Topics in this Issue:
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Blue Light
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Text to 911
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What’s Happening in Colleges and Universities Across the Country?
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Pima County and Off-Campus Testing
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Two New COVID Links
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Local Tucson
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Reid Park Zoo
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PCOA and Groceries for the Elderly
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Harvard COVID Update
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Be Kind, Tucson Homeless Connects
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Covid Raw Data
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Old Tucson
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City of Tucson Resources
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In this week's newsletter, I’m going to get into the current situation related to COVID and how it’s affecting some of the off-campus high rises. It’s also spreading in on-campus dorms. As you read that, keep in mind the whole idea of community spread. While the health of the UA students who live in those apartments is of concern, of even greater concern to me is the way those kids will spread the virus throughout the City if it’s not addressed now. Now is too late without full compliance by the owner of the apartments, and the UA. Neither group can wash their hands of this and suggest their failure to plan is somehow a City/County problem. So keep this graphic in mind as you read the rest of the newsletter. It’s a simple description of how a virus spreads beyond our ability to contain it if proper protocols are not implemented.
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Blue Light
Right now, California, parts of Oregon, and Washington are suffering forest fires. I included a blue light shoutout to the firefighters last week. The issue has expanded, so they’re front and center again this week for that recognition.
That’s some fatigue. This is why -
If you thought our recent hazy days are the cause of your eyes to itch, you’d be right. And California forest fires are the cause. And this year has been a record-setter.
We at the Ward 6 office are grateful to our own TFD workers who have "done their time" on our own forest fires. And we recognize the huge personal sacrifices being made by firefighters across the west coast in protecting life and property every day.
Tomorrow when you itch your eyes, think of these workers.
Text to 911
Here is another public safety item that is important to make yourself aware of. Last week we rolled out a new feature in our 911 emergency dispatch center. It allows people to text 911 and connect with a commo operator.
Its another example of how great things can happen when we work collaboratively on a regional level. Each of our agency partners in Pima County worked together to get this up and running – and the access was ultimately provided by the State 911 office.
Very simply, if you’re in a position where it would be dangerous for you to make noise (speak) you can now text 911, enter your calling location, and engage with a dispatcher by a series of texts. Most importantly, is that you first enter the address of where your emergency is in case you get disconnected.
While the scenario I just shared is important, the primary initiative for adding the text feature comes as an equity/accessibility issue. Now people such as, our hearing impaired neighbors can take advantage of the 911 center. So there are multiple ways this will be of value, and we owe a debt of thanks to our disabled community for raising the issue. Here’s a short video put together by the Pima County Sheriff’s office – you'll recognize Kevin Adger, former local news reporter. Looks like he has found a new gig, but still one with a camera and mic involved.
What’s Happening in Colleges and Universities Across the Country?
To answer that question I could leave it at showing this graph. But there’s much more to add, especially to our local situation, than to simply let you absorb that rising red line.
First, as a reminder, if you see/hear large partying going on, not social distanced/unmasked, you can phone that into the UA Party Hotline at 520.282.3649. You can also alert the TPD Red Tag unit at 520.837.7318.
Here’s the language of the City unruly gathering ordinance:
An unruly gathering is defined as a gathering of five (5) or more persons on any private property, including property used to conduct business, in a manner which causes a disturbance of the quiet enjoyment of private or public property by any person or persons. Such disturbances include, but are not limited to, excessive noise or traffic, obstruction of public streets by crowds or vehicles, drinking in public, the service of alcohol to minors or consumption of alcohol by minors, fighting, disturbing the peace, and littering.
As you’ll see below, COVID has made its appearance around campus. None of these parties can be tolerated. Each of them is a public health concern to me. So how has the virus spread in just the past couple of weeks?
Here is a dashboard report from the UA as of just before Labor Day weekend.
