August 11, 2020 • No Comments • National News

Ovidiu Dugulan/iStockBy MORGAN WINSOR and EMILY SHAPIRO, ABC News

(NEW YORK) — A pandemic of the novel coronavirus has now killed more than 737,000 people worldwide.

Over 20 million people across the globe have been diagnosed with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new respiratory virus, according to data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. The actual numbers are believed to be much higher due to testing shortages, many unreported cases and suspicions that some national governments are hiding or downplaying the scope of their outbreaks.

Since the first cases were detected in China in December, the United States has become the worst-affected country, with more than 5 million diagnosed cases and at least 163,681 deaths.

Here’s how the news is developing today. All times Eastern.

1:10 p.m.: Over 800 students quarantined in Georgia school district

Georgia’s Cherokee County school district has ordered 826 students and 42 teachers to quarantine due to possible exposure in the six days that school has been open, The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported.

Of the more than 42,000 students in the district, about 25% of them chose to do virtual learning, according to the newspaper.

Cherokee district staff must wear masks but students do not, the Journal Constitution said.

Cherokee County is about 40 miles north of Atlanta.

11:45 a.m.: Florida sees new record daily death toll

Hard-hit Florida reached a new record daily death toll with 276 additional fatalities reported on Monday, according to the state’s Department of Health.

The previous high record was 257 deaths reported on July 31.

Florida, with more than 542,000 diagnosed coronavirus cases, has the second highest number of cases in the U.S. behind California.

At least 8,684 people in Florida have died, according to the state’s Department of Health.

Hawaii, South Dakota and the Virgin Islands have been added to New York state’s travel advisory list, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday.

Alaska, New Mexico, Ohio and Rhode Island have been removed from the list.

Those traveling to New York from states on the list must quarantine for two weeks when arriving.

A state or territory is added to the list if it has a positive test rate higher than 10 per 100,000 residents over a one-week average or a 10% or higher positivity rate over a one-week average.

Here are the states and territories currently on New York’s travel advisory list: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Virgin Islands and Wisconsin.

In New York state, once the U.S. epicenter of the pandemic, .86% of those tested on Monday were positive, Cuomo said.

10:40 a.m.: UMass cancels football season

The University of Massachusetts is canceling its football season, athletic director Ryan Bamford announced Tuesday.

“The continuing challenges surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic posed too great of a risk,” he said in a statement.

Football players started returning to campus in June. In the last seven weeks, there has been one positive coronavirus test among the more than 600 tests administered to the team, the school said.

7:29 a.m.: ‘The point is not to be first with a vaccine,’ Azar says

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said “transparent data” from phase three clinical trials is necessary to determine whether a vaccine is actually safe and effective.

Azar made the comments during an interview Tuesday on ABC’s Good Morning America, following news that Russia had become the first country in the world to officially register a COVID-19 vaccine and declare it ready for use. Moscow approved the vaccine before completing its final Phase III trial, and no scientific data has been released from the early trials so far.

“The point is not to be first with a vaccine; the point is to have a vaccine that is safe and effective for the American people and the people of the world,” Azar said on GMA.

The U.S.-led Operation Warp Speed initiative, which the Trump administration introduced in early April, currently has six vaccines in development, including two that are in Phase III trials — the final stage before a vaccine candidate could potentially be authorized for use by the Food and Drug Administration. Azar said he believes the United States “could have FDA-authorized or approved vaccines by December.”

“We believe that we are on track towards having tens of millions of doses by December of FDA gold-standard vaccine, and hundreds of millions of doses as we go into the new year,” Azar said. “It will really depend on the speed at which the clinical trials enroll and people are vaccinated and then are exposed to the virus.”

6:31 a.m.: New Zealand returns to lockdown after finding local transmission

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced Tuesday that the city of Auckland would temporarily return to lockdown, after four new locally-transmitted cases of COVID-19 were identified in a household in the region.

New Zealand had gone 102 days without recording any locally-transmitted cases — until now.

Auckland will be placed under level three restrictions for three days, starting Wednesday afternoon. The rest of the country will go into level two until midnight on Friday.

Residents of Auckland will be asked to stay home where possible, while restaurants, bars and non-essential shops will shutter. Schools across the city will also be closed for those three days and gatherings of over 10 people will be prohibited.

