normal Thanksgiving , but the logistics remain unclear Zimmerman doesn ’ t know what the holiday season will look like .
Nobody running a turkey farm does .
Americans want a normal Thanksgiving — after these past eight months , we certainly deserve it — but the logistics remain unclear .
How many people will opt out of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will significantly curtail the number of guests they have and reduce the menu down to the essentials ?
How many will take advantage of the sweeping anti-institutional radicalism the pandemic has provoked and decide to have steak or lobster for this and all Thanksgivings going forward ?
Those are some of the unknowns Zimmerman is up against , and he won ’ t know the answers until a few days before the feast , when Americans make their trip to the supermarket .
Turkey is a seldom-used protein in the staple American diet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cattle , or chicken , or pork .
Still , he tells me the turkey business is agile by nature .
He and his fellow farmers are always scheming up new ways to get people to eat more turkey ; that ’ s what begat the turkey bacon , turkey sausage , and turkey burgers that line the freezer shelves at your local grocery store .
The coronavirus is a massive , generation-altering event , but Zimmerman has spent his whole life thinking about the inefficiencies in our diets that turkey could exploit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t a new problem .
We talked about that , as well as the similarities Zimmerman sees between this pandemic and the bird flu epidemics of the past and the supply chain disruptions he pushed through as the world slowed to a halt in March and April .
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity .
How are you guys feeling going into Thanksgiving ?
The big thing right now is like , are people going to have Thanksgiving this year ?
We had to plan for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ together , how big of turkeys are they going to want , what are we going to do ?
That market is still in flux .
What does the future hold ?
Are people going to change their tradition this year , and will that continue when things return to normal ?
How did the pandemic affect your farm throughout the year ?
We lost a lot of business .
A lot of turkey goes to the military , or school services , or cruise ships and casinos .
A lot of our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ now , and we ’ re still waiting for that to rebound .
It was a significant drop in demand .
The silver lining was that there was also a group of people at home cooking that never did before .
There were some whole birds sold , and people smoking turkeys on pellet grills .
We tried to have people pivot to that .
“ Instead of smoking a brisket , try out a turkey.
” That ’ s been a bright spot , and it ’ s opened a marketing avenue @ @ @ @ @ @ @ did the pandemic become a reality for the turkey farming business ?
“ The silver lining was that there was also a group of people at home cooking that never did before ” It started quickly in March and April , because at our processing plant we started to have employees test positive for Covid .
A lot of those employees live in large family groups , so one employee would be positive , and you ’ d have to quarantine 15 or 20 people .
We saw a definite decrease in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ affected the farm because we ’ re working at half speed so we can ’ t get the birds out on time .
Our situation was good ; we didn ’ t have to euthanize any birds , but we did have to truck some of them out to Utah for processing .
The supply chain broke down really quickly .
[ Many farms did have to make the difficult decision to cull their livestock . ]
Things had to be massaged .
It was daunting , but we made it through .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ with a workforce issue rather than a drop in demand ?
Exactly .
Schools shut down .
So if both a husband and wife worked in the plant , someone had to stay home and take care of the kids .
That probably affected our workforce more than anything else .
What was it like to work through those logistical questions ?
How did you come to the decision of , “ Okay , I think we need to ship off some of our birds out of state.
” Was that challenging ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ some growers just had to keep their birds longer .
Some put pens outside the barns in the warmer months to give them more room , just because they were going to grow to a larger weight .
Every time we have a flock go out to market , another flock is coming in , so the whole system gets gummed up .
We had to push back when we were getting our baby turkeys because our adult turkeys hadn ’ t left the farm yet .
As things got better , it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hopefully there are some lessons to be learned there .
Were you surprised at how easily the supply chain was disrupted ?
Was that pipeline revealed to be more fragile than you believed it to be before the pandemic ?
Yeah , it ’ s not just the turkey industry or the livestock industry .
I ordered parts for the farm , and in the past it was always , “ You ’ ll have those tomorrow.
” But then it turned into , “ You ’ ll have those in three days.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ have those in a week.
” Everyone had to adjust to that just-in-time timetable .
So it ’ s , “ We ’ re not going to carry any inventory , it ’ s just all going to just show up.
” I imagine that in spring , the idea that the pandemic was going to agitate Thanksgiving plans seemed far-fetched .
In those days , so many Americans felt that Covid-19 would be over by summer .
So when did you , and other turkey farmers , begin to understand the holiday @ @ @ @ @ @ @ usual ?
It was June and July .
“ We ’ ve thought about everything , maybe growing a smaller bird for smaller gatherings ” What ’ s interesting about the turkey industry is that we ’ ve been through epidemics before .
We had bird flu a number of years ago , so we knew how these arcs worked .
It gets worse for a while , then it gets better .
There are different peaks .
We didn ’ t expect Covid to go on for this long , but when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s lasting longer than it probably would ’ ve .
So in summer , we knew that these closures would likely still be in effect and that it was going to change the way people celebrate for the foreseeable future .
We ’ ve thought about everything : giving people recipes for turkey at home , maybe growing a smaller bird for smaller gatherings .
It ’ s interesting how you guys are thinking that far outside the box .
Like , “ Maybe we can change the dimensions of turkey meat to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ turkey industry always has to be nimble .
We ’ re small compared to beef and pork , and we know that families have gotten smaller , cultures change , and people are doing that Friendsgiving thing more .
That ’ s made us look at the “ whole bird ” concept differently .
We ’ re promoting different ways to eat turkey ; turkey bacon , turkey sausage , turkey burgers .
That mindset , to be innovative , has always been there when you ’ re growing turkeys .
People don @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a couple days before they cook it .
Does that make projecting the impact Covid-19 will have on the market this year difficult ?
I ’ m not in the marketing department , but we work with a company that does a preorder system for their turkeys , and they ’ ve still seen good demand from their customers .
Some people want Thanksgiving to be normal , so they ’ re going to buy that turkey come hell or high water .
And if they ’ ve got leftovers , they ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ talk about this problem , it ’ s clear you ’ re considering that the pandemic might affect the turkey industry for years to come .
A lot of people in commerce and public policy tend to think about Covid-19 in month-to-month terms .
What makes you look at it from such a wide scope ?
It ’ s because I ’ m a farmer .
I raise corn , soybeans , and turkeys .
Our corn takes a full year to come to fruition .
We live on a seasonal cycle .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ us for multiple years .
If you ’ re in agriculture , you have to have that perspective .
We ’ ve dealt with diseases that have affected us for six months or nine months .
You can ’ t have that myopic mindset of , “ What ’ s happening today , and how is it going to affect us tomorrow ?
” We ’ re not worrying about our stock prices .
We want to make sure that our farms are here for the next generation , that what we ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ my kids .

