San Diego News Fix

About half of the 900 homeless people sheltered at the San Diego Convention Center are scheduled to move out of the venue and into permanent homes next week with the remainder expected to leave the following week, a city official said Tuesday.San Diego Housing Commission President and CEO Rick Gentry said the city finalized the purchase of two extended-stay hotels last Wednesday, and 400 people now at the Convention Center’s Shelter to Home program will begin moving in next week.Read more: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/homelessness/story/2020-12-01/convention-center-shelter-poised-to-close-hundreds-moving-out

On Tuesday, San Diego County reached a grim milestone, reporting on the first day of a new month that COVID-19 deaths have now passed 1,000.It is impossible, at the moment, to say exactly who was the 1,000th person to succumb to the disease because it often takes days, or even weeks, for COVID-related deaths to make it into the county health departments daily updates.

Schools nationwide and across San Diego County are seeing a surge in poor grades fueled by the pandemic. The trend is in line with school officials’ and national experts’ predictions that school closures, along with obstacles to online education, will cause massive learning loss this year.Read the story: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/education/story/2020-11-28/surge-in-ds-and-fs-in-san-diego-county-schools-raises-questions-how-to-grade-during-pandemic

Already a holiday season like no other, experts are looking into their crystal balls of shopping predictions and coming up with more questions than answers. Still, the consensus seems to be that, despite the pandemic’s unwelcome and unavoidable presence, there’s more reason for end-of-year retail cheer than fearRead the story: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/retail/story/2020-11-25/holiday-shopping

San Diego home prices went up the third fastest in the nation in September and appreciated at a pace not seen in more than six years.Prices in the San Diego metropolitan area were up 9.5 percent annually, the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Indices reported Tuesday. The acceleration is still not near housing boom levels when, in July 2004, prices were up 33.37 percent in a year.Only Phoenix, up 11.4 percent, and Seattle, up 10.1 percent, saw prices go up faster in September. But all markets covered in the 19-city index were up, even places like New York and San Francisco, that saw price gains slow considerably since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.Read more: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/story/2020-11-24/san-diego-home-prices-going-up-3rd-fastest-in-nation-at-rates-not-seen-since-2014

Conversations revealed many people of color are concerned that science has been polluted by politics and isn’t being explained to them clearly. Others worry their communities are being used for clinical trials without an assurance they’d have access to an approved vaccine.Read more: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/biotech/story/2020-11-22/covid19-vaccine-mistrust-communities-of-color

The state curfew requires any county in the most restrictive, “purple” tier of the state’s reopening system — which includes San Diego — to limit “all gatherings with members of other households and all activities conducted outside the residence, lodging, or temporary accommodation with members of other households.” https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/health/story/2020-11-19/san-diego-covid-enforcement-california-curfew

The annual Truth Act community forum took place this week.The discussion is meant to inform the community of their legal rights when it comes to how local law enforcement agencies work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement on immigration issues.At the forum, dozens of people criticized Sheriff Bill Gore for allowing ICE access to county jails and for transferring immigrants to ICE.Here’s how he responded. Read more: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/immigration/story/2020-11-18/more-than-100-residents-criticize-sheriffs-dept-s-work-with-ice-during-truth-act-community-forum

A judge has issued an emergency restraining order that prohibits the Trump administration from making civil immigration arrests at the San Diego federal courthouse, saying the widespread practice “invades the decorum and dignity of the court” and violates common-law principles dating back to the 15th century.“The court is not an ‘arrest pad’ nor will it ever be,” U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw said in a strongly worded opinion filed late Monday.At issue in the case are two wholly separate legal systems.

Last year, three cities in San Diego County hired police chiefs. All three cities — Escondido, National City and El Cajon — promoted top brass from within their police departments with little public input and transparency.That was the norm.It was what Oceanside City Manager Deanna Lorson noticed a few months ago when the time came to find a successor to replace the city’s police chief, Frank McCoy, who will retire at the end of the year. With the hires across the county in 2019 in mind, Lorson started an internal recruitment.“Of course, 2020 is different” she said recently.Read more: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public-safety/story/2020-11-16/cities-face-calls-for-transparency-public-input-in-hiring-of-police-chiefs

