Free Republic

NEW YORK - New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio called the city’s latest COVID-19 numbers “worrisome” in a briefing on Thursday. City officials say that the percentage of New Yorkers testing positive for COVID-19 has risen to just under three percent, with the threshold set by the Department of Health at five percent.

Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed to crackdown on large Halloween gatherings this weekend amid “worrisome” new data showing an increasingly growing number of COVID-19 infections in the city. Over a seven-day average, 1.92 percent of New Yorkers have tested positive for coronavirus — a statistics that’s typically hovered between 1.5 to 1.75 percent over the past few weeks, the mayor said at his daily press briefing. “The growth is what worries me,” he added.

Dr. Deborah Birx said protesters who gather without wearing masks and not practicing social distancing at rallies against states’ lockdown regulations are “devastatingly worrisome” because they could spread the coronavirus to at-risk family members. Birx, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, was asked by host Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday” about crowds that gathered at Michigan’s state capitol from a “public health standpoint.” “It’s devastatingly worrisome to me personally because if they go home and, in fact, their grandmother or their grandfather who has a co-morbid condition and they have a serious or a very or...

Iran confirmed 13 new coronavirus cases, bringing its total in the country to 18. Seven people with the flu-like virus were diagnosed in Qom, four people in Tehran and two in Gilan. The small outbreak in Iran has been linked to a case in Canada and another infection of a 45-year-old woman in Lebanon after those patients traveled to the Middle East nation. rld health officials still have a chance to contain the virus, he said, but it’s getting less likely by the day. Iran’s health-care system has the “basic capacity” to detect and contain the coronavirus, said Dr. Jaouad...

20 suspects carried N.C. licenses 3-10-05 By Taft Wireback Staff Writer News & Record GREENSBORO — Most of the aircraft workers arrested Tuesday on immigration charges at Piedmont Triad International Airport were carrying North Carolina driver’s licenses they shouldn’t have been issued. Twenty of 24 suspected, illegal immigrants had N.C. licenses, highlighting a continuing problem that state government has been unable to vanquish, said Thomas O’Connell of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “That’s not uncommon. Practically everybody we arrest has a North Carolina driver’s license on them,” said O’Connell, resident agent in charge of ICE’s Piedmont Triad office. O’Connell’s agency...

Well isn't that interesting: John Edwards is on his way out, so that makes Arlen Specter the trial lawyers' darling in the Senate. The liberal Specter is also in line to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. If that happens, we're betting that President Bush's plans for tort reform will be dead on arrival. The real problem, though, will be the Senate approval for Supreme Court Justices. Bush may get to pick three this term, as well as elevate Clarence Thomas to Chief Justice. As Justice Committee chairman, will Specter play ball and support Bush's picks? Many groups around...

CHICAGO (Reuters Health) - A group of drug-resistant microbes that infect the intestine have become much more common among hospitalized patients and in the general community over the last decade, a Spanish team of researchers report. The bacteria are called extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL)-producing Enterobacteriaceae. The findings are concerning because these microbes are resistant to drugs called cephalosporins, and most can evade other types of antibiotics too. Dr. Rafael Canton of Hospital Ramon y Cajal in Madrid presented his team's findings here at the 43rd annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. The researchers compared more than 1200 stool samples...