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How California Became a New Center of Political Corruption

The New York Times

How California Became a New Center of Political Corruption

Ralph Vartabedian – August 29, 2024

Over the last 10 years, 576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges, according to Justice Department reports, exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including New York, New Jersey and Illinois. (Getty Images)More

LOS ANGELES — Jose Huizar’s downfall at Los Angeles City Hall was as stunning as his rise to success, a political tragedy that, like many in the land of dreams, has become a familiar one.

Born to a large family in rural Mexico and raised in poverty near the towering high-rises of downtown Los Angeles, he overcame enormous odds to graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University and UCLA law school.

He returned to his old neighborhood in East Los Angeles to run for the school board and eventually the City Council, where he gained control of the influential committee that approves multimillion-dollar commercial development projects across the city.

His spectacular fall — after FBI agents caught him accepting $1.8 million worth of casino chips, luxury hotel stays, a liquor box full of cash and prostitutes from Chinese developers — was cast by federal prosecutors as an epic Hollywood tale. They persuaded a judge in January to sentence him to 13 years in prison on charges of tax evasion and racketeering.

“He was the King Kong of LA City Hall for many, many years,” Mack E. Jenkins, chief of the criminal division at the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, told the court. “And with his fall, a lot of devastation was left in his wake.”

This week, when Huizar is scheduled to report to prison, he will become the third recent Los Angeles City Council member to go down on charges of corruption, part of a much larger circle of staff aides, fundraisers, political consultants and real estate developers who have been charged in what federal authorities called an “extraordinary” recent wave of bribery and influence-peddling across California.

Two other members of the City Council, Mitchell Englander and Mark Ridley-Thomas, were convicted earlier on various corruption charges, as was the former head of the city’s Department of Water and Power. A fourth City Council member, Curren Price, is facing charges of embezzlement, perjury and conflict of interest.

Over the last 10 years, 576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges, according to Justice Department reports, exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including New York, New Jersey and Illinois.

California has a larger population than those states, but the recent wave of cases is attributable to much more than that, federal prosecutors say.

A heavy concentration of power at Los Angeles City Hall, the receding presence of local news media, a population that often tunes out local politics and a growing Democratic supermajority in state government have all helped insulate officeholders from damage, political analysts said.

In Los Angeles, Huizar’s influence was even greater than that of most other council members: Not only did his district include downtown Los Angeles, where billions of dollars of foreign investment was transforming the skyline, but he also controlled the Planning and Land Use Management Committee that approves major developments all over the city.

“When you have that kind of power, pay-to play schemes run amok,” said U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada, whose office has led many of the recent prosecutions in Los Angeles. “I wouldn’t call it ordinary what these folks did. It is extraordinary.”

Huizar, 55, pleaded guilty to racketeering, a charge often used in prosecuting organized crime or street-gang cases. The $1.8 million in bribes he received was twice the amount that recently convicted Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey was charged with accepting.

In March, a jury convicted Raymond Chan, a former Los Angeles deputy mayor whom prosecutors called the “architect” of the Huizar conspiracy, also on racketeering charges. In all, more than 50 key political figures and executives in Los Angeles and San Francisco have been convicted since 2019. Many more were investigated or resigned after allegations surfaced.

California also had cases of corruption in the days, now in the distant past, when Republicans held statewide office.

But political analysts say the Democrats’ present lock on political power leaves little opportunity for Republicans to effectively raise the issue of corruption as a campaign issue.

“When a political party enjoys that much uncontested power, there’s no penalty for stepping over ethical or legal lines,” said Dan Schnur, a former head of the state Fair Political Practices Commission and a former Republican who is now an independent.

A two-year-old reform effort to curb some of the extraordinary power conferred to individual council members in Los Angeles has foundered.

“When you talk about reducing individual council member discretion over land use, there is real pushback,” said Nithya Raman, a council member who sits on the city’s charter reform committee.

What happened in Los Angeles had been playing out on a smaller scale for years in the small industrial cities of Los Angeles County that have been described as a “corridor of corruption”: South Gate, Bell, Lynwood and Vernon, among others, where civic leaders were prosecuted for taking bribes or tapping into city funds.

“You have large immigrant populations, largely marginalized communities that do not have the resources to watch their politicians closely,” said Estrada, whose parents emigrated from Guatemala. “I think you have a pretty unique cauldron of factors in Los Angeles and the greater Los Angeles area that allow for these things to happen.”

The arrival of large-scale investments from China starting in 2011 heightened the risks.

Over the next half-dozen years, about $26 billion of direct investment from Chinese firms and their billionaire owners arrived in the state.

Downtown Los Angeles underwent a dramatic revival. New high-rise condos and hotels went up, abandoned warehouses were converted into loft apartments and galleries and expensive restaurants opened.

The 40-year-old Grand Hotel, a rundown eyesore used until recently by the city as a homeless shelter, was at the center of one investor’s grandiose plan.

The investor, Wei Huang, a billionaire owner of the development company Shen Zhen New World, bought the hotel in 2010 with plans to convert it into a 77-story tower, the highest in the western United States.

What he needed was help managing the byzantine political approval process. He found it, federal prosecutors said, with Huizar, who had been elected to the council in 2005.

Starting in 2013, federal prosecutors said, Huizar took the first of 20 all-expenses paid trips to Las Vegas with Huang, during which he was supplied with about $10,000 worth of casino chips each time.

Their involvement deepened just before a 2015 election, when Huizar faced allegations from his deputy chief of staff that he had sexually harassed her. Huang, prosecutors said, provided him with $600,000 of collateral for a loan to settle out of court.

But it was the free casino chips in Las Vegas that would ultimately unravel the arrangement. During one trip to the Cosmopolitan casino in 2016, its security chief, a former FBI agent, spotted Huizar playing a $16,000 pile of chips at a card table. When he asked his identity, he became flustered and walked away, leaving the chips.

“Who walks away from $16,000 of casino chips?” said Carlos Narro, who was then the chief of the FBI’s public corruption section in Los Angeles, who got a call from the security chief.

In short order, Narro had the casino’s video of the scene at the card table and flight records. With those, the FBI got court approval for wire taps and searches of Huizar’s text messages and emails.

Ultimately, the investigation found that Huang had paid roughly $1.8 million to Huizar, but that was only part of a much wider network of corruption, investigators found. The wide-ranging racketeering indictment to which Huizar pleaded guilty also targeted a City Hall aide, a deputy mayor, a lobbyist and a political fundraiser, all of whom were also convicted.

Huang was also indicted and is now a fugitive, believed to be in China. His company was fined $4 million.

Also included in the indictment were three other large development projects whose backers, prosecutors said, obtained Huizar’s help in exchange for bribes.

