The Context of the Current COVID-19 Spike; the Palm Springs Surf Club Has a Setback–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Jan. 11, 2024

Indy Digest: Jan. 11, 2024

A week ago in this space, we discussed the fact that we’re in the midst of another COVID-19 spike—and it’s becoming quite clear that this one is big. In fact, it appears to be the second-largest spike we’ve had, period, behind only that nasty Omicron spike of 2021-2022.

The New York Times says:

Reported levels of the virus in U.S. wastewater are higher than they have been since the first Omicron wave, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, though severe outcomes still remain rarer than in earlier pandemic winters.

“We are seeing rates are going up across the country,” said Amy Kirby, program lead for the C.D.C.’s National Wastewater Surveillance System. The program now categorizes every state with available data at “high” or “very high” viral activity.

The surge might reach its peak this week or soon after, modelers predict, with high levels of transmission expected for at least another month beyond that.

Chances are, you know more than one person who is currently sick. I certainly do, and there’s a good chance some of the businesses you frequent are short-staffed.

Some people out there may be wondering: If we have these great, updated vaccines, how are so many people getting sick? Well, about that …

ABC News yesterday published a piece headlined “Why are 1,500 Americans still dying from COVID every week?” About 10 paragraphs into the piece, you’ll find this interesting tidbit: “As of Jan. 5, just 19.4% of adults aged 18 and older and 8% of children have received the updated COVID vaccine, CDC data shows. Additionally, just 38% of adults aged 65 and older, who are at higher risk of severe illness, have been vaccinated.”

No wonder so many people are getting sick—and even dying—four years into the pandemic.

Despite these concerning stats, a lot of folks think getting COVID-19, for them, is no big deal; getting sick sucks, but life goes on. Well, about THAT … Time magazine says, in an article headlined “Is It Dangerous to Keep Getting COVID-19?“:

As cases continue to rise and more variants arrive on the scene, infectious-disease experts are warning that repeat infections could have cumulative, lasting effects.

“There is some early evidence starting to show that if you had COVID-19, there can be all sorts of problems after getting infected” and reinfected, says Dr. Robert Murphy, professor of medicine and executive director of the Havey Institute for Global Health at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “We are just at the beginning of learning about them.”

Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, studies Long COVID: a condition marked by health effects that linger after infection. “Reinfection remains consequential,” he says.

We have some good tools to help in the battle against the nasty virus that is SARS-CoV-2, such as updated vaccines and tools like Paxlovid. Problem is, not nearly enough of us are using them.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• We’ll start off this section with a few local items of note. First off: You’ve probably heard about the much-ballyhooed Palm Springs Surf Club, which opened around New Year’s at 1500 S. Gene Autry Trail. Well, a website called Beach Grit reported today that the club’s wave tank has closed indefinitely due to “technical issues.” The site says: “The month of January sold out almost as soon as it was posted. Alas, sad news is trickling out from the desert. The tank is being shuttered indefinitely due ‘technical challenges.’ ‘In recent days,’ a missive to those who had booked began, ‘we have been experiencing technical challenges. We have been working through them but our goal here at The Palm Springs Surf Club is to consistently deliver epic waves. In order to maintain the quality we have worked so hard to achieve within our wave settings, we need to take the whole system down to make it strong again. As a team that has been dedicated to the stoke, it saddens us to make this call but we can confidently say we will be back again with the product you all have seen and hoped to experience.'” Our Matt King, who has been working on a piece on the facility, reached out to the Surf Club for details, and received a response saying a public statement would be coming soon.

• The Riverside County Office of Education is having a series of Art Connects contests, and any students in the county through the eighth grade can enter the visual arts portion through 5 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 22. The contest site says: “The Arts at Riverside County Office of Education (RCOE) invites elementary and middle school students to submit artworks of any theme (that is school appropriate). All visual art mediums are welcome. There is no size restriction. No coloring sheets will be considered. Please submit a photograph (of the art) that is clear and complete. This is an online contest only, and the work should be submitted by teachers or parents. Limit ten entries per teacher and five entries per student.” Up next are dance, theater and film contests; click that website link above to learn more.