Minnesota family farms raise about 45 million turkeys every year, more than any other state in the US. John Zimmerman, owner of P and J Products in Northfield, Minnesota, is a small part of that equation. His farm produces 4 million to 5 million pounds of turkey each year, all of which is packed up and delivered to grocery stores, schools, cruise ships, and military bases around the country. Like every other industry, the turkey business was hamstrung by the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. Consumer demand is down, and meatpacking plants have been notoriously vulnerable to Covid-19 outbreaks. With a very strange Thanksgiving on the horizon, Zimmerman and his colleagues are gearing up for their biggest trial of the year.
Americans want a normal Thanksgiving, but the logistics remain unclear
Zimmerman doesn’t know what the holiday season will look like. Nobody running a turkey farm does. Americans want a normal Thanksgiving — after these past eight months, we certainly deserve it — but the logistics remain unclear. How many people will opt out of close family gatherings entirely? How many will significantly curtail the number of guests they have and reduce the menu down to the essentials? How many will take advantage of the sweeping anti-institutional radicalism the pandemic has provoked and decide to have steak or lobster for this and all Thanksgivings going forward? Those are some of the unknowns Zimmerman is up against, and he won’t know the answers until a few days before the feast, when Americans make their trip to the supermarket.
Turkey is a seldom-used protein in the staple American diet, and Zimmerman doesn’t grow cattle, or chicken, or pork. Still, he tells me the turkey business is agile by nature. He and his fellow farmers are always scheming up new ways to get people to eat more turkey; that’s what begat the turkey bacon, turkey sausage, and turkey burgers that line the freezer shelves at your local grocery store.
The coronavirus is a massive, generation-altering event, but Zimmerman has spent his whole life thinking about the inefficiencies in our diets that turkey could exploit. In that sense, this isn’t a new problem. We talked about that, as well as the similarities Zimmerman sees between this pandemic and the bird flu epidemics of the past and the supply chain disruptions he pushed through as the world slowed to a halt in March and April. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
How are you guys feeling going into Thanksgiving?
The big thing right now is like, are people going to have Thanksgiving this year? We had to plan for that. Are people going to get together, how big of turkeys are they going to want, what are we going to do? That market is still in flux. What does the future hold? Are people going to change their tradition this year, and will that continue when things return to normal?
How did the pandemic affect your farm throughout the year?
We lost a lot of business. A lot of turkey goes to the military, or school services, or cruise ships and casinos. A lot of our turkey is going into the freezers right now, and we’re still waiting for that to rebound. It was a significant drop in demand. The silver lining was that there was also a group of people at home cooking that never did before. There were some whole birds sold, and people smoking turkeys on pellet grills. We tried to have people pivot to that. “Instead of smoking a brisket, try out a turkey.” That’s been a bright spot, and it’s opened a marketing avenue for us in the future.
When did the pandemic become a reality for the turkey farming business?
“The silver lining was that there was also a group of people at home cooking that never did before”
It started quickly in March and April, because at our processing plant we started to have employees test positive for Covid. A lot of those employees live in large family groups, so one employee would be positive, and you’d have to quarantine 15 or 20 people. We saw a definite decrease in the workforce at the plant, and that affected the farm because we’re working at half speed so we can’t get the birds out on time. Our situation was good; we didn’t have to euthanize any birds, but we did have to truck some of them out to Utah for processing. The supply chain broke down really quickly. [Many farms did have to make the difficult decision to cull their livestock.] Things had to be massaged. It was daunting, but we made it through.
So that slowdown had more to do with a workforce issue rather than a drop in demand?
Exactly. Schools shut down. So if both a husband and wife worked in the plant, someone had to stay home and take care of the kids. That probably affected our workforce more than anything else.
What was it like to work through those logistical questions? How did you come to the decision of, “Okay, I think we need to ship off some of our birds out of state.” Was that challenging?
I’m a grower, so some growers just had to keep their birds longer. Some put pens outside the barns in the warmer months to give them more room, just because they were going to grow to a larger weight. Every time we have a flock go out to market, another flock is coming in, so the whole system gets gummed up. We had to push back when we were getting our baby turkeys because our adult turkeys hadn’t left the farm yet. As things got better, it did start working itself out again. Hopefully there are some lessons to be learned there.
Were you surprised at how easily the supply chain was disrupted? Was that pipeline revealed to be more fragile than you believed it to be before the pandemic?
Yeah, it’s not just the turkey industry or the livestock industry. I ordered parts for the farm, and in the past it was always, “You’ll have those tomorrow.” But then it turned into, “You’ll have those in three days.” Or, “You’ll have those in a week.” Everyone had to adjust to that just-in-time timetable. So it’s, “We’re not going to carry any inventory, it’s just all going to just show up.”
I imagine that in spring, the idea that the pandemic was going to agitate Thanksgiving plans seemed far-fetched. In those days, so many Americans felt that Covid-19 would be over by summer. So when did you, and other turkey farmers, begin to understand the holiday season wouldn’t be business as usual?
It was June and July.
“We’ve thought about everything, maybe growing a smaller bird for smaller gatherings”
What’s interesting about the turkey industry is that we’ve been through epidemics before. We had bird flu a number of years ago, so we knew how these arcs worked. It gets worse for a while, then it gets better. There are different peaks. We didn’t expect Covid to go on for this long, but when you get politics involved, it’s lasting longer than it probably would’ve. So in summer, we knew that these closures would likely still be in effect and that it was going to change the way people celebrate for the foreseeable future. We’ve thought about everything: giving people recipes for turkey at home, maybe growing a smaller bird for smaller gatherings.
It’s interesting how you guys are thinking that far outside the box. Like, “Maybe we can change the dimensions of turkey meat to better suit a global pandemic.”
The turkey industry always has to be nimble. We’re small compared to beef and pork, and we know that families have gotten smaller, cultures change, and people are doing that Friendsgiving thing more. That’s made us look at the “whole bird” concept differently. We’re promoting different ways to eat turkey; turkey bacon, turkey sausage, turkey burgers. That mindset, to be innovative, has always been there when you’re growing turkeys.
People don’t buy their Thanksgiving turkey until a couple days before they cook it. Does that make projecting the impact Covid-19 will have on the market this year difficult?
I’m not in the marketing department, but we work with a company that does a preorder system for their turkeys, and they’ve still seen good demand from their customers. Some people want Thanksgiving to be normal, so they’re going to buy that turkey come hell or high water. And if they’ve got leftovers, they’ve got leftovers.
The way you talk about this problem, it’s clear you’re considering that the pandemic might affect the turkey industry for years to come. A lot of people in commerce and public policy tend to think about Covid-19 in month-to-month terms. What makes you look at it from such a wide scope?
It’s because I’m a farmer. I raise corn, soybeans, and turkeys. Our corn takes a full year to come to fruition. We live on a seasonal cycle. Things we do right now will affect us for multiple years. If you’re in agriculture, you have to have that perspective. We’ve dealt with diseases that have affected us for six months or nine months. You can’t have that myopic mindset of, “What’s happening today, and how is it going to affect us tomorrow?” We’re not worrying about our stock prices. We want to make sure that our farms are here for the next generation, that what we’ve built will still be here for my kids.


vox--2020-11-13--The disturbing surge in Covid-19 hospitalizations, in one chart

More Americans are currently hospitalized with Covid-19 than at any other point in the pandemic , a grim indicator that the third big wave of cases in the US may be the worst wave to date .
On November 11 , 65,368 people across the United States were in the hospital after testing positive for the novel coronavirus , according to data reported by the Covid Tracking Project .
That ’ s significantly higher than the last peak of 59,940 recorded on April 15 , when the New York City area was the epicenter of the US outbreak .
( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the national and state hospital data have been erratic and incomplete , and reported totals may continue to shift . )
What ’ s clear from the data is that Covid-19 migrated across the country to new hot spot regions this fall .
In the spring , hospitalizations were overwhelmingly concentrated in the Northeast .
In the summer , more than half of hospitalized Covid-19 patients were in the South and West : states like Arizona , California , Florida , Georgia , and Texas .
Now the Midwest , Great Plains , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spots , but some former hot spots are warming back up as well , with cases and hospitalizations surging again .
“ There ’ s so many places , with so many people , that the numbers are just drastically higher , ” said Daniel McQuillen , an assistant professor of medicine at Tufts and a senior physician in the division of infectious diseases at Beth Israel Lahey Health , at a Wednesday Infectious Diseases Society of America briefing .
As of November 11 , Texas had the highest number of hospitalizations of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Illinois was in second place with 5,042 people in the hospital ; other Midwestern states like Michigan , Indiana , and Wisconsin have seen record spikes in cases in recent weeks and now have more than 2,000 people hospitalized each .
“ The hospitalization number is the best indicator of where we are , ” Eric Topol , a professor of molecular medicine and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute , told Vox this summer .
That ’ s because it ’ s a better measurement of the severity of the pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a fraction of cases and includes more mild cases .
“ We ’ re going to go to new heights in the pandemic that we haven ’ t seen before .
Not that what we saw before wasn ’ t horrifying enough.
” Some states like Utah and North Dakota have lower total hospitalizations but also fewer hospitals and hospital beds — and they ’ re now reaching a woeful tipping point of hospitals stretched to maximum capacity .
“ Here in Salt Lake City , we provide a lot of [ specialized @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people in four states as far away as Montana , Arizona , and Wyoming ... and our hospitals and caregivers are extraordinarily stressed , ” Andrew Pavia , the chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Utah School of Medicine , said at the IDSA briefing .
“ Our ICUs are full , but that includes overflow ICUs that have been purpose-built , taking advantage of the time we ’ ve had to plan.
” This was , unfortunately , to be expected ( although it wasn ’ t inevitable ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and states failed to fully control their outbreaks , transmission picked up when people moved indoors .
Nearly all the states currently experiencing an increase in new cases and hospitalizations also did not experience major outbreaks in the spring or summer , so residents were less fearful and took less action to prevent the spread of the virus .
“ There was a political climate where there ’ s distrust of government and reluctance to take harsh measures , ” in places like Utah , said Pavia .
“ Many of these states @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recently , and some don ’ t even have them today and have very limited restrictions on mass gatherings.
” Deaths are ticking up again too , reaching 1,592 on November 11 , reversing a steady decline that had begun in early May after the first wave and in August after the second wave .
Cumulatively , 10.2 million Americans have tested positive for Covid-19 since the pandemic began , and more than 233,000 of them have died .
With hospitalizations surging and several states reporting thousands of new cases a day , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ difficult late fall and winter .
The new hospitalizations , and the untenable pressure they ’ re putting on the health care system , are also a reminder of how critical it is for states to implement and enforce measures like mandatory face masks , restrictions on bars and restaurants , and for the federal government to fix testing and contact tracing problems .
“ It should be an all-points bulletin to really bear down on this , because otherwise there ’ s no limit on where this might go , ” said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ staff and beds for Covid-19 patients The good news is that infectious disease experts think many hospitals are better prepared to handle surges in Covid-19 patients than they were in the spring .
For the most part , they have the equipment they need and they know how to deploy it .
They also have more standardized protocol for treating the sickest patients .
Yet hospitals in hot spots across the country are maxing out their staff , equipment , and beds , with doctors and nurses warning that the worst-case scenario of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ horizon if their states don ’ t get better control of the coronavirus .
“ The surge of Covid-19 patients takes away from our ability to care for the sick patients that are already in Arkansas , ” said a nurse at a major health system in Little Rock , who asked to go unnamed fearing retaliation from her employer .
“ We have so many nurses quarantined that we ’ re not able to staff our oncology unit appropriately , and our patients are being negatively affected .
Covid-19 is right now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hospitals in several states are also straining to find enough specialists to treat the very sick Covid-19 patients .
“ ICU beds don ’ t take care of people — you need staff , ” said Pavia of the University of Utah School of Medicine .
“ And one of the things that many of the Western states have in common is a relative shortage of the people we need to take care of very sick people during a pandemic like this : ICU doctors , probably most importantly ICU nurses , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ These folks have been working flat out for eight or nine months , and three months into the surge , they ’ re exhausted , they ’ re stressed.
” Staffing is a universal problem in hot spots .
Gov .
Gary Herbert of Utah said the state will have to bring in out-of-state nurses to help with the surge , and officials and health care providers in South Dakota , Tennessee , Arizona , and Wisconsin are requesting them too : In Texas , officials are setting up medical tents in El @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rapid rise in hospitalized Covid-19 patients and a dwindling number of hospital beds .
“ El Paso , Texas , is almost completely out of ICU beds ; Lubbock , the same thing , ” said McQuillen .
“ We are the 11th-largest city in the state of Texas and we have two field hospitals on their way to town , ” Jarrett Atkinson , Lubbock ’ s city manager , told KCBD on Tuesday .
“ I can absolutely assure you that never in my career did I think we would be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” According to McQuillen , both El Paso and Lubbock have been “ much less stringent with their populations [ mandating ] simple things like wearing masks , and socially distancing.
” He compared that to Massachusetts and other Northeast states where he says strict measures during the spring surge made a big difference in reversing the steep climb in cases and hospitalizations .
Yet too many states ignored that critical lesson , and now are paying the price .
Daily deaths are creeping up again but are still far below the earlier @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , another key metric , daily deaths , reached 1,562 on November 11 , the highest it has been since May during the first surge , according to the Covid Tracking Project .
It ’ s an ominous sign that deaths could reach unprecedented levels in the coming weeks and months , given that cases and hospitalizations are now at new highs .
It ’ s possible , experts say , that fewer people who are hospitalized will end up dying in this winter stage of the pandemic as compared to the spring @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reported , there have been significant improvements in mortality in the US and Europe in the past several months , as doctors ’ understanding of Covid-19 and how to treat it has improved : That said , if hospitals in the hard-hit states run out of beds and staff to treat the incoming flow of patients , more people who could have been saved may die .
When ICU staff were stretched in the spring , “ ICU patients just didn ’ t get the same attention , ” intensive care doctor Lakshman @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Health Alliance , told Belluz .

