There were some parents who stated that they should have the right to decide when their children go back to school and what sports they should participate in, in spite of evidence showing the downside of individual actions. It should be noted that the lack of a n of national guidelines makes these decisions difficult to impossible. MA

By SEAN CRAWFORD• SEP 15, 2020ShareTweetEmailCREDIT NPR ILLINOIS

Amid growing calls to allow contact sports to resume this fall, Illinois’ governor Tuesday appeared to double down on postponement of the seasons.

J.B. Pritzker said it’s not a political decision. 

“I know that there are people who would like me simply to make a political decision to allow people to endanger themselves,” he told reporters.

Sports like football, volleyball and boys’ soccer has been pushed to a possible spring schedule due to COVID-19.  Several other Midwest states have made decisions to let the games go on.

“And if they’ve decided to endanger children and families in those states, by allowing certain contact sports to take place, that’s their decision. That’s not something that’s good for the families…the children of Illinois,” Pritzker said.

“Look, I’m not willing to sacrifice people’s lives or their health.  Neither the children nor their parents who would be affected also.”

The governor said he will continue to make decisions based on advice from doctors and researchers.  A few fall sports, such as cross country and tennis, are currently allowed, even though some of the seasons have been shortened. 

There have been protests and rallies across the state in recent days pushing for the restrictions on fall sports to be lifted.

The Illinois High School Association announced last week that it sent a letter to the governor asking to resume control over determining the resumption of IHSA sports and activities. 

• Dirty side of Politics
• Faux News
• Information
• Insertion
• Inside my head
• My Opinion
• politricks
• postings from others
• Smoke & Mirrors
• Trumpedation

• Dirty side of Politics
• Faux News
• Information
• Insertion
• Inside my head
• My Opinion
• politricks
• postings from others
• Smoke & Mirrors
• Trumpedation

By Carmen Paun  5 hrs ago– POLITICO

In only half a year, the coronavirus pandemic has wiped out decades of global development in everything from health to the economy.

Progress has not only stopped, but has regressed in areas like getting people out of poverty and improving conditions for women and children around the world, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation finds in its 2020 Goalkeepers report published Monday.

Vaccination coverage, seen as a good indicator for how health systems are functioning, is dropping to levels last seen in the 1990s, it says.

“In other words, we’ve been set back about 25 years in about 25 weeks,” the report says. “What the world does in the next months matters a great deal.”

Global action to stop the pandemic would prevent illness and deaths caused by Covid-19, but there’s more at stake: The crisis sets back strides made in global poverty, HIV transmission, malnutrition, gender equality, education and many more areas. Even if the world manages to get the coronavirus under control soon, it could take years to claw back lost progress.

“We’re at the real cusp moment at how you can tackle this and how long-term the effects are,” Mark Suzman, the CEO of the Gates Foundation, told POLITICO.

If the world can get a coronavirus vaccine successfully distributed in the next 18 months or so, things may return to the way they were before the pandemic in one or two years, he said. But in some developing countries, reversing the economic downturn may take longer because they don’t have the ability to invest as much money in their economies as rich countries, Suzman said.

Every year it was released since 2017, the Goalkeepers report celebrated progress in fighting poverty and disease in the developing world, Suzman said.

But this year it’s striving to show just how bad things are.

After 20 years of continuous progress, almost 37 million people have this year become extremely poor, living on less than $1.90 a day, according to the report. “‘Falling below the poverty line’ is a euphemism, though; what it means is having to scratch and claw every single moment just to keep your family alive,” it says.

These newly impoverished people are likely to be more women who work mostly in informal jobs in low- and middle-income countries.

And the coronavirus’s bad news for women doesn’t stop there.

“Indirectly, COVID will cause more women than men to suffer and die, in large part because the pandemic has disrupted health care before, during, and immediately after childbirth,” the report says. Newborns are at risk too, as more infants are likely to die when health systems falter — as is happening now around the world.

Children are also at risk of contracting life-threatening diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis since, for the first time in almost 30 years, the first four months of 2020 showed a substantial drop in the number of those completing the three doses of the DTP vaccine, according to the World Health Organization and UNICEF.

And outbreaks harm not only children’s health, but also their education.

“Data from the Ebola epidemic in West Africa suggests that, when schools open again, girls are less likely to return, thereby closing off opportunities for themselves and for their future children,” the Goalkeepers report says.

The early signs of that are present in Malawi, for example.

Teenage girls living with HIV who have been stuck at home as schools were closed because of the pandemic are getting pregnant, Grace Ngulube, a 25-year old HIV activist based in Blantyre, Malawi’s second largest city, told POLITICO. As schools reopen, they will be busy taking care of their babies at home, she said.

Ngulube, who works with the country’s association for young people living with HIV and who was born with the disease, said some are afraid to go to youth clinics to get treatments and mental health support like they would have before the pandemic. Those who can make it need to wear a face mask, and that can be an expensive item to procure for some young people who have lost their jobs, she said.