“We’re asking people in Auckland to stay home to stop the spread,” Ardern said at a press conference Tuesday. “Act as if you have COVID, and as though people around you have COVID.”

5:10 a.m.: Russia becomes first country to approve COVID-19 vaccine, Putin says

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Tuesday that his country has become the first in the world to grant regulatory approval to a COVID-19 vaccine.

Speaking at a meeting with his cabinet ministers on state television, Putin said the vaccine had “passed all the needed checks” and had even been given to one of his daughters. The vaccine will soon be administered to Russian health workers, he said.

The vaccine, developed by the state-run Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow, was officially registered and declared ready for use after less than two months of human testing, without completing its final Phase III trial. So far, the drug has been tested on fewer than 100 people and Russia has yet to release any scientific data from those early trials.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says Phase III trials must involve a minimum of 3,000 volunteers to be recognized.

Dozens of COVID-19 vaccine candidates are being developed by teams of researchers around the world, and several are in final Phase III human trials, according to the latest data from the World Health Organization.

3:45 a.m.: US records under 50,000 new cases for second straight day

There were 49,544 new cases of COVID-19 identified in the United States on Monday, according to a count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

It’s the second consecutive day that the nation has recorded under 50,000 new cases. An additional 525 coronavirus-related deaths were also reported.

Sunday’s caseload is well below the record set on July 16, when more than 77,000 new cases were identified in a 24-hour reporting period.

A total of 5,094,565 people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and at least 163,465 of them have died, according to Johns Hopkins. The cases include people from all 50 U.S. states, Washington, D.C. and other U.S. territories as well as repatriated citizens.

By May 20, all U.S. states had begun lifting stay-at-home orders and other restrictions put in place to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. The day-to-day increase in the country’s cases then hovered around 20,000 for a couple of weeks before shooting back up and crossing 70,000 for the first time in mid-July.

Many states have seen a rise in infections in recent weeks, with some — including Arizona, California and Florida — reporting daily records. However, the nationwide number of new cases and deaths have both decreased in the last week, according to an internal memo from the Federal Emergency Management Agency obtained by ABC News Monday night.

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August 11, 2020 • No Comments • National News

Halfpoint/iStockBy ANTHONY RIVAS, TENZIN SHAKYA and. ASHLEY RIEGLE, ABC News

(NEW YORK) — Nancy Shively, a lifelong educator in Oklahoma, says she’s always loved teaching. But with the coronavirus still raging and schools around the country beginning to reopen, she resigned from her job last week to protect herself and her family.

Shively has spent the last few years teaching special education. She said it’s been “rewarding” helping students to develop their strengths and overcome their weaknesses. After starting a job at a new school in the Skiatook Public Schools district last year, she’s disappointed she won’t be back to greet the second graders who are now entering third grade. Her school started in-person classes on Monday.

“I was really looking forward to it, and I have to finally come to the decision that I can’t [go back],” Shively told “Nightline.” “I was heartbroken. My children are grown but my daughters in particular asked me not to go back. And I lost my own mother when I was 30, and that’s about the age they are now and I don’t want them to go through that … the choice became, do I resign to protect myself and my kids or do I keep going because I want to help my students?”

In her 60s and dealing with underlying health conditions, Shively said the potential exposure to COVID-19 at school not only puts her at risk but also her husband at home, who she says is also susceptible to the virus.

Shively’s concern is one shared by many students, parents and teachers as safety issues in some schools begin to emerge. At North Paulding High School in Dallas, Georgia, where in-person classes started last week, images of its packed hallways between classes went viral on social media. On Saturday, a letter received by one of the parents and provided to ABC News said six students and three staff members at the high school had tested positive for COVID-19.

Tiffany Robbins’ daughter, Elyse, goes to Sequoyah High School, which faced similar criticism after a photo surfaced of students not wearing masks or social distancing on the first day of classes. She said she wasn’t surprised by the North Paulding image. As an English teacher who returned to work last week at Dean Rusk Middle School in Cherokee County, Georgia, she says the excitement of being back at school turned into stress and anxiety by the end of the week.

“We are happy to be face to face. We’re happy to be in the building,” Robbins, who is also the president of the Cherokee County Teachers Association, told “Nightline.” “But we don’t feel like we can guarantee the safety of our students — the safety of our coworkers.”