Far more Americans are currently hospitalized with Covid-19 than at any other point in the pandemic, a grim indicator that the third big wave of cases in the US is the worst wave to date by a lot.
On December 2, 100,226 people across the United States were in the hospital after testing positive for the novel coronavirus, according to data reported by the Covid Tracking Project. That’s significantly higher than the last two peaks recorded on April 15 and July 23, when the New York City and the Southeast and Southwest, respectively, were epicenters of the US outbreak. (As the Covid Tracking Project notes, the national and state hospital data have been erratic and incomplete, and reported totals may continue to shift.)
What’s clear from the data is that Covid-19 migrated across the country to new regions this fall. In the spring, hospitalizations were overwhelmingly concentrated in the Northeast. In the summer, more than half of hospitalized Covid-19 patients were in the South and West: states like Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, and Texas.
Now, every state is battling an active outbreak, and many of them are severe. “There’s so many places, with so many people, that the numbers are just drastically higher,” said Daniel McQuillen, an assistant professor of medicine at Tufts and a senior physician in the division of infectious diseases at Beth Israel Lahey Health, at a November Infectious Diseases Society of America briefing.
“There are no more hot spots,” said Murtaza Akhter, an emergency medicine physician with Valleywise Health Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona. “Everywhere is a hot spot.”
As of December 3, California had the highest number of hospitalizations of any state (9,702), and Texas was in second place with 9,151 people in the hospital; Midwestern states like Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio have also seen record spikes in cases in recent weeks and now have more than 4,000 people hospitalized each.
“The hospitalization number is the best indicator of where we are,” Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told Vox this summer. That’s because it’s a better measurement of the severity of the pandemic than Covid-19 testing, which only finds a fraction of cases and includes more mild cases. “We’re going to go to new heights in the pandemic that we haven’t seen before. Not that what we saw before wasn’t horrifying enough.”
Some states like Utah and North Dakota have lower total hospitalizations but also fewer hospitals and hospital beds — and they’re now reaching a woeful tipping point of hospitals stretched to maximum capacity.
“Here in Salt Lake City, we provide a lot of [specialized infectious disease and ICU care] to people in four states as far away as Montana, Arizona, and Wyoming ... and our hospitals and caregivers are extraordinarily stressed,” Andrew Pavia, the chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Utah School of Medicine, said at the IDSA briefing. “Our ICUs are full, but that includes overflow ICUs that have been purpose-built, taking advantage of the time we’ve had to plan.”
This was, unfortunately, to be expected (although it wasn’t inevitable). As the weather has turned cooler and states failed to fully control their outbreaks, transmission picked up when people moved indoors. Nearly all the states currently experiencing an increase in new cases and hospitalizations also did not experience major outbreaks in the spring or summer, so residents were less fearful and took less action to prevent the spread of the virus.
“There was a political climate where there’s distrust of government and reluctance to take harsh measures” in places like Utah, Pavia said. “Many of these states did not have mask mandates until very recently, and some don’t even have them today and have very limited restrictions on mass gatherings.”
Deaths have nearly hit a new record high as well, reaching 2,733 on December 2, reversing a steady decline that had begun in early May after the first wave and in August after the second wave.
Cumulatively, 13.9 million Americans have tested positive for Covid-19 since the pandemic began, and more than 267,000 of them have died. With hospitalizations surging and several states reporting thousands of new cases a day, CDC Director Robert Redfield said Wednesday Americans are in for “the most difficult in the public health history of this nation.”
The new hospitalizations, and the untenable pressure they’re putting on the health care system, are also a reminder of how critical it is for states to implement and enforce measures like mandatory face masks, restrictions on bars and restaurants, and for the federal government to fix testing and contact tracing problems. “It should be an all-points bulletin to really bear down on this, because otherwise there’s no limit on where this might go,” said Topol.
Hospitals are running out of staff and beds for Covid-19 patients
The good news is that infectious disease experts think many hospitals are better prepared to handle surges in Covid-19 patients than they were in the spring. For the most part, they have the equipment they need and they know how to deploy it. They also have more standardized protocol for treating the sickest patients.
Yet hospitals in hot spots across the country are maxing out their staff, equipment, and beds, with doctors and nurses warning that the worst-case scenario of hospital resources being overwhelmed have already arrived as their states have failed to get control of the coronavirus.
“The surge of Covid-19 patients takes away from our ability to care for the sick patients that are already in Arkansas,” said a nurse at a major health system in Little Rock, who asked to go unnamed fearing retaliation from her employer. “We have so many nurses quarantined that we’re not able to staff our oncology unit appropriately, and our patients are being negatively affected. Covid-19 is right now overburdening our health care system in Arkansas.”
Hospitals in several states are also straining to find enough specialists to treat very sick Covid-19 patients.
“ICU beds don’t take care of people — you need staff,” Pavia said. “And one of the things that many of the Western states have in common is a relative shortage of the people we need to take care of very sick people during a pandemic like this: ICU doctors, probably most importantly ICU nurses, and infectious disease physicians, respiratory therapists. These folks have been working flat out for eight or nine months, and three months into the surge, they’re exhausted, they’re stressed.”
Staffing is a universal problem in hot spots. Gov. Gary Herbert of Utah said the state will have to bring in out-of-state nurses to help with the surge, and officials and health care providers in South Dakota, Tennessee, Arizona, and Wisconsin are requesting them too
In Texas, officials are setting up medical tents in El Paso and Lubbock in response to the rapid rise in hospitalized Covid-19 patients and a dwindling number of hospital beds. “El Paso, Texas, is almost completely out of ICU beds; Lubbock, the same thing,” said McQuillen.
“We are the 11th-largest city in the state of Texas and we have two field hospitals on their way to town,” Jarrett Atkinson, Lubbock’s city manager, told KCBD in November. “I can absolutely assure you that never in my career did I think we would be deploying field hospitals to Lubbock, Texas.”
According to McQuillen, both El Paso and Lubbock have been “much less stringent with their populations [mandating] simple things like wearing masks, and socially distancing.” He compared that to Massachusetts and other Northeast states where he says strict measures during the spring surge made a big difference in reversing the steep climb in cases and hospitalizations. Yet too many states ignored that critical lesson, and now are paying the price.
Daily deaths are creeping up again but are still far below the earlier peak
While daily Covid-19 hospitalizations are surging, another key metric, daily deaths, reached 2,733 on December 2, the highest it has been since April during the first surge, according to the Covid Tracking Project. It’s an ominous sign that deaths will reach horrifying new levels in the coming weeks and months, given that cases and hospitalizations are now at new highs.
It’s possible, experts say, that fewer people who are hospitalized will end up dying in this winter stage of the pandemic as compared to the spring. As Vox’s Julia Belluz reported, there have been significant improvements in mortality in the US and Europe in the past several months, as doctors’ understanding of Covid-19 and how to treat it has improved:
Now, there’s strong evidence that common steroids like dexamethasone can reduce the risk of mortality in severely sick inpatients. Putting patients to rest on their stomachs instead of their backs (a practice known as proning) also seems to help. Though there’s still a lot of progress to be made, the treatment approach has become more standardized over time, said Jen Manne-Goehler, an infectious disease doctor at Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General hospitals. When she started treating Covid-19 patients in the spring, it felt like practice was changing every few days. Now it’s more streamlined — and that’s undoubtedly helping with survival, too.
That said, if hospitals in the hard-hit states run out of beds and staff to treat the incoming flow of patients, more people who could have been saved may die. When ICU staff were stretched in the spring, “ICU patients just didn’t get the same attention,” intensive care doctor Lakshman Swamy, who works with the Cambridge Health Alliance, told Belluz.
Murtaza Akhter, the Arizona doctor, worries that his emergency room will be completely overwhelmed around Christmas, about one month after Thanksgiving, when many people are expected to have been infected after ignoring or the public health guidance to avoid family gatherings. He says he’s most worried about the “borderline patients who may otherwise have been admitted to the ER — they may now be more likely to go home because there are no hospital beds. And of those people, a very distinct fraction will have a worse outcome.”
This is one big reason why overtaxed hospitals will lead to more deaths. “This Covid-19 surge really has a huge downstream effect everywhere, not just on Covid patients but everybody else because it’s not like car accidents magically stopped or heart attacks stopped, they’re still there. The ones who do come in and get discharged, more often than many get worse outcomes.”


