DAILY REPUBLIC — Monday, June 28, 2021 A7
Bodies From Page One
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Kimber Smith and Vicki Bailey pick plums in Green Valley, Saturday.
Table: Gleaners From Page One He also delivers the food to the food bank. The gleaners are out a few times a month. Sometimes there are four or five volunteers. Other times there may be a dozen. They gather the lowhanging fruit, as well as the high-hanging fruit and what’s on the ground. Saturday morning they separated the plums into groups, ones that were ripe and ones that were too ripe or damaged and could not be shared. And, they made new friends. The gleaners pick for an 86-year-old Vacaville resident, who picks what she can daily. Villarreal pitched in Saturday morning to help with her backyard plums. Some people don’t have time, or the necessary tools, to prune their trees. June Johnson, another gleaner, said she now notices how many fruitbearing trees are not being picked. “We need that fruit,” she said. “It’s said how much is wasted,” Raycraft said.
The gleaners not only pick the fruit and donate it, but they can also leave a donation receipt. After picking, many of the volunteers head to the food bank to help bag the fruit. One of the most common questions the gleaners receive is about liability insurance. “Because it’s a Rotary event, it’s covered,” Smith said. “There is no issue.” Johnson has worked several years at the food pantry at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church and sees the reaction of the recipients. “I’ve seen a huge difference,” she said of the produce addition. “There’s a high demand for it.” Vegetarians also get their needs met while taking a step toward food sustainability and security for all. Smith has a garden planted by Sustainable Solano, which was launched in 2016 to bring local sustainable food to the county. To volunteer or request tree picking, visit https://foodisfreesolano. org/gleaning.
Deal: Infrastructure From Page One infrastructure bill by connecting it with the bigger legislation that the GOP opposes. “It was a surprise, to say the least, that those two got linked,” the Ohio Republican said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “And I’m glad they’ve now been de-linked and it’s very clear that we can go forward with a bipartisan bill that’s broadly popular, not just among members of Congress, but the American people.” The president and a bipartisan group of senators presented the agreement on new infrastructure spending on Thursday. Biden suggested after the deal was struck that his signature on any infrastructure bill was contingent on Congress also passing the much larger tax and socialspending measure that Democrats are preparing. On Saturday, he issued a statement saying it “was certainly not my intent” to create the impression he was threatening to veto “the very plan I had just agreed to.” Mitt Romney, also among a group of GOP senators who announced the infrastructure deal with Biden at the White House on Thursday, said he was concerned about the president’s earlier comments but thinks “the waters have been calmed by what he said on Saturday.” “I do trust the president,” Romney, a Utah
Republican, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “At the same time I recognize that he and his Democratic colleagues want more than that.” Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who’s in the bipartisan group, said “I’ll continue to work for the bill.” Asked whether on NBC’s “Meet the Press” whether he expects Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to try to sink the bipartisan plan, he said: “If we can pull this off, I think Mitch will favor it.” Biden plans to begin traveling the country on Tuesday to promote the bipartisan deal, with his first stop in Wisconsin, a White House official said. The goal is to build public support not only for the deal but for the social spending and tax increases Democrats hope to include in the second piece of legislation, which would include elements of his American Families Plan. While seeking Republican support for infrastructure spending focused on transportation and broadband, Biden faces pressure from progressive Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for a separate package that would expand funding for programs such as child care and fighting climate change and raise corporate taxes. Ocasio-Cortez suggested that Biden can’t afford to ignore House Democrats, including progressives.
