8-25: California’s case curve shrinks again - PLUS Californians ‘Aren’t Buying’ Claims About Mail-In Voting Fraud

✅OC Health Officials Stand By Reopening Push, Despite Higher State Coronavirus Estimates
Voice of OC
     As Orange County comes off the state coronavirus watchlist, there’s still nagging questions about whether there’s more virus cases than county health officials have publicly stated.
     State counts for infected people with coronavirus in Orange County looks very different from the county’s. And both are still over the threshold established by the state to come off the watchlist.
     When OC came off the list Sunday night, several state thresholds were reportedly met to come off the list.
     Counties across the state were placed on the watchlist for worsening virus trends, like more than 100 new cases per 100,000 residents over a 14-day period, a testing positivity greater than 8 percent during a seven-day period, or increasing hospitalization rates.
     According to county and state officials, Orange County met the thresholds for hospitals and testing positivity rates to come off the watchlist.
     But there remains conflicting data on the number of cases per 100,000 people.As of Monday, county Health Care Agency virus update website shows 85.1 cases per 100,000 residents, which is 15 below the state threshold.
     Meanwhile, the state’s county monitoring website shows 186 cases, which is more than 100 above the state threshold. And the state’s virus watchlist shows 180 cases.
     Despite stark differences in outstanding case estimates and the fact that both state numbers exceed the state threshold, state and county officials have apparently agreed to ignore the discrepancies on case estimates.
     After interviewing a host of county and state public health officials, it still isn’t clear why the case estimates are so different.…

✅California’s case curve shrinks again. Is it for real this time? -- With its data snafu in the rearview mirror, California’s case load has now fallen below the recent false low set three weeks ago when hundreds of thousands of tests went unreported. Evan Webeck in the San Jose Mercury$ -- 8/25/20

 

✅Only 3% of UC Irvine students are Black. The ‘Black Thriving Initiative’ aims to change that -- Teresa Watanabe in the Los Angeles Times$ -- 8/25/20

 

✅Californians ‘Aren’t Buying’ Claims About Mail-In Voting Fraud, New Poll Finds -- Despite months of GOP attacks on mail-in voting, Californians across ethnic and racial groups remain confident in the security of the process, according to a UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies survey released on Monday. Chris Nichols Capital Public Radio -- 8/25/20

 

✅5 takeaways from the first night of the RNC -- Welcome to a parallel universe. Conventions are unabashedly partisan affairs, offering the purest distillation of a political party and its beliefs. So a certain amount of contrast is to be expected when Democrats and Republicans stage their coronations back-to-back. But the differences on display Monday at the opening night of the GOP convention weren’t just jarring. They could practically knock your fillings out. Mark Z. Barabak in the Los Angeles Times$ -- 8/25/20

 

✅Nominating Trump, Republicans Rewrite His Record -- President Trump and his party engaged in sweeping revisionism about his management of the coronavirus, his record on race relations and much else. Jonathan Martin, Alexander Burns and Annie Karni in the New York Times$ -- 8/25/20

✅SDSU Students Greeted With Near-Empty Campus, Strict Rules On First Day -- Campus courtyards and lecture halls were mostly deserted on Monday with 90% of classes online-only and dormitories only filled to half capacity, housing about 3,500 residents. Joe Hong KPBS -- 8/25/20

 

✅USC reports ‘alarming increase’ in COVID-19 cases -- Just one week into fall semester, USC is reporting “an alarming increase” in the number of COVID-19 cases in students among the campus community, according to a Student Health notice sent out Monday. Nina Agrawal in the Los Angeles Times$ -- 8/25/20

 

✅Jerry Falwell's Future at Liberty in Question
     Falwell agreed to resign on Monday and withdrew that agreement later in the day.
—Inside Higher Ed

✅Report Sees Shift to Public Colleges During Pandemic
—Inside Higher Ed

✅Boulder Won't Cancel Scholar Who Wrote Harris Op-Ed

—Inside Higher Ed
     Philip P. DiStefano, chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder, doesn’t like a faculty member’s recent Newsweek op-ed questioning Senator Kamala Harris’s eligibility for the vice presidency based on her parents’ immigrant backgrounds. But Boulder won’t fire or otherwise punish the professor. DiStefano said in a statement Monday that visiting scholar John Eastman’s Newsweek op-ed was “neither compelling nor consistent with my understanding of who is eligible to hold our highest elected offices.” DiStefano also condemned “the way his work has been used to promote a racist agenda against the historic candidacy of Senator Harris, the daughter of a Jamaican-born father and an Indian-born mother.” And he said that Eastman’s op-ed has “marginalized members of our CU Boulder community and sown doubts in our commitment to anti-racism, diversity, equity and inclusion.”
     Still, DiStefano said he won’t rescind Eastman’s visiting appointment or otherwise “silence” him, for doing so “would falsely feed a narrative that our university suppresses speech it does not like and would undermine the principles of freedom of expression and academic freedom that make it possible for us to fulfill our mission.”….