_edit.jpg)
~
In the news:
"Jails can be a large source of coronavirus spread, both inside the facility and in the surrounding communities, researchers reported Monday.
Inmates going in and out of Chicago’s Cook County Jail appear to have carried the infection as they went, the researchers reported in the journal Health Affairs.
Data suggests that more than 4,700 cases of coronavirus in Illinois up through April 19 were associated with 2,129 individuals going through the Cook County Jail in March, the researchers from Harvard University’s Department of Anthropology and the Center National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris said.
The jail may be linked with 15.7% of all documented cases of Covid-19 in Illinois and 15.9% in Chicago, they said.
“Existing conditions in jails and penitentiaries make infection control particularly difficult, putting inmates at unconscionable and perhaps unconstitutional risk,” they wrote.
Cook County Jail was the largest known source of spread of Covid-19 before being surpassed by an Ohio state prison, according to the researchers.
Many facilities and jurisdictions have begun to release certain low risk offenders, the researchers said, but this does not address how arrest and pre-trial detention may be contributing to community spread.
The researchers looked at the relationship between Covid-19 case rates and five variables: jail inmates released in March, proportion of Black residents, poverty rate, public transit utilization rate and population density.
For the state as a whole, all of the five variables that the researchers looked at were significantly positively correlated with Covid-19, they said.
They found that Chicago zip codes are poorer, use public transit more, have a higher proportion of Black residents and higher population density compared with the rest of the state.
“The criminal justice system in the United States is just one among many existing social structures that are being subjected to renewed scrutiny during the COVID-19 pandemic because of the public health hazards they pose. Pandemic reality has brought us to an unprecedented collective realization of national and global interconnectedness in which the risks of vulnerability to disease for America’s incarcerated and the world’s poor, for example, threaten all of us, although clearly not equally,” the researchers wrote.
The researchers looked at booking, release and Covid-19 data from the Cook County Jail, demographic data from the US Census and the American Community Survey and Covid-19 data from the Illinois Department of Public Health to examine the epidemiological connection between jail and community at the zip code level." {CNN.com}
~
My thoughts:
Well this week was awesome! Sorry to post so late, we got home a little later than expected and I was asleep at the normal post time. I'll probably be posting a bunch of Disney related posts over the next month or so. Of course, we went to Disney World last Saturday and we decided to go to all 4 parks on different days. This was our schedule:
Sunday~Hollywood Studios
Monday~Epcot
Tuesday~Day off
Wednesday~Magic Kingdom
Thursday~Animal Kingdom
Friday~Go to rental beach house
Saturday~Full beach day
Sunday~Go home
We had lots of fun! My favourite rides from each park {in the order of the parks listed above} were The Rock 'N Roller Coaster, Test Track, either The Haunted Mansion or the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train and Avatar: Flight of Passage. I thought Disney did a great job adapting to keep everyone as healthy and safe as they could manage. They would occasionally stop the ride to clean the cars/pods/transportation, but they did it so that we wouldn't be waiting in the lines for hours at a time, which was really nice. I think Disney did really well with social distancing tables in restaurants, putting hand sanitizer in places where it would be used the most and keeping us all socially distanced. Overall, a great experience, it would be even better than normally going to Disney if not for the *extreme* heat on top of being made wear masks. We also had lots of fun at the beach, the only thing I would change about that, though, would be if everyone actually wore masks. We were only there for about 2 days, but I saw one person that wasn't in my family wearing a mask. I really did have a fun time, though, and I will go more in-depth to some of the days in the next few posts, hopefully!
Have a great week, everyone! Sorry for the late post!
Comments