vox--2020-11-13--“A multi-year fight”: Ballot wins on police reform is just the first step, activists say

In the weeks after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis , calls to defund the police could be seen on protesters ’ signs , read in etchings on sidewalks , and heard in chants in America ’ s streets .
The demand , generally , was to move money from massive police budgets to social services and other local agencies , diminishing the role of police .
The goal was to end the racist and violent policing of Black people .
The Minneapolis City Council , seeing how Floyd ’ s death had moved the country , took @ @ @ @ @ @ @ defund their department .
Meanwhile , the mounting pressure pushed elected officials in states like New York , Massachusetts , and Colorado not to slash police budgets but to pass reform legislation , including chokehold bans , training commissions , and body camera requirements .
But many of those initial moves in cities and states across the country eventually stalled .
For example , five months later , the battle over funding continues in Minneapolis .
And while media coverage of protests also dwindled as summer turned to fall , local activists kept @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the protests erupted — to get police reform and defunding initiatives on the ballot .
Their efforts , coupled with the momentum of the protests , seem to have paid off .
Despite being a contentious issue across party lines , voters last week in cities in six states overwhelmingly approved 18 of these ballot measures , including creating and improving police oversight boards , changing police department staffing and funding , and requiring public access to police body and dashboard camera recordings .
While most of these measures are a step toward @ @ @ @ @ @ @ terms of reimagining policing .
Many are standards already implemented in other cities — and a bare minimum for police accountability , activists say .
On one hand , these wins prompt questions of what ’ s next , stirring the debate on what to do about the broken institution of policing — whether to fight for the incremental change of reform or to dismantle the entire system through defunding or even abolishment .
On the other , that voters got behind so many measures at all shows a possible tide shift ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ done about police violence and accountability .
Rev .
Mark Kelly Tyler , the co-director of Power Live Free , an interfaith activism group that focuses on criminal justice issues in Philadelphia , said the ballot approvals , including a citizens oversight committee in his city , are just the first step in the fight for how policing should be in America .
“ For me , it ’ s about the kind of world we want to leave behind and how policing would look 10 to 20 years from now , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a marathon , not a sprint.
” While some cities and states started passing police accountability legislation this summer , others followed suit through citizen votes .
In California , seven local ballot initiatives passed as a result of last week ’ s elections .
The most progressive ballot initiative was Los Angeles County ’ s Measure J , also known as “ Reimagine LA County , ” which would amend the county ’ s charter and require 10 percent of the city ’ s unrestricted general funds to be invested in housing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and other alternatives to incarceration instead of prisons and policing .
Although Measure J is effectively a move to defund the police ( county chief executive Fesia Davenport said the $ 2 billion Sheriff ’ s Department budget would likely be impacted ) , the initiative didn ’ t use “ defund ” language .
As Roge Karma reported for Vox , the campaign ’ s messaging has focused almost entirely on the benefits of increased investment in underserved Black and brown communities .
This may be a response to polling that suggests @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ defunding ” even if they are into the core idea behind it — shifting police funds to social services .
“ The passage of Measure J sets a new precedent for the nation on how to invest in care and opportunity as a means of solving social problems , instead of continuing to grow our carceral system , which has only exacerbated the root causes of inequity , ” Isaac Bryan , co-chair of the Reimagine LA Coalition , told Vox .
But the police accountability measures that passed in other cities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ do with defunding .
One of the most popular measures voters approved in cities around the country was creating civilian oversight committees , which would essentially investigate citizen complaints of police and police misconduct .
For decades , Portland activists have been pushing for sweeping legislation on police reform due to the police bureau ’ s history of abusing and killing the city ’ s Black residents .
( In 2019 , criminal justice activists advocated and passed a bill that would protect Black youth .
Also that year , activists fought to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) So when Measure 26-217 — which would overhaul Portland ’ s police oversight system and create a new commission of civilian volunteers who could investigate misconduct and allegations against the police — got on the ballot after a long summer of protests and clashes with police in the city , activists fought to pass it .
They rallied outside city hall and the police bureau .
They gave presentations to elected officials .
And it worked .
The ballot measure passed with more than 80 percent of votes .
“ I will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Portland Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty , the key architect of Portland ’ s recent police reform initiatives including Measure 26-217 , said during a press conference on election night .
“ I expected that we would have overwhelming support , but 80 percent sends a very strong message that the community is ready for a transformation when it comes to policing.
” Voters passed similar oversight board measures in the California cities of San Diego and San Jose , as well as Sonoma County .
So did voters in King County , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Black Lives Matter protesters created an “ autonomous zone ” free from the police — as well as those in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia , which had seen protests leading up to the election over the police shooting death of Walter Wallace Jr .
Even cities in red states like Columbus , Ohio , and Kyle , Texas ( roughly 20 miles south of Austin ) , voted in favor of oversight boards .
All this support marks a shift in how Americans are thinking about policing after Floyd ’ s death sparked a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ racism .
For many organizers , though , it ’ s been a work long in progress .
Since last year , Rev .
Tyler ’ s organization had been developing a list of demands for the Philadelphia City Council to put an end to police brutality , gun violence , and mass incarceration .
It wasn ’ t until after Floyd ’ s death , when the city was looking for a quick win to address the national upheaval , that city officials started to take them seriously .
In July , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ town halls with police oversight experts to brainstorm ideas on how a civilian oversight board should work .
Tyler said that members of the oversight commission should be elected by the people , much like a school board , instead of appointed by the city council .
He also wants to see the oversight commission have full power over police policy and strategies , including where budgets should be allocated .
” We think the commission should have full power over police policy and police directives , along with having control of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he said .
“ We need to take the politics out of it .
This body should oversee how that budget is allocated and spent.
” Tyler also praised cities like Oakland and San Francisco , which are already expanding the power of their civilian oversight boards .
Oakland , for instance , already established an oversight commission four years ago .
But the city just voted to not only strengthen the commission ’ s powers but also make the commission independent — meaning it would sever ties from the city and police @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Activists say the move would increase police accountability and public trust .
Other policing measures that voters approved in the recent election : slashing mandatory police staffing levels in San Francisco ; using body and dashboard camera recordings to document police use of force in Akron Ohio ; and symbolically codifying “ stop and frisk ” policing in Philadelphia — though its passage doesn ’ t entirely eradicate the practice .
In other words , these are all small steps in shifting police accountability .
Oluchi Omeoga — co-founder and core team member @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one of the groups behind the push to defund the city ’ s police — said that some of these police reform ballot initiatives don ’ t exactly limit or lessen the power of the police and that defunding is the way forward .
“ The system of policing , if you look at our country ’ s history , is working the way it ’ s supposed to , since it was created at a time when we abolished slavery , ” said Omeoga .
“ When we think about reform , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ system is working exactly the way it ’ s supposed to .
So the two strategies that I see is either the reformation of existing structures that we have or the complete abolition and restructure of a new community safety.
” “ We have a long way to go ” Even among these recent wins , pushback has already begun .
The Portland Police Association filed a grievance against the city arguing that Measure 26-217 should have been negotiated with the union before the ballot measure went to voters .
In Minneapolis , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Medaria Arradondo is asking other law enforcement agencies and city council for more funding to expand staffing , since many police officers went on leave .
Bryan said that Reimagine LA , along with other grassroots organizations , will make sure election officials keep their pledge by tracking where the money will be spent in terms of improving communities .
“ As long as we continue to see lethal encounters with law enforcement on our phones and TVs , I believe voters will continue to call for more direct measures to address the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bryan .
“ Measure J is a powerful example , but I don ’ t believe it will be the last .
There ’ s still a lot of work to do.
” Abdirahim Mohamoud , a 17-year-old Black student activist who lives in a predominantly white neighborhood about 10 miles southwest of Portland , said people should pay attention to the same challenges of racism and police violence — as well as grassroots actions — that are also occurring in suburban areas .
He also worries the fight for police reform will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over and a Democrat will take the highest seat in the nation .
“ I have a really big fear that because these ballots passed , people are going to stop caring , stop being active with their voices , ” said Mohamoud .
“ The lack of momentum from other people is probably going to be the downfall of it , because this is not something that only a few [ people ] can do or I , by myself can do , it ’ s a group effort.
” Mohamoud also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ defunding ” out loud , since the term has been “ so politicized ” — as a means to rile up their base , Republicans have often made false claims that Democratic leaders like President-elect Joe Biden are in favor of defunding the police .
One of the only ballot measures that was a loss for police accountability this election cycle was about budgeting : In DuPage County , Illinois , voters overwhelmingly voted to continue financial support of law enforcement and public safety as its “ top budgeting priority.
” Omeoga @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t a view , but rather a tactic in reenvisioning policing in communities .
That includes diverting money from the police and reinvesting it in communities , changing the way people use 911 calls when addressing car accidents or mental health crises , and implementing a robust policing education that would improve relationships across communities .
“ Believe it or not , we have tried to reform policing for the last at least 200 years , and nothing has actually been fixed because it ’ s not exactly broken , ” Omeoga @ @ @ @ @ @ @ understand that this system of policing is in the interest of capitalism and white supremacy , so the tactic is defunding the police to take our reliance away from the police and turning it into new systems of community accountability and safety that isn ’ t relying on the state.
” For Tyler , reforming the police creates an avenue toward defunding .
He expects more police reform initiatives to emerge in upcoming ballots as city leaders learn from each other .
Some of the measures he expects to see are changes that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the oversight commission having the ability to hire and fire the police chief .
“ This is a long haul and an ongoing national conversation , ” said Tyler .
“ It ’ s really about the citizens taking control over police departments because the police have proven themselves incapable of policing themselves .
I ’ m happy that the first step is done , but this is a multi-year fight , not a one-campaign fight .
We have a long way to go .
”

