Good Thursday morning, CivMixers.
 
It’s World Pneumonia Day, which is taking on heightened significance this year, as it is occurring during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
 
Even before this crisis, pneumonia – a respiratory infection that usually affects young children and elderly individuals – was the single biggest infectious killer of adults and children, claiming the lives of 2.5 million, including 672,000 children, in 2019. 
 
COVID-19 could add 1.9 million to that death toll this year alone, increasing “all cause” pneumonia deaths by more than 75 percent.
 
In addition, disruptions to healthcare services as a result of the pandemic are estimated to cause up to an additional 2.3 million child deaths – 35 percent from pneumonia and newborn sepsis.
 
Countries that were already struggling with high pneumonia death rates now are fighting a public health war on two fronts and need support not only to help encourage good protocols like mask wearing and hand washing, but also improved diagnosis and treatment – using oxygen, for example, and pulse oximetry.
 
One of the problems with pneumonia, is that – similar to the manifestation of COVID-19 in some, but not all, people – its symptoms look a lot like the flu, and so it often goes undiagnosed or misdiagnosed.
 
And here’s a very New York thing: Women’s rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born on this day in 1815 in Johnstown to the community’s most prominent citizens, Margaret Livingston and Daniel Cady, a noted attorney and state Assembly member. She was educated in part at what is now Emma Willard in Troy.
 
Cady Stanton was the chief philosopher of the suffrage movement and formulated the agenda for woman’s rights that guided the struggle well into the 20th century. She married abolitionist lecturer Henry Stanton, (in a ceremony that notably, for its day, did not include mention of the word “obey”).
 
It was through her work to abolish slavery that Cady Stanton met her partner in crime in the fight for women’s rights: Lucretia Mott.
 
Cady Stanton came to national attention by helping to organize the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls in 1848, which is widely viewed as the genesis of the women’s rights movement in the U.S.
 
Cady Stanton died in 1902 without living to see the fruition of her main quest – to see women get the right to vote, though a draft she wrote served as the foundation for the 19th Amendment. She is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
 
Gov. Herbert Lehman proclaimed this day “Elizabeth Cady Stanton Day” in New York as early as 1936 and did so again in 1941. Gov. Thomas Dewey followed suit in 1945. This is an unofficial holiday celebrated by women’s rights advocates and organizations statewide.
 
Also born today in 1929 in Philadelphia, PA was Grace Kelly, AKA Princess Grace of Monaco, who died in Monte Carlo in 1982 from injuries she suffered in a car accident one day previous.
 
We’re going to have more seasonably appropriate weather today, with temperatures hitting the high 50s in the morning and falling into the 40s. It will be generally cloudy.
 
As New York businesses and organizations reopen and re-calibrate to a “new normal,” the tremendous amount of information coming from all corners can be daunting and overwhelming. 

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—In the headlines…
 
President Donald Trump met with his top election advisors as his chances for reversing an apparent win by President-elect Joe Biden in the race for the White House looked increasingly daunting.
 
Trump’s campaign is pursuing a patchwork of legal attacks in key states that have been called for Biden to mount a long-shot effort to try to prevent officials from certifying the results, advisers and lawyers involved said.
 
“For those who are filled with dread that this will somehow prevent Biden from taking office: Relax. It won’t.”
 
Trump spent 10 minutes in public yesterday honoring America’s war veterans — a veneer of normalcy for a White House that’s frozen by a defeated president mulling his options, mostly forgoing the mechanics of governing and blocking his inevitable successor.
 
A stack of messages from foreign leaders to Biden are sitting at the State Department but the Trump administration is preventing him from accessing them.
 
As the president and his allies continue to publicly dispute the outcome of the election, they are also quietly seeking to discredit the Russia investigation that has cast a dark cloud over the administration for more than four years.
 
Trump threw his weight behind Ronna McDaniel, endorsing the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee to keep her position as the party is months away from leaving the White House.
 
Three more White House staffers have tested positive for the coronavirus, bringing the latest outbreak among Trump’s aides and advisers to 12 people.
 
Evangelical pastor Robert Jeffress has become one of the few high-profile supporters of Trump to publicly acknowledge that the election was won by Biden — and to urge his followers to pray for (rather than against) him.
 
Georgia officials said they would hold a rare, by-hand recount of the state’s 5 million votes for president, a move that comes amid a close margin as other states are winding down their official counts.
 
Republican Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich defended the state’s election process on Wednesday against accusations of voter fraud and irregularities from the Trump campaign.
 
Biden has chosen Ron Klain as his White House chief of staff, turning to a longtime adviser and Ebola czar under President Obama as he prepares his incoming administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
 
Several New Yorkers (other than the governor) are being mentioned as potential contenders for positions in the Biden administration.
 
NYC Commissioner Polly Trottenberg was selected for an 18-person transportation team that will prepare Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and their cabinet as they transition to the White House.
 