The scandal was almost inevitable, said Miguel Santana, the former top administrative officer of Los Angeles.

“The depth of power that a council member has around development in their own districts almost facilitates the level of corruption that took place,” Santana, now president of the California Community Foundation. “That level of power still exists today.”

San Francisco has had its own round of corruption cases, many of the recent ones surrounding the former Department of Public Works chief, Mohammed Nuru, who pleaded guilty in 2021 to accepting gifts, including a tractor for his ranch outside the city, a Rolex watch and millions of dollars, from various people with business before the city.

Florence Kong, the owner of a recycling company, pleaded guilty to offering some of the bribes in exchange for city contracts. Zhang Li, a Chinese developer also accused of offering bribes, signed a deferred prosecution agreement.

Now scheduled to surrender to prison by Saturday, Huizar made a public apology at his sentencing hearing, saying he had long been dedicated to his community. “Shiny things were dangled in front of me, and I could not resist the temptation,” he said in a letter to the judge asking for leniency. “The money, the fancy dinners, luxury flights. It was there for the taking, and I could not say no.”

Estrada, the U.S. attorney, said that Huizar’s corruption offended him as a Latino.

“It feels like a real betrayal,” Estrada said. “Because for those of us whose families came from Latin America, and know that system, there’s just rampant corruption there. You come to this country, you have more opportunities, you are offered to be part of a system that is theoretically supposed to operate cleanly.”

On the COVID ‘Off-Ramp’: No Tests, Isolation or Masks

The New York Times

On the COVID ‘Off-Ramp’: No Tests, Isolation or Masks

Emily Baumgaertner – August 27, 2024

Visitors on the Coney Island boardwalk on the Friday ahead of the Memorial Day weekend, May 24, 2024. (Karsten Moran/The New York Times)

Jason Moyer was days away from a family road trip to visit his parents when his 10-year-old son woke up with a fever and cough.

COVID-19?

The prospect threatened to upend the family’s plans.

“Six months ago, we would have tested for COVID,” said Moyer, 41, of Ohio. This time they did not.

Instead, they checked to make sure the boy’s cough was improving and his fever was gone — and then set off for New Jersey, not bothering to tell the grandparents about the incident.

In the fifth summer of COVID, cases are surging, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported “high” or “very high” levels of the virus in wastewater in almost every state. The rate of hospitalizations with COVID is nearly twice what it was at this time last summer, and deaths — despite being down almost 75% from what they were at the worst of the pandemic — are still double what they were this spring.

As children return to schools and Labor Day weekend travel swells, the potential for further spread abounds. But for many like Moyer, COVID has become so normalized that they no longer see it as a reason to disrupt social, work or travel routines. Test kit sales have plummeted. Isolation after an exposure is increasingly rare. Masks — once a ubiquitous symbol of a COVID surge — are sparse, even in crowded airports, train stations and subways.

Human behavior is, of course, the reason that infections are soaring. But at some point, many reason, we need to live.

“I no longer even know what the rules and recommendations are,” said Andrew Hoffman, 68, of Mission Viejo, California, who came down with respiratory symptoms a few weeks ago after his wife had tested positive for COVID. He skipped synagogue, but still went to the grocery store.

“And since I don’t test, I can’t follow them,” he said.

Epidemiologists said in interviews that they do not endorse a lackadaisical approach, particularly for those spending time around older people and those who are immunocompromised. They still recommend staying home for a couple of days after an exposure and getting the newly authorized boosters soon to become available (despite the poor turnout during last year’s round).

But they said that some elements of this newfound laissez faire attitude were warranted. While COVID cases are high, fewer hospitalizations and deaths during the surges are signs of increasing immunity — evidence that a combination of mild infections and vaccine boosters are ushering in a new era: not a post-COVID world, but a postcrisis one.

Epidemiologists have long predicted that COVID would eventually become an endemic disease, rather than a pandemic. “If you ask six epidemiologists what ‘endemic’ means, exactly, you’ll probably get about 12 answers,” said Bill Hanage, associate director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “But it certainly has a sort of social definition — a virus that’s around us all the time — and if you want to take that one, then we’re definitely there.”

Certain threats remain clear. For vulnerable groups, the coronavirus will always present a heightened risk of serious infection and even death. Long COVID, a multifaceted syndrome, has afflicted at least 400 million people worldwide, researchers recently estimated, and most of those who have suffered from it have said they still have not recovered.

But the CDC director, Dr. Mandy Cohen, called the disease endemic last week, and the agency decided this year to retire its five-day COVID isolation guidelines and instead include COVID in its guidance for other respiratory infections, instructing people with symptoms of COVID, RSV or the flu to stay home for 24 hours after their fever lifts. The updated guidelines were an indicator that, for most people, the landscape had changed.

Hanage defended the hard-line mandates from the early years of the pandemic as “not just appropriate, but absolutely necessary.”

“But,” he said, “it is just as important to help people onto an off-ramp — to be clear when we are no longer tied to the train tracks, staring at the headlights barreling down.”

The absence of stringent guidelines has left people to manage their own risks.

“I don’t bother testing myself or our kids for COVID,” said Sarah Bernath, 46, a librarian on Prince Edward Island in Canada. “My husband doesn’t test himself either. Knowing if it’s COVID wouldn’t change whether I stay home or not.”

In some social circles, diverging choices can make for uncomfortable dynamics.

Debra Cornelius, 73, of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, stayed home from a recent indoor party because she learned that several other guests — a family of five — had returned from vacation and tested positive for COVID three days before the gathering, but still planned to attend.

“They said, ‘Oh, it’s like a bad cold, we wouldn’t stay home for a cold,’” she said. “I think people’s attitudes have changed considerably.”

But for countless others, attitudes haven’t changed at all. Diane Deacon, 71, of Saginaw, Michigan, said she tested positive for COVID three days into a trip to Portugal with her two adult daughters. She isolated herself for five days before flying home wearing a mask.

“A number of people asked me, ‘Why did you test? You could have carried on with your vacation,’” she said.

For Deacon, it was about remembering the refrigerated morgue trucks of 2020 and anticipating the vulnerable people she might see on her flight home — people in wheelchairs, or people on oxygen, she said.

“I’m trying to avoid a moral judgment of people who make other choices,” she said. “To me, it was inconvenient and it was unfortunate, but it was not a tragedy.”

In a Gallup poll this spring, about 59% of respondents said they believed the pandemic was “over” in the United States, and the proportion of people who said they felt concerned about catching COVID has been generally declining for two years. Among people who rated their own health positively, almost 9 in 10 said they were not worried about getting infected.