In the weeks after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, calls to defund the police could be seen on protesters’ signs, read in etchings on sidewalks, and heard in chants in America’s streets. The demand, generally, was to move money from massive police budgets to social services and other local agencies, diminishing the role of police. The goal was to end the racist and violent policing of Black people.
The Minneapolis City Council, seeing how Floyd’s death had moved the country, took this to heart, immediately pledging to defund their department. Meanwhile, the mounting pressure pushed elected officials in states like New York, Massachusetts, and Colorado not to slash police budgets but to pass reform legislation, including chokehold bans, training commissions, and body camera requirements.
But many of those initial moves in cities and states across the country eventually stalled. For example, five months later, the battle over funding continues in Minneapolis.
And while media coverage of protests also dwindled as summer turned to fall, local activists kept pushing — much like they had before the protests erupted — to get police reform and defunding initiatives on the ballot. Their efforts, coupled with the momentum of the protests, seem to have paid off.
Despite being a contentious issue across party lines, voters last week in cities in six states overwhelmingly approved 18 of these ballot measures, including creating and improving police oversight boards, changing police department staffing and funding, and requiring public access to police body and dashboard camera recordings. While most of these measures are a step toward reform, almost none are radical in terms of reimagining policing. Many are standards already implemented in other cities — and a bare minimum for police accountability, activists say.
On one hand, these wins prompt questions of what’s next, stirring the debate on what to do about the broken institution of policing — whether to keep fighting for the incremental change of reform or to work toward dismantling the entire system through defunding or even abolishment. On the other, that voters got behind so many measures at all shows a possible tide shift; Americans are recognizing something needs to be done about police violence and accountability.
Rev. Mark Kelly Tyler, the co-director of Power Live Free, an interfaith activism group that focuses on criminal justice issues in Philadelphia, said the ballot approvals, including a citizens oversight committee in his city, are just the first step in the fight for how policing should be in America.
“For me, it’s about the kind of world we want to leave behind and how policing would look 10 to 20 years from now,” he said. “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”
What the approved police reform ballot measures entail
While some cities and states started passing police accountability legislation this summer, others followed suit through citizen votes. In California, seven local ballot initiatives passed as a result of last week’s elections. The most progressive ballot initiative was Los Angeles County’s Measure J, also known as “Reimagine LA County,” which would amend the county’s charter and require 10 percent of the city’s unrestricted general funds to be invested in housing, mental health programs and services, and other alternatives to incarceration instead of prisons and policing.
Although Measure J is effectively a move to defund the police (county chief executive Fesia Davenport said the $2 billion Sheriff’s Department budget would likely be impacted), the initiative didn’t use “defund” language. As Roge Karma reported for Vox, the campaign’s messaging has focused almost entirely on the benefits of increased investment in underserved Black and brown communities. This may be a response to polling that suggests people are turned off by the term “defunding” even if they are into the core idea behind it — shifting police funds to social services.
“The passage of Measure J sets a new precedent for the nation on how to invest in care and opportunity as a means of solving social problems, instead of continuing to grow our carceral system, which has only exacerbated the root causes of inequity,” Isaac Bryan, co-chair of the Reimagine LA Coalition, told Vox.
But the police accountability measures that passed in other cities don’t exactly have anything to do with defunding. One of the most popular measures voters approved in cities around the country was creating civilian oversight committees, which would essentially investigate citizen complaints of police and police misconduct.
For decades, Portland activists have been pushing for sweeping legislation on police reform due to the police bureau’s history of abusing and killing the city’s Black residents. (In 2019, criminal justice activists advocated and passed a bill that would protect Black youth. Also that year, activists fought to increase police accountability, which stalled.) So when Measure 26-217 — which would overhaul Portland’s police oversight system and create a new commission of civilian volunteers who could investigate misconduct and allegations against the police — got on the ballot after a long summer of protests and clashes with police in the city, activists fought to pass it. They rallied outside city hall and the police bureau. They gave presentations to elected officials. And it worked. The ballot measure passed with more than 80 percent of votes.
“I will say I’m not surprised,” Portland Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, the key architect of Portland’s recent police reform initiatives including Measure 26-217, said during a press conference on election night. “I expected that we would have overwhelming support, but 80 percent sends a very strong message that the community is ready for a transformation when it comes to policing.”
Voters passed similar oversight board measures in the California cities of San Diego and San Jose, as well as Sonoma County. So did voters in King County, Washington, home to Seattle — where Black Lives Matter protesters created an “autonomous zone” free from the police — as well as those in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, which had seen protests leading up to the election over the police shooting death of Walter Wallace Jr. Even cities in red states like Columbus, Ohio, and Kyle, Texas (roughly 20 miles south of Austin), voted in favor of oversight boards.
All this support marks a shift in how Americans are thinking about policing after Floyd’s death sparked a national conversation on police violence and systemic racism. For many organizers, though, it’s been a work long in progress.
Since last year, Rev. Tyler’s organization had been developing a list of demands for the Philadelphia City Council to put an end to police brutality, gun violence, and mass incarceration. It wasn’t until after Floyd’s death, when the city was looking for a quick win to address the national upheaval, that city officials started to take them seriously.
In July, Tyler began hosting a series of virtual town halls with police oversight experts to brainstorm ideas on how a civilian oversight board should work. Tyler said that members of the oversight commission should be elected by the people, much like a school board, instead of appointed by the city council. He also wants to see the oversight commission have full power over police policy and strategies, including where budgets should be allocated.
”We think the commission should have full power over police policy and police directives, along with having control of the budgets for the police department,” he said. “We need to take the politics out of it. This body should oversee how that budget is allocated and spent.”
Tyler also praised cities like Oakland and San Francisco, which are already expanding the power of their civilian oversight boards. Oakland, for instance, already established an oversight commission four years ago. But the city just voted to not only strengthen the commission’s powers but also make the commission independent — meaning it would sever ties from the city and police department’s chain of command. Activists say the move would increase police accountability and public trust.
Other policing measures that voters approved in the recent election: slashing mandatory police staffing levels in San Francisco; using body and dashboard camera recordings to document police use of force in Akron Ohio; and symbolically codifying “stop and frisk” policing in Philadelphia — though its passage doesn’t entirely eradicate the practice. In other words, these are all small steps in shifting police accountability.
Oluchi Omeoga — co-founder and core team member of Black Visions Collective in Minneapolis, one of the groups behind the push to defund the city’s police — said that some of these police reform ballot initiatives don’t exactly limit or lessen the power of the police and that defunding is the way forward.
“The system of policing, if you look at our country’s history, is working the way it’s supposed to, since it was created at a time when we abolished slavery,” said Omeoga. “When we think about reform, there’s no reform because the system is working exactly the way it’s supposed to. So the two strategies that I see is either the reformation of existing structures that we have or the complete abolition and restructure of a new community safety.”
“We have a long way to go”
Even among these recent wins, pushback has already begun. The Portland Police Association filed a grievance against the city arguing that Measure 26-217 should have been negotiated with the union before the ballot measure went to voters. In Minneapolis, where legislation has stalled, Police Chief Medaria Arradondo is asking other law enforcement agencies and city council for more funding to expand staffing, since many police officers went on leave.
Bryan said that Reimagine LA, along with other grassroots organizations, will make sure election officials keep their pledge by tracking where the money will be spent in terms of improving communities.
“As long as we continue to see lethal encounters with law enforcement on our phones and TVs, I believe voters will continue to call for more direct measures to address the root causes of injustice,” said Bryan. “Measure J is a powerful example, but I don’t believe it will be the last. There’s still a lot of work to do.”
Abdirahim Mohamoud, a 17-year-old Black student activist who lives in a predominantly white neighborhood about 10 miles southwest of Portland, said people should pay attention to the same challenges of racism and police violence — as well as grassroots actions — that are also occurring in suburban areas. He also worries the fight for police reform will wind down now that the election is over and a Democrat will take the highest seat in the nation.
“I have a really big fear that because these ballots passed, people are going to stop caring, stop being active with their voices,” said Mohamoud. “The lack of momentum from other people is probably going to be the downfall of it, because this is not something that only a few [people] can do or I, by myself can do, it’s a group effort.”
Mohamoud also said he no longer uses the word “defunding” out loud, since the term has been “so politicized” — as a means to rile up their base, Republicans have often made false claims that Democratic leaders like President-elect Joe Biden are in favor of defunding the police. One of the only ballot measures that was a loss for police accountability this election cycle was about budgeting: In DuPage County, Illinois, voters overwhelmingly voted to continue financial support of law enforcement and public safety as its “top budgeting priority.”
Omeoga, meanwhile, argues that defunding isn’t a view, but rather a tactic in reenvisioning policing in communities. That includes diverting money from the police and reinvesting it in communities, changing the way people use 911 calls when addressing car accidents or mental health crises, and implementing a robust policing education that would improve relationships across communities.
“Believe it or not, we have tried to reform policing for the last at least 200 years, and nothing has actually been fixed because it’s not exactly broken,” Omeoga said. “Abolitionists will say we understand that this system of policing is in the interest of capitalism and white supremacy, so the tactic is defunding the police to take our reliance away from the police and turning it into new systems of community accountability and safety that isn’t relying on the state.”
For Tyler, reforming the police creates an avenue toward defunding. He expects more police reform initiatives to emerge in upcoming ballots as city leaders learn from each other. Some of the measures he expects to see are changes that would build on previous measures such as the oversight commission having the ability to hire and fire the police chief.
“This is a long haul and an ongoing national conversation,” said Tyler. “It’s really about the citizens taking control over police departments because the police have proven themselves incapable of policing themselves. I’m happy that the first step is done, but this is a multi-year fight, not a one-campaign fight. We have a long way to go.”


