The high-profile homecoming for Jaren Jackson Jr. will not materialize.
When the Memphis Grizzlies sent the veteran forward to the Utah Jazz shortly before the Feb. 5 trade deadline, they realized the schedule-makers had built in an intriguing mid-February matchup.
But when the Grizzlies play the visiting Jazz on Friday, Jackson will not be in uniform. The former Defensive Player of the Year, in his eighth NBA season, underwent successful surgery earlier this week in Salt Lake City to remove a localized pigmented villonodular synovitis (PVNS) growth from his left knee. A physical performed after the trade revealed the growth.
Jackson, the league’s top defender in 2022-23, will be out for at least four weeks, according to the Jazz, and could return to the court later this season.
In his team debut on Feb. 7 against the Orlando Magic, he had 22 points, three assists and three steals in 25 minutes. He is averaging 19.4 points, 5.7 rebounds and 1.4 blocks in 48 games, all but three with the Grizzlies.
Jackson, John Konchar and Vince Williams Jr. went from the Grizzlies to the Jazz on Feb. 3. Memphis received Walter Clayton Jr., Kyle Anderson, Taylor Hendricks, Georges Niang and three first-round draft picks.
Utah coach Will Hardy has only worked with Jackson briefly, but he said the Jazz knew the quality person and player they were getting.
‘When we traded for Jaren, obviously there is so much talk about (Jaren) the player,’ Hardy said. ‘And I’m very excited about the player. But what we are trying to build as an organization and a program, Jaren’s character, and who he is as a person, is just as important.
‘That has been evident since the day that he (joined the Jazz). He is a high-character guy. He has a good sense of humor. He also has a respect level that comes with him because of how he has played during his career.’
Letting go of another key member of the Grizzlies’ core was difficult for Memphis general manager Zach Kleiman, but it could be a move that pays dividends.
‘We felt good about the return (for Jackson) and we felt it healthier for the organization to turn the page as much as we were able to and be able to build this team with a clear mind as to what we’re trying to achieve going forward, which is pivoting to a younger build,’ Kleiman said. ‘We’re not shying away from that. That’s where this team is.’
While the Grizzlies adjust to life without Jackson for the first time since he was taken with the No. 4 pick in the 2018 draft, they are hoping to snap a four-game losing streak without star guard Ja Morant.
Sidelined with a left elbow sprain since Jan. 23, Morant missed the team’s last 11 games and is expected to miss another two weeks. He has only appeared in 20 games because of a variety of injuries.
With Morant out, guard Ty Jerome recently returned from a right calf injury that had him unavailable from the start of the season. In his six games back, Jerome has averaged 19.7 points in 20.2 minutes.
Other contributions have come from Jaylen Wells, Cam Spencer and Cedric Coward, who were selected to play in last Friday’s Rising Stars mini-tournament at NBA All-Star Weekend. Coward was withheld from action due to knee soreness.
Jazz standout Keyonte George missed six of the final seven games before the break due to injuries to each ankle. He is averaging 23.8 points in 48 games.
LAS VEGAS — Cathy Engelbert accepted some responsibility for WNBA players’ disapproval of the job she’s done as commissioner while denying certain remarks that Napheesa Collier alleged she said in a pointed statement earlier this week.
Engelbert faced reporters ahead of Game 1 of the WNBA Finals between the Las Vegas Aces and Phoenix Mercury on Friday. It is a tradition among major sports commissioners to address the state of the league before its championship game or series.
But Engelbert’s press conference came days after Collier said the WNBA had ‘the worst leadership in the world,’ accusing her of making disparaging remarks about star players and not taking officiating seriously.
Collier is a Women’s National Basketball Players Association vice president along with a star on the Minnesota Lynx, and her voice carried extra heft amid the backdrop of a collective bargaining agreement that’s set to expire Oct. 31.
Engelbert released a statement Tuesday saying she was ‘disheartened by how Napheesa characterized our conversations and league leadership,’ but on Friday she was careful to speak highly of the players and looked to make amends.
‘I have the utmost respect for Napheesa and for every single player in our league,’ Engelbert said in a prepared statement before she took questions. ‘They are at the center of everything we do. I was disheartened to hear that some players feel the league, and me personally, do not care about them or listen to them. If the players in the W don’t feel appreciated and valued by the league, then we have to do better and I have to do better.’
Speaking Tuesday at an end-of-season media availability, Collier blasted Engelbert and the league office, her speech earning plaudits from many of her peers.
Collier said she asked Engelbert how she’d fix the fact that young superstars like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers are earning so little on their rookie contracts while driving massive revenue for the league. ‘Her response was, ‘Caitlin should be grateful she makes $16 million off the court because without the platform the WNBA gives her, she wouldn’t make anything,” Collier said.
‘And in that same conversation,’ she continued, Engelbert ‘told me players should be on their knees thanking their lucky stars for the media rights deal that (she) got them.’