Robbins said “it took a lot of soul searching,” but she chose to go back to school because she loves to teach. “And if this is the only way I can do it in this county, at this point in my life, then I have to go back into the classroom,” she said.

She also updated her will and looked into life insurance “because I am worried,” she explained.

Georgia saw a record number of COVID-19 deaths over the weekend even as new cases and hospitalizations have started going down. In the Cherokee County School District, more than 250 students and staff have been quarantining after at least 11 students and two staff members tested positive for COVID-19.

In her community, Robbins says one of the challenges she faces is that some parents don’t believe the virus is real.

“There are many students across the county who come in declaring to their teachers that their parents don’t believe in COVID,” Robbins said. “There are parents who’ve reached out to me to express their dislike of my requests for a safe school. Across the board, there are people who believe in science and there are people who don’t believe in science, and having a conversation between the two is almost pointless. We’re not going to change each other’s minds.”

Robbins said she can have between 25 and 35 students in each of her four classes, or about 120 students a day. At the middle school level, many of these students then go on to different classes, “not really moving together as a team,” she noted.

She said that even with several precautions in place, like making hand sanitizer, cleaning supplies and masks available, the risk of exposure to the virus is still there.

“Every day you leave your house and you walk into the building, you’re exposing yourself to hundreds and hundreds of students who are exposing themselves to multiple people when they’re outside of school,” Robbins said.

Dibett Lopez, a language arts teacher in Gwinnett County, Georgia, says she’s feeling a lot of anxiety about returning to school. Classes in her county are scheduled to begin on Wednesday, first through virtual learning until Aug. 26 and then by phasing in students for in-person learning thereafter.

Lopez said even this plan is risky for her and her family. She lives in a multigenerational home with her grandfather, her parents, her children and her sister’s family, and she’s also a Type 1 diabetic.

“For Type 1 diabetics, fevers can impact our blood sugar,” she said. “It can put us in different ranges with our blood sugar, it can mess with our insulin and the production of our insulin and our hormones. And so, all of that can mess with how medicine comes into us.”

Lopez said that like her, many of her students live in multigenerational homes, and she’s concerned her students may become asymptomatic carriers and inadvertently pass the virus on to someone in their families.

“Gwinnett is the most diverse county in all of Georgia, and so I have students from last semester who live with grandparents or live with aunts and uncles or live with extended families,” she said. “So I know that multigenerational homes are definitely going to be impacted. I know that they were impacted in the spring, so I can only imagine when schools reopen in the fall.”

When students return to school, Lopez said she expects them to face “a lot of confusion and chaos” as they try to adjust to the new protocols. Like Robbins, she said her classes have upwards of 36 students.

“There’s just no way that I’m not going to be within 3 [feet], 2 feet of a student,” she said. “You know, even if I wore a face shield and both of my masks, I’m still going to be in direct contact with those students.”

Lopez also said “there’s nothing else we would rather do” than teach students in-person. But she said teachers shouldn’t be placed in a position where they’re risking their own health or that of their students, some of whom may also have underlying health conditions.

“We are still in a pandemic. We’re still in crisis mode. We’ve just learned how to handle it better,” she said. “And so, I think it’s important to tell parents this is about our community. This is about making sure that we are all OK, because I can’t deliver a lesson if I’m constantly thinking about, ‘Oh my God, are they getting too close?’”

Shively said she’s concerned for younger teachers, who aren’t at the end of their career and don’t have the option to resign. In an op-ed she wrote for USA Today, she called out President Donald Trump and the federal government as well as local governments for what she says is failed leadership.

“It’s like a cascade of failure of leadership, starting with our president who abdicated his responsibility to handle the pandemic,” she told “Nightline.”

“I’m not willing to take the consequences for these failed leaders by risking my life in school,” she added.

Shively said she doesn’t “see how they are going to avoid outbreaks in schools.”

“I think what we’re doing is conducting this big experiment with schools reopening,” she said. “And the people who are gonna pay the price are the teachers and children, and it’s wrong.”

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August 11, 2020 • No Comments • National News

ABC NewsBy MAX GOLEMBO, ABC News

(NEW YORK) — A derecho moved through the Midwest Monday from Nebraska to Ohio producing more than 500 damaging severe storm reports and leaving more than one million people without power.

A derecho is a powerful line of severe storms that produces straight line winds that can cause major damage.