vox--2020-11-13--Trump’s own officials say 2020 was America’s most secure election in history

The 2020 US election was the most secure in American history , according to US elections officials .
“ The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history .
Right now , across the country , election officials are reviewing and double-checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result , ” the coordinating bodies on election infrastructure and security said in a joint statement issued by the Department of Homeland Security ’ s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency ( CISA ) .
The statement directly contradicts President Donald Trump , who has made unfounded allegations of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ president is using these claims to challenge the vote counts in several key states that delivered President-elect Joe Biden his apparent Electoral College victory .
The Trump campaign has filed dozens of lawsuits , some of which have already been dismissed .
But the barrage of legal action and Trump ’ s false claims — often bolstered by right-wing media and some of the president ’ s allies in the Republican Party — have undermined overall faith in the electoral process and in the safety and security of US elections .
In the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some states may do recounts , “ All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote , allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary.
” This beefs up the security of the vote and allows officials to correct and identify mistakes in the counting process .
But the statement made one thing very clear : “ There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes , changed votes , or was in any way compromised.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of CISA , put it : “ TLDR : America , we have confidence in the security of your vote , you should , too.
” Learning the lessons of 2016 and fearing further foreign interference in 2020 , CISA undertook massive efforts in both 2018 and 2020 to protect America ’ s election infrastructure .
Krebs made securing elections a priority and received bipartisan backing for his efforts to do so .
In 2020 , CISA set up a 24/7 “ war room ” that election officials could contact to report suspicious @ @ @ @ @ @ @ CISA officials at the ready to deploy to polling places , if necessary , according to the Washington Post .
CISA also beefed up its public communication before and after the election on potential threats , including setting up a “ rumor control ” web page that debunks election disinformation .
Of course , countering election disinformation is infinitely more difficult when the president of the United States is the main purveyor of that disinformation .
Krebs has reportedly told people he believes he ’ ll be fired soon , in large part @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about election vulnerabilities has , not surprisingly , put him on the wrong side of the White House .
The 2020 election faced a lot of challenges .
But the system worked .
Krebs and CISA are not the only voices here .
America ’ s election officials agree that this US election was not only secure but incredibly successful given the unprecedented challenges states faced .
The Covid-19 pandemic forced election officials across the country to quickly adapt protocols , often with limited resources .
Some states vastly expanded mail-in voting .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ concerns at polling places , like social distancing and sanitation , and had to come up with innovative solutions such as deploying curbside voting .
“ The 2020 general election was one of the smoothest and most well-run elections that we have ever seen , and that is remarkable considering all the challenges , ” Ben Hovland , a commissioner on the Election Assistance Commission , told the Associated Press .
The New York Times spoke to election officials in every state , including plenty of Republican officials , and all stated there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ irregularities in this election .
“ There ’ s a great human capacity for inventing things that aren ’ t true about elections , ” Frank LaRose , the Republican secretary of state in Ohio told the Times .
“ The conspiracy theories and rumors and all those things run rampant .
For some reason , elections breed that type of mythology.
” Some states have begun running post-election audits ; in Arizona , for example , half the counties conducted post-election audits , and none of them found any evidence of systematic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , where Phoenix is located ; authorities there found no irregularities , according to CNN .
Pima County , where Tucson is located , discovered just a two-vote discrepancy .
The state , where he leads by more than 11,000 votes , has already been called for Biden .
International election observers from the Organization of American States also said they witnessed no fraud or voting irregularities .
Another international election watchdog , the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe ( OSCE ) , said the US elections were “ well managed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s rhetoric undermining faith in the results .
As more states conduct recounts or post-election audits , discrepancies are going to emerge .
But voter fraud is extraordinarily rare in the United States — just a handful of cases out of the tens of millions of ballots cast .
NYU ’ s Brennan Center for Justice did a study in 2007 that found the incidence of voter fraud to be between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent , which made it more likely that an American would be struck by lighting than “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ polls.
” A Washington Post report in December 2016 found just four cases of voter fraud in that year ’ s election .
Trump ’ s focus on mail-in voting as somehow full of fraud also doesn ’ t hold up .
In Oregon , which has been voting by mail for about two decades , officials referred 54 cases of possible voter fraud to law enforcement in 2016 .
Of those , 22 people — representing just 0.0001 percent of all ballots cast that year — were found guilty of having voted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Washington Post and the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center found officials in Colorado , Washington state , and Oregon referred 372 possible cases to law enforcement of double voting or voting on behalf of a dead person , out of about 14.6 million mail-in votes in the 2016 and 2018 general elections .
That comes out to about 0.0025 percent of all ballots .
Trump ’ s rhetoric undermines faith in the democratic process , but it also obscures the hard work done by election officials , ballot counters , and poll @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Beyond the logistical hurdles of Covid-19 , the threat of foreign interference loomed over this election .
So did fears of potential voter intimidation and violence at the polls .
But with the exception of a few isolated incidents , the elections were largely safe and peaceful .
The pandemic also raised concerns about poll worker shortages , and that led to a surge of volunteers in some places , a trend that played out across the country .
Emily Hou , a 27-year-old who volunteered as a poll worker in San Francisco @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Day that began at 6 am and ended long after the polls closed .
It took her and her colleagues about three hours after the polls closed to shut down the polling location , as they had to triple-check the number of ballots they ’ d received against the number of ballots the machine had counted .
Sophia Radis , an 18-year-old college student who signed up to be a poll worker in Madison , Wisconsin , saw firsthand the meticulous process of absentee-ballot counting : teams of two , handling just three @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with observers present and election officials overseeing their work .
Kristi Critchley , who worked as a poll clerk in Pima County , Arizona , kept a running list of how many people had cast ballots , and then checked that against the number of ballots turned in — not what was written on those ballots , just that the numbers matched up .
The numbers are checked , and checked again , and checked again .
“ I very much got a greater appreciation for how tight the process is , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to keep that as accurate and transparent as possible , ” Critchley told me .
But maybe the biggest testament to the election ’ s success was the incredibly high turnout , with a preliminary estimate of 160 million Americans voting .
With votes still to be counted , 2020 ’ s turnout is now at more than 64 percent of all eligible voters , the highest percentage since 1900 .
A huge chunk of those voters did so early , either in person or by mail , another first .
Janet Boyd @ @ @ @ @ @ @ election official for nearly three decades in Arlington County , Virginia , told me that law changes before and after Covid-19 could have created challenges for both election officials and voters .
But they were prepared and managed everything well , both during the early voting period and on Election Day .
“ There could be some little mistakes here and there , ” Boyd said of the election , “ but I can ’ t imagine that any of them are to such a level that would create a change in the @ @ @ @

