Sunday, December 22

Tag: times

Echoing A History Of Calls For Companies To Chip In When Times Are Tough, Biden Wants Corporations To Pay For His $2 Trillion Infrastructure Plans
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BUSINESS

Echoing A History Of Calls For Companies To Chip In When Times Are Tough, Biden Wants Corporations To Pay For His $2 Trillion Infrastructure Plans

President Joe Biden just proposed a roughly US$2 trillion infrastructure plan, which he ambitiously compared to the interstate highway system and the space race. He aims to pay for it solely by taxing companies more, including the first increase in the corporate tax rate since the 1960s. Biden said he wants to increase the rate from 21% to 28% – which would still be below the 35% level it was at before the 2017 tax cut – and strengthen the global minimum tax to discourage multinational corporations from using tax havens. Together, he estimates it would raise the necessary funds to finance his plan over 15 years. “No one should be able to complain about” raising the rate to 28%, Biden said in a speech announcing the plan. “It’s still lower than what that rate was between World War II and ...
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Black People Are 3 Times More Likely To Experience Pulse Oximeter Errors
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HEALTH & WELLNESS, VIDEO REELS

Black People Are 3 Times More Likely To Experience Pulse Oximeter Errors

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have purchased small devices called pulse oximeters for use in their home – based on well-intentioned recommendations from health care providers and the media. Pulse oximeters are devices, usually placed on a person’s finger, used to noninvasively measure oxygen levels in the blood. Clinics and hospitals, for example, use them regularly to screen newborns for heart defects after birth. Yet pulse oximeter measurements are imperfect, particularly for Black patients. Our recent paper demonstrated that Black patients were three times more likely than white patients to have low oxygen levels that were missed by pulse oximeters. That could translate into as many as 1 in 10 inaccurate readings among Blacks. We are ICU physicians and internists with expe...
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Coronavirus is hundreds of times more deadly for people over 60 than people under 40
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COVID-19, HEALTH & WELLNESS

Coronavirus is hundreds of times more deadly for people over 60 than people under 40

How deadly is SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19? And what are the risks of death for people of different ages and demographics? These have been hard numbers to calculate during this pandemic. To calculate the true death rate – more accurately called the infection–fatality ratio (IFR) – you would simply divide the total number of coronavirus deaths by the total number of infections. The problem is that with so many asymptomatic cases and limited testing for much of the pandemic, finding the true number of infections has been very difficult. The easiest way to calculate more accurate infection and death rates is to perform random testing. I am a professor of health policy and management. In April, in partnership with the Indiana State Department of Health, I led a team of researc...
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Random testing in Indiana shows COVID-19 is 6 times deadlier than flu, and 2.8% of the state has been infected
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COVID-19, HEALTH & WELLNESS

Random testing in Indiana shows COVID-19 is 6 times deadlier than flu, and 2.8% of the state has been infected

Since day one of the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. has not had enough tests. Faced with this shortage, medical professionals used what tests they had on people with the worst symptoms or whose occupations put them at high risk for infection. People who were less sick or asymptomatic did not get tested. Because of this, many infected people in the U.S. have not been tested, and much of the information public health officials have about the spread and deadliness of the virus does not provide a complete picture. Short of testing every person in the U.S., the best way to get accurate data on who and how many people have been infected with the coronavirus is to test randomly. I am a professor of health policy and management at Indiana University, and random testing is exactly what we did in ...
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Wait times remain stubbornly long in hospital emergency rooms
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HEALTH & WELLNESS

Wait times remain stubbornly long in hospital emergency rooms

Each year, there are well over 100 million hospital emergency department visits in the U.S. In 2017, there were about 139 million, or 43 visits for every 100 Americans. While wait times have declined in the last decade – now averaging about 40 minutes – they remain stubbornly long. Millions of patients still wait at least two hours to see a provider – 7 million did in 2017 – and that is no guarantee they won’t have to wait even longer for treatment. In California, hundreds of thousands of patients that same year left after getting an emergency department bed but before their care was complete. How long people have to wait can have a lot to do with the outcome of those visits, sometimes with serious consequences that include longer hospital stays, increased medical errors and higher death...
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How SNAP can help people during hard economic times like these
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IN OTHER NEWS, Journalism

How SNAP can help people during hard economic times like these

A record number of Americans are seeing their hours cut or losing their jobs due to the initial economic repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic. How will millions of newly jobless families keep putting food on the table? They might get some help from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The nation’s largest anti-hunger system helped about 35 million low-income people buy groceries in 2019, down from a peak of over 47 million in 2013 in the aftermath of the Great Recession. After repeatedly trying to scale back SNAP the White House recently agreed to Congress’s efforts to ramp it back up. The Families First Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law on March 18, included an additional US$1 billion in funding for other nutrition programs and will let more people enroll ...
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11-Year-Old Skips Rope 108 Times in 30 Seconds, Sets New World Record
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VIDEO REELS

11-Year-Old Skips Rope 108 Times in 30 Seconds, Sets New World Record

11-year-old Cen Xiaolin can move his legs faster than most people can count. The boy recently set a new rope skipping world record by completing a whopping 108 skips in just 30 seconds! That’s so fast that you can’t even see the rope. In fact, judges at the first World Inter-School Rope Skipping Championships, in Dubai, simply couldn’t keep up with him. They were unable to count Cen’s steps while he was skipping, as it was all a bit of a blur. They had to rewatch the footage in slow-motion eight times to verify the exact number of steps. Later, he broke another record by skipping 548 times in three minutes. Cen said that he learned skipping at his school, Seven Star Primary, located on the outskirts of Guangzhou city in South China. The school started giving teachers and students skippin...
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Langston Hughes – The Life, Times, Works as Well as Impact of a Versatile African-American Writer
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Journalism

Langston Hughes – The Life, Times, Works as Well as Impact of a Versatile African-American Writer

Langston Hughes stands as a literary and cultural translation of the political resistance and campaign of black consciousness leaders such as Martin Luther King to restore the rights of the black citizenry thus fulfilling the ethos of the American dream, which is celebrated universally every year around February to April. Hughes' overriding sense of a social and cultural purpose tied to his sense of the past, the present and the future of black America commends his life and works as having much to learn from to inspire us to move forward and to inform and guide our steps as we move forward to create a great future. Hughes is also significant since he seems to have conveniently spanned the genres: poetry, drama, novel and criticism leaving an indelible stamp on each. At 21 years of age he...
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