That could be, at least partly, a result of personal experience: About 70% of people said they had been through a COVID infection already, suggesting that they believed they had some immunity or at least that they could muscle through it again if need be.

If the Olympics were any barometer, the rest of the world seems to have exhaled as well. In Tokyo in 2021, there were daily saliva samples, plexiglass dividers between cafeteria seats and absolutely no live spectators; the arenas were so empty that coaches’ voices echoed. In Beijing in 2022, under China’s zero-tolerance policy, conditions were much the same.

But in Paris last month, the organizing committee for the 2024 Olympics offered no testing requirements or processes for reporting infections, and so few countries issued rules to their athletes that the ones that did made news.

There were high-fives, group hugs, throngs of crowds and plenty of transmission to show for it. At least 40 athletes tested positive for the virus, including several who earned medals despite it — as well as an unknowable number of spectators, since French health officials (who had once enforced an eight-month-long nightly COVID curfew) did not even count.

In the United States, about 57% of people said their lives had not returned to prepandemic “normal” — and the majority said they believed it never would. But the current backdrop of American life tells a different story.

The years-old social-distancing signage is faded and peeling from the floors of an indoor market in Los Angeles. Hand-sanitizer dispensers at amusement parks have dried up. The summer camp hosted by Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo requires children to bring a face covering — not to protect other children, but the animals.

Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the newfound complacency can as much be attributed to confusion as to fatigue. The virus remains remarkably unpredictable: COVID variants are still evolving much faster than influenza variants, and officials who want to “pigeonhole” COVID into having a well-defined seasonality will be unnerved to discover that the 10 surges in the United States so far have been evenly distributed throughout all four seasons, he said.

Those factors, combined with waning immunity, point to a virus that still evades our collective understanding — in the context of a collective psychology that is ready to move on. Even at a meeting of 200 infectious disease experts in Washington this month — a number of whom were older than 65 and had not been vaccinated in four to six months — hardly anybody donned a mask.

“We’ve decided, ‘Well, the risk is OK.’ But nobody has defined ‘risk,’ and nobody has defined ‘OK,’” Osterholm said. “You can’t get much more informed than this group.”

Asked about how the perception of risk has evolved over time, Osterholm laughed.

Trump Picked Worst Possible Spot For New Border Wall Stunt

HuffPost

Trump Picked Worst Possible Spot For New Border Wall Stunt

Ed Mazza – August 26, 2024

Donald Trump boasted of building the “Rolls-Royce” of walls during a visit to a segment of border barrier in Montezuma Pass, Arizona, last week.

There was just one problem: That segment of wall was actually built by the administration of President Barack Obama, according to The Washington Post.

The Cochise County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the portion where Trump spoke was built under the Obama administration, the Post added.

The newspaper said a nearby extension was started under the Trump administration ― at a cost of $35 million a mile ― but didn’t get very far, with much of the construction material left in piles at the site.

Trump in 2016 repeatedly vowed to build a “big beautiful wall” across the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border if elected.

He has claimed that he completed the task.

“I did finish the wall,” he said on CNN earlier this year. “I built a wall.”

He didn’t.

His administration replaced about 400 miles of existing wall and added about 52 miles of new wall.

Some of the wall built under Trump fell in a storm.

A 2022 report found the wall built under Trump was breached thousand of times using “inexpensive power tools.” Others reported the wall could be breached with a primitive ladder made from about $5 in material.

A report last year also found it did significant environmental and cultural damage to the region.

Trump also promised Mexico would pay for his wall.

It didn’t.

Trump border event at wall that Obama built highlighted an unfulfilled promise

The Anchorage Daily News

Trump border event at wall that Obama built highlighted an unfulfilled promise

Isaac Arnsdorf, Marianne LeVine and Erin Patrick O’Connor,

The Washington Post – August 26, 2024

MONTEZUMA PASS, Ariz. – A brown ribbon carved a straight gash across a vast, flat desert basin, the only mark of human civilization visible on this wilderness. The partition charged up a steep hill in Montezuma Canyon, then suddenly stopped. Extra pieces lay in piles nearby, rusting monuments to an unfinished campaign promise.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump came here on Thursday to heap praise on the structure standing to his right – “the Rolls-Royce of walls,” he called it – and lament the unused segments lying to his left. Joining him there, Border Patrol union leader Paul A. Perez called the standing fence “Trump wall” and the idle parts “Kamala wall,” after his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Those labels were inaccurate. This section of 20-foot steel slats was actually built during the administration of President Barack Obama. Trump added the unfinished extension up the hillside, an engineering challenge that cost at least $35 million a mile. The unused panels of 30-foot beams were procured during the Trump administration and never erected.

“Where you were, that was kind of a joke today,” John Ladd, a Trump supporter whose ranch extends along the border, said while driving the dirt road along the barrier, the gapped panels making a flipbook out of the shrubby trees and grass on the other side. “Had to be in front of Trump’s wall, but you went to Montezuma, and that’s Obama’s wall.”

The Cochise County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the barrier next to Thursday’s campaign stop was built during the Obama administration. The Trump campaign and Perez did not respond to questions about the discrepancy.

“If Kamala truly wanted to close the border and continue building President Trump’s wall, she could go to the White House and do it today,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “Only President Trump will get it done.”

This spot along the U.S.-Mexico border, quickly accessible from nearby Sierra Vista, has often served as the backdrop for Republican photo ops. The scenery here did not attest to the fearsome migrant caravans or invasions of military-age foreign men that Trump often describes. There was no evidence here of Trump’s depiction of vicious criminals and terrorists, cannibals and infectious hordes, or people sent directly from prisons and mental institutions pouring over the border. There was no sign of foot traffic over such hostile shadeless wilderness, other than a small patrol of Mexican authorities on the other side.

Nor did this site show the very real conditions that exist in other parts of the border: Towns teeming with displaced people, cars backed up at legal crossings and swept for smuggling, bodies recovered from the Rio Grande.

Former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event in front of the US-Mexico border, Thursday, Aug 22, 2024, in Sierra Vista, Arizona. (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri)

For Trump, a campaign stop here on Thursday had larger meaning. It was an attempt to recapture the storyline of this presidential race from Vice President Kamala Harris, who wrapped up an ebullient Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Thursday evening. For Trump, visiting the border was also something of a spiritual homecoming to the place that has animated his candidacy and movement since 2015.

But the reality on the ground was not as straightforward as the “Build the Wall” chant that electrified his campaign eight years ago suggested. His vow to finish the wall, now formalized in the Republican Party platform, highlights the uncomfortable fact that he did not finish it in his first term, and Mexico did not pay for it, as he once promised it would.

“I’d hear people say, ‘Oh, he didn’t build the wall’ – we built the wall,” Trump said defensively on Thursday in front of the unfinished barrier. “We built much more than I was anticipated to build.”

