State Senator Michelle Ugenti-Rita is questioning the fairness of Twitter s policies after a local sports announcer was able to harass her for months from an anonymous account, while she was suspended just days after she revealed his true identity.
Even those bitterly opposed to Ugenti-Rita, a Scottsdale Republican who has pushed legislation critics say would make it harder to vote, agreed that the troll, Josh Miller, had crossed a line in his political criticism by hurling misogynistic abuse. For example, in a post that was less egregious than some, Miller spewed, “Resign you dumb nazi whore.”
Publicly exposed, Miller deactivated his Twitter accounts and resigned his 17-year gig as the in-stadium announcer for the San Francisco Giant s spring training. He had also been employed as an announcer at Desert Mountain High School, which has opened an investigation. Scottsdale Unified School District spokesperson Nancy Norman said that Miller had submitted his resignation Monday.
People with COVID-19 occupy less than half of all intensive-care beds in the state for the first time since mid-December. Statewide, 45 percent of intensive-care beds are in use by COVID-19 patients. Overall, available intensive-care bed capacity has finally exceeded 10 percent, although a 20 percent safety margin is usually considered the minimum capacity needed. The majority of COVID-19 patients in intensive care, 561 of 838, are on ventilators. Lower occupancy means hospitals are resuming more surgeries. Banner Health Chief Clinical Officer Marjorie Bessel told the media last Wednesday that the hospital network, the state s largest, has now resumed surgeries that require no more than one night of intensive-care monitoring and three days of in-hospital recovery. Banner is working through a backlog of needed surgeries that were postponed due to COVID-19 and Bessel said they remain very busy. Some of the contracts for travel nurses brought into the state to bolster staffing will
The Arizona Department of Health Service (DHS) is adding an additional 21,000 vaccination appointments at its recently opened Phoenix Municipal Stadium site.
It s Tuesday, February 2. More than 765,000 Arizonans have contracted COVID-19 and more than 13,360 have died as a result. Here s what happened in the last week:
Arizona is averaging 4,634 cases of COVID-19 each day. The average number of new cases each day has continued to drop since peaking in the second week of January. Despite the decrease, the number of people being infected with COVID-19 still remains worse than over the summer. An average of 3,844 people were infected each day at the peak of that surge.
Arizona is still leading the country for the number of COVID-19 cases by population in the last week. The state averaged 70.3 cases per 100,000 people in the last seven days, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. The next worst state, South Carolina, averaged 69.5 cases per 100,000 people. Oregon continues to do the best in the continental United States, with an average of 14.4 cases per 100,000 people. Arizona dropped to third for the number of deaths