PHOENIX — Melissa Calles used to walk her dog to the park every day, and she was part of a dance group. Life changed for the 26-year-old Phoenix resident on May 15 when she fell ill. After tests, her doctor informed her she had COVID-19.

“I lost my sense of smell, that was the first symptom in my experience, and I had a mild fever and headache,” she said. “But the most prominent symptom was shortness of breath.”

According to Maricopa County’s website, 50% of COVID-19 cases and 40% of hospitalizations in the county involve Hispanics, including Calles.

“I felt like I was running a marathon,” she said of her fatigue. “Even going to the bathroom left me agitated and lightheaded, and I have to take a break from that.”

Calles is among the estimated 24% of Arizona’s eligible voters who are Latino. A Jan. 30 report by the Pew Research Center indicates that Arizona is among the top states for Latino eligible voters in the 2020 election, with 1.2 million.

Members of Mi Familia Vota, a national nonprofit working to unite the Latino community through voter participation, said they are watching the high numbers of COVID-19 cases in Maricopa County. They are informing the Hispanic community about taking health precautions while voting.

“You don’t have to line up, you don’t have to be in big groups because of the pandemic we’re living in,” said Cristian Avila, the group’s national coordinator for civic engagement.

Preserving Family Memories: How to Care for Your Photographs. Admit it. You’ve got hundreds of family photos somewhere in your house—maybe in albums, maybe in boxes, some probably just, like, floating loose around the garage—that you’ve been meaning to “organize” for years.

What better time to finally take care of them than during a global pandemic? This livestream with Dana Hemmenway, senior photograph conservator at the UA Center for Creative Photography, will go over the proper care and storage of all types of family photos, from daguerreotypes to inkjet prints.

If you have any questions, or photographs with specific condition issues you want to share, you can send them to [email protected] in advance. 4 to 5:15 p.m. Saturday, July 25. Register in advance at bit.ly/preservingfm. Free.

The Big Bang Theory had a recurring character, a likeable dimwit named Zach who was best-known for saying things like, “That’s one of the great things about science—there’s no one right answer.” That’s cute (and utterly false), but in the Time of the Pandemic, in these life-or-death days, being dimwitted (especially intentionally so) is not likeable or useful or acceptable. It’s criminal.

Not everybody is good at math and science. That’s just a fact of life. However, I’ve never understood why it’s socially acceptable to brag about one’s deficiency in that area. (“Oh, I’m horrible at math…giggle”). It’s like standing up at a formal dinner party and announcing that you have really bad incontinence. It happens, but keep it to yourself (in both word and deed).

It was obvious from the start of this mess that the media would often take the lazy route and just throw a bunch of numbers at the watchers/listeners/ readers. That way, there is something for everybody and essentially nothing for anybody. You give people a smorgasbord of figures and they can pick and choose what they want to bolster their argument or (as is more often the case) to give themselves an excuse to ignore the reality that’s right in front of their faces.

I could spout real (and important) raw numbers, but then I would be engaging in the same folly I just criticized. More enlightening are trends.

The main problems with numbers are twofold. First, unless you’re like John Nash (of “A Beautiful Mind”) or Srinivasa Ramanujan (who had an even more-beautiful mind), a series of numbers thrown at even a well-educated person will eventually begin to cascade and dissolve into mathematical gibberish. (So imagine what it must do to the average Trump voter.)

It’s okay if the figures are online or in a newspaper or magazine because the reader has time to pore over the numbers and try to make sense of them. But when they are presented on the radio or (especially) television, it does a disservice to the person who is trying to get pertinent information. Again, trends are more informative than raw numbers. If the TV talking head comes on and says that Arizona had 314 confirmed cases of COVID-19 on May 1 and then, just two months later, that number was 4,877, people would say “Wow, that’s a bigger number.” But if the TV guy said (on July 1), “Today, Arizona is reporting 16 times as many cases of the virus as we did just two months ago,” that actually conveys information that, which less specific, is actually more significant.

Of course, the other main problem is that numbers can be misused. And it’s not just the Benjamin Disraeli (and Mark Twain) quote about, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” People have long cherry-picked stats to bolster their argument, but in the Trump era, the lazy bastards don’t even bother. They just make stuff up and their audiences lap it up. (I read a disturbing thing about Trump followers who refuse to believe their own eyes. Three-and-a-half years after the fact, they had a bunch of them look at the aerial shots of the Obama and Trump Inaugurations and they still swear that they see more people in the Trump picture, apparently seeing tightly packed-together white people who showed up for the thing disguised as empty sidewalk.)

