TV News LIES

Timmins, a longtime coach and referee, was not the first person in Mitchell, S.D., pop. 15,600, to die of the coronavirus. He was not even the first that week.

As the funeral director tucked blankets over the knees of Timmins’s wife, Nanci, Pastor Rhonda Wellsandt-Zell told the small group of masked mourners that just as there had been seasons in the coach’s life — basketball season, football season, volleyball season — Mitchell was now enduring a phase of its own.

Pandemic season.

On Feb. 29, hundreds of people packed into the Pullman Christian Reformed Church, a squat, beige brick building on Chicago’s South Side. An attendee began the ceremonies by blasting a shofar, the trumpet made out of a ram’s horn. Somebody played keyboard. And a long line of people waited to speak into a microphone about their memories of Angeli Demus.

The lifelong Chicagoan, who had died a month earlier at age 59, insisted she didn’t want it called a funeral. “Donate, cremate, celebrate,” had been her credo to her family near the end of a gutting battle with lung cancer, and with her eyes donated and her body cremated, all that was left was this party.

Her husband, Earl Demus, billed it as “Angeli’s Joyous Celebration,” and thought that the crowd it gathered spoke to his wife’s beloved nature. “Standing room only,” recounted Demus, who estimated there were more than 450 people there. "I stopped counting after a while.”

In a statement released by the Biden-Harris transition team, the president-elect's son, Hunter Biden, on Wednesday said he was recently informed that he is under federal investigation over a tax matter.

"I learned yesterday for the first time that the U.S. Attorney's Office in Delaware advised my legal counsel, also yesterday, that they are investigating my tax affairs. I take this matter very seriously but I am confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately, including with the benefit of professional tax advisors," the statement from Hunter Biden reads.

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The U.S. government’s first shipment of millions of coronavirus vaccine doses to be divided among states and federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, will fall far short of protecting high priority groups such as healthcare workers, a Reuters analysis has found.

Across the country, state health departments are preparing local hospitals for the first shipments of Pfizer Inc’s COVID-19 vaccine if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorizes it, possibly as early as mid-December.

The first shipment is expected to cover inoculations of 3.2 million people, nowhere near enough for the 21 million U.S. healthcare workers. And government officials said initial shipments would also go to five government agencies including the Departments of Defense, State and the Veterans Health Administration.

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U.S. deaths from the coronavirus pandemic have surged past 2,000 for two days in a row as the most dangerous season of the year approached, taxing an overwhelmed healthcare system with U.S. political leadership in disarray.

The toll from COVID-19 reached its second-highest level ever on Wednesday with 2,811 lives lost, according to a Reuters tally of official data, one short of the record from April 15.

Nearly 200,000 new U.S. cases were reported on Wednesday, with record hospitalizations approaching 100,000 patients.

The sobering data came as the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday warned that December, January and February were likely to be “the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation.”

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America’s coronavirus surge showed no sign of abating over the Thanksgiving holiday, which saw over 100,000 new cases and hospitalizations continue to break records.

Thursday marked the 24th consecutive day that the US reported more than 100,000 new Covid-19 cases and the 17th day straight that the number of patients in hospital with the virus has hit a new record.

There were 110,611 new cases on Thursday, Johns Hopkins University figures show, and 1,232 new deaths. So far, more than 12.8 million people in the US have contracted the virus and 263,454 people have died – by far the largest totals for any country in the world.

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Dr. Drew Miller knew his patient had to be moved.  The vital signs of the 30-year-old COVID-19 victim were crashing, and Kearny County Hospital in rural Lakin, Kansas, just wasn’t equipped to handle the case. Miller, Kearny’s chief medical officer - who doubles as the county health officer - called around to larger hospitals in search of an ICU bed. With coronavirus cases soaring throughout Kansas, he said, he couldn’t find a single one.

By the time a bed opened elsewhere the following day, the young man was near death. For a full 45 minutes, Miller and his staff performed chest compressions in a desperate attempt to save him.

Somehow, Miller said, the patient regained a pulse, and was dispatched in an ambulance to the larger facility about 25 miles away. Miller then prayed with the family, whom he knew “very well” from Lakin, a town of just a few thousand people.

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Emily Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration, on Monday formally designated President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the apparent winner of the presidential election, providing federal funds and resources to begin a transition and authorizing his advisers to begin coordinating with Trump administration officials.

The decision came after several more senior Republican lawmakers denounced Ms. Murphy’s delay in allowing the peaceful transfer of power to begin, a delay that Mr. Biden and his top aides said was threatening national security and the ability of the incoming administration to effectively plan for combating the ongoing pandemic.

In her letter, Ms. Murphy said she was “never directly or indirectly pressured by any Executive Branch official — including those who work at the White House or the G.S.A.” She defended her delay by saying that she did not want to get ahead of the constitutional process of counting votes and picking a president.

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