WASHINGTON – Hate crimes in Arizona bounced back in 2019 after a sharp drop the year before, and advocates say they fear the numbers are only going to continue to rise when the tumult of 2020 is reported.

Despite a steep increase from the 173 hate crimes recorded in Arizona in 2018, the state’s 217 hate crimes in 2019 were just below average for the past decade, according to data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.

But advocates note that the latest FBI numbers do not include events from 2020, including Black Lives Matter protests and the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to reports of anti-Asian violence for what President Donald Trump repeatedly called the “Wuhan virus.” These numbers are likely to surge again when 2020 results are reported next year, they said.

“We have seen a surge in hate crimes and hate incidents against Asian Americans in connection with COVID-19, our community is being wrongly blamed,” said Marita Etcubañez, director of strategic initiatives for Asian Americans Advancing Justice. “The numbers we just got (from the FBI) are for 2019, so none of the COVID-19 data will have been captured in the numbers just released.”

And none of the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis are captured in the 2019 numbers either, said Lecia Brooks, chief of staff at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The Pima County Department of Environmental Quality hand-delivered an abatement order to a northwest-side apartment complex owner for causing a public health nuisance to the complex’s tenants by shutting off the water supply.

The county ordered GR Partners Casas Adobes to restore potable water service within 24 hours of receiving the notice or PDEQ will do it for them and send the property owner the bill.

Residents of the 204-unit Casas Adobes Apartment Homes, located at 6200 N. Oracle Road, have been without running water and “unable to bathe, flush toilets or maintain hand hygiene since” Saturday, Dec. 26, according to the order.

With more than 5,200 new cases reported today, the number of Arizona’s confirmed novel coronavirus cases topped 512,000 as of Wednesday, Dec. 30, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services.

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Pima County, which reported 758 new cases today, has seen 68,437 of the state’s 512,489 confirmed cases.

A total of 8,718 Arizonans have died after contracting COVID-19, including 1,039 deaths in Pima County, according to the Dec. 30 report.

The number of hospitalized COVID cases statewide continues to soar as the virus has begun to spread more rapidly, putting stress on Arizona’s hospitals and surpassing July peaks. ADHS reported that as of Dec. 29, a record 4,526 COVID patients were hospitalized in the state. The summer peak of 3,517 hospitalized COVID patients was set on July 13; that number hit a subsequent low of 468 on Sept. 27.

A record number of 2,341people visited emergency rooms on Dec. 29 with COVID symptoms. That number had previously peaked at 2,008 on July 7; it hit a subsequent low of 653 on Sept. 28.

A record number of 1,076 COVID-19 patients were in intensive care unit beds on Dec. 29. The summer’s record number of patients in ICU beds was 970, set on July 13. The subsequent low was 114 on Sept. 22.

Healthcare leaders continue to plead with public to stay home as much as possible as healthcare system is overloaded

The Pima County Health Department shared a number of sobering statistics about COVID-19 this week:

• There is an all-time high of 1,512 medical/surgical beds in use in Pima County.

• Med/Surg bed availability hit an all-time low with 2%, or just 33 beds available in the county.

• On Monday morning there were 96 patients waiting for an inpatient bed, 62 of whom were COVID-19 patients.

• There are 669 hospital patients who are COVID positive.

• ICU beds usage hit an all-time high with 364 ICU beds in use, 198 are COVID-19 patients, the most ever. Despite an increase of 20 ICU beds in the past week, only 2% (9 beds) remain available. Hospitals continue to implement their surge plans to add ICU capacity.

• COVID-19 patients account for 54% of ICU bed and ventilator usage.

• There was a record high of 27 COVID-19 ICU admissions in a single day in the past 24 hours.

• On Christmas Day, County hospitals reported 19 COVID-19 deaths.

The health department is asking residents to stay home and minimize activities that involve contact with people outside of their households, stay physically distanced and practice mask-wearing and frequent sanitization.

“This isn’t just about COVID anymore and whether you think it’s a real problem or not. The patients filling these hospitals are absolutely real and if you have a heart attack, or if you get into a car accident, or your appendix bursts, there is a real possibility that you may not get the timely care you need to save your life if we don’t get control of this virus,” said Dr. Theresa Cullen, the director of the Pima County Health Department who herself contracted COVID-19 earlier this month. “People are dying yet many of those deaths are preventable if the people of this community stay home, wear their masks and avoid people they don’t live with as much as possible.”

Pima County under curfew

Pima County remains under a mandatory 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew in an attempt to combat Southern Arizona's rising number of coronavirus cases.

Penalties for a nonessential business found violating curfew range from having their business permit suspended or revoked.

The mandatory curfew will stay in place until coronavirus infection rates drop below 100 per 100,000 people, according to county officials.