The day before, at a rally in North Carolina, Trump responded to a supporter who shouted “Build the Wall” by saying, “Well, the wall was largely built. We were adding space onto the wall.”

As president, Trump spent more than $11 billion to finish more than 450 miles of wall along the almost 2,000-mile southern border, one of the most expensive federal infrastructure projects in history. During the primary, some GOP rivals experimented with attacking Trump for failing to finish the wall, but Republican voters largely shrugged or scoffed.

He references the wall in a smaller percentage of his social media posts and speeches than he did eight years ago, according to a Washington Post analysis. Instead, he has emphasized plans for large-scale, militarized roundups and deportations of undocumented immigrants throughout the United States. To justify such drastic measures, he has frequently used dehumanizing language to vilify undocumented immigrants as violent and dangerous. The overwhelming majority of people in removal proceedings do not have criminal charges, according to an analysis of Department of Homeland Security records by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee.

Even as Trump has made immigration central to his bid to take back the White House, border apprehensions have declined dramatically this summer amid the Biden administration’s new asylum restrictions and stepped-up enforcement in Mexico. In July, illegal border crossings, which rose to record levels during the Biden administration, declined to the lowest levels in almost four years, after the Biden administration enacted sweeping measures to limit asylum access.

A short walk from the spot where Trump spoke on Thursday, the barrier crosses a dry stream bed, and the uniform bollards give way to storm gates. The gates were wide open, to accommodate the sudden floods of the summer monsoon season, spanned only by a few strands of barbed wire. The base of some of the nearby slats show the scars of erosion that have sometimes left the fence dangling above the ground.

Smugglers have breached the barrier thousands of times, including while Trump was in office. The wall has been tunneled under and climbed over. It has been walked around and sawed through. It has not stopped migration any more that it has stopped drug and human smuggling, most of which happens at ports of entry.

The wall’s defenders argue that, as part of broader border enforcement, it helps slow down crossings and free up Border Patrol resources. The border wall “completely changed the operational environment and allowed Border Patrol to secure those areas with significantly fewer agents,” said Rodney Scott, who was chief of the U.S. Border Patrol under Trump and under Biden until August 2021.

But some policy experts say the barrier simply shifts where and how migrants cross the border. And many experts argue that U.S. immigration policy and conditions in migrants’ home countries are what drive migration, regardless of the obstacles placed in their path to reaching the United States.

“It’s really hard to measure the effectiveness of the wall because it’s one piece of a larger puzzle in U.S. policy on immigration, and even though it is a physical barrier, there are so many other reasons why migrants end up where they end up trying to cross into U.S. territory,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

In his first term, Trump used executive power to bypass congressional opposition to the wall. In late 2018, his fight with Congress over funding led to the longest government shutdown in American history. When Congress refused to budge, Trump declared a national emergency in order to divert money from the military budget.

Former administration officials and the Trump campaign said he would be determined to use every available power to complete the wall in a second term.

“There’s no doubt in my mind … he will, I hope on day one, declare a national emergency,” said Mark Morgan, acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection under Trump. “On day one, that will give him the ability then to tap into those [Department of Defense] funds … while at the same time working with Congress … You’re going to see the same approach that he used during the first administration.”

The former president “will utilize any and all appropriate authorities necessary to continue construction of the border wall and protect America’s homeland,” Leavitt said in an emailed statement.

If Trump were to declare a national emergency again in a second term, outside groups would likely sue to stop him. But the legal process could take a long time, said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Trump might be able to complete large sections of wall in the meantime, she said.

“The appeals would run the entire course of the Trump presidency and even though there might be, and I think there are, meritorious legal challenges … it’s still quite possible that the Trump administration could continue to rely on that power while this process played out, if the lower courts stayed their rulings,” Goitein said.

A changed political environment might also make it easier for Trump to complete the wall. The Republican Party has become more Trump-aligned, and should Trump become president and Republicans control the House and the Senate with significant margins, border wall funding is likely to increase in the annual appropriations process.

The border wall has also become more popular with the public than it was during the Trump administration. A Monmouth University poll found that 53 percent of Americans favored the border wall in February 2024, the highest share since Monmouth began asking the question in September 2015, when support for the wall was at 48 percent. Support for the wall hit a low in September 2017, with 35 percent of Americans in favor.

Mexico has opposed the construction of the border wall and has pursued more aggressive enforcement along the border, helping the Biden administration reach its lowest level of illegal border crossings in almost four years.

But as long as construction takes place on the U.S. side of the border, Mexico can’t do much to stop it, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, senior adviser for immigration and border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Even if he gets the funding, Trump might face obstacles obtaining the land he needs for construction. Much of the land along the border in Texas is privately owned, and some landowners are reluctant to sell.

Trump might also face environmental opposition to renewed wall construction. The incomplete border wall has already affected the migration patterns of many northern American wildlife species, said Myles Traphagen, borderlands program coordinator at the Wildlands Network, a nonprofit conservation organization focused on sustaining biodiversity. The current barrier will also require constant, expensive maintenance, Traphagen noted.

“There’s going to be this big albatross hanging around America’s neck to continually maintain this beast,” he said.

For many Americans, though, the border wall has become a symbol. Traphagen added: “The border wall reinforces that, okay, this guy is doing something.”

Nick Miroff, Clara Ence Morse, Emily Guskin, Scott Clement and Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.

Trump Doubles Down on Hating America: Trump says Caracas is ‘safer’ than most U.S. cities. Here’s what the numbers show

Miami Herald

Trump says Caracas is ‘safer’ than most U.S. cities. Here’s what the numbers show

Antonio Maria Delgado – August 24, 2024

Former President Donald Trump has said on different occasions that Caracas, the Venezuelan capital with a reputation for a sky-high crime rate, has now become a “safe” city because most of its criminals have entered illegally into the United States.

On Thursday night he repeated the claim in an interview with Newsmax. “We’ll go to Caracas, because it will be safer than any place in our country,” he said.

On Aug. 5, he told livestreamer Adin Ross that “If you look at Caracas, it was known for being a very dangerous city and now it’s very safe,” he said. “In fact, the next interview we do, we’ll do it in Caracas, Venezuela, because it’s safer than many of our cities.”

But is Caracas, which just a few years ago was considered one of the most dangerous cities in the Western Hemisphere, safer now than large American cities?

The Nicolas Maduro regime has not broken out numbers for crime in Venezuelan cities for years. But there are organizations that keep track of the figures — and they show the Venezuelan capital is still significantly less safe than most American cities.