And this is what was on their dashboard this past weekend:
But even that last dashboard doesn’t tell the whole story. On the Tuesday following the Labor Day holiday weekend, I had Rescue Me Wellness testing door-to-door in 3 of the high rises near Main Gate. They tested 47 new positive cases, 32 of which were located in one of the apartment buildings. Combined with the testing we did a little over a week earlier we’ve now done 420 tests in those towers and have come up with 77 positives. That’s just under a 20% positive rate. And it does not include the contact tracing tests that are still not back from the roommates of the students who tested positive while the team was in the building.
To get those 32 positives in the one high rise we tested 89 kids. That is an alarming 36% positivity rate. Over the weekend I Zoomed with the ownership group from each of the 3 buildings and made the case that we need to test every single person who lives in that tower. The EEOC allows employers to require testing of employees as long as the requirement is "job related and consistent with a business necessity." While that condition doesn’t apply here, we certainly have a situation where there is a clear public health vulnerability if these kids go out into the wider community and infect others. During that Zoom the County announced they had additional positives from two of the buildings. My 32 jumped to 42 positives in the one building, and another where I had 11 jumped to 41. Then our contact tracing results came back and now Hub Tucson stands at 45 active positive cases; that we know of.
The owners’ response was they cannot compel testing. It violates their lease. The only thing testy, at that point, was the tenor of the conversation. I won’t go through it all, but there were a few takeaways. One is that at about the time this newsletter goes out, the County will be over shutting down their pools. Also, we’re planning a virtual town hall that will include as many residents of the towers as we can get, plus their parents. We need to test everyone and isolate the sick ones. Otherwise, we will see this spread throughout the community. And the County is looking at its legal options for going in right now and quarantining every room where there’s a positive, isolating the one who tested and quarantining the roommates.
That’s all getting legal, and I’m afraid, will take too long. The answer is the UA has to mandate that everybody who comes onto campus or taking classes virtually must have a valid PCR test within 48 hours of arriving, or they will be turned away. That PCR test is not what they’ve been giving to students to allow them into the on-campus dorms.
The UA has been offering rapid result antigen testing on campus. Several of the students who tested positive in the saliva PCR test we administered had already taken the rapid "2-hour" result test and had tested negative. False negatives are an issue because a person believes he/she is safe to mingle in crowds. In fact, we learned that some of the students who did the false-negative rapid test attended a large birthday party at the apartment complex. It was after the party that they received our test result and understood that they had just potentially infected their friends.
We have also heard from varying student sources that when inside the elevators in these towers, crammed together, the masks come off. In a poorly ventilated space with sick kids, the virus does what it does. And that’s what we’re finding.
So, it’s a new week, the virus has had 3 more days to spread around the towers, and I’m sure our conversation will resume now that they’ve had the weekend to rest and think about my “100% testing” suggestion. Stay tuned.
This is a list of Arizona Colleges and Universities from a NY Times article that shows data as of 9/3. As you can see, it’s numbers are already out of date, and based on what we’re learning from the tower testing, even what’s shown on the 9/11 UA dashboard is dated. But this is a snapshot of cases on those campuses since the start of the pandemic. Clearly most of them happened since reopening.
Here’s a short list of how COVID is impacting 10 schools across the country. I pulled these from the Chronicle last week. Trust me when I say that the list could have been significantly expanded.
The entire Cal St University system will go to mostly online again in the spring. That’s the largest State University system in the nation.
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U. Minnesota cut men’s indoor track and field, men’s outdoor track and field, men’s gymnastics, and men’s tennis as a measure to try to deal with the financial impact of COVID.
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Grad assistants and student dining workers are on strike at the U. Michigan over safety concerns related to COVID. They’re a part of a union of campus workers, similar to what just formed on the UA campus.
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U. Wisconsin moved to online for at least 2 weeks due to outbreaks among students. They’re using 2 large dorms for quarantine after having over 1,000 infections since the semester started last week.
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U. Tennessee is now over 2,000 people on campus who are in quarantine. The count of active COVID cases on their campus is now over 600.
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U. Georgia logged more than 1,400 cases among students in the past week. Their total number is now over 3,000 since the start of the pandemic.
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The Baylor vs Louisiana Tech football game was postponed after 38 LTU players tested positive.
