Author: Mary Pat Campbell

House Democrats Push Minimum Wage Raise in Covid-19 Relief Bill Despite Senate Concerns

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/house-democrats-to-craft-covid-19-relief-bill-with-minimum-wage-increase-11613168330?mod=djemwhatsnews

Excerpt:

House Democrats are preparing to stitch together a legislative version of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief proposal next week, which will include an increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour despite a second Senate Democrat opposing it this week.

House committees spent the past week shaping portions of the legislation, including the proposal to gradually increase the federal minimum wage to $15 over four years. Early next week, the House Budget Committee is expected to assemble all the pieces into one bill, which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) said should pass the full House by the end of the month.

Author(s): Kristina Peterson and Andrew Restuccia

Publication Date: 12 February 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

Robinhood’s Reckoning: Facing Life After GameStop

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/robinhoods-reckoning-can-it-survive-the-gamestop-bubble-11612547759?mod=djemwhatsnews

Excerpt:

Many startup founders dream of the day their creation claims the top spot in Apple Inc.’s app store. For Vlad Tenev, Robinhood Markets Inc.’s chief executive, it was more like a nightmare.

Mr. Tenev and his co-founder, Baiju Bhatt, had set out eight years earlier to bring the stock market to a new class of investors. With engineers plucked from Facebook Inc. and other tech giants, they stripped down the trading experience and eliminated commissions, making buying a share of stock about as easy as posting a photo on Instagram.

It worked. During the pandemic, throngs of amateur investors—homebound, bored and flush with stimulus checks—opened Robinhood accounts to experience the market’s thrills. By the end of December, the firm had amassed about 20 million users, according to people close to it, and weeks later its app hit the top of download charts.

Author(s): Peter Rudegeair, Kirsten Grind and Maureen Farrell

Publication Date: 5 February 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

GameStop Mania Is Focus of Federal Probes Into Possible Manipulation

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/gamestop-mania-is-focus-of-federal-probes-into-possible-manipulation-11613066950?mod=djemwhatsnews

Excerpt:

The Justice Department’s fraud section and the San Francisco U.S. attorney’s office have sought information about the activity from brokers and social-media companies that were hubs for the trading frenzy, the people said. Prosecutors have subpoenaed information from brokers such as Robinhood Markets Inc., the popular online brokerage that many individual investors used to trade GameStop and other shares, the people said.

GameStop shares surged from about $20 to $483 over a period of two weeks in January. The stock has since fallen to around $50. It was fueled by an army of bullish individual traders exhorting one another on Reddit to buy the shares and squeeze hedge funds that bet the price would fall. Traders who bet stock prices will decline are known as short sellers.

Author(s): Dave Michaels

Publication Date: 11 February 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

Government investigating massive counterfeit N95 mask scam

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://apnews.com/article/government-investigation-n95-scam-1694ed85d6ef99cdb6662f67d823c271/

Excerpt:

Federal authorities are investigating a massive counterfeit N95 mask operation in which fake 3M masks were sold in at least five states to hospitals, medical facilities and government agencies. The foreign-made knockoffs are becoming increasingly difficult to spot and could put health care workers at grave risk for the coronavirus.

These masks are giving first responders “a false sense of security,” said Steve Francis, assistant director for global trade investigations with the Homeland Security Department’s principal investigative arm. He added, “We’ve seen a lot of fraud and other illegal activity.”

Author(s): Colleen Long

Publication Date: 10 February 2021

Publication Site: Associated Press

Demystifying Vaccination Metrics

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://medium.com/nightingale/demystifying-vaccination-metrics-cd0a29251dd2

Graphic:

Excerpt:

3. Display distribution (supply) and administration (demand) data together for a more complete picture of the vaccine rollout.

To make sense of what was happening with COVID cases, charts from groups like the COVID-19 Tracking Project clustered trends on testing, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths for a more complete picture. Similarly, we can’t look at data on doses administered in isolation to understand how a country or state is performing on vaccine rollout.

The New York Times displays a combination of the percent of people given at least one shot or two shots and information about the doses distributed and the share of doses used. Together, these metrics give a high level snapshot of information about supply distributed and administered. Note that understanding demand requires knowing more than how many people received shots though, which is likely influenced by supply.

Author(s): Amanda Makulec

Publication Date: 1 February 2021

Publication Site: Nightingale at Medium

State goes over 100,000 dose mark in vaccinations of long-term care residents and staff

Mary Pat Campbell
State goes over 100,000 dose mark in vaccinations of long-term care residents and staff

Excerpt:

More than 110,000 doses of COVID vaccine have been administered in the state’s long-term care facilities since late December, and state official estimate they are about two-thirds of the way to completing vaccinations of those residents.

Data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week show that 110,016 vaccines have been administered through the long-term care facility partnership through which CVS and Walgreens pharmacists have vaccinated residents staff at nursing homes and assisted living facilities in Connecticut.