Asked Friday if she in fact said the media rights part of that statement, Engelbert talked around it.
‘There’s a lot of inaccuracy out there through social media and all this reporting,’ Engelbert said. ‘And so I think what’s most helpful is to focus on, I have been in touch with Napheesa, we’ve exchanged texts, we’re talking next week. So, I think, obviously, a lot of reporting, a lot of inaccuracy about what I said or what I didn’t say. And I will tell you, I highly respect the players.’
Given a second chance to address the faux pas, specifically regarding Clark’s endorsement earnings, Engelbert was more direct.
‘Obviously I did not make those comments,’ Engelbert said. ‘Caitlin has been a transformational player in this league. She’s been a great representative of the game. She’s brought in tens of millions of new fans to the game.
‘… But again, I’m not going to get into every point-counterpoint. It’s not productive here. We’re here to celebrate the WNBA Finals.’
Clark, for her part, said this week that Engelbert had yet to reach out to her directly and said that she agreed with Collier’s stance.
Saying she is not a ‘quitter,’ Engelbert addressed the notion that players don’t feel she is fit to be their commissioner and painted it as ‘inaccurate’ and ‘clickbait,’ though criticism of Engelbert was seen far and wide this week.
Engelbert said she was confident ‘that we can repair any loss of trust’ amid the ongoing CBA negotiations. She claimed the league office wants ‘a transformative deal’ with ‘significant, significant’ pay increases for the players and some proposals have included revenue-share components.
‘I think it’s all about balancing the significant increase in salaries and benefits with the long-term viability of the league,’ Engelbert said. ‘… You know, they’re obviously bargaining for more and so we’re just trying to obviously balance looking out many years.’
The CBA expires at the end of the month, and Engelbert said she was confident in the sides’ ability to meet that deadline, but felt it could be extended if necessary, as they did by a few months before their most recent agreement in January 2020.
Among players’ other concerns is with officiating, and several head coaches have been fined for criticizing referees this season. Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve was suspended for Game 4 of the semifinal round against Phoenix for harsh criticism of what she felt was a missed call on a play that injured Collier. Minnesota’s season ended in that Game 4 with a loss to Phoenix without Collier or Reeve.
Collier said when she brought up officiating to Engelbert earlier this year, her response was, ‘Well, only the losers complain about the refs.’
Engelbert said Friday the league is establishing a ‘state of the game’ committee with players and other stakeholders able to voice their opinions on officiating and player safety.
‘I think it’s pretty clear that we’re misaligned currently on what our stakeholders want from officiating,’ she said. ‘We have heard loud and clear that we have not lived up to that needed alignment and that attention and change is needed to serve the WNBA to the level of excellence that is not currently being met in the various stakeholders’ eyes.
‘There are no greater stakeholders than our players. Their voice is integral to the alignment that is required for good officiating, and we look forward to including their perspectives on how our staff can better serve the game moving forward.’
Jackson Hopkins scored his third goal in four games and 10-man D.C. United held on for a 1-1 draw against visiting Orlando City on Saturday night in Washington.
Luis Barraza made a career-best 10 saves for D.C. (5-15-10, 25 points), whose numbers were reduced upon Lukas MacNaughton’s 57th-minute dismissal.
Those performances helped the Black-and-Red remain unbeaten in four matches (1-0-3) under new manager Rene Weiler despite having already been eliminated from postseason contention.
Defender Alex Freeman pulled Orlando level in the 53rd minute with his fifth goal of the season. But the Lions were otherwise a combination of wasteful and the victim of Barraza’s excellent night, failing to take three points despite leading 26-6 in shots and 11-3 in efforts on target.
Orlando (13-7-9, 48 points) dropped one spot into sixth in the Eastern Conference via Columbus’ victory at Atlanta.
Hopkins put D.C. ahead against the run of play in the run of play in the 33rd minute on one of D.C.’s rare forays forward.
Conner Antley did the most impressive work in the buildup, taking Joao Peglow’s pass, making a hard cut to evade a defender on the right side of the box, and then picking out Hopkins in front of goal.
Hopkins then used his back to spin his defender before firing a low finish past Pedro Gallese.
Freeman leveled 20 minutes later during a sequence that also eventually resulted in MacNaughton’s ejection.
Pasalic forced Barraza into an initial save after he was played down the right. Freeman was first to the rebound to poke it over the line. And after referee Chris Penso was summoned to the replay monitor, he ruled that MacNaughton had made a dangerous enough challenge on Freeman in his attempt to deny the rebound effort to warrant a red card.
Barraza could have done better to push that rebound to a less dangerous area. But he made up for it in the late stages with two late denials of Marco Pasalic and another of Eduard Atuesta.