While businesses will now face losing their operating permits if they don't comply with the curfew, it "carries no penalty associated with the individual, as it would be difficult to enforce a curfew against individuals without the cooperation of law enforcement," Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry wrote in the memo regarding the memo.

More details here. 

Get tested: Pima County has free COVID testing

Pima County offers a number of testing centers around town.

You’ll have a nasal swab test at the Kino Event Center (2805 E. Ajo Way) the Udall Center (7200 E. Tanque Verde Road) and downtown (88 E. Broadway).

The center at the northside Ellie Towne Flowing Wells Community Center, 1660 W. Ruthrauff Road, involves a saliva test designed by ASU.

In addition, the Pima County Health Department, Pima Community College and Arizona State University have partnered to create new drive-thru COVID-19 testing sites at three Pima Community College locations. At the drive-thru sites, COVID-19 testing will be offered through spit samples instead of nasal canal swabs. Each site will conduct testing from 9 a.m. to noon, and registration is required in advance. Only patients 5 years or older can be tested.

Schedule an appointment at these or other pop-up sites at pima.gov/covid19testing.

The University of Arizona’s antibody testing has been opened to all Arizonans as the state attempts to get a handle on how many people have been exposed to COVID-19 but were asymptomatic or otherwise did not get a test while they were ill. To sign up for testing, visit https://covid19antibodytesting.arizona.edu/home.

—with additional reporting from Austin Counts, Jeff Gardner, Nicole Ludden and Mike Truelsen

LOS ANGELES – Being locked up was supposed to be a punishment for Terry “Tank” Johnson. It also turned out to be an awakening.

In the early 2000s, the product of Tempe McClintock High and the University of Washington was basking in the spotlight of football success – playing seven NFL seasons with Chicago, Dallas and Cincinnati – but he was leading a double life. In 2007, while the Bears were getting ready to play in Super Bowl XLI, Johnson was navigating the criminal justice system.

As a young man looking to have fun, Johnson said, he put himself in “uncontrolled environments,” including his November 2005 arrest in a Chicago nightclub for unlawful possession of a handgun. He was convicted and given probation.

But there were subsequent brushes with the law, including illegal possession of weapons and drugs, culminating in a March 2007 court order remanding him to 120 days behind bars for violating the terms of his probation.

He languished at first, frustrated by his bad choices. He went to the Cowboys and then the Bengals, but his football career was essentially over. But because of what he witnessed during incarceration, Johnson turned that disappointment into motivation, and he now finds himself a key figure in a renewed debate about the role of private for-profit prisons.

The ancient people of western Utah’s Danger Cave lived well. They ate freshwater fish, ducks and other small game, according to detritus they left behind. They had a lush lakeside view with cattails, bulrushes and water-loving willows adorning the marshlands.

But over time, the good life became history. As heat and drought set in, the freshwater dried up, and the ancients were forced to survive by plucking tiny seeds from desert shrubs called pickleweed. Archaeologists know this from a thick layer of dusty chaff buried in the cave’s floor.

It might be ancient history, but science tells us that the past could also become the future. In fact, thanks to global warming, regional climate patterns linked to extended periods of heat and drought that upended prehistoric life across the Southwest thousands of years ago are setting up again now.

“The benefit of any kind of paleoclimate data is that it tells us what nature is capable of,” said Matthew Lachniet, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

The climate risk across the Southwest is actually growing, based on Lachniet’s recent study of a different cave about 200 miles across the Great Basin, which covers most of Nevada and the western half of Utah.

His geochemical data from Leviathan Cave in Nevada shows that drought can last 4,000 years – findings that Lachniet’s team cross-checked against paleoclimate data from the Arctic and tropical Pacific. In short, the story in the cave data suggests a worst-case scenario that could – and probably should – guide planning throughout the Southwest, home to 56 million people.

WASHINGTON – After years of steadily slashing the number of refugees it will accept, the U.S. can expect to see an increase under the incoming Biden administration.

An eight-fold increase and then some.

President-elect Joe Biden has said that when he enters office next month, he plans to raise the number of refugees who can be admitted to the U.S. to 125,000 from the current cap of 15,000.

The current number was the most recent in an annual series of reductions by President Donald Trump, who inherited a refugee cap of 85,000 from President Barack Obama. Trump has since cut the number steadily, to 50,000 in 2017, then 45,000, then 30,000, then 18,000 for 2020 and, finally, 15,000 for next year.

Refugee groups in Arizona have compared the Trump administration’s cuts to the U.S. “closing its doors during the Holocaust.” The reduction comes despite what the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees calls the largest international refugee crisis since the end of World War II, with almost 80 million people, or about 1% of the world’s population, forcibly displaced.

Other critics said the move harmed the country’s reputation as a world leader, for failing to lead by example.

But defenders of the new refugee ceiling – the lowest since the Refugee Act of 1980 – said it will protect American jobs during the recession and limit the abuse of the policy by those who are not in humanitarian need.