“A lot of young people are really struggling, and some of them, they have contracted themselves into prostitution or maybe transactional sex,” she said. That could lead to new HIV infections.

In 2018, almost 1 in 10 people between 15 and 49 years old lived with HIV in the country, according to UNAIDS. Overall, 1 million out of the 18 million people in Malawi had HIV in 2018.

Recent modeling studies show that deaths from HIV, tuberculosis and malaria could as much as double in the next year as a result of the pandemic, wiping out decades of progress, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria said in a report on Monday. There could be a half-million more AIDS deaths globally compared to 2018, setting the world close to 2008 levels, it said.

To try to avoid that, HIV Alliance India called citizens who had returned home as the country locked down to tell them which were the closest facilities providing antiretroviral treatment, Rosenara Huidrom from the Alliance told POLITICO. Field workers provided treatment to those who were too scared of getting infected with coronavirus to go out for it, she said. India has the third-highest number of people with HIV and the second-highest number of coronavirus cases.

Richer countries need to work with middle- and low-income countries to figure out how to help, the United States’ top infections disease expert Anthony Fauci said during a virtual event organized by Friends of the Global Fight on Friday.

From the vantage point of the White House coronavirus task force he sits on, the “extraordinary disruption” of disease treatment and prevention the U.S. and others have invested in is not on the radar screen, “when it really should be,” Fauci said.

This year’s Gatekeepers report is based on imperfect data that its partner, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), has managed to gather so far. The full picture won’t be available until 2021.

The data covering 2020 is based on a series of smartphone surveys and telephone interviews with 70,000 people in 82 countries, though they were not a representative sample for all countries. Other data considered includes information on the number of people receiving health services monthly, the number of tourist arrivals, employment data and human mobility patterns.

IHME modeled what will happen by the end of 2021 based on what has happened so far, including an assumption that people would react to new restrictions the same way they reacted at the beginning, among others.

Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie slams United States leadership over COVID-19 response

Ryan Young·WriterAugust 30, 2020, 11:51 PM CDT

The NFL season is set to kick off next month as the COVID-19 pandemic is still raging throughout the United States.

The fact that the country hasn’t been able to get it under control by now, Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie said on Sunday, is “a tragic embarrassment.”

Jeffrey Lurie slams leadership over COVID-19 response

Though he didn’t call the president out by name, Lurie took aim at his and the rest of the country’s leadership during the coronavirus pandemic.

“We have to own the questions of leadership and the questions about policies,” Lurie said Sunday, via NJ.com. “There is a lot to be discussed here on that and in the future. It is heartbreaking. These are needless deaths. We should be similar to most countries on this planet, and yet, we are an embarrassment, a tragic embarrassment.”

There were more than six million confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the United States as of Sunday night, according to The New York Times, and nearly 183,000 deaths attributed to it. The United States is one of just three countries in the world with more than one million total cases — along Brazil and India, though both countries had less than four million each — and had the second-most reported cases in the world over the past week.

[ Coronavirus: How the sports world is responding to the pandemic ]

Those numbers, Lurie said, don’t make sense to him.

“What if I told you yesterday that five Boeing 737′s crashed in the United States and everybody died?” Lurie asked, via NJ.com. “That is every single day right now. It has been that way for many weeks. We are 4 percent of the world’s population, 21 percent of the fatalities. There is a lot to figure out. Why is that the case? 

“The fact of the matter is it’s feeling the pain of all those people in the United States and wondering why we are the wealthiest country in the world but have 21 percent of the deaths. We have the ability to socially distance better than any country and life-saving mechanisms more than any third-world country.”

‘We are going through two terrible pandemics’

Lurie didn’t stop with the coronavirus. 

He addressed the massive social justice movement taking place in the country, too — specifically the death of George Floyd earlier this year. 

Floyd, a Black man, died in Minneapolis police custody in May after a white officer placed his knee in the back of Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes while he yelled out, “I can’t breathe.”

Video of that incident quickly went viral, sparking a massive social justice push that included countless athletes. 

“If you open your heart, you’re not going to put your knee on someone’s neck and let them expire,” Lurie said, via NJ.com. “That’s from someone whose heart is closed and hates themselves. We have to weed out those who are so disassociated from themselves that they hate themselves. That’s really hard to do.”

Both that and the pandemic happening at the same time, Lurie said, have made for an extremely tough year. The only way to change, he said, is owning our mistakes and “opening our hearts.”

“There is just so much pain both in our country and around the world,” Lurie said, via NJ.com. “We are going through two terrible pandemics, one that has existed for the entirety of our country in the pandemic of systemic racism, violence to minorities and oppression, and all of those activities that have been part of our history. The other is the once in a 100-year health pandemic that has been devastating.”