Those numbers show that while crime has come down in recent years, a visit to the Venezuelan capital still is not recommended for the fainthearted. According to the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, a Caracas-based non-profit group widely regarded as the authority on the nation’s homicide rate, Caracas had a rate of 50.8 homicides per 100,000 people.

That’s more than six times the U.S. national average of 7.8 registered in 2020, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, a unit of the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The national homicide average for Venezuela in 2023 was 26.8, almost four times higher than the rate in the U.S.

According to the group, the Caracas homicide rate rate for 2023 came down a bit from previous years. Part of the reason is that 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled the country in the past few years, and among them are a comparatively small numbers of criminals, according to experts on Venezuelan crime. In 2020, for example, Caracas closed the year with a homicide rate rate of 56.2 per 100,000 people.

Caracas’ 2023 homicide rate is surpassed by only two large U.S. cities: New Orleans, at 58.4, and St. Louis, at 57.2, according to 2022 numbers from the CDC.

Most large American cities have numbers between the mid single digits and the low double digits. In 2022, for example, the city of Miami’s homicide rate was 8.6, while Jacksonville stood at 15.3, according to the CDC numbers.

Despite their high rates, New Orleans and St. Louis could be considered relatively peaceful in comparison with Venezuela’s most violent cities, all located in the mining region of the southern state of Bolivar. These are El Callao, with 424 violent death victims for 100,000 people, Sifontes, with 151, and Roscio, with 134, according to the violence observatory.

Concerns about the lack of security in Venezuela led the U.S. State Department to maintain a level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory on Venezuela, originally issued on January 2023, warning Americans that they would be at risk in the South American country given its high crime, civil unrest and the risk of becoming victims to kidnappings or ill treatment from local police.

“Violent crimes, such as homicide, armed robbery, kidnapping, and carjacking, are common in Venezuela. Political rallies and demonstrations occur, often with little notice. Anti-Maduro demonstrations have elicited a strong police and security force response, including the use of tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets against participants, and occasionally devolve into looting and vandalism,” the State Department warned in its advisory.

How U.S. cities rate

Here are the homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants in the 10 largest U.S. cities in 2022, according to the CDC:

▪ Philadelphia, 34.1

▪ Chicago, 18.2

▪ Houston, 13

▪ Dallas, 11

▪ New York, 9.7

▪ San Antonio, 9.4

▪ Phoenix, 8.5

▪ Los Angeles, 7.3

▪ San Diego, 3.4

▪ San Jose, 2.2

Putin Is Getting Rattled

The New York Times

Putin Is Getting Rattled

By Serge Schmemann – August 23, 2024

A picture of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, sitting at a table. — Credit…Pool photo by Gavriil Grigorov

Mr. Schmemann is a member of the editorial board and a former Moscow bureau chief for The Times.

In purely military terms, Ukraine’s surprise incursion of Russia earlier this month is a dubious gamble. Moscow has not diverted forces from its grinding advances on the Donetsk front, a main focus of the current fighting, and the physical cost in dead or captured troops and evacuated citizens does not concern Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.

The more significant potential of the invasion lies on the other front — that of information, propaganda, morale, image and competing narratives. That is where the fight is being fought to keep the West involved, to keep Ukrainians hopeful and to get Russians worried about the toll of the war in lives and treasure. And this is where Ukraine may see an advantage.

The very invocation of Kursk, the region where Ukraine made its advance, is familiar to every Russian as the site of not only a great World War II Soviet triumph but also the catastrophic accident that sank a Soviet nuclear-powered submarine in 2000. By moving into Kursk, Ukraine’s military has loudly advertised its boldness just when it looked like its troops might never regain the initiative.

The surprise and speed of the Ukrainian attack and the flaccid Russian response have given new strength to calls by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for the United States and his other Western supporters to abandon their insistence that he not use their weapons to attack Russian territory. Mr. Zelensky calls this the “naïve illusion of so-called red lines,” and so far, his allies have not complained about the Kursk invasion. They may see little value in scolding Ukraine, the plucky David in this war, right after he has landed an audacious strike against a plodding Goliath.

Just as important, Ukraine’s move into Kursk highlights the inherent contradiction in Mr. Putin’s propaganda, which portrays the conflict as a proxy war against Western powers trying to deny Russia its destiny, and one in which a calm, united and prosperous Russia is certain to prevail. But that illusion falls apart once Ukrainian forces have succeeded in slicing into Russia and forcing tens of thousands of Russians to flee their homes.Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

The overriding imperative of Mr. Putin’s propaganda, inherited from the Soviet Union, is to enforce the belief that whatever is happening, however grave it may seem and whatever the cost, the Kremlin — Vladimir Putin, to be precise — is in full control. The depth of the disaster precipitated by Russia’s war is revealed by the intensity of the effort — the euphemisms, insinuations, scapegoats and excuses — marshaled toward propaganda.

Mr. Putin, a product of the old K.G.B., is well practiced in this dark art. From the moment the war against Ukraine began in February 2022, he has been ruthless in enforcing a ban against even calling it a war. Russians are subject to arrest if they fail to call it a “special military operation,” even though Mr. Putin himself has occasionally slipped. When the Russian caterer and warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a suspicious plane crash after sending his mercenaries who were fighting in Ukraine to march on Moscow, Mr. Putin kept a straight face as he offered his condolences, noting only that his latest victim had “made serious mistakes in life.”

So when the Ukrainian army launched its unexpected drive into the Kursk region on Aug. 6, the Kremlin propaganda mill got to work. There was no invasion, of course, only an “armed provocation,” a “situation,” a “terrorist attack” or “events in the Kursk region.” And of course, the insidious West was to blame. At a televised meeting at his residence with security chiefs and regional governors six days into the Kursk invasion, Mr. Putin declared that once again, it was “the West fighting us with the hands of the Ukrainians.” He insisted that Russian forces would retaliate appropriately and still accomplish “all our goals.”

When the acting governor of the Kursk region, speaking over a video link, began giving some actual details of the invasion, including the number of towns and villages affected and the amount of territory seized by the Ukrainian army, Mr. Putin sharply cut him off, saying he should leave such detail to the military and focus on the humanitarian response. The poor governor, who probably never imagined having his remote province invaded by anyone, must have assumed that his president wanted to learn what was really happening. Perhaps he was unaware that his job was not to worry the population with facts, but only to show that the government was in control and taking care of its people.

Mr. Putin has so far held firm to the line “We have everything under control.” He has not bothered to visit Kursk, and he has not delivered a rousing speech calling for a grand defense of the motherland. The state-controlled media has focused on showing the government ensuring that evacuees are safe and cared for and that the nation was rallying with an outpouring of humanitarian aid. The latest report from Russia’s emergencies ministry on Tuesday said more than 122,000 civilians had been relocated, including more than 500 in the previous 24 hours, many to shelters across Russia.