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Indiana U reports over 1,300 cases on their campus since August 22nd.
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Florida State U. had 700 students test positive in one week in the first week after having resumed classes.
Finally, this. A football player at Cal U of Pennsylvania died of COVID complications. Their athletics conference had postponed fall sports so this wasn’t the result of him getting sick during intercollegiate competition. He was a 6’3”, 355 lb junior. You’ve heard how people with co-morbidities are subject to more severe complications from COVID. It appears that is what happened to Jamain Stephens. He was only 20 years old at his passing.
Over the weekend, Michigan State University told all students to self-quarantine for the next 14 days. The University of Illinois has done the same. On Sunday I sent out this Public Health Advisory, suggesting actions the UA, private apartment management, County and City can each do to help control spread:
Pima County and Off-Campus Testing
When I began the off-campus testing outside the high rises just a couple of weeks ago, both the UA folks and County health commented that they’d been looking for ways to get into some of those buildings. Everyone knew, or should have known that they’re vectors for spread. The UA is still taking the position that off-campus is not their responsibility. Kudos to the Pima County health department for stepping towards this problem and really expanding their testing protocols.
Last week they got involved in testing some of the Greek houses off campus. And they’ve been in other private apartment complexes where they market primarily to UA students. Here’s a short list of where they’ve been. There is a similar list of upcoming scheduled testing efforts the County is leading.
And at other private apartments and/or dorms:
So the ball is finally rolling. The work you see reflected in these schedules is coming from the County efforts and funding. They’ve called and invited me to continue working at the Main Gate tower area, which I’m happy to do in close coordination with them. They’ll keep moving to other off-campus private housing sites.
The County is also doing a significant amount of testing in other areas of both within City limits, and beyond. I see maps like this that show where the testing is taking place. You can see that they’re spread out all over the County. While I can afford to focus on the UA area, Pima County health has a much larger chunk of work to coordinate.
To give you a sense of how the numbers are tracking, these are some of the totals that have been reported through this work.
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Between August 9th and 15th, they reported 557 cases.
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Between August 16th and 22nd, another 368 cases reported.
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Between August 23rd and 29th, 319 new cases.
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Between August 30th and September 5th, 413 cases at the test collection sites.
What about the UA study area? During that same August 30th - September 5th week, Pima County reported 165 cases. And based on the testing both the County and I have contracted since then you know that number has escalated.
Testing’s great. What happens after a positive test is confirmed is key. Isolating everybody who tested positive, and tracing contacts and testing them is the only way we’re going to slow this train down. When the Governor prematurely opened businesses across the State we saw Arizona jump to #1 internationally in terms of rate of infection. We’re now seeing rates of infection grow at alarming rates among UA students, both on and off campus. That is the public health condition we’re now faced with.
None of the groups who had a role in getting us to this point can step aside and act as though containment is somebody else’s responsibility.
Two New COVID Links
This link: azhealth.gov/compliancecovid19 is what the Arizona Department of Health asks you to use for reporting businesses that are not abiding by the CDC/State guidelines for reopening. Without repeating all of those standards, the ones most commonly violated are having large crowds, not social distanced, and not wearing masks.
And please remember, Ducey and State Health Director Christ encouraged people to get a flu shot as soon as possible. Flu season runs through March, but with COVID lingering, getting the vaccine may prove more valuable this year than in the past.
Finally, this isn’t a "new" link, but it’s one worth repeating, given the current issues. The Red Tag unit is still operating and now has COVID as an extra motivating tool. Report violations to RedTag@tucsonaz.gov. This alerts the City Red Tag unit to large parties. This coming week there will also be a special emphasis – shared between the UAPD and TPD – on the areas immediately around campus.
Local Tucson
This week’s Local Tucson item is going to be a departure from the norm. Hey, I write these things so I’m taking license. This local item is our local exposure to PFAS contamination coming from DM. First a little history. |
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PFAS is a combination of chemicals that are used largely in a fire fighting foam used by the Air Force. It was used on DM both in hangars, and on the runways for both fire training drills, and real emergencies. The foam is Aqueous Film Forming Foam (AFFF.) It was produced by 3M and others.