The 2020 US election was the most secure in American history, according to US elections officials.
“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double-checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result,” the coordinating bodies on election infrastructure and security said in a joint statement issued by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
The statement directly contradicts President Donald Trump, who has made unfounded allegations of widespread voting irregularities and fraud. The president is using these claims to challenge the vote counts in several key states that delivered President-elect Joe Biden his apparent Electoral College victory.
The Trump campaign has filed dozens of lawsuits, some of which have already been dismissed. But the barrage of legal action and Trump’s false claims — often bolstered by right-wing media and some of the president’s allies in the Republican Party — have undermined overall faith in the electoral process and in the safety and security of US elections.
In the statement, election officials noted that though some states may do recounts, “All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary.” This beefs up the security of the vote and allows officials to correct and identify mistakes in the counting process.
But the statement made one thing very clear: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
Or as Chris Krebs, the head of CISA, put it: “TLDR: America, we have confidence in the security of your vote, you should, too.”
Election Infrastructure Subsector - SCC/GCC Joint Statement on the 2020 Election. TLDR: America, we have confidence in the security of your vote, you should, too. #Protect2020 https://t.co/nT9ZnHTbSv — Chris Krebs #Protect2020 (@CISAKrebs) November 13, 2020
Learning the lessons of 2016 and fearing further foreign interference in 2020, CISA undertook massive efforts in 2020 to protect America’s election infrastructure. Krebs made securing elections a priority and received bipartisan backing for his efforts to do so.
In 2020, CISA set up a 24/7 “war room” that election officials could contact to report suspicious activity in real time, and had CISA officials at the ready to deploy to polling places, if necessary, according to the Washington Post. CISA also beefed up its public communication before and after the election on potential threats, including setting up a “rumor control” web page that debunks election disinformation.
Of course, countering election disinformation is infinitely more difficult when the president of the United States is the main purveyor of that disinformation. Krebs has reportedly told people he believes he’ll be fired soon, in large part because his efforts to correct false claims about election vulnerabilities has, not surprisingly, put him on the wrong side of the White House.
The 2020 election faced a lot of challenges. But the system worked.
Krebs and CISA are not the only voices here. America’s election officials agree that this US election was not only secure but incredibly successful given the unprecedented challenges states faced.
The Covid-19 pandemic forced election officials across the country to quickly adapt protocols, often with limited resources. Some states vastly expanded mail-in voting. Election officials had to manage public health concerns at polling places, like social distancing and sanitation, and had to come up with innovative solutions such as deploying curbside voting.
“The 2020 general election was one of the smoothest and most well-run elections that we have ever seen, and that is remarkable considering all the challenges,” Ben Hovland, a commissioner on the Election Assistance Commission, told the Associated Press.
The New York Times spoke to election officials in every state, including plenty of Republican officials, and all stated there was no evidence of widespread fraud or irregularities in this election. “There’s a great human capacity for inventing things that aren’t true about elections,” Frank LaRose, the Republican secretary of state in Ohio told the Times. “The conspiracy theories and rumors and all those things run rampant. For some reason, elections breed that type of mythology.”
Some states have begun running post-election audits; in Arizona, for example, half the counties conducted post-election audits, and none of them found any evidence of systematic voter fraud. That includes Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located; authorities there found no irregularities, according to CNN. Pima County, where Tucson is located, discovered just a two-vote discrepancy. The state, where he leads by more than 11,000 votes, has already been called for Biden.
International election observers from the Organization of American States also said they witnessed no fraud or voting irregularities. Another international election watchdog, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), said the US elections were “well managed,” though they warned against Trump’s rhetoric undermining faith in the results.
As more states conduct recounts or post-election audits, discrepancies are going to emerge. But voter fraud is extraordinarily rare in the United States — just a handful of cases out of the tens of millions of ballots cast.
NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice did a study in 2007 that found the incidence of voter fraud to be between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent, which made it more likely that an American would be struck by lighting than “he will impersonate another voter at the polls.” A Washington Post report in December 2016 found just four cases of voter fraud in that year’s election.
Trump’s focus on mail-in voting as somehow full of fraud also doesn’t hold up. In Oregon, which has been voting by mail for about two decades, officials referred 54 cases of possible voter fraud to law enforcement in 2016. Of those, 22 people — representing just 0.0001 percent of all ballots cast that year — were found guilty of having voted in two states.
Another analysis by the Washington Post and the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center found officials in Colorado, Washington state, and Oregon referred 372 possible cases to law enforcement of double voting or voting on behalf of a dead person, out of about 14.6 million mail-in votes in the 2016 and 2018 general elections. That comes out to about 0.0025 percent of all ballots.
Trump’s rhetoric undermines faith in the democratic process, but it also obscures the hard work done by election officials, ballot counters, and poll workers across the country in 2020. Beyond the logistical hurdles of Covid-19, the threat of foreign interference loomed over this election. So did fears of potential voter intimidation and violence at the polls. But with the exception of a few isolated incidents, the elections were largely safe and peaceful.
The pandemic also raised concerns about poll worker shortages, and that led to a surge of volunteers in some places, a trend that played out across the country.
Emily Hou, a 27-year-old who volunteered as a poll worker in San Francisco this year, described a long Election Day that began at 6 am and ended long after the polls closed. It took her and her colleagues about three hours after the polls closed to shut down the polling location, as they had to triple-check the number of ballots they’d received against the number of ballots the machine had counted.
Sophia Radis, an 18-year-old college student who signed up to be a poll worker in Madison, Wisconsin, saw firsthand the meticulous process of absentee-ballot counting: teams of two, handling just three to five ballots at a time, with observers present and election officials overseeing their work.
Kristi Critchley, who worked as a poll clerk in Pima County, Arizona, kept a running list of how many people had cast ballots, and then checked that against the number of ballots turned in — not what was written on those ballots, just that the numbers matched up. The numbers are checked, and checked again, and checked again. “I very much got a greater appreciation for how tight the process is, and how hard people are working to try to keep that as accurate and transparent as possible,” Critchley told me.
But maybe the biggest testament to the election’s success was the incredibly high turnout, with a preliminary estimate of 160 million Americans voting. With votes still to be counted, 2020’s turnout is now at more than 64 percent of all eligible voters, the highest percentage since 1900. A huge chunk of those voters did so early, either in person or by mail, another first.
Janet Boyd, who’s worked as an election official for nearly three decades in Arlington County, Virginia, told me that law changes before and after Covid-19 could have created challenges for both election officials and voters. But they were prepared and managed everything well, both during the early voting period and on Election Day.
“There could be some little mistakes here and there,” Boyd said of the election, “but I can’t imagine that any of them are to such a level that would create a change in the election results.”


vox--2020-11-13--The second White House coronavirus outbreak: Mark Meadows, the Secret Service, and more

The US Secret Service , which exists to protect the president and those closest to him , is being hit hard by the coronavirus — possibly from the White House itself .
President Donald Trump had been traveling extensively in the run-up to the election , and everywhere he went , he had Secret Service agents with him .
Now , more than 130 of those agents are in quarantine or isolation , either because they tested positive for the virus or were around people who did , the Washington Post reported Friday .
Trump held multiple rallies per day @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and at least part of the new White House outbreak may have come from those rallies , according to people the Post spoke with who were familiar with Secret Service staffing .
Roughly 10 percent of the Secret Service ’ s core security team is now off duty , the Post ’ s Carol D. Leonnig and Josh Dawsey reported .
On November 1 and 2 , just before Election Day , Trump had 10 rallies in seven different states , requiring a different group of Secret Service officers to be stationed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attendees packed tightly together , many of them without masks , and sometimes in cold , dry weather conditions that help fuel the virus ’ s spread .
But as Leonnig and Dawsey report , the outbreak could also be coming from within the White House itself rather than from Trump ’ s travels .
This is not the first coronavirus outbreak among the Secret Service .
When Trump first resumed his campaign rallies in June , dozens of Secret Service agents came down with Covid-19 .
That outbreak happened after Trump ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Oklahoma , and following a trip Vice President Mike Pence took to campaign in Arizona .
And it ’ s not just the Secret Service experiencing an outbreak , either .
After Trump , several of his top officials , and many others in contact with them tested positive for the coronavirus in October , it appears the entire White House is dealing with another coronavirus cluster .
These are the White House officials who have tested positive for the coronavirus since Election Day White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Trump administration ’ s second outbreak .
Bloomberg ’ s Jennifer Jacobs reported that Meadows tested positive on November 4 after attending an election night event at the White House alongside hundreds of people without masks .
That news would be worrying enough on its own .
But as Jacobs reported , Meadows ’ s infection was not widely known until she broke the news — reportedly two days after he tested positive : Others in Trump ’ s inner circle who have tested positive include Secretary of Housing and Urban Development @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Carson was at the same large event on election night as Meadows , and he tested positive on Monday at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda , Maryland .
He told the Post that afternoon that he was experiencing a “ fever of 101 [ degrees ] , chills , muscle cramps , respiratory issues , and fatigue.
” Lewandowski was at the election night event as well , which took place in the East Room of the White House .
He told CNN that the party was likely not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , saying he believes he caught it in Philadelphia .
Trump ’ s political affairs director Brian Jack , adviser David Bossie , and Republican National Committee chief of staff Richard Walters have also tested positive for the coronavirus .
The outbreak has also caught up with a number of other staffers and aides .
As Jacobs reported , that list includes Nick Trainer , a senior Trump campaign aide ; Cassidy Hutchinson , one of Meadows ’ s closest aides ; and Charlton Boyd , an aide to senior Trump adviser Jared @ @ @ @ @ @ @ latest White House outbreak might not be known for some time .
The US as a whole is dealing with its third — and worst — spike in Covid-19 cases .
Nearly every day this week has seen a new single-day record for most cases , and hospitalizations and deaths are on the rise as well .
The White House , it seems , is doing little better .

