The administration is shifting control over COVID-19 infection and hospitalization data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to a private contractor, raising serious concerns over access and reliability of data. “On the eve of a new coronavirus reporting system this week, data disappeared from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website as hospitals began filing information to a private contractor or their states instead. A day later, an outcry — including from other federal health officials — prompted the Trump administration to reinstate that dashboard and another daily CDC report on the pandemic. And on Thursday, the nation’s governors joined the chorus of objections over the abruptness of the change to the reporting protocols for hospitals, asking the administration to delay the shift for 30 days. In a statement, the National Governors Association said hospitals need the time to learn a new system, as they continue to deal with this pandemic. The governors also urged the administration to keep the information publicly available.”
The New York Times reports on park inequities and efforts to expand park access to underserved communities. “In a city with some of the most famous green spaces in the world, many low-income New Yorkers live in virtual park deserts and are largely shut out of a sprawling network of more than 2,300 parks that has become more important than ever for physical and mental well being. Many Black and Hispanic families squeezed into cramped apartments in the South Bronx, one of the poorest sections of the city, have to fight for every bit of green space, while less than five miles away, residents of the affluent Upper West Side of Manhattan have both the lawns and ball fields in the 840-acre Central Park, and the playgrounds, dog runs and waterfront views in the 310-acre Riverside Park. At the height of the pandemic, more than 1.1 million New Yorkers did not have access to any park within a 10-minute walk of where they lived, according to an analysis by the Trust for Public Land, a conservation group that helps create public parks across the country. Many of those without access were in densely packed and low-income Black and Hispanic neighborhoods outside Manhattan. Nearly all these New Yorkers lost the only outdoor space they had when the city shut down playgrounds and small recreation areas to prevent the virus from spreading. Since then, playgrounds have officially reopened, but many parents said they have stayed away because of crowding. “The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed flaws in the park system that I don’t think we understood,” said Adrian Benepe, a senior vice president for the Trust for Public Land and a former city parks commissioner. “Not all parks are created equal. Small parks do not have room for lots of people to exercise and socially distance.””
Asheville, North Carolina, plans to launch a reparations initiative to invest in Black homeownership and businesses. “The measure was unanimously approved by the Asheville City Council on Tuesday night, but it stopped short of stipulating direct payments, which are usually associated with reparations. City leaders said their goal was to help create generational wealth for Black people, who have been hurt by income, educational and health care disparities. The city, which is in Western North Carolina and has about 93,000 residents, also apologized for its participation in and sanctioning of slavery, as well as other historical injustices perpetrated against Black people, who make up about 12 percent of the city’s population.”
The New York Times reports that the Trump administration “unilaterally weakened one of the nation’s bedrock conservation laws, the National Environmental Policy Act, limiting public review of federal infrastructure projects to speed up the permitting of freeways, power plants and pipelines… Revising the 50-year-old law through regulatory reinterpretation is one of the biggest — and most audacious — deregulatory actions of the Trump administration, which to date has moved to roll back 100 rules protecting clean air and water, and others that aim to reduce the threat of human-caused climate change.”