Author(s): DAVE ALTIMARI

Publication Date: 12 February 2021

Publication Site: CT Mirror

How W.E.B Du Bois Used Data Visualization to Debunk Social Darwinism and Tell A Story of Resilience

Mary Pat Campbell
How W.E.B Du Bois Used Data Visualization to Debunk Social Darwinism and Tell A Story of Resilience

Graphic:

Excerpt:

Du Bois was a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. He established a sociology program in 1897, now recognized as the first school of American sociology. It was here that he led a team of students to produce 60 full-color charts, graphs, maps and tables on what had changed for African Americans since slavery. This collection was generated from a mix of existing records and empirical data collected by his sociological laboratory. The visualizations stressed one narrative; that the African American community had made progress.  The colorful, hand-drawn illustrations showed that literacy rates for African Americans were rising and that African American ownership of property and land was increasing. African American businesses were growing and so were the number of patents for inventions. 

Author(s): Allen Hillery

Publication Date: 1 February 2021

Publication Site: Data Literacy

Cities and regions are betting that working from home is the next big thing in economic development.

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.city-journal.org/cities-betting-big-on-remote-work-trend

Excerpt:

After decades of expert predictions that technological change would reshape the nature of employment, in just ten months the Covid-19 economic shutdowns have made full-time corporate employment from home a reality for tens of millions of American workers. Just how many of these workers will remain employed at home after the pandemic ends remains an open question, but it’s clear that many workers have become convinced that there’s little reason to go back to the old model of everyone in the office all the time. In a Gallup poll in the initial stages of the shutdown last April, 46 percent of workers said that they were working full-time out of their homes. Millions have since gone back to the office, but 33 percent of respondents told Gallup that they were still working from home last fall. More to the point, about a third of all those who worked remotely told Gallup that they would like to do so permanently, even after the pandemic. In another poll, taken by the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, 29 percent of workers said that they wanted to work permanently from home.

Author(s): Steven Malanga

Publication Date: 1 February 2021

Publication Site: City Journal

How Is The COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign Going In Your State?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/01/28/960901166/how-is-the-covid-19-vaccination-campaign-going-in-your-state

Graphic:

Excerpt:

Since vaccine distribution began in the U.S. on Dec. 14, more than 50 million doses have been administered, reaching 11.2% of the total U.S. population, according to federal data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U.S. is currently administering over 1.6 million shots a day.

Author(s): Pien Huang, Audrey Carlsen

Publication Date: 14 February 2021

Publication Site: NPR

Myths of Vaccine Manufacturing

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/myths-of-vaccine-manufacturing

Excerpt:

The first thing to understand is that these are not, of course, traditional vaccines. That’s why they came on so quickly. mRNA as a vaccine technology has been worked on for some twenty to twenty-five years now, from what I can see, and (as I never tire of mentioning) we’re very fortunate that it had worked out (and quite recently) several of its outstanding problems just before this pandemic hit. Five years ago we simply could not have gone from sequence to vaccine inside of a year. And I mean that “we” to mean both “we the biopharma industry” and “we the human race”.

At this point, let me briefly dispose of an even less well-founded take that’s been going around as well. I’ve seen a number of people say something like “We had the vaccine back in February! It only took until the end of the year to roll it out because of the FDA!” The main thing I’ll say about that idea is that no one who actually works on vaccines, in any capacity, has any time for that statement. Not all vaccine ideas work – we’re already seeing that with the current coronavirus, and if you’d like to talk to some folks about that, then I suggest you call up GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi and ask them what happened to their initial candidate, and while you’re at it, call up Merck and ask them what happened to their two. Note that I have just named three of the largest, most experienced drug companies on the planet, all of whom have come up short. So no, we did not “have the vaccine” in February.

Author(s): Derek Lowe

Publication Date: 1 February 2021

Publication Site: Science Magazine

Many State Senators Want To Strip Cuomo Of Emergency Powers, Citing Nursing Home Cover-Up

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://dailyvoice.com/new-york/northsalem/politics/many-state-senators-want-to-strip-cuomo-of-emergency-powers-citing-nursing-home-cover-up/803232/

Excerpt:

New York State Senate Republicans, and now, a growing number of Democratic Senators, are seeking a special session in an effort to remove Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s emergency powers in the wake of the report into the underreporting of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes statewide.

Senate Republican Leader Robert Ortt and members of the Republican Conference called on the Senate Majority to convene a special session and strip Cuomo of his emergency powers while calling for a thorough investigation into his administration. They were later joined by 14 Democratic senators.

…..

“This administration has shown a callous disregard for these vulnerable residents and their families for months, but this stunning admission is a horrific new low,” she said. “A full, independent investigation into the state’s handling of the COVID crisis in New York’s nursing homes needs to be launched immediately and any lawmaker who is not actively working to make that happen is complicit in the cover-up—period.”

Author(s): Zak Fallia

Publication Date: 13 February 2021

Publication Site: Daily Voice