ElPasoSpeak

Here it comes:

It looks like EPISD will have to raise 11 million more dollars next year to service their debt.  That will still leave them 1.3 million dollars short.

Where will the money come from?

The chart tells you.  Local revenue is their  answer.  Doesn’t that mean property tax increases?

If so the penny swap was a trick.

We deserve better

Brutus

I’m not a health care professional.  I am not qualified to make decisions about what we should and should not do about the COVID-19 situation.   I still wonder if closing the schools is the right thing to do.

Children up to the age of 19 are 24% of our US population.

These two statements from the United States Centers for Disease Control are interesting:

Pediatric cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), have been reported. However, there are relatively fewer cases of COVID-19 among children compared to cases among adult patients.1-5

• • In the United States, 2% of confirmed cases of COVID-19 were among persons aged <18 years.4

and

As of March 8, 2020, just one pediatric death was reported among confirmed COVID-19 cases in China,15 and as of March 15, 2020, none of the 1,625 deaths associated with COVID-19 in Italy were among children aged <18 years.2 In Spain, no pediatric deaths were reported as of March 16, 2020.5 In the U.S., as of April 2, 2020, there have been three deaths among children with laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection that have been reported to CDC, but the contribution of SARS-CoV-2 infection to the cause of death in these cases is unclear.4

It seems that school age youngsters have an easier time with COVID-19 than infants and seniors.  In fact according to the CDC they are seeing that some kids with COVID-19 don’t even develop symptoms:

There have been multiple reports to date of children with asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection.3,6,14,15 In one study, up to 13% of pediatric cases with SARS-CoV-2 infection were asymptomatic.16 The prevalence of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection and duration of pre-symptomatic infection in children are not well understood, as asymptomatic individuals are not routinely tested.

Should the schools really be closed?  I would appreciate your thoughts.

We deserve better

Brutus

It’s Saturday.

What’s on your mind?

We deserve better

Brutus

Those El Paso businesses that use locally owned banks seem to have done better getting assistance under the Paycheck Protection Program than those dealing with the national banks.

It makes sense.  The fate of our local businesses is more important to our local banks than it is to the national mega-banks.  It also helped to have decision making authority right here where evaluations could be made without having to go up endless chains of command.

We owe the local banks and their employees our gratitude.

This was better

Brutus

This came in from a loyal reader:

https://www.scribd.com/document/457654574/Golf-Course-Documents

Brutus,

I see this as another Great Wolf Lodge deal where we pay this developer to open up the Butterfield Gold Course.  He wants the city to pay him  $2 Million a year plus extras to do it.  Read the link to see the proposal.  Made me sick to even think the city would even consider it.

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We deserve better

Brutus

Our COVID-19 situation is not good.

Media reporting on the issue is not good either.

This headline is from a local news broadcast on April 18, 2019:

The story contained this:

In addition to the man’s death, officials are reporting 23 new positive cases of the virus, bringing the total in the county to 505. There are now 25 hospitalized patients and ten who are in the ICU. Seven of the ten ICU patients are on ventilators, according to the City. The number of hospitalized patients is an improvement from Friday when 38 patients were hospitalized.

I have not found a source that has published a day-by-day accounting of the number of new cases so I had to look up each day individually.  Here is what I found:

• • Day                    New Cases
  • April 13                    46
  • April 14                    47
  • April 15                    58
  • April 16                    31
  • April 17                    23

Let’s hope that the trend continues.  For the benefit of our local media dictionary.com defines soar this way:  increase rapidly above the usual level.

We deserve better

Brutus