At the same time, the Kremlin has not reined in bellicose bloggers and commentators who are demanding a brutal retaliation for Kursk or shaming evacuees for not standing and fighting against the foreign invaders. Such critics actually serve a purpose for Mr. Putin. Hawks who call on an authoritarian ruler to be even more authoritarian are a useful foil, presenting the ruler as relatively reasonable.

Though public opinion is hard to gauge in a country where candor is dangerous, some discontent over Kursk has been gleaned on social media, and it does seem that Mr. Putin has been rattled. His irritation with the acting governor was one sign; another was his display of anger when he declared that the Ukrainian initiative undermined the possibility of negotiations. “What kind of negotiations can we talk about with people who indiscriminately attack the civilian population and civilian infrastructure, or try to create threats to nuclear power facilities?” he asked, oblivious to the rich irony of his words.

Whether the rant revealed that Mr. Putin was considering negotiations or that he was warning the West that it has to keep Ukraine in check if it wants negotiations is unclear. Mr. Zelensky has said only that the goal was to push the Russians further back from Ukraine. Ukrainian forces have made little headway in Kursk after the initial assault, while to the south, Russian troops are advancing on their next major target, the city of Pokrovsk.

Whatever happens next in this unpredictable war, the importance of the information front must not be underestimated. Any operation that raises Ukrainian morale, bolsters Western support and jolts Mr. Putin’s narrative is a battle won.

Serge Schmemann joined The Times in 1980 and worked as the bureau chief in Moscow, Bonn and Jerusalem and at the United Nations. He was editorial page editor of The International Herald Tribune in Paris from 2003 to 2013.

Russian Attitudes About Putin Might Be Shifting

The New York Times

Russian Attitudes About Putin Might Be Shifting

Negative remarks on social media have increased since Ukrainian troops launched an incursion, according to a firm that tracks Russian attitudes.

Julian E. Barnes, from Washington – August 22, 2024

A statue with part of its head blown off stands in front of a damaged building. — A heavily damaged statue of Vladimir Lenin in Sudzha, Russia, after Ukrainian troops crossed the border in a counteroffensive this month. Credit…Yan Dobronosov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Negative feelings about President Vladimir V. Putin have appeared to increase across Russia since Ukrainian troops pushed into Russian territory two weeks ago, according to a firm that tracks attitudes in the country by analyzing social media and other internet postings.

While news outlets in Russia have tried to put a more positive spin on the developments in the war, focusing on the Russian government’s humanitarian response, some Russian social media users have expressed discontent.

Many of the online postings, according to the analysis by FilterLabs AI, say Ukraine’s advance is a failure of the Russian government and, more specifically, Mr. Putin.

It is difficult to accurately gauge public opinion in Russia, or any other authoritarian country, because people responding to polls often give answers that they think the government wants. To address that shortcoming, FilterLabs tracks comments on social media sites, internet postings and news media sites, using a computer model to analyze sentiments expressed by ordinary Russians.

Positive attitudes about Mr. Putin took a hit last year after a short-lived armed rebellion led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of a Russian paramilitary force. But the shift in sentiment has appeared sharper in the days since Ukrainian troops launched their incursion into the Kursk region of western Russia.

“Putin’s response to the incursion was seen as inadequate at best and insulting at worst,” said Jonathan Teubner, the chief executive of FilterLabs.

Attitudes toward Mr. Putin remain more positive in Moscow, where Russia keeps a firmer hand on the news media and public debate. But views of Mr. Putin have soured even there, though not as quickly as elsewhere in the country. In Russia’s outlying regions, frustration with the Kremlin is growing, according to the analysis.

American officials cautioned that it was too early to know whether any damage to Mr. Putin’s reputation would be lasting. Mr. Putin’s standing in Russia quickly rebounded after Mr. Prigozhin ended his rebellion, the officials said, and the Russian president has consistently demonstrated an ability to manipulate the public view of himself.

Still, a permanent loss of popularity could complicate the Kremlin’s ability to wage war in Ukraine.

“It is right now difficult to determine the effect of the Ukrainian counteroffensive,” Mr. Teubner said. “But it is clear that is shocking and, for Putin, embarrassing. Kremlin propaganda, spin, and distraction can only do so much in the face of bad news that is widely discussed across Russia.”

Sentiment toward Mr. Putin has fallen sharply in the regions of Russia where the Kremlin focuses its military recruiting efforts. The Kremlin’s recruiting strategy depends on its ability to manage perception of the war.

“If Putin’s prestige and popularity fall in these key regions (especially if Russians feel that the war is going badly), the Kremlin may find it more difficult to fill its military ranks,” the FilterLabs analysis said.

The Kremlin continues to exert influence on how Russia’s national news outlets cover the war, with few running prominent stories, the analysis showed. But regional news outlets are less likely to sugarcoat the news, Mr. Teubner said.

FilterLabs also tracks Russian disinformation. Mr. Teubner said the firm found that the Kremlin began targeting Russians in border regions with a propaganda campaign after the Ukrainian counteroffensive began.

The campaign, which was reminiscent of Soviet propaganda, warned that Ukrainian “psychological operations” were targeting Russians.

But even as localized news sites pushed out the propaganda, they also mixed it with reports of the Ukrainian incursion, information that was harder to find in Moscow. In the Soviet Union, the technique of wrapping bad news in propaganda, Mr. Teubner said, was known as “rotten herring.”

One article, for example, featured paintings of Russian military might even as it chronicled the artillery duel Ukrainian troops were forcing in Kursk.

Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.

$15 million Ohio State study takes aim at molecule at the heart of Long COVID

The Columbus Dispatch

$15 million Ohio State study takes aim at molecule at the heart of Long COVID

Samantha Hendrickson, Columbus Dispatch – August 14, 2024

COVID-19 is here to stay, and for some, that means symptoms last months, even years after developing the little-understood Long COVID — but a team at the Ohio State University has received millions to find out more.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded $15 million over the next five years to fund the university’s efforts, including developing new ways to treat COVID-19 and to further understanding of why Long COVID happens and how to fend it off.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that millions of adults and children have suffered — and continue to — suffer from Long COVID.

Dr. Amal Amer, center with glasses, stands with fellow Ohio State University researchers, who have been granted $15 million over five years to study Long COVID. The research is personal for Amer, who suffered from Long COVID herself.

The disease can be present for as short as three months, but can also last years after someone is first infected. It’s defined as a chronic condition that occurs after a COVID-19 infection with a wide range of debilitating symptoms such as severe fatigue, brain fog, heart and lung problems, bodily pain or exacerbating already existing health issues, all of which can impact someone’s daily life.

