Friday, August 20, 2021
The convicted child rapist emerged from the tree line without warning, walked quickly past the elders who feared him and entered the Navajo home, where his 15-year-old daughter was feeding her pet rabbits.
A short while later, the 6-foot-3-inch man known for being violent emerged with the girl, promising to return in half an hour. But that was a lie. Ozzy Watchman Sr. was kidnapping his daughter for the second time in six months.
Family members pleaded with tribal authorities to issue an Amber Alert, but it never came. Nearly two weeks passed before Watchman and his daughter were found on June 30 — not by Navajo police or the FBI, which has the investigative lead in such cases, but by a maintenance worker who encountered the two as they scavenged for food.
Child sexual abuse is among the worst scourges on Indigenous communities in North America, yet little hard data exists on the extent of the problem. Some researchers estimate it could be as high as one in every two children.
Dr. Renée Ornelas, a veteran child abuse pediatric specialist working in the Navajo Nation — the largest and most populous tribe in the United States — said practically every family she sees has a history of child sexual abuse.
“They’re just little victims everywhere,” she said.
Thursday, August 19, 2021
As health experts have predicted, COVID-19 is spreading in Pima County schools.
As of Thursday, the Pima County Health Department reported 836 cases in schools since July 20. Staff accounted for a little more than 100 of those cases, while the rest were students. The county has declared 31 outbreaks in schools.
Along with school cases, Arizona and the county have a high level of transmission of 282 and 172 cases per 100,000 individuals, respectively, for the week of Aug 8.
Last school year, the CDC recommended schools should switch to virtual instruction when they are in an area of high transmission, unless they can successfully implement all mitigation strategies and have few cases.
Prior to the start of this school year, the CDC emphasized the importance of in-person learning and made it a priority to safely return to in-person instruction in the fall 2021. Given the rise in cases since June due to the highly contagious Delta variant, the CDC changed the guidance on masking, recommending universal masking when indoors for K-12 schools on Aug. 4. But the CDC has yet to return to guidance provided last year regarding virtual learning.
Pima County Health Department Director Dr. Theresa Cullen said they do not know at what point the health department would recommend a return to hybrid or virtual instruction, but instead are “doing everything they can to keep schools open.”
“We believe students need to be in school,” said Cullen.
We Rock the Spectrum Tucson is hosting autism activist and award-winning producer Marcus Boyd for a discussion on his experience navigating the world with an autism diagnosis.
We Rock the Spectrum is a gym designed for children with autism and special needs. Owner Destiny Wagner was touched by Marcus Boyd’s story.
“As the mother of a daughter with autism and microcephaly, hearing Marcus’ story allowed me to feel more optimistic about her future than I had allowed myself to feel in a very long time,” Wagner said in a media release. “I am sharing this experience with other parents of children with special needs and adults with special needs in the community.”
Boyd was diagnosed with autism at the age of 10 and was unable to speak until he was 13. However, these difficulties didn’t stop Boyd from winning seven Grammys, becoming an autism advocate and spearheading a new clothing line.
Wagner said Boyd told her he never expected people to want to hear what he had to say or understood how he felt, but he now feels as though his voice is being heard.
This event is free for anyone over 18 with limited space available. Click here to sign up. The event will be from 3 to 5 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 21, at We Rock the Spectrum, 411 East Grant Road. Don’t forget to bring a mask and socks!
Prompted in part by concerns that voters lack trust in elections after nearly a year of baseless fraud claims promoted by former President Donald Trump and his allies, several Republican lawmakers and a conservative advocacy group want to give voters an opportunity to impose a new identification requirement for early ballots.
The Arizonans for Voter ID Act, as the measure is dubbed, would also augment a state law against third-party ballot collection, often described by critics as “ballot harvesting,” and strengthen laws requiring photo identification to vote in person.
Several Republican lawmakers joined the conservative Arizona Free Enterprise Club, which sponsored the measure, to announce the launch of their campaign on Tuesday afternoon outside the state Senate at a sometimes raucous press conference in which supporters of the measure shouted over reporters and a few others heckled the initiative’s supporters, as well as the press.
Sen. J.D. Mesnard, whose failed legislation to require voter ID on early ballots is now the core provision of the ballot measure, said many people have lost faith in Arizona’s elections system. And regardless of whether people agree with the reasons why, he said, that’s a problem that needs fixing.
Wednesday, August 18, 2021
Banner Health is reporting a troubling increase in hospitalizations of COVID-19, coupled with a higher-than-average number of non-COVID patients.
Last week, the number of ICU patients in Arizona, for both COVID and non-COVID patients, reached the peak numbers of those seen in the summer 2020 surge, said Chief Clinical Officer Dr. Marjorie Bessel at a media conference Wednesday morning.
She reported only 30% of those patients are COVID positive, compared to the last surge when 50 to 60% were COVID positive. Bessel believes the high number of non-COVID patients in the ICU is partly due to patients delaying care in 2020 because of the pandemic and are now seeking care for illnesses and medical issues that have become more severe.
“The high number of non-COVID patients that we were caring for coupled with the week over week increase in COVID hospitalizations is troubling,” said Bessel.
During the past week, she said they continue to see an increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations, ICU admissions, and ventilator usage. Banner has also seen exponential growth in pediatric COVID hospitalizations. In the first two weeks of August, Banner had as many pediatric COVID admissions as they did the entire month of June, according to Bessel. She said they are on track to surpass the number of pediatric COVID patients seen during the winter surge.
Due to the rise in cases and decreased hospital capacity, the Pima County Health Department updated its Public Health Advisory on Tuesday.
Similar to Banner, Pima County hospitals are seeing more people coming to the ER for reasons other than COVID-19, such as heart attacks, RSV and sepsis, who require hospital admission. According to the Public Health Advisory, local hospitals are also experiencing abnormally long wait times for EMS to be able to transfer care of their patient to the hospital staff, becoming unable to respond to other emergencies.
The Pima County Health Department said “It is NOT the norm for area hospitals to be experiencing such high hospital admission rates, reduced hospital surge capacity and long EMS offload times at this time of year.”
Alongside decreased hospital capacity, area hospitals face severe nursing workforce shortages due to high rates of turnover and burnout from the pandemic.
Banner Health has several core positions available and is securing external contracted labor for both nurses and therapists. Bessel said they have individuals who are starting each week and expect that to continue throughout the winter. Banner is requiring all employees to receive the COVID-19 vaccine by Nov. 1 and would include vaccination in the onboarding process for new employees. Bessel does not believe this requirement will have a large impact as many other health care systems in the communities they operate have a similar process.
“We do expect that staffing will continue to be our greatest challenge as we continue to face this surge,” said Bessel.
The team that conducted the troubled review of the 2020 election in Maricopa County will present a draft report of its findings to Senate President Karen Fann by Friday.
Randy Pullen, a spokesman for the self-styled audit, said the team will submit its report to the Senate by the end of the week. The Senate will then have the option of suggesting modifications before the final report is issued. The audit team will submit a separate report, also by Friday, on the machine tally it conducted to count the number of ballots cast in the general election.
Fann tweeted on Monday that the audit team is preparing its draft report. She wrote that the Senate’s team will review the report “for accuracy and clarity” before the final report is released to the public. It’s unclear when the final report will be available to the public.
And the final report may not be the last word on the election review.