The highest winds in this derecho were in Linn County, Iowa, of 112 mph.

In Lee County, Illinois, winds gusted to 92 mph and in Chicago’s Lincoln Square, a weather observation recorded a wind gust to 85 mph.

Meanwhile, the Northeast still has thousands of people that are without power from last week’s Tropical Storm as the heat wave is set to continue there.

Eight states from New Jersey to Maine are under Heat Advisory where some areas could feel like it’s 95 to 102 degrees.

So when will this sauna-like weather will be over in the Northeast? Looks like not until Thursday, and Wednesday will be another hot and humid day.

In the West, it’s bone dry with erratic gusty winds that are spreading wildfires quickly.

Because of these dry and windy conditions, the Grizzly Creek Fire in western Colorado spread so quickly that interstate 70 had to be shut down overnight.

The fire is now covers 1,300 acres and containment is currently unknown.

Ten western states are under Red Flag Warnings, Fire Weather Watches and Excessive Heat Watches.

Western Colorado is expected to see gusty winds to near 30 mph with relative humidity as low as 7%.

An Excessive Heat Watch has been issued for southern California deserts and into Arizona including Phoenix, where temperatures are expected to reach 110 to 120 by the end of the week.

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August 11, 2020 • No Comments • National News

Wolterk/iStockBy CAMMERON PARRISH, ABC News

(TEMPE, Ariz.) — Even as students have begun moving into housing at one of the biggest colleges in the United States, debate rages over if they should even be there in the first place.

With the fall term scheduled to begin Aug. 20, Arizona State University is facing backlash from students and staff for insisting on opening in-person amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Five hundred staff and students signed a letter to ASU’s president with concerns over COVID-19 safety on campus.

“Communication regarding the reasoning for ASU’s return to in-person instruction at this time and regarding what will happen when an eventual outbreak occurs on campus has been lacking,” the letter explained.

The school announced in May that it would be opening with in-person classes in spite of a rise in coronavirus cases in the state and advice from a state official for schools to be careful about reopening.
 
“Arizona is not currently in place to resume traditional in-person instruction or hybrid learning models. Every indicator says that there is high community spread across the state,” Arizona State Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman said in an Aug. 4 statement.

The school president and provost are working to address the concerns expressed in the letter, an ASU spokesperson told ABC News in a statement, saying the letter included “very legitimate ideas, questions, requests and concerns.”

“ASU will continue to provide a university-wide framework for managing and mitigating the spread of COVID-19, which to the maximum extent possible empowers individual members of the ASU community to live, work, teach, research, and serve the people of Arizona in whatever ways best address the needs of each individual member of the ASU community,” the statement continued.

Some of ASU’s plans for when students and staff return to campus for in-person learning include in-person courses with less than 100 students, staggered in-person learning, mandatory face-coverings in all ASU buildings and no visitors in ASU resident halls, according to the school’s website.

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August 11, 2020 • No Comments • National News

Florida Dept. of Law EnforcementBy LUKE BARR, ABC News

(NEW YORK) — One year after Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide inside New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center there have been no answers from the federal Bureau of Prisons on what happened Aug. 10, 2019 after a promised investigation and a call for more transparency.

“We will get to the bottom of it, and there will be accountability,” Attorney General William Barr said just days after the suicide.

In an interview with Axios last week, President Donald Trump suggested that he believes that Epstein’s death wasn’t a suicide, despite his attorney general and medical experts concluding it was.

“People are still trying to figure out how did it happen. Was it suicide? Was he killed?” Trump asked.

That contradicts what Barr has said on several occasions about the death of the former financier and convicted sex offender.

The attorney general told ABC News’ Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas in July, he was “livid’ about the suicide.

“As you will recall– after he committed suicide I said that I was confident that we would continue to pursue this case vigorously and– pursue anyone who’s complicit in it,” Barr said.

Barr said that at the surface the motives seemed nefarious, but it wasn’t once he took a look at the whole picture.

The Bureau of Prisons declined to make the director available for an interview and declined to comment citing ongoing investigations.

A week after Epstein’s death, the attorney general appointed a new Bureau of Prisons director — Kathleen Hawk Sawyer. Barr also promised to get to the bottom of what happened in MCC New York.

Hawk Sawyer, a BOP veteran, lasted less than a year in the institution, and new director Michael Carvajal was appointed by the attorney general in March.