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Though access to the site was restricted, it was clear from helicopter video that the search effort was also ramping up with heavy equipment. At least two cranes and two backhoes were on the scene. But when asked if the mission is going to turn from rescue to recovery, Burkett said no. The heavy equipment is on-site, but “it is going to be a rescue mission for the indefinite future.” “We are not stopping until we pull every resident out of that rubble,” he said. While the number of missing people has not been updated, still at 156 unaccounted for, officials said families will be notified directly before additional victim identities are released. One of the people who was rescued on Thursday died at the hospital, Levine Cava said. Meanwhile, local authorities insist they are still conducting a search and rescue mission. Rescuers have built a 125-foot trench underneath the rubble to aid with their operation. It is 20 feet wide and 40 feet deep, Levine Cava said. Heavier equipment, including additional cranes, have been brought to the scene. There are six to eight rescue squads on the building’s rubble, with hundreds more on standby. “We are not lacking any personnel but we have the best,” said Levine Cava. According to MiamiDade Fire Chief Alan Cominsky, rescuers have not identified any “natural voids” in the rubble, addressing questions on rumors that there are sinkholes in the area of the disaster. He said teams of rescuers will continue following any potential clues that could lead them to finding more residents. “We know that we are in a race against time,” Erika Benitez, a spokeswoman for the fire department. Miami-Dade FireRescue Firefighter M a r ga r it a C ast r o explained that teams are searching within a “methodical grid system” for both survivors and the deceased. And, because rescu-
Delta From Page One But vaccinated people are well protected against infection and illness from the Delta variant. One recent study found that the full course of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine (two doses) was 88% effective against symptomatic disease caused by the Delta variant and 96% protective against hospitalization. There is no widespread scientific consensus on whether the Delta variant is more likely to cause more serious illness than other conventional strains. Delta’s rise comes as California’s currently dominant strain, Alpha, first identified in the United Kingdom, may have peaked. In May, the Alpha variant comprised 58.4% of coronavirus cases that were analyzed in California. In June, Alpha’s share fell, and now makes up 37.7% of analyzed cases – still the top variant but with a much smaller percentage among all variants sequenced. The Gamma variant, first identified in Brazil, is also being seen more often in California. In May, the Gamma variant comprised 10.1% of analyzed cases. It now makes up 21.6% of analyzed cases in the state. But Delta is still growing at a more rapid rate.
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A man walks past a makeshift memorial featuring photos of some of the missing people, Sunday, near the site of the 12-story oceanfront Champlain Towers South Condo that partially collapsed Thursday in Surfside, Fla. ers are still hoping to find people alive, the process is painstaking and delicate. “The entire situation is a huge challenge,” said Castro, who is also a member of Florida Task Force 1, of the Federal Emergency Management Administration. “Obviously, we have a very large area of debris and the debris pile that we have to slowly and methodically work our way through,” she said. “We have to be careful in the way we do that procedure because if there’s any possibility of there being void spaces, or pockets where anybody could be alive, we can’t disturb the pile to the point where we’d collapse the pile.” Rescuers are also using dogs to run over the debris field. If the dogs alert to something in the pile, searchers conduct a thorough investigation, Castro said. Rescue teams also consist of structural engineers who say which areas could potentially hold pockets, Castro said. At any given time, Castro said there are no fewer than 50 to 60 rescuers working the pile. They’re working in 12-hour shifts, 24 hours a day, she said. As heavy machinery lifts chunks of rubble off the pile, Gov. Ron DeSantis said in a Sunday morning news conference that it’s being preserved in a nearby lot to help solve the mystery of why the building collapsed. “The debris that’s removed does have forensic value and that’s going to be parsed,” he said. Asked whether he would back any legislation
that would prevent something like the collapse from ever happening again, DeSantis said the priority was finding residents and investigating the cause. “South Florida has some of the most stringent building codes in the country, and so I have a lot of confidence that what’s being built in the here and now are being done very, very well and would be resistant not only to a thing like this but storms,” he said. He added that he would support changes if investigations into the collapse make it clear new legislation is necessary need to be made. “We’ve got to do everything we can,” he said. Speaking from the command center early Sunday, Levine Cava said officials are having “very frank conversations” with the families at the reunification center about the possibility of finding no more survivors. “The firefighters and others who’ve briefed them are very direct about the situation, that we are continuing to search. We do continue to hope that we find people, but certainly they’re aware that we’re finding remains and even that we’re finding body parts so they’re preparing for that,” Levine Cava told the Miami Herald. She said families have very detailed questions about where exactly teams are searching in the pile since most of them know the location of their loved ones’ apartments. The pancake-like collapse of the 12-story building, with floors
tightly stacked atop each other, has limited access. The trench dug through the pile was intended to open some new areas to search efforts. “What can I say? It’s a terrible, terrible situation, one in which they’re coming through it with our support,” she added. Levine Cava said there’s a FEMA booth set up at the family assistance center to help families apply for all kinds of financial assistance, including relocation costs, costs related to staying in Miami for families waiting for news and funeral expenses. Despite reassurances from officials, families are growing frustrated at the pace of rescue and recovery efforts. Burkett said families told him they want “fewer politicians and more answers.” A video posted to the Instagram account @ abigailpereiraok of the Saturday afternoon update meeting for families and loved ones showed some yelling at Miami-Dade Fire Rescue officials, Levine Cava and DeSantis. “Maybe other eyes have other ways of going at it!” said one mother, who questioned why an Israeli team wasn’t already on the scene. The room was later told another group from Israel was on the way in addition to the Israeli rescue workers already present. A Miami-Dade Fire Rescue official told the group it wasn’t a matter of quantity or quality of rescue personnel – there’s a physical limit to how many workers could be on the pile.
Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous, has confirmed 123 Delta variant cases – 49 of them among residents of Palmdale and Lancaster. Fourteen cases of the Delta variant were among people from a single household. L.A. County data suggest that vaccines are still overwhelmingly effective in protecting people against the Delta variant, as well as other known variants. Of those 123 confirmed cases of the Delta variant in L.A. County, 89% of them occurred among people who were not vaccinated against Covid-19, and 2% among those who were partially vaccinated. No one has died from the Delta variant in L.A. County. The few fully vaccinated people who have been infected with the Delta variant “experienced relatively mild illness,” L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said. Almost everyone who has died in L.A. County of Covid-19 in the last six months has been unvaccinated. Data released by the county showed that 99.8% of Covid-19 deaths occurred among unvaccinated people between Dec. 7 and June 7. “If you are fully vaccinated, you have a lot of protection,” Ferrer said, adding that for the “very small numbers” of people who contracted the Delta
variant despite vaccination, “they really did not have serious illness. ... This is a pandemic of unvaccinated people.” The results of outbreaks of the Delta variant elsewhere also support the vaccines’ effectiveness. In Israel, there’s an outbreak of the Delta variant “driven primarily by the unvaccinated,” tweeted Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. Yes, there are some vaccinated people in Israel who are still getting infected, “because no vaccine is 100%,” Jha wrote. But the infections that are breaking through the immunity provided by the vaccines are causing mild disease. “What’s happening in Israel is vaccines working exactly as we all expected,” Jha wrote. Data released by the state also show that the percentage of the tested population who have antibodies to the coronavirus – a sign of immunity to Covid-19 – is also increasing. Between May 16 and June 12, 85.9% of Californians who were tested for coronavirus antibodies had them – a promising sign of growing immunity, either because of immunization or past exposure to the virus. That’s up from 76.6%, calculated during a four-week period in May. Experts have estimated that 70% to 85% of a population needs to have immunity for a region to
develop “herd immunity” to Covid-19, which interrupts the sustained transmission of the virus. Officials are continuing to urge everyone to be vaccinated against Covid19, including people who survived the disease earlier in the pandemic. Experts say immunity provided by the vaccination is more robust and long-lasting than immunity from surviving an infection. The highly infectious Delta variant is making the task of getting to herd immunity more difficult. With conventional coronavirus strains, it could take perhaps 71% of the population to be immune for a region to reach “herd immunity” and interrupt the virus’ transmission, University of California, San Francisco epidemiologist Dr. George Rutherford said. But a variant such as Delta – because it is so transmissible – would increase that threshold to, say, 84%, he said. The Delta variant is also spreading nationwide. Between May 9 and May 22, the Delta variant comprised less than 3% of analyzed coronavirus samples nationwide. But from June 6 to June 19, that proportion rose to more than 20%. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious disease expert, called the strain “currently the greatest threat in the U.S. to our attempt to eliminate Covid-19.”
