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The Abstract
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> By Stephanie DiCapua Getman, Arnold Ventures
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Today is a special one — I’ll be celebrating my son’s 6th birthday. He’s my rainbow baby, which got me thinking about what pregnancy loss in quarantine might look like when you can’t be physically comforted by loved ones or talk in person with someone about your grief. As Jenny Rollins writes about her miscarriage experience during COVID-19, “stigmas and division around reproductive care, whether it is miscarriage, abortion or contraception, are magnified by this pandemic.” The crisis has cut women off from contraceptive care, but service providers are moving to adapt with telehealth and other support — for as long as their staffing allows. And while today my son won’t get the roller rink party he wanted (or any drive-by birthday parades or other extravagant gestures to make up for the missed party — like other parents managing the “parent-employee-teacher” trifecta, I just don’t have the bandwidth), he will get unlimited game time with family and a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and chocolate sprinkles — and hopefully go into another year with a bit more resiliency to life’s unexpected disappointments.
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Minimizing Injustice:
Fines and Fees Edition
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Like the coronavirus, criminal justice debt disproportionately harms low-income people and communities of color. The fines and fees that courts and agencies impose are essentially racially discriminatory taxes placed on those experiencing the most economic uncertainty right now.
What's next: The proposed HEROES Act includes a moratorium on fees and fines during the pandemic, among other much-needed criminal justice provisions. |
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While no one was looking (there’s a pandemic, after all), Missouri Republicans undermined the will of the people by referring a constitutional amendment to the November ballot to repeal and replace a redistricting reform that was overwhelmingly passed by 62 percent of state voters in 2018. The previously approved Clean Missouri amendment represented an end to gerrymandering and an effort to make electoral districts more fair.
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“The ballot question was a top priority for the GOP, who said voters were confused when they signed off on the so-called “Clean Missouri” initiative in 2018.” (Gosh, voting is hard. For the record, I bring a list of who and what I’m voting for, and I imagine most other people — left or right — do their research, too.) — St. Louis Post Dispatch
- "The amendment would open the door to discriminatory and likely illegal efforts to draw districts in ways that minimize the power of communities with lots of children… This would hit African-American communities especially hard.” — News Tribune
- Republicans' plan would put the usual bipartisan commissions back in command and shift concerns about competitive races to the back burner. — Springfield News-Leader
Why it matters: “They want to replace the voter-approved reforms with a truly extreme gerrymandering scheme unlike anything we’ve ever seen.” — Kansas City Star
Redistricting is set for 2021.
Related: Laura Arnold tackles the legal landscape of gerrymandering and efforts to redraw political maps in a way that supports democracy in this podcast episode of Deep Dive With Laura Arnold.
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A deep dive into the college program ASAP, “one of the least-known and most effective programs to boost social mobility in America,” says the Economist. While the article may not fully support the claim made in the headline, we have previously shared evidence that ASAP works and is a proven good use of government resources.
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What the NBA can teach us about for-profit higher ed, via The Atlantic.
Related: NPR uplifted stories from students who say they were defrauded by a for-profit college that targeted students of color (reverse redlining) and yet received millions of dollars in federal relief through the CARES Act. |
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Since March, federal officials have done more to reform treatment for substance use disorder than in the two decades prior or even at the height of the opioid epidemic, writes STAT. Here’s hoping the reforms persist. |
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The domination of private equity firms in the health care industry — and the resulting drive for profits over patients, from CBS News.
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Two short films that are amplifying the voices of those incarcerated amid COVID-19. The largest outbreaks in the country right now are in correctional facilities.
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Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
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By Stuart Buck, Arnold Ventures Vice President of Research
The Economist recently reported on a paper out of France claiming that “smokers are ‘much less likely’ to suffer severely from [COVID19],” and speculating that nicotine has a protective effect.
If you look at the actual paper, what they did was interview several hundred hospitalized people in France, and ask them whether they smoked. Six percent of them said yes. The authors say that this is much lower than the average smoking rate in all of France (25%).
Interviews are not an ideal source of data here. For one thing, some patients might deny being smokers because they want to make a good impression and perhaps avoid any triage situations.
Even worse, the researchers collected smoking data only from patients who were NOT in the ICU, because ICU patients are too hard to interview. I would also add that dead people are even harder to interview than ICU patients. Thus, the study tells us nothing about what makes people susceptible to serious illness or death. For all we know, almost all of the French smokers were in the ICU or had already died. It was irresponsible for the Economist to present this study as if it proves that smoking is beneficial.
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Now there’s crying in baseball: Mary Pratt, a member of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, has died at 101. She was believed to be the last original Rockford Peach, the team that inspired the film “A League of Their Own.” (I know what I’ll be watching this weekend.)
Related: Baseball season in July? It might happen, reports CBS Sports.
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Another option as my son learns to read: Booking a Zoom reading session with a therapy dog.
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I’m late to the game, but at my sister’s insistence, I’ve finally tuned in to John Krasinski’s Some Good News, and I’m glad I did. This is the news I need right now.
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The Twitter account Room Rater might have you rethinking your Zoom background.
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Grandparents and their grandchildren dancing together on Tik Tok is sure to bring a smile to your face. (Our household has not yet succumbed to Tik Tok, but it sure is fun to watch.)
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Have an evidence-based week,
- Stephanie
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Stephanie DiCapua Getman develops and executes Arnold Ventures' digital communications strategy with a focus on multimedia storytelling and audience engagement and oversees daily editorial operations and design.
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