“It’s just unacceptable, you can’t just let that happen,” said Dr. Amal Amer, a professor of microbial infection and immunity at OSU and a principal investigator in the project, “We have to understand it, and if somebody, not just us, anybody, happens to have a clue or the beginning of the story, we have to follow it.”

Tiny creatures lead to big discoveries

This massive undertaking started with simple mice and a single molecule.

An OSU study published in 2022 found that mice infected with COVID-19 reacted differently to the disease depending on if they had a certain enzyme-producing molecule known as caspase 11.

More: Steady ‘summer surge’ sees Ohio COVID cases nearly triple in July

Research showed that blocking this molecule in the infected mice resulted in lower inflammation, tissue injury and fewer blood clots in the animals’ lungs.

Humans have their own version of this molecule, or caspase 4, Amer said, and researchers discovered high levels of the enzyme in patients hospitalized for COVID-19 in intensive care units — a direct link to severe disease.

“It starts getting high because it has useful functions, but any molecule, when it gets too high, then these useful functions start becoming harmful,” Amer said.

The new work funded by the NIH will go beyond the study of the lungs and into how this molecule may impact the brain and the rest of the body, interfering with immune responses and possibly resulting in more blood clots in pathways leading to the brain and other vital organs – an entertained explanation for why Long COVID impacts people differently from case to case.

Currently, there are over 200 serious symptoms associated with Long COVID, according to the CDC.

Understanding how Long COVID comes to be is the first step in creating a treatment, Amer said. “Once you know the mechanism, then you can design what to target, where to target it and how to target it in order to reduce the damage being done.”

No one left behind

For Dr. Amer, finding that mechanism is an incredible research opportunity, but it’s also personal.

She herself contracted Long COVID during the pandemic. For three months, the leader in cutting edge research in her field suffered from terrible brain fog and other neurological symptoms after her second, thought seemingly mild, COVID-19 infection.

Amer has traveled all over the world, and confessed she’s gotten sick in many countries, including contracting the often deadly malaria. But nothing compared to Long COVID.

Amer would receive emails from her students, and read one sentence, but not remember what it said after reading it. She started having trouble typing on a keyboard. She couldn’t recall things people had just said to her moments before.

“I started thinking, ‘what’s gonna happen to my life?’ My job is a brain job. I lose my job, then what’s gonna happen to me?” Amer recalled. Now, she’ll head the brain-focused part of the project.

This continued for three months, before she gradually started to recover. Around six months, Amer said she began to feel normal again. Though she can’t be certain that she’s back to where she was before Long COVID, she acknowledges some people aren’t as lucky as she is.

“I have to find out, and I have to understand it, and I’m not going to let anybody be left behind,” she said.

Scientists Drilled So Deep Into the Center of the Earth, They Knocked on the Mantle’s Door

Popular Mechanics

Scientists Drilled So Deep Into the Center of the Earth, They Knocked on the Mantle’s Door

Darren Orf – August 13, 2024

a drill breaks into the ground — Scientists Go Deeper Into Mantle Than Ever BeforeBloomberg Creative – Getty Images

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To understand the mantle—the largest layer of Earth’s rocky body—scientists drill deep cores out of the Earth.
In May of 2023, scientists drilled the deepest core yet and recovered serpentinized peridotite that forms when saltwater interacts with mantle rock.
Although this is the deepest into the mantle scientists have ever drilled, the mission didn’t uncover pristine mantle that lies beyond the Mohorovičić discontinuity, or Moho, boundary.

If you want to understand the geology of our home planet, studying the mantle is a great place to start. Separating the planet’s rocky crust and the molten outer core, the mantle makes up 70 percent of the Earth’s mass and 84 percent of its volume. But despite its outsized influence on the planet’s geologic processes, scientists have never directly sampled rocks from this immensely important geologic layer.

And that’s understandable, especially when you consider that the crust is roughly 9 to 12 miles thick on average. Luckily, that average contains outliers—areas of the world where the crust is actually incredibly thin and faulting exposes the mantle through cracks. One such area is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, specifically near an underwater mountain called the Atlantis Massif.

On the south side of this massif is an area known as the Lost City—a hydrothermal field whose vent fluids are highly alkaline and rich in hydrogen, methane, and other carbon compounds. This makes the area a particularly compelling candidate for explaining how early life evolved on Earth. Additionally, it contains mantle rock that interacts with seawater in a process known as “serpentinization,” which alters the rock’s structure and gives it a green, marble-like appearance.

It was here, 800 meters south of this field, in May of 2023 that members of the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP)—aboard the JOIDES Resolution, a 470-foot-long research vessel rented by the U.S. National Science Foundation—extracted a 1,268-meter core containing abyssal peridotites, which are the primary rocks that make up the Earth’s upper mantle. The results of the study were published last week in the journal Science.

Although this makes this particular drill core the deepest sample of the mantle yet, going that deep into the rock wasn’t the goal of this record-breaking expedition.

“We had only planned to drill for 200 meters, because that was the deepest people had ever managed to drill in mantle rock,” Johan Lissenberg, a petrologist at Cardiff University and co-author of the study, told Nature. He said that the drilling was so easy that they progressed three times faster than usual. The team eventually drilled a staggering 1,268 meters, and only stopped due to the mission’s limited operations window.

Andrew McCaig—study co-author and University of Leeds scientist—said in an article from The Conversation that, according to a preliminary analysis of the rock, the core’s composition contains a variety of peridotite called harzburgite that forms via partial melting of mantle rock. It also contained rocks known as gabbros, which are coarse-grained igneous rocks. Both of these rocks then chemically reacted with seawater, changing their composition.

While this core represents an incredibly opportunity to learn more about the Earth’s mantle, as well as give an in-depth look at the geologic substrate upon which the Lost City rests, the mission didn’t quite complete the “grand challenge” of crossing the Mohorovičić discontinuity. Otherwise known as the Moho, the Mohorovičić discontinuity is recognized as the true boundary between the crust and pristine mantle.

Future missions could continue exploring this site near the Atlantis Massif, but sadly, those missions won’t include JOIDES Resolution—the NSF declined to fund more core drilling past 2024. Just as scientists are finally knocking on the door to the Earth’s most ubiquitous geologic layer, the future of these kinds of drilling missions is now uncertain.

This is now California’s worst summer COVID wave in years. Here’s why

The Los Angeles Times

This is now California’s worst summer COVID wave in years. Here’s why

Rong-Gong Lin II – August 12, 2024

Laguna Beach, CA - July 28: Individuals walk along Laguna Beach, CA on Sunday, July 28, 2024. (Zoe Cranfill / Los Angeles Times) — Individuals, some wearing face masks, walk in Laguna Beach on July 28. (Zoe Cranfill / Los Angeles Times)

California’s strongest summer COVID wave in years is still surging, and an unusual midsummer mutation may be partly to blame.