The other day, I was listening to the local morning Trump licker and he was trying to claim that things have not gotten worse in Arizona since Ducey re-opened the state. (The radio talker was an early cheerleader for opening things up and God forbid that he admit that he was wrong.) So, he's going on this rant and he finishes by claiming that “things have gone down 17 days in a row in Arizona.”

What could he possibly be talking about? Over that 17-day period, the number of confirmed cases in Arizona went up eight times over the previous day and went down nine times, so nothing has happened 17 days in a row. Likewise for the number of deaths—up eight times, down nine times. And, in both cases, the total on the last day of that period was higher than the number on the first day. (The number of ICU beds occupied by COVID patients also went up sharply over that 17-day period.)

So, what then? Obviously, from experience, he knows that he can just make stuff up and nobody is going to question him. (Stations like that will never take callers with an opposing viewpoint. Their preference of callers, in ascending order, is Angry Supporter, Loud Angry Supporter, and Loud Angry Supporter With a Side of Racism.)

ICYMI, here are the stories we covered today: 

• The total number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Arizona climbed past 138K as of Friday, July 17, after the state reported 3,910 new cases this morning, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services.
• In yet another sign that Arizona is in play in this year's presidential race (as in the U.S. Senate race between appointed Republican Sen. Martha McSally and Democrat Mark Kelly), the Democratic National Committee is launching a new ad on Tucson airwaves.
• The Outpost—based on a real-life battle that took place at an American base poorly placed in the middle of a mountainous Afghanistan—is a harrowing and frustrating experience.
• As COVID-19 began to spread across the Southwest in March, lawyers representing incarcerated Arizonans reported “unsanitary conditions,” “inadequate medical staffing and treatment” and a “failure to take strong and sensible precautionary measures” in state prisons.
• Strewn across parking lots, in rivers and washing up on beaches, disposable face masks, gloves and other personal protection equipment are turning up everywhere except where they should be – in the landfill.
• As hospitals across the United States brace for a difficult six months — with the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic still raging and concerns about a second wave in the fall — some are acutely short-staffed because of an ill-timed change to immigration policy and its inconsistent implementation.
• Gov. Doug Ducey extended the state’s eviction moratorium and announced an additional $5 million for renters and measures to prevent foreclosure as the state continues to grapple with unemployment and housing problems caused by COVID-19.
• Hospitalizations for COVID-19 have been seen as a key metric of both the coronavirus’s toll and the health care system’s ability to deal with it. Recent federal actions may strike a blow to the public’s ability to track them.
• Arizona’s U.S. senators are pushing legislation to renew a federal program that fights diabetes in Indian Country – an initiative tribal leaders say is vital amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

PHOENIX — Arizona’s U.S. senators are pushing legislation to renew a federal program that fights diabetes in Indian Country – an initiative tribal leaders say is vital amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The Special Diabetes Program for Indians is critical in our fight against diabetes and viruses such as COVID-19,” Navajo President Jonathan Nez said in a statement. “If we want our people to be stronger and able to prevent and fight off viruses, then we need our people to eat healthy foods and build their immune system.”

The reauthorization bill – introduced by Sen. Martha McSally, Republican, and co-sponsored by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat – seeks to reauthorize the program for five more years and increase funding to $200 million a year from $150 million. The measure is pending in the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.

COVID-19, which is more dangerous and deadly for people with diabetes and other underlying health conditions, has devastated parts of Indian Country. As of Wednesday, the Navajo Nation had 8,370 cases and 405 fatalities.

Native American adults have the highest rates of diabetes in the U.S. and are twice as likely as white adults to have the chronic disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Congress in 1997 established the Special Diabetes Program for Indians to provide funding for diabetes prevention and treatment programs. The initiative has received $150 million a year since 2004.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Click here to read their biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Hospitalizations for COVID-19 have been seen as a key metric of both the coronavirus’s toll and the health care system’s ability to deal with it. Recent federal actions may strike a blow to the public’s ability to track them.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removed from its website, and then restored, data on hospital capacity across the country to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. But in a note, the agency indicated that the data may no longer be updated because of a change in federal reporting requirements to hospitals.

