More than 130 Vermonters have used the Vermont State Police “Executive Order Reporting Tool” (EORT) to inform police about other Vermonters’ alleged infractions of Gov. Scott’s executive orders for work, travel and social distancing, Department of Public Safety Commissioner Michael Schirling said this week.
President Donald Trump gave out new three-stage guidelines for states to begin reopening their economies as the deaths and hospitalizations due to the coronavirus have been much less than predicted.
When the time comes to honor all of those Vermonters who displayed great courage, commitment, and capabilities during the pandemic, I hope that those who were deep in the fight — our janitors, custodians, wipers and environmental engineers — are recognized for also protecting all of us.
Norway has had 128 deaths from COVID-19 out of a population of 5.4 million. Finland, with 5.5 million, has had fewer than 100 deaths, and Denmark, with 5.6 million, has had 275 deaths. It’s too early to know, but Sweden later may be seen as a success because its smaller population allows it to respond more easily.
Jobless claims in Vermont have reached 81,947 since Gov. Phil Scott declared a state of emergency last month and ordered residents to restrict business activities and “stay home” in response to the coronavirus.
The House Transportation Committee on Wednesday discussed several thorny problems raised by the state of emergency: 34 public transit drivers are out, three have tested positive; ridership is down 75 percent; and Burlington riders are less likely to wear masks.
We will never know how many more Vermonters have years knocked off their lives, never know how many cases of domestic abuse occurred, how many more high schoolers dropped out a year or two later due to the stay-at-home order.
While it would not be wrong for people who are showing the symptoms of the coronavirus to be presumed to have it in order for safety precautions to be taken, to presume and then publicly report that someone had died from the virus is misleading and brings into question all the numbers of deaths that are being reported.
Health Department guidelines for filling out death certificates in Vermont instruct doctors to cite COVID-19 as the cause of death even if patients didn’t test positive for the virus. Patients who died with other serious underlying health conditions also are to be classified as having died of the coronavirus.
Michiganders are expressing their frustration with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s sweeping coronavirus stay-at-home orders, with protests and more than 200,000 people signing a petition for her to be removed from office.
President Donald Trump made it official Tuesday that the administration was halting money to the World Health Organization, the international body that said in January that COVID-19 could not be spread by human-to-human contact, and praised China’s response to the virus.
Yahoo News reported that the U.S. intelligence community is exploring all possible avenues the virus could have been unintentionally released from research facilities that were known to be studying bat-based coronaviruses in Wuhan.