For more than a decade, Tameka Jones held onto the idea — a fantasy, really — that her son would come home one day.She believed it in April 2002 after she got a call from her then-husband, the man she’d trusted to care for 2-year-old Jahi Turner while she was deployed on a Navy ship off San Diego. “Baby, I can’t find Jahi. The police are here,” she recalled hearing as she stood on the smoke deck of the USS Rushmore, her hand trembling as she held the phone.Jones, then just 18, was certain she’d see Jahi again even as police told her they didn’t believe her husband’s version of how the boy disappeared. She kept believing it as weeks, months and years went by without charges filed or a body found.Read the story: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public-safety/story/2020-11-15/jahi-turner-was-2-when-he-vanished-in-san-diego-in-2002-his-mother-still-searches-for-answers

California Assembly member Dr. Shirley Weber was the featured speaker at a community forum on reparations being held virtually on Nov. 12. Dr. Weber is the chair of the Legislative Black Caucus and author of AB3121, which will create a task force to recommend appropriate slavery reparations and determine who would be eligible to receive compensation. This discussion is moderated by Luis Cruz, host of Together San Diego livestream.

The San Diego City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to approve an ordinance that would govern all surveillance technologies in the city — action rooted in pushback after the city had quietly installed cameras on 3,000 smart streetlights.The councilmembers also backed a second ordinance creating an advisory board to oversee uses of surveillance technology.The proposals face a few more steps before becoming law, but the unanimous votes marked a leap forward in a push by advocates fighting for transparency and oversight for surveillance programs in the city.https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public-safety/story/2020-11-10/san-diego-city-council-unanimously-backs-ordinances-to-govern-surveillance-technologies

Pandemic-weary businesses, hit with the third shutdown of indoor operations in eight months because of rising COVID-19 rates, fear they may not survive this time around as they watch their customers — and financial reserves — evaporate.From restaurants, bars, gyms and movie theaters, which will soon be limited to outdoors-only service, to shops and malls where indoor capacities will drop to just 25 percent, the news Tuesday that San Diego County will enter the most restrictive tier of the state’s reopening system is yet another financial blow to both the owners and their workers.Read more: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/story/2020-11-10/san-diego-county-businesses-fear-they-may-not-be-able-to-survive-another-indoor-shutdown-due-to-covid

The day many have dreaded for months has now come to pass. San Diego County fell to the most-restrictive level of the state’s COVID-19 reopening system Tuesday, meaning that restaurants, houses of worship, movie theaters and other organizations must cease or significantly reduce their indoor operations by 12:01 a.m. Saturday.In the state’s latest tier report, the region received an adjusted case rate of 8.9 per 100,000 residents, once again over the limit of 7. Taken together with last week’s score of 7.4, San Diego has now gone two consecutive weeks with out-of-bounds numbers that force it to fall to the lowest of the four levels included in the coronavirus risk-ranking system

Pfizer Inc. said Monday that its COVID-19 vaccine may be a remarkable 90% effective, based on early and incomplete test results that nevertheless brought a big burst of optimism to a world desperate for the means to finally bring the catastrophic outbreak under control.The announcement came less than a week after an election seen as a referendum on President Donald Trump’s handling of the scourge, which has killed more than 1.2 million people worldwide, including almost a quarter-million in the United States alone.

Thanks to persistently high COVID-19 case rates, San Diego County is days away from potentially landing in the purple tier, the most-restrictive level of the state’s COVID-19 monitoring system, which would mean that schools that have not started teaching at least some students in person would lose their chance to reopen.Falling into the purple tier would mean San Diego County’s closed schools would not be able to reopen until Dec. 16 at the earliest, or five weeks after Tuesday.Read more: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/education/heres-how-schools-might-be-affected-if-san-diego-county-falls-to-purple-tier-next-week

An out-of-bounds score in the state’s weekly reopening report creates the possibility that San Diego County could fall to the most-restrictive tier in the COVID-19 ranking system next week.Released by the California Health and Human Services Agency on Wednesday, the weekly scorecard lists San Diego County with 7.4 coronavirus cases per 100,000 residents. That number is slightly greater than the limit of 7, the demarcation point between the red and purple tiers of the state’s COVID-19 risk-ranking system.

Political columnist Michael Smolens discusses the local results.

Politics reporter Charles Clark discusses the early returns, plus a longer update from Daniel Wheaton