Which party controls the U.S. Senate will largely dictate how ambitious Biden can get on taxes, health care, climate change and other policy priorities.
 
Internal Republican divisions over the fate of Gina Haspel’s tenure as C.I.A. director have come tumbling into view as some Senate leaders showed support while Trump’s allies pushed for her ouster.
 
Democrats’ majority in the House – 218 to 202 – is set to be their tightest since World War II, limiting their room to maneuver on legislation with Biden and possibly raising tensions between centrist and progressive lawmakers.
 
New York Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney wants to be the next chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which would make him the first openly gay leader of the political arm for House Democrats if elected.
 
Nicole Malliotakis, who is poised to become New York City’s only Republican member of Congress, is refusing to acknowledge that Biden beat Trump in the Nov. 3 presidential election.
 
A retired astronaut, a former football coach and the first woman to graduate from the Citadel are among the new lawmakers on their way to the Capitol, with some races still left to be called.
 
Facebook and Google plan to continue banning political ads on their platforms for the next several weeks to prevent confusion about election results.
 
Eastman Kodak said five former executives were able to collect millions of dollars by selling stock options they didn’t own, an admission that is set to add to the scrutiny the company faces over the circumstances surrounding a halted U.S. loan.
 
It took the U.S. only 10 days to reach 1 million new COVID-19 cases in November, an ominous sign for the coming weeks as the pandemic rages across the nation.
 
Even as drug manufacturers make progress on a vaccine and treatments, epidemiologists, scientists and public health officials are warning that the U.S. has yet to see the most difficult days of the outbreak. Those are projected to come over the next three to four months.
 
Dr. Michael Osterholm, a coronavirus advisor to Biden, believes that shutting down businesses nationally for between four to six weeks could help the United States from entering “Covid hell”.
 
“We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the wages, lost wages for individual workers, for losses to small companies, to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments; we could do all of that,” Osterholm said. “If we did that, then we could lock down for four to six weeks.”
 
With its annual meeting underway this week, WHO has been sharply criticized for not taking a stronger and more vocal role in handling the pandemic. 
 
Tokyo 2020 is working with the Japanese government to ensure that athletes and Olympic staff can avoid a 14-day quarantine on arrival in Japan ahead of the games.
 
A black market for negative COVID-19 tests has popped up across the globe as more countries require travelers to prove their negative status before entering.
 
Developers of Sputnik V, Russia’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine, announced that early, interim data from a large trial suggests the shot appears to be 92 percent effective.
 
The European Union will buy as many as 300 million doses of the highly promising BioNTech-Pfizer coronavirus vaccine when it becomes available after the drug showed incredible results during trials.
 
By the end of Nov. 11, also known as Singles Day, Alibaba, the Chinese technology giant, said it had raked in the equivalent of a record $75.1 billion in sales.
 
Spurred by consumer trends that are prompted by the coronavirus pandemic, restaurant chain Chipotle Mexican Grill will debut a new, digital-only restaurant in Highland Falls, NY this week with no dining room and no order-taking capability.
 
The pandemic is revving up the market for expensive homes where many people are spending far more time, luring richer buyers and nudging more sales over the half-million-dollar mark from northern California to the New York City suburbs.
 
Ticketmaster has been working on a framework for post-pandemic fan safety that uses smart phones to verify fans’ vaccination status or whether they’ve tested negative for the coronavirus within a 24 to 72-hour window.
 
New York will impose a handful of coronavirus restrictions on residents and businesses across the state as it tackles several “hotspot” outbreaks and tries to avoid a surge in cases, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced.
 
Restaurants and bars licensed by the State Liquor Authority will be ordered to close at 10 p.m. beginning tomorrow, though they can operate for curbside pickup past that time. Gyms will also be forced to close at that time.
 
The governor indicated that diners should have wrapped up their meals by curfew time. Takeout and delivery is still allowed after 10 p.m., but only for food orders. Takeout and delivery alcohol orders after 10 p.m. will be off limits.
 
In theory, restaurants and bars should be safe if people are following mask-wearing and distancing guidelines, Cuomo said, but in reality, the rules are not being enforced enough and people are not following them.
 
Reacting to the news, the Lionheart Pub in Albany, which caters to a later crowd, announced it will cease operations “until COVID-19 numbers drop low enough that we can open without concern.”
 
The NYT editorial board opines: “New York residents and officials, it’s time to face some cold, hard facts. The city is on the cusp of its second wave of the coronavirus. As such, restrictions need to be brought back, as economically and socially painful as they might be.”
 
Two weeks after the release of Cuomo’s COVID-era leadership book on Oct. 13, a JCOPE commissioner publicly questioned how much weight the ethics watchdog’s opinions on such matters really carry – sparking an extraordinary response from the panel’s Cuomo appointees.
 