The relocation of the warden in charge of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, was stalled by the Bureau of Prisons in January. The BOP said Lamine N’Diaye, who was the warden at the time of Epstein’s death, has been “deferred pending the conclusion of investigations.”

Shane Fausey, the president of the Council of Prison Locals, the union that represents corrections officers said that the bureau has serious staffing issues, that have yet to be addressed.

“Until we have enough correctional officers to properly supervise inmates, we can’t increase the level of safety and incidents will continue to happen. The agency is reactionary,” Fausey explained. “Reacting to problems instead of being proactive. You can only be proactive, if you’re adequately staffed. The COVID response, the suicide rates, the rates of inmate violence. The statistics speak for themselves and they depict an agency in the midst of a staffing crisis.”

In November, two corrections officers, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, were charged with “making false records and conspiring to make false records and to defraud the United States by impairing the lawful functions of the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a Manhattan detention facility that houses federal inmates,” a release from the Southern District of New York said.

“For a period of approximately two hours, Noel and Thomas sat at their desk without moving, and appeared to have been asleep,” the indictment says. “Noel used the computer periodically throughout the night including to search the internet for furniture sales and benefit websites. Thomas used the computer briefly around 1 a.m., 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. to search for motorcycle sales and sports news.”

Both Noel and Thomas have pleaded not guilty.

“These indictments don’t address the core issues inside of the Metropolitan Correctional Center New York or the Federal Prison system in its entirety. These staff were placed in an assignment where the tools and resources needed to be successful were not available. Simply assigning blame will not correct the staff shortages that put this chain of events in place,” Tyrone Covington, who represents the Correctional Officers Union, and is president of union Local 3148 said.

Federal Bureau of Prisons sources told ABC News, that “nothing” has changed inside the agency — despite pledges to do so.

One federal source said there has been no movement on the internal investigation looking at BOP’s shortfalls with Epstein’s death, and none on the investigation into the 2018 death of Whitey Bulger, the legendary leader of the Boston-based Winter Hill Gang. Bulger was beaten to death at United States Penitentiary Hazelton in West Virginia.

Even with the added scrutiny, BOP facilities have been in the headlines.

At MCC, a gun was found inside the facility in March 2020.

From May 2019 to December 2019, there were 11 assaults of MCC officers, while there have been 15 in just the first two months of 2020, a source said.

A source familiar with the matter says that the very place where Epstein died by suicide, the Special Housing Unit, is “routinely” understaffed highlighting a major safety issue for the inmates in the SHU.

One source described the prison as a “nightmare” to work in and outlined what they describe as a revolving door of leadership, where some members of upper management are only in their positions for 18 months before they move on to different facilities.

Typically, the source said, wardens and associate wardens stay at a facility much longer.

MCC has had their share of high profile inmates, such as Michael Avenatti, the former lawyer to Stormy Daniels who was convicted in mid-February for extorting Nike.

Although Avenatti was released from MCC in March due to COVID-19, a source familiar with his conditions at MCC said he was kept in the Special Housing Unit, the same unit as Epstein.

Across the river, at the Metropolitan Detention Center, where Ghislaine Maxwell is being held, a Department of Justice Inspector General review found that MDC, which left 1,700 inmates in below-freezing temperatures after a fire last year, had “longstanding” problems with its heating system.

“We determined that heating issues had been a longstanding problem at the jail that existed before, during, and after the fire and power outage and were unrelated to these events,” said Horowitz, adding, “Rather, they were the result of the facility’s lack of proper equipment to continuously monitor temperatures, which the BOP (Bureau of Prisons) was aware of and had not addressed.”

When asked about Epstein’s accomplice Maxwell, Trump wished her well.

“She’s now in jail. Yeah, I wish her well. I’d wish you well. I’d wish a lot of people well. Good luck. Let them prove somebody was guilty,” Trump said.

The attorney general said last month that he’s committed to making sure she makes it to trial, and has asked those responsible for her safety to relay, “specifically the protocols they’re following, and we have a number redundancy systems to monitor the situation.”

One of those protocols, sources said, is that she was given paper clothes upon checking into the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, over fears that she might take her own life.

Sources stressed to ABC News that it is standard procedure for high-profile inmates or new inmates. However, one source told ABC News that the federal Bureau of Prisons has gone to “great measures” to ensure Maxwell’s safety.

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