• A local casino is celebrating a significant anniversary, and is inviting the public to celebrate. From a news release: “On Sunday, Jan. 14, the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians will mark the 29th anniversary of Spotlight 29 Casino, celebrating with free swag, anniversary cupcakes, and a swoon-worthy giveaway of $29,000. Starting at 10 a.m. on the casino floor, commemorative 29th anniversary T-shirts will be given away to all Club 29 members, while supply lasts. At 5 p.m. the celebration continues with free cupcakes” and various casino-play giveaways. Click here to learn more.

• Outdoor-recreation enthusiasts, take note: An REI store is opening in Rancho Mirage, in a long-shuttered retail space. “Specialty outdoor retailer REI Co-op announced expansion plans to open 10 new stores in 2024 to better serve its members and outdoor community. Locations have been finalized for summer 2024 openings in Glendale, Ariz., and Rancho Mirage, Calif. The co-op will open its doors in … The River in Rancho Mirage. … Each location will offer a wide assortment of apparel, gear and expertise for camping, cycling, running, fitness, hiking, climbing and more. In addition, a full-service bike shop will be staffed with technicians to tune, repair and enhance the performance of all bikes.” The Desert Sun reported that the store will open in the space that formerly house Forever 21, and, before that, Borders.

• The New York Times reports that after decades of declines, fatal car crashes are on the rise again: “From 2020 to 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has … calculated, the number of crashes in the United States soared 16 percent, to more than six million, or roughly 16,500 wrecks a day. The fatality figures were somehow even worse: In 2021, 42,939 Americans died in car crashes, the highest toll in a decade and a half. Of those deaths, a sizable portion involved intoxicated or unrestrained drivers or vehicles traveling well in excess of local speed limits.”

• Gov. Gavin Newsom has made his suggestions on how the state should deal with its significant budget deficit. Our partners at CalMatters say: “California is in a budget hole, its depth measured not in feet, but in dollars. How deep? A projected $38 billion deficit, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said today he will declare a fiscal emergency if necessary and unveiled his initial plan to dig the state out of a fiscal chasm for the second year in a row. But Newsom painted it as a return to a more normal budget, after recent spikes in revenue. He called it ‘a story of correction, a story of normalization after a period of tremendous amount of distortion.’ His deficit projection is far less dire than last month’s outlook from the nonpartisan legislative analysts, who projected that the state is eyeing a $68 billion deficit for the 2024-25 fiscal year, which starts July 1. Crucially, Newsom’s team is assuming $15 billion more in revenues than the legislative analysts, explaining much of the difference in forecasts, based on the resilience of the economy.”

• Today’s recall subject: Dodge Ram trucks. However, this recall includes a bit of a twist. NPR reports: “The Department of Justice released new details of a settlement with engine manufacturer Cummins Inc. Wednesday that includes a mandatory recall of 600,000 Ram trucks, and that Cummins remedy environmental damage it caused when it illegally installed emissions control software in several thousand vehicles, skirting emissions testing. Cummins is accused of circumventing emissions testing through devices that can bypass or defeat emissions controls. The engine manufacturer will pay a $1.675 billion civil penalty to settle claims – previously announced in December and the largest ever secured under the Clean Air Act – in addition to $325 million on remedies. … Over the course of a decade, hundreds of thousands of Ram 2500 and 3500 pickup trucks … were equipped with Cummins diesel engines that incorporated the bypassing engine control software. This includes 630,000 installed with illegal defeat devices and 330,000 equipped with undisclosed auxiliary emission control devices.”

• And finally … if you’re craving Mexican food (and I pretty much always am), there’s almost certainly a restaurant, or three, nearby where you can quench that crave. The Pew Research Center has the facts: “Mexican culture is widely established in America’s restaurants. Some 11% of restaurants in the United States serve Mexican food, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from SafeGraph, which curates information about millions of places of interest around the globe, and the user review site Yelp. Although especially common in California and Texas, Mexican restaurants are found in a large majority of counties in the U.S. Some 37.2 million people in the U.S. trace their ancestry to Mexico, making Mexican Americans by far the largest Hispanic origin group in the nation. … This analysis finds that 85% of U.S. counties have at least one Mexican restaurant. In turn, the counties that don’t have Mexican restaurants tend to have small populations. The 15% of counties without any Mexican restaurants have about 4 million people living in them. That is just 1% of the total U.S. population.”

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