A Fox News meteorologist whose in-laws died of COVID-19 has joined critics blasting the governor for his book, while an ex-Brooklyn politician (former Assemblyman Dov Hikind) has published a spoof by ‘King Covidius Cuomo’.  
 
Cuomo signed a bill into law allowing gym members to cancel subscriptions and end recurring charges while cracking down on businesses that mislead consumers through automatic renewals based on free trial periods or continuous-service schemes.
 
He’s been trashing the Trump administration’s COVID-19 vaccine plan, but Cuomo stopped taking part back in June — skipping more than a dozen White House meetings and snubbing a one-on-one with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.
 
Nearly four times as many New Yorkers cast ballots by mail this fall than in the 2016 presidential election, including 318,455 from Long Island, according to state and county records.
 
The outcome of numerous state Senate races and some congressional contests remained in question yesterday – a day before many local boards of elections were scheduled to begin counting the historic number of absentee and mailed-in ballots that have been received.
 
Though other counties have already begun tabulating (including New York City with its colossal task), Erie County ranks as one of the state’s last to report final totals. It will not tackle its ballots until Monday.
 
State Democratic Party chairman Jay Jacobs ripped into Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over disappointing results in key New York battleground congressional and legislative races last week.
 
Staten Island Councilman Joe Borelli blasted Cuomo’s newest restrictions on indoor family gatherings ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, declaring he’ll gladly flout the limit on private indoor gatherings to 10 people.
 
Staten Island has become the main target of New York City’s COVID-19 control efforts as some of the borough’s neighborhoods have turned into hot spots in recent weeks and health officials scramble to stave off a second wave of the virus.
 
Staten Island has bristled at coronavirus restrictions, but now has the highest positive test rate in the city.
 
Before COVID-19 hit, New York City was home to many of the richest people in the world, an elite group of 30,000 families earning at least $1 million a year. Gotham’s future will be decided by how many of these super-wealthy people remain after the pandemic is over.
 
The summer season lasted longer than usual in the Hamptons this year, as New York City residents relocating or riding out the pandemic in their second homes kept beach towns busy into November. 
 
Offenses from turnstile jumping to “consensual” sex work would not be prosecuted by state Assemblyman Dan Quart if he wins the race for Manhattan district attorney, he said.
 
For two consecutive days this week, state Sen. Brad Hoylman, a candidate for Manhattan borough president, found wallets stuffed with cash and credit cards in Greenwich Village — and has endeavored to return them to their rightful owners.
 
Brooklyn state Sen. Kevin Parker announced he’s joining the 2021 race to become the city’s chief fiscal watchdog.
 
The NYC Department of Education suddenly nixed a series of parent meetings on high school admissions — just a day after announcing them.
 
An NYPD sergeant who oversaw the Harvey Weinstein probe was transferred to a new assignment after it was previously revealed she was the “focus” of an internal investigation into cops playing hooky and misusing official vehicles.
 
As Albany County continues to see a surge in COVID-19 cases, nine city restaurants, including a cluster in the Lark Street corridor, are temporarily closed after staff members tested positive for the virus.
 
Two Rensselaer County residents have died from COVID-19 raising the county death toll to 48 from the disease, the Rensselaer County Health Department confirmed.
 
The Hudson Falls Central School District announced that it will move all classes to remote learning on Nov. 12-13 after learning that two members of the school district community have tested positive for COVID-19.
 
Albany County yesterday confirmed 99 new cases of coronavirus overnight — its highest one-day total since the pandemic began eight months ago.
 
Glens Falls Hospital is the latest Capital Region hospital to announce new visitation restrictions as the region’s coronavirus caseloads increase to record levels.
 
The Albany Capital Center and adjoining Renaissance Hotel will serve as a bubble site for the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference women’s volleyball championships to be held March 31 to April 3 of next year, the MAAC announced.
 
Local civil-rights activists, and other loved ones, lost their protector after 26-year-old Dan Prouty was found dead by his roommates in his bedroom this week. An official cause of death has not yet been determined, they said.
 
A jail guard and his supervising sergeant were fired after the guard brutally beat a prisoner who complained it was taking too long for him to be released from the Schenectady County jail, Sheriff Dominic Dagostino said.
 
The New York State DEC confirmed this week that a Harmful Algal Bloom (HAB) had been discovered in Lake George for the first time.
 
LaGuardia Airport’s new Terminal B has added two 25-foot-tall indoor fountains that double as New York-themed light shows.
 
The New Yorker has fired high-profile staff writer Jeffrey Toobin weeks after he exposed himself on a video call with colleagues.
 
Food Network chef Alton Brown has deleted and apologized for a tweet he posted on Tuesday that contained a reference to World War II–era death camp uniforms.
 
Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa of Bahrain, one of the world’s longest-serving prime ministers, has died at the age of 84.

Photo credit: Joah Alindato.