The US Secret Service, which exists to protect the president and those closest to him, is being hit hard by the coronavirus — possibly from the White House itself.
President Donald Trump had been traveling extensively in the run-up to the election, and everywhere he went, he had Secret Service agents with him. Now, more than 130 of those agents are in quarantine or isolation, either because they tested positive for the virus or were around people who did, the Washington Post reported Friday.
Trump held multiple rallies per day in the weeks prior to Election Day, and at least part of the new White House outbreak may have come from those rallies, according to people the Post spoke with who were familiar with Secret Service staffing. Roughly 10 percent of the Secret Service’s core security team is now off duty, the Post’s Carol D. Leonnig and Josh Dawsey reported.
On November 1 and 2, just before Election Day, Trump had 10 rallies in seven different states, requiring a different group of Secret Service officers to be stationed at each location. The rallies featured attendees packed tightly together, many of them without masks, and sometimes in cold, dry weather conditions that help fuel the virus’s spread.
But as Leonnig and Dawsey report, the outbreak could also be coming from within the White House itself rather than from Trump’s travels.
White House staff largely eschew wearing masks, despite public health guidelines that they help contain the spread of the virus, and some Secret Service officers on duty at the complex have also been seen without them.
This is not the first coronavirus outbreak among the Secret Service. When Trump first resumed his campaign rallies in June, dozens of Secret Service agents came down with Covid-19. That outbreak happened after Trump’s ill-fated indoor rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and following a trip Vice President Mike Pence took to campaign in Arizona.
And it’s not just the Secret Service experiencing an outbreak, either. After Trump, several of his top officials, and many others in contact with them tested positive for the coronavirus in October, it appears the entire White House is dealing with another coronavirus cluster.
These are the White House officials who have tested positive for the coronavirus since Election Day
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was the first high-profile staffer to test positive in the Trump administration’s second outbreak. Bloomberg’s Jennifer Jacobs reported that Meadows tested positive on November 4 after attending an election night event at the White House alongside hundreds of people without masks.
That news would be worrying enough on its own. But as Jacobs reported, Meadows’s infection was not widely known until she broke the news — reportedly two days after he tested positive:
A small circle of people were aware earlier in the week that Meadows had become infected but were told to keep it quiet, several people said.
Others in Trump’s inner circle who have tested positive include Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson and campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski. Carson was at the same large event on election night as Meadows, and he tested positive on Monday at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. He told the Post that afternoon that he was experiencing a “fever of 101 [degrees], chills, muscle cramps, respiratory issues, and fatigue.”
Lewandowski was at the election night event as well, which took place in the East Room of the White House. He told CNN that the party was likely not the source of his infection, however, saying he believes he caught it in Philadelphia. Trump’s political affairs director Brian Jack, adviser David Bossie, and Republican National Committee chief of staff Richard Walters have also tested positive for the coronavirus.
The outbreak has also caught up with a number of other staffers and aides. As Jacobs reported, that list includes Nick Trainer, a senior Trump campaign aide; Cassidy Hutchinson, one of Meadows’s closest aides; and Charlton Boyd, an aide to senior Trump adviser Jared Kushner.
The full extent of the latest White House outbreak might not be known for some time.
The US as a whole is dealing with its third — and worst — spike in Covid-19 cases. Nearly every day this week has seen a new single-day record for most cases, and hospitalizations and deaths are on the rise as well.
The White House, it seems, is doing little better.


vox--2020-11-13--TikTok’s US ban has been delayed another two weeks — or maybe forever

Uncovering and explaining how our digital world is changing — and changing us .
Remember when the Trump administration thought TikTok was a grave threat to America ?
Well , fair enough .
The Trump administration also seems to have forgotten that it had planned on banning the Chinese video app , which is wildly popular with American kids .
That ban was supposed to go into effect yesterday , based on an August executive order that has already been amended once .
In the original order , Donald Trump argued that there was “ credible evidence ” that ByteDance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States.
” ByteDance ’ s only option , supposedly , was to sell TikTok to an American owner .
But a convoluted , complicated deal to sell some of TikTok to Walmart and Oracle has yet to be completed .
And as TikTok ’ s tens of millions of US users have noticed , TikTok is still working in the US , even though it didn ’ t meet yesterday ’ s deadline .
Last night , Trump ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ off on its would-be ban .
Today , TikTok told a federal court that the Trump administration has given it and ByteDance another 15 days to work out its Walmart/Oracle deal .
The extension comes days after TikTok complained that the Trump administration hadn ’ t said a word about TikTok ’ s proposed plan .
TikTok ’ s new deadline to figure something out is November 27 .
But feel free to be skeptical about that deadline , too .
Trump ’ s approach to TikTok , as well as WeChat , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tried to ban , has been wildly erratic , even by Trump standards .
At various times , Trump has announced that he would ban the app ; or that he would force TikTok to sell itself to a US company ; or that any deal would force TikTok to give a portion of the sales proceeds to the US ; or that TikTok was going to contribute $ 5 billion to a fund “ so we can educate people as to the real history of our country.
” It ’ s much @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump hasn ’ t spent a lot of time thinking about TikTok and was instead hoping that his stance against a Chinese-owned tech company might help him rile up voters and/or donations for this month ’ s election , which he lost .
But even that seemed like a half-hearted attempt : Aside from a couple weeks in August and September , Trump rarely mentioned TikTok , WeChat , his proposed bans , or the so-far-successful court challenges to those bans .
It probably would be good for US lawmakers to take TikTok @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Chinese-made consumer app with widespread appeal in the US , and there ’ s a legitimate debate about whether or not the app poses real security risks , and whether it is censoring content on its massive platform .
Ben Thompson , the American-born tech commentator who lives in Taiwan , for instance , argues that the US should ban TikTok because it ’ s a potentially powerful tool for Chinese propaganda and censorship .
Tens of millions of Americans , meanwhile like using the app to create and watch memes and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ app .
But there ’ s a good chance this issue will keep getting kicked down the road , right into the lap of the Biden administration .

Remember when the Trump administration thought TikTok was a grave threat to America?
No?
Well, fair enough. The Trump administration also seems to have forgotten that it had planned on banning the Chinese video app, which is wildly popular with American kids.
That ban was supposed to go into effect yesterday, based on an August executive order that has already been amended once. In the original order, Donald Trump argued that there was “credible evidence” that ByteDance, TikTok’s China-based owner, “might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States.”
ByteDance’s only option, supposedly, was to sell TikTok to an American owner. But a convoluted, complicated deal to sell some of TikTok to Walmart and Oracle has yet to be completed.
And as TikTok’s tens of millions of US users have noticed, TikTok is still working in the US, even though it didn’t meet yesterday’s deadline.
Last night, Trump’s Commerce Department said it was holding off on its would-be ban. Today, TikTok told a federal court that the Trump administration has given it and ByteDance another 15 days to work out its Walmart/Oracle deal.
The extension comes days after TikTok complained that the Trump administration hadn’t said a word about TikTok’s proposed plan. TikTok’s new deadline to figure something out is November 27.
But feel free to be skeptical about that deadline, too. Trump’s approach to TikTok, as well as WeChat, a Chinese-based messaging app he has also tried to ban, has been wildly erratic, even by Trump standards. At various times, Trump has announced that he would ban the app; or that he would force TikTok to sell itself to a US company; or that any deal would force TikTok to give a portion of the sales proceeds to the US; or that TikTok was going to contribute $5 billion to a fund “so we can educate people as to the real history of our country.”
It’s much more likely, in fact, that Trump hasn’t spent a lot of time thinking about TikTok and was instead hoping that his stance against a Chinese-owned tech company might help him rile up voters and/or donations for this month’s election, which he lost.
But even that seemed like a half-hearted attempt: Aside from a couple weeks in August and September, Trump rarely mentioned TikTok, WeChat, his proposed bans, or the so-far-successful court challenges to those bans.
It probably would be good for US lawmakers to take TikTok seriously: There’s never been a Chinese-made consumer app with widespread appeal in the US, and there’s a legitimate debate about whether or not the app poses real security risks, and whether it is censoring content on its massive platform.
Ben Thompson, the American-born tech commentator who lives in Taiwan, for instance, argues that the US should ban TikTok because it’s a potentially powerful tool for Chinese propaganda and censorship. Tens of millions of Americans, meanwhile like using the app to create and watch memes and likely have no idea who owns the app.
But there’s a good chance this issue will keep getting kicked down the road, right into the lap of the Biden administration.