Sick staff. Endless COVID patients. Doctors ‘just scraping by’ as omicron sweeps hospitals
On a single day this week, 616 staffers called out sick with COVID-19 at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. Without nearly a tenth of its workers — doctors, nurses, administrators and janitors — the hospital assigned the National Guard to help with an unrelenting swarm of patients, many of them critically ill.
Such scenes around the nation have been brutal as the highly transmissible — if less deadly — omicron variant has set a record of nearly 2 million infection cases each week. That surge has battered health care systems, sapped the morale of doctors and nurses, delayed thousands of surgeries, postponed treatments for life-threatening diseases such as cancer and turned hospitals into around-the-clock triage centers where nerves bristle and anger echoes alongside despair.
The daily grind of rising infections has left virtually no part of America untouched. It has changed how we think about the virus, the sick and medical communities in cities and towns that are barely coping as the pandemic approaches its third year. Masks and ventilators were once in short supply; now, it is the staff members. Front-line workers used to end their shifts by walking out of hospital doors to the sound of clanging pots and cheers. Today, many are fatigued and some even irate as a sea of unvaccinated Americans seek treatment.
In big cities, hospitals are reporting hundreds or thousands of workers out sick with COVID-19 each week.
Projections suggest omicron may wane in coming weeks and months. But for now it is raging: This week, COVID-19 hospitalizations broke last January’s record of 132,051. Omicron has essentially changed the game, as if a storm had rearranged the landscape. The constant crush of patients — and the inability of many hospitals to treat them — is straining the patience and compassion of doctors, nurses and other medical staff.
—Los Angeles Times
US vows ‘decisive’ response if Russia pursues threatened deployments to Cuba, Venezuela
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration responded Thursday to threats from Russian officials that Moscow could begin military deployments in Cuba and Venezuela if tensions continue to rise with the United States, vowing a “decisive” response if it sees any evidence that the threat is real.
Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, told state television Thursday that he could “neither confirm nor exclude” the potential deployments. Russian media followed up on the remarks with a report that agents from Russia’s spy agency, the FSB, had visited the two Western Hemisphere countries in recent days.
“We are not going to respond to bluster,” a senior administration official told McClatchy and the Miami Herald. “If Russia actually started moving in that direction, we would deal with it decisively.”
Tensions have been rising between Washington and Moscow since December, when Russia began amassing tens of thousands of troops on its border with Ukraine. Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, have not ruled out an invasion.
—McClatchy Washington Bureau
Gov. Gavin Newsom rejects parole for Sirhan Sirhan, convicted assassin of Robert F. Kennedy
California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday refused to parole the man convicted of gunning down Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles, a brazen assassination of a presidential candidate that scarred the nation and altered the course of American politics during the turbulent 1960s.
A two-person state parole panel recommended in August that Sirhan Sirhan be paroled, influenced in part by two of Kennedy’s children, who have advocated for his release. Sirhan has been imprisoned for more than half a century since his conviction in Kennedy’s shooting death at the Ambassador Hotel the day after the senator won California’s 1968 Democratic presidential primary.
“Mr. Sirhan’s assassination of Senator Kennedy is among the most notorious crimes in American history,” Newsom said in a statement released Thursday afternoon. “After decades in prison, he has failed to address the deficiencies that led him to assassinate Senator Kennedy. Mr. Sirhan lacks the insight that would prevent him from making the same types of dangerous decisions he made in the past.”
Newsom, who as governor has the final say on Sirhan’s release, had appeared resistant from the outset.
The governor has said he has idolized Kennedy throughout his adult life. In recent months, he repeatedly told reporters that one of the few photographs on his desk shows Kennedy with Newsom's father, late appellate court Judge William Newsom.
On the night Gov. Newsom overwhelmingly defeated the Sept. 14 recall vote, he ended a subdued victory speech by quoting Kennedy: “Tonight I’m humbled, grateful, but resolved in the spirit of my political hero Robert Kennedy ‘to make more gentle the life of this world.’”
Kennedy, who represented New York in the U.S. Senate, championed civil rights and campaigned to end America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. He was considered a leading candidate for president when he was assassinated.
—Los Angeles Times
Human Rights Watch warns of ‘alarming’ democratic backsliding in Latin America
Latin America suffered a setback in basic freedoms and respect for democratic institutions in 2021, Human Rights Watch says in its report on the situation of human rights in the world.
“The alarming decline in fundamental freedoms in Latin America today forces us to defend democratic spaces that we used to take for granted,” said Tamara Taraciuk Broner, Acting Director for the Americas at the organization. “Even leaders who came to power through democratic elections have attacked independent civil society, freedom of the press, and judicial independence. Millions of people have been forced to leave their homes and countries, and the pandemic has had a devastating economic and social impact."
The report, published on Wednesday, highlights the “abusive” legal proceedings against the July 11 protesters in Cuba; the holding of elections in Nicaragua without the “minimum democratic guarantees” and preceded by a wave of arrests of leader Daniel Ortega’s opponents, as well as the investigation of the International Criminal Court on possible crimes against humanity committed in Venezuela under the government of Nicolás Maduro.
The document details the government’s repression of the massive protests in July in Cuba, where 1,355 people were detained, according to the latest count by the legal aid organization Cubalex. According to relatives of the detainees who spoke with the Miami Herald, the trials of 57 protesters began this week in Santa Clara, Holguín and Havana under heavy police presence and without due process.
—Miami Herald
