Updates on the unfolding tragedy of the USPS, the homeless + the NYC subway, and the horrific outbreak of Covid-19 in rural southwest Georgia –
We’ve followed these stories on our Facebook page, and we wrote about the USPS here (yesterday). More bad news on all three fronts.
*Update to USPS*
Re: the dire straits of the USPS and resignation of Board of Governors vice-chairman David Williams
The President has just appointed a new Postmaster General,Louis DeJoy, a top Republican donor and fundraiser for the RNC in North Carolina.
DeJoy replaces Megan Brennan, who announced her retirement at the end of 2019. DeJoy will begin his tenure on June 15.
He is the first Postmaster General in 20 years not to have come up through the ranks.
Here’s the President’s bone of contention:
“Trump has for years seized on the rates the Postal Service charges companies like Amazon to deliver packages. The business of package delivery has proved increasingly vital to the service’s finances as first class mail has deteriorated, and Trump has contended the agency charges Amazon and other companies too little.”
“’The Postal Service is a joke,’ Trump said publicly last month in the Oval Office. He called for the agency to quadruple its shipping prices. Many analysts warn that if the Postal Service did that, it would put itself at a massive disadvantage in the marketplace.”
DeJoy’s wife is also well-connected in the Republican Party, having previously served under President George Bush as US Ambassador to Estonia. She has recently been nominated to serve as Ambassador to Canada.
*Update: The homeless and the NYC subway*
Follow-up to our earlier post on Governor Cuomo’s decision to empty out the NYC subway system nightly between 1 am and 5 am for a thorough disinfection.
As we already know:
“…homelessness groups and charities said the move will have ‘counterproductive and harmful’ impacts for those who seek safety and shelter in subway trains and stations – forcing them on to the streets or into the city’s shelters, where more than 700 people have tested positive for coronavirus in recent weeks.”
Giselle Routhier, policy director at Coalition for the Homeless, which works with 3,500 people in New York every day:
“‘What’s happening is that large groups of police officers are gathering at the end of the [subway] line, telling people to move, forcing people often to the streets, offering them access to congregate shelters which many are rightfully refusing to enter because of the safety issues and not actually offering real solutions to help people access a safer space.’”
“Routhier said the new policy will encourage a “more punitive approach”, leaving homeless people vulnerable to the elements and potentially the criminal justice system.
“Conditions for New York’s homeless are already ‘dire’, she added, especially with many of the city’s cafes, restaurants, public bathrooms, gyms and food banks that many rely on for hygiene and nourishment closed. Demand for Coalition for the Homeless’s mobile food programme has doubled on some nights.”
Statistics:
Number of homeless people testing positive for Covid-19: 829
Number of these in shelters: 705
Number of deaths: 65
Number of homeless currently in NYC: 62,679 (official, normally an undercount)
+ Thousands on the streets and in the subways (perhaps as many as 2,000) who are not counted.
As we’ve written before, there is an at-hand solution for the near future for homelessness – and it’s the first time one has presented itself in living memory.
Joshua Goldfein, an attorney at the Legal Aid Society and a member of its Homeless Rights Project:
“We have tens of thousands of empty hotel rooms in New York City right now, and rates that those hotels are asking for those rooms are much lower than they were before this, and Fema [Federal Emergency Management Agency] is going to pay for that, so it would be very simple to move people into hotel rooms, to offer case management services onsite.”
In the meantime:
“The city said it is using hotels, but that it is prioritising relocating older people and single adults ‘based on risk’ from larger shelters. So far, they said about 7,000 people have been moved to hotels from shelters, with plans for 1,000 more ‘each week as needed.’”
[Note: NYC has nearly 110,000 rooms and a vacancy rate of 80%]
At that rate, it will require another 70 weeks to house even those officially recorded as homeless.
It won’t happen–and you can take that prediction to the bank and plan on a very decent rate of interest
*Update: A(nother) Message to Rural America: NO, you are NOT immune*
“Then I thought, why are low income people and people of color dying more than anyone else? This is the richest nation in the world, why doesn’t it have a level playing field?” he said. “Tell me that.”
– Ezekiel Holley, longtime leader of the NAACP in Terrell County, Georgia
Re: Albany, Georgia, where community spread was set off by two large funerals in late February – early March and has now encompassed 10 counties in far southwest Georgia
“As the world’s attention was fixated on the horrors in Italy and New York City, the per capita death rates in counties in the impoverished southwest corner of Georgia climbed to among the worst in the country. The devastation here is a cautionary tale of what happens when the virus seeps into communities that have for generations remained on the losing end of the nation’s most intractable inequalities: these counties are rural, mostly African American and poor.”
We know what the contributing factors to a higher death rate are: lack of health care / hospitals, an aging population with chronic conditions (diabetes, heart disease) making them more vulnerable – and underlying everything, everything: endemic and persistent poverty down through the generations.
The 10 counties featured in this heart-wrenching story about Covid-19 in rural SW George now have the highest death rate per 100,000 residents in the U.S. (Randolph Cty: 268.1 vs NYC: 224.13). And of the top-ten slots in death rates, five belong to this group of SW Georgia counties. The counties radiate out and around the town of Albany, where a pair of funeral in February started the cascade of community – and county-wide – spread.
Here’s what happened beginning on March 10:
“The hospital [Phoebe Putney Memorial, in Albany] saw its first known coronavirus patient on March 10; within a few days, it had 60 and the ICU was full. Two weeks later, patients began flooding in from farther-flung rural communities. Helicopters buzzed from the top of the parking garage, flying patients to other hospitals that still had room to take them. They burned through six months of masks and gowns in six days, said Phoebe Putney president Scott Steiner. Then they were competing for supplies against wealthier, more politically powerful places; they paid $1 each for surgical masks that typically cost a nickel and were losing about $1 million each day.”
Rural Georgia’s healthcare infrastructure is as vulnerable as the patients it cares for:
“Georgia has lost seven rural hospitals in the last decade. Nine counties in rural Georgia don’t even have a doctor, according to the Georgia Alliance of Community Hospitals; 18 have no family practitioner, 60 have no pediatrician, 77 without a psychiatrist.”
The state of Georgia has a governor named Brian Kemp who was bound and determined that his state would re-open for business no matter what.
Did Kemp know what’s been happening in the rural southwest corner of the state? Of course he did.
Did he care?
We ask readers to think long and hard on that.