We know there’s a significant contamination level in the groundwater just north of the DM runway. We also know that when the USAF used the foam, they either hosed it into the soil, or they dumped it in a diluted form into the sewer system. There’s also PFAS contamination out by the sewage treatment plant.
Last year, I invited a legal team that’s involved with litigation on PFAS to come to Tucson and meet with our water department leadership, city attorney, and then Mayor Rothschild. The outcome of that meeting was for the City to join in class action litigation against 3M and other manufacturers of the foam. That trial is in the discovery stage and should start once the judge is brought up to speed on the science he’ll be ruling on.
To date, the Air Force has not been joined in any litigation. One reason is that we want to partner with them in studying the impact on our central well field, and ultimately to get them to pay for remediation. With the help of the State Department of Environmental Quality, those discussions are now ongoing.
My concern is that the conversations are progressing at the speed of government. In this case, it’s the speed of 3 governments; the City, State, and Feds. Meanwhile, PFAS is in the soil, we’re shutting down wells to contain it, and have invested millions of your dollars in this effort while nobody is owning the issue, either from the standpoint of causing it, or fixing it.
So you’re relatively up to date – the local piece is a report the USAF issued last week specific to work they’re doing out at DM. The report is a risk evaluation. I won’t bother you with all the DOD acronyms, but in layman’s terms, they evaluate various sites and assign a risk value to them. Here’s a picture of the DM runway with the risk values shown for the parts of the runway they’re studying.
Of particular importance to me is AFFF Area 3 – it's listed as a High Risk location, is at the north end of the runway, is adjacent to City wells that we’ve had to shut down because of PFAS contamination, and is where they hosed AFFF into the soil. Do you see a possible connection? Cause/effect?
The report just issued says the USAF is taking this information, calling it a Remedial Investigation (RI), and will at some point decide on how to react to the risk.
This is a quote from the study:
“The RI is part of a large contract that includes 31 installations and is in the infancy stage of determining the extent of the contamination. The RI will not include any “remedial/treatment actions” however it will include recommendations. The RI is anticipated to be completed by 2024.”
That is the speed of government – by 2024 they hope to have finished a proposal that will include actual actions they’ll take to remediate our water contamination problem. Meanwhile, the plume sits just SE of our central well field. But plumes don’t just sit in place and wait for the DOD to decide on how to contain it. They move. Nobody knows where it will be by 2024.
I’ve made it very clear to our legal folks, and to our water folks that the pace of all this is a huge issue for me. I’m not going to be that guy who someone asks in several years "what did you do about it" and only be able to say that I sat and waited, trusting the DOD and 3M to do the right thing.
So that’s Local Tucson for this week. We will have a PFAS update during our next M&C meeting. I know our staff already understands how I feel about moving this whole process along as rapidly as possible. And to their credit, I can say nobody I’ve spoken to about this either within City staff or from the outside legal team is taking this lightly.
Reid Park Zoo
Time for a more positive piece. Let these little guys bring a smile to your face before I get back into the tougher news. In fact, bringing a smile to your face is one of the things the zoo promises to do when you visit.
The zoo has now been open for a couple of weeks. They’re following extra-cautious COVID protocols, so visiting is an outing you can feel safe doing. You have to buy tickets in advance so they can control the number of people inside the park at a given time.
They’re open from 8 am until 2 pm daily. The train, carousel, café, gift shop, and giraffe feeding isn’t open for now. And bring a reusable water bottle pre-filled. The fountains are not open either. But you will find kiosks scattered around the park where you can buy grab-and-go drinks and food.
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PCOA and Groceries for the Elderly
This is a good news update on the work Pima Council on Aging is doing to get groceries out to our seniors. The work stems from an August 11th authorization of $500K from M&C to PCOA so they could expand their grocery shopping program.