On Wednesday, ProPublica noticed that the CDC’s website had stopped displaying hospital capacity information, which was seen as a good barometer of whether hospitals in certain states had enough beds to deal with surges in COVID-19 cases. The data showed that more than 70% of intensive care unit beds in some states, including Texas and Arizona, were filled. That had been viewed by some experts as a benchmark for safely reopening businesses.

Looks like @CDCgov national map on hospital capacity is no longer working. A consequence of the data move yesterday to change reporting to @HHSGov? How is less public info a good thing? https://t.co/QQslh3BcSk @ngusletter pic.twitter.com/8ky2K1PnpR

— Charles Ornstein (@charlesornstein) July 15, 2020

PHOENIX – Gov. Doug Ducey extended the state’s eviction moratorium and announced an additional $5 million for renters and measures to prevent foreclosure as the state continues to grapple with unemployment and housing problems caused by COVID-19.

“Today’s plan protects families and individuals impacted by COVID-19 while empowering them to keep making rent payments,” Ducey told a news conference Thursday. “We’ll continue working with our partners at the county and local levels to make resources and assistance available for all those impacted by COVID-19.”

Housing advocates this week had raised the alarm that with the moratorium slated to end July 25, many Arizonans were in danger of losing housing or facing hardship, the Arizona Daily Star reported.

The second-term Republican governor voiced optimism about the latest numbers in Arizona, stating that the percentage of positive tests is trending downward.

“Much of this gives us reason to be very cautious, but to have some hope and optimism about what is possible in the very near future in the state of Arizona,” he said.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Click here to read their biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

As hospitals across the United States brace for a difficult six months — with the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic still raging and concerns about a second wave in the fall — some are acutely short-staffed because of an ill-timed change to immigration policy and its inconsistent implementation.

A proclamation issued by President Donald Trump on June 22, barring the entry of most immigrants on work visas, came right as hospitals were expecting a new class of medical residents. Hundreds of young doctors were unable to start their residencies on time.

Trump’s order included the H1-B visa for highly skilled workers, which is used by some practicing doctors abroad who get U.S. residency slots. The proclamation stated that doctors “involved with the provision of medical care to individuals who have contracted COVID-19 and are currently hospitalized” should be exempt from the ban, but it delegated the issuing of guidance to the departments of State and Homeland Security. That guidance has been slow and inconsistent.

PHOENIX – Strewn across parking lots, in rivers and washing up on beaches, disposable face masks, gloves and other personal protection equipment are turning up everywhere except where they should be – in the landfill.

With the production and use of PPE surging during the COVID-19 pandemic, many experts are worried this new type of pollution, which is in the early stages of study, could have an array of lasting environmental impacts.

One researcher who is developing a way to track such waste said the effects may be seen for years to come.

“If it’s on your streets, it’s going to the ocean because it’s one rainfall away from getting into a storm water system, and then being carried into a river and into the ocean. Like any other plastic, this stuff is going to break down under ultraviolet light into smaller pieces,” said Mark Benfield, a zooplankton ecologist and professor in the department of oceanography and coastal sciences at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

The recent influx of PPE waste is among the 8 million metric tons of plastic estimated to enter the oceans each year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Ocean Service.

As COVID-19 began to spread across the Southwest in March, lawyers representing incarcerated Arizonans reported “unsanitary conditions,” “inadequate medical staffing and treatment” and a “failure to take strong and sensible precautionary measures” in state prisons.

The combination left prisoners “highly vulnerable to outbreaks,” the attorneys wrote in a letter to the state before asking a federal judge to intervene. The judge did by issuing an order for officials to release more information, but prison advocates say it hasn’t been enough.

Nearly four months later, complaints of insufficient safety measures and subpar medical care continue to plague Arizona prisons. At least 569 prisoners at 13 of the state’s 16 prison complexes had tested positive for COVID-19 as of July 15, according to the Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry, and at least 371 staffers have reported positive results.

Justice reform advocates and others with ties to the correctional system worry the state is running out of time to prevent an even more dangerous surge in cases. COVID-19 can spread swiftly in crowded indoor spaces and among individuals with chronic health problems.

“(Inmates) are scared,” said Jared Wagoner, who was incarcerated in the Cibola Unit at the Arizona State Prison Complex in Yuma until June 8. He cited close quarters, insufficient testing and indifferent medical staff as ongoing obstacles.

“They’re scared that their two-year sentence is going to become a life sentence,” Wagoner said.