There are a number of possible culprits behind the worst summer infection spike since 2022, experts say. A series of punishing heat waves and smoke from devastating wildfires have kept many Californians indoors, where the disease can more easily spread. Most adults are also well removed from their last brush with the coronavirus, or their last vaccine dose — meaning they’re more vulnerable to infection.

But changes in the virus have also widened the scope of the surge.

Of particular concern is the rise of a hyperinfectious subvariant known as KP.3.1.1, which is so contagious that even people who have eluded infection throughout the pandemic are getting sick.

“COVID is extraordinarily common now,” said Dr. Elizabeth Hudson, regional chief of infectious diseases for Kaiser Permanente Southern California’s 16-hospital healthcare system.

COVID hospitalizations are ticking up, but remain lower than the peaks for the last two summers, probably thanks to some residual immunity and the widespread availability of anti-COVID drugs such as Paxlovid.

The World Health Organization has warned of COVID infections rising around the world, and expressed concern that more severe variants could emerge.

“In recent months, regardless of the season, many countries have experienced surges of COVID-19, including at the Olympics,” said Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on COVID.

Among those caught up was 27-year-old American sprinter Noah Lyles, who after winning the gold in the men’s 100-meter finals, came up short Thursday during the 200-meter finals, taking the bronze. Lyles collapsed after the race, fighting shortness of breath and chest pain, and was later taken away in a wheelchair.

“It definitely affected my performance,” he said of the illness, estimating that he felt “like 90% to 95%” of full strength.

The rate at which reported coronavirus tests are coming back positive has been rising for weeks — to above 10% globally and more than 20% in Europe. In California, the coronavirus positive test rate was 14.3% for the week that ended Aug. 5 — blowing past the peaks from last summer and winter — and up from 10% a month ago.

There were already indications in May that the typical U.S. midyear wave was off to an early start as a pair of new coronavirus subvariants — KP.2 and KP.1.1, collectively nicknamed FLiRT — started to make a splash, displacing the winter’s dominant strain, JN.1.

But by July, a descendant strain, KP.3.1.1, had clearly taken off.

“KP.3.1.1 is extremely transmissible and a little bit more immune evasive. It kind of came out of the blue during the summer,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious-diseases specialist at UC San Francisco.

Cases are up at Kaiser Permanente Southern California, and “looking through the CDC data … KP.3.1.1 is really what is driving this particular surge,” Hudson said. “We are certainly much higher than we were last summer.”

Anecdotally, some infected people report being “pretty darn miserable, actually — really severe fatigue in the first two days,” Hudson said.

People may want to think their symptoms are just allergies, she said, but “it’s probably COVID. So we’re just really encouraging folks to continue to test.”

An initial negative test doesn’t necessarily mean you’re out of the woods, though. Officials recommend testing repeatedly over as many as five days after the onset of symptoms to be sure.

California has now reported four straight weeks with “very high” coronavirus levels in its wastewater, according to data released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday. That followed five weeks of “high” viral levels.

Last summer, California recorded only eight weeks with “high” coronavirus levels in wastewater, and never hit “very high” levels. In the summer of 2022, California spent 16 weeks with “high” or “very high” levels of coronavirus in wastewater.

“Fewer people got immunized this year compared to last year at this time,” Chin-Hong said. “That means, particularly amongst people who are older, they’re just not equipped to deal with this virus.”

There are 44 states with “high” or “very high” coronavirus levels in their wastewater, according to the CDC. Five states, and the District of Columbia, have “moderate” levels, and there were no data for North Dakota.

The CDC said coronavirus infections are “growing” or “likely growing” in 32 states, including California; are “stable or uncertain” in seven states, as well as the District of Columbia; are “likely declining” in Connecticut; and “declining” in Hawaii and Nevada. There were no estimates in eight states.

In Los Angeles County, coronavirus levels in wastewater jumped to 54% of last winter’s peak over the 10-day period ending July 27, the most recent available. A week earlier, coronavirus levels in wastewater were at 44% of last winter’s peak.

For the week ending Aug. 4, L.A. County reported an average of 479 coronavirus cases a day, double the number from five weeks earlier. Cases are an undercount, only reflecting tests done at medical facilities — not self-tests conducted at home.

In Santa Clara County, the most populous in the San Francisco Bay Area, coronavirus levels were high in all sewersheds, including San Jose and Palo Alto.

Hospitalizations and emergency room visits related to the coronavirus are also rising. Over the week ending Aug. 3, there were an average of 403 coronavirus-positive people in hospitals in L.A. County per day. That’s double the number from five weeks earlier, but still about 70% of last summer’s peak and one-third the height seen in summer 2022.

For the week ending Aug. 4, 4% of emergency room encounters in L.A. County were classified as related to the coronavirus — more than double the figure from seven weeks earlier. The peak from last summer was 5.1%.

“We’ve had a few people who have become very ill from COVID. Those are people who tend to be pretty severely immunocompromised,” Hudson said.

UC San Francisco has also seen a rise in the number of coronavirus-infected hospitalized patients. As of Friday, there were 28, up from fewer than 20 a week earlier, Chin-Hong said.

In the Bay Area, three counties have urged more people to consider masking in indoor public settings because of the COVID surge. Contra Costa County’s public health department “recommends masking in crowded indoor settings, particularly for those at high risk of serious illness if infected,” the agency said Tuesday, following similar pleas from San Francisco and Marin County health officials.

Compared with advice such as washing hands and staying away from sick people, suggesting wearing a mask can provoke strong opposition from some.

“The moment people see this, like in their mind, it sets off this chain reaction of, like, all the negative things of the pandemic, having to have society shut down and social isolation,” said Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious-disease doctor and researcher at Stanford University.

But masks do help reduce the risk of infection, and people don’t have to wear them all the time to benefit. Karan says he socializes and eats at indoor restaurants. But he’ll decide to mask in other situations, like “when I’m traveling,” and, obviously, at work.

Doctors say that wearing a mask is one of many tools people can use to reduce their risk, and can be especially helpful when in crowded indoor settings.

Karan said he’s seen more coronavirus-positive patients while working shifts in urgent care, and he suggested that more healthcare providers take the time to order tests. He said he worries that when people come in with relatively mild symptoms, they may be sent home without testing.

But that could miss potential COVID diagnosis, which could allow a patient to get a prescription for an antiviral drug like Paxlovid.

Without testing, “you run the risk of taking shortcuts and not prescribing people meds that they actually should technically be getting,” Karan said.