In an earlier newsletter, I shared the program eligibility requirements. Recipients must be over 60 years old, make less than $25K annually and live either in the City of Tucson, or South Tucson. PCOA has now served 76 clients and has found varying reasons for people needing assistance. That includes the loss of a caregiver, loss of income, and increased expenses (fixed income issues.) Some have received groceries, and others simply needed cleaning and hygiene supplies.
Please continue to send client contacts to PCOA at www.pcoa.org. They’re out serving in all areas of the community, and the needs only continue to grow.
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Harvard COVID Update
Here is a graph from the Harvard site showing how Counties throughout Arizona stack up on COVID progress.
Last week I said the data they were relying on had yet to reflect some of the school and University reopenings. Now some of those data are trickling in. I say "trickle" because as you look at the Pima County results in that graph you see they’re saying we have 22,247 total cases. Here’s what the State site says for Pima County, as of Sunday afternoon:
Based on that it looks like they’re about a day behind the State reporting. With that, they have us in the yellow category again. That means “rigorous test and trace programs advised.”
The recent upsurge in COVID around campus is not yet included in the Pima County numbers, so that may be reflected in next week’s update. But without that context, our recent 3 week improvements with the Harvard Global Health Institute reversed ground this week. Last week they showed us having 6.8 daily cases per 100,000, and a 7 day moving average with 71.7 new cases. Here are this week’s numbers in comparison.
To refresh your memory, these are the risk levels they base their advice on. With the news about what’s happening around campus, I’m expecting both some policy changes this week, as well as continuous changes in the direction of these numbers.
Be Kind
Tucson Homeless Connects
The Tucson Homeless Connect is normally a one-stop-shop homeless support operation that Jonathan used to champion. This year we have to do things a bit differently – no large gatherings where people can come to get food, clothing, hygiene services, etc.
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This Be Kind is for the organizing team of Tucson Homeless Connect for keeping things moving, despite COVID. On Sunday the 13th, they did a backpack distribution, taking them out and delivering the goods to people in need. The more than 300 backpacks they handed out contained the same sorts of provisions people normally get during the in-person events, and this time added certificates for food as well as resource cards for social services. My staff and I are grateful to all of you who donated to Connect, and to those who invested their time in this event.
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COVID Raw Data
Here are the Statewide numbers for the total number of cases and fatalities that were posted on Sunday. It’s an increase in about 3,000 new cases last week, and another 100 fatalities Statewide.
The State still has Pima County running an 8.3% positive test rate. In Hub Tucson last Tuesday we had a positive test rate in excess of 35%. Think of the difference as showing a comparison between spread in a rural area vs spread in a densely populated congregate setting. Viruses spread when given the opportunity.
Here’s your weekly update on the Statewide COVID numbers, by County. From last week’s newsletter:
Here are the numbers from AZDHS as of last weekend:
Here is the set of data links I refer to for some of the sections in the newsletter. I’m adding a new one this week so you can track the daily updates from the UA health department:
For the NY Times data sets, use this link:
The State Department of Health site is at this link: www.azdhs.gov.
Track the advice on public schools through this link:
You can find all the dashboard information at the “School Reopening Public Health Benchmarks” spot. Let your school-aged kids play with it if you can’t find the data you’re after. That might save you some time.
Here’s the UA daily update link. www.covid.arizona.edu. When it opens, click "See Latest Updates" and it’ll take you to a screen with the updated data.
Old Tucson
And finally, this note. Pima County announced last week that Old Tucson is shutting its doors. After 81 years of providing an excellent movie setting, and hosting tens of thousands of visitors, the combination of COVID and the failure of the State to adopt a Statewide film incentive proved too much financial strain for the park.
As Pima County considers options for repurposing, my hope is that all candidates for State office this November take a hard look at the collateral damage our not having a competitive film incentive is causing. Google the economic successes incentives are bringing to our neighbor New Mexico and it shouldn’t be tough to get behind Arizona’s State legislature getting us back in the movie industry game.
Sincerely,
Steve Kozachik Council Member, Ward 6 ward6@tucsonaz.gov
City of Tucson Resources
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