A Central Florida congressman has put forward a proposal for the newest national park in the United States: the Florida Springs National Park.Congressman Randy Fine (R) has filed a bill in the U.S. Congress to create the nation’s 64th national park, consisting of the Ocala National Forest and several area springs, including Silver Springs and Alexander Springs.Fine said he’s an avid traveler to the county’s national parks, which include the Everglades in South Florida.”The idea of it is to commemorate our Florida springs and the surrounding areas on a level like the Everglades or Yellowstone or Yosemite,” Fine said. “Our Florida springs are something unique, not just to Florida but to the country.”He said designating the forest and springs as a national park, which would spread across multiple counties, would drive tourism, increase environmental protections and funding for the springs.Fine maintains recreational activities, including hunting and hiking, or kayaking at the springs, would be up for discussion, and the designation could perhaps be varied depending on the types of activities that occur.”Florida springs are unique on an international level,” he said. “They should be protected, and how do we build that into something that has a national designation that would transform this part of Central Florida?”Fine plans to announce the filing at a news conference Monday at Silver Springs.
OCALA, Fla. —
A Central Florida congressman has put forward a proposal for the newest national park in the United States: the Florida Springs National Park.
Congressman Randy Fine (R) has filed a bill in the U.S. Congress to create the nation’s 64th national park, consisting of the Ocala National Forest and several area springs, including Silver Springs and Alexander Springs.
Fine said he’s an avid traveler to the county’s national parks, which include the Everglades in South Florida.
“The idea of it is to commemorate our Florida springs and the surrounding areas on a level like the Everglades or Yellowstone or Yosemite,” Fine said. “Our Florida springs are something unique, not just to Florida but to the country.”
He said designating the forest and springs as a national park, which would spread across multiple counties, would drive tourism, increase environmental protections and funding for the springs.
Fine maintains recreational activities, including hunting and hiking, or kayaking at the springs, would be up for discussion, and the designation could perhaps be varied depending on the types of activities that occur.
“Florida springs are unique on an international level,” he said. “They should be protected, and how do we build that into something that has a national designation that would transform this part of Central Florida?”
Fine plans to announce the filing at a news conference Monday at Silver Springs.
Lin Chin-Tse retired the first 13 batters he faced and allowed just one hit in five innings as Taiwan beat Nevada 7-0 in the Little League World Series championship Sunday, ending a 29-year title drought for the Taiwanese.Taiwan won its first LLWS since 1996, although its 18 titles are the most of any country beside the United States, including five straight from 1977 to 1981.Video above: Little League team chases World Series gloryLin, a 5-foot-8 right hander, also smashed a three-run triple in Taiwan’s five-run fifth. The 12-year-old from Taipei hit more than 80 mph with his fastball multiple times during the tournament, which to batters looks much faster because the plate in this level of baseball is only 46 feet away. His velocity looked much the same on Sunday.Lin’s longest start before Sunday was three innings in Taiwan’s opening game against Mexico. He allowed only one hit in a subsequent victory over Venezuela.Garrett Gallegos broke up the perfect game with a single into left field in the fifth inning but was caught in a double play when Grayson Miranda lined out to second. Nevada was appearing in its first championship game.Offensively, Taiwan capitalized on four wild pitches and a passed ball. Jian Zih-De worked a walk leading off the bottom of the second and later scored when he beat the throw home after the wild pitches.Chen Shi-Rong scored Taiwan’s second run in the bottom of the third when he ran home on a Nevada throwing error to first base.The last international team to win the tournament title was Japan in 2017.
SOUTH WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. —
Lin Chin-Tse retired the first 13 batters he faced and allowed just one hit in five innings as Taiwan beat Nevada 7-0 in the Little League World Series championship Sunday, ending a 29-year title drought for the Taiwanese.
Taiwan won its first LLWS since 1996, although its 18 titles are the most of any country beside the United States, including five straight from 1977 to 1981.
Video above: Little League team chases World Series glory
Lin, a 5-foot-8 right hander, also smashed a three-run triple in Taiwan’s five-run fifth. The 12-year-old from Taipei hit more than 80 mph with his fastball multiple times during the tournament, which to batters looks much faster because the plate in this level of baseball is only 46 feet away. His velocity looked much the same on Sunday.
Lin’s longest start before Sunday was three innings in Taiwan’s opening game against Mexico. He allowed only one hit in a subsequent victory over Venezuela.
Garrett Gallegos broke up the perfect game with a single into left field in the fifth inning but was caught in a double play when Grayson Miranda lined out to second. Nevada was appearing in its first championship game.
Offensively, Taiwan capitalized on four wild pitches and a passed ball. Jian Zih-De worked a walk leading off the bottom of the second and later scored when he beat the throw home after the wild pitches.
Chen Shi-Rong scored Taiwan’s second run in the bottom of the third when he ran home on a Nevada throwing error to first base.
The last international team to win the tournament title was Japan in 2017.
Every dragon can grant help completing an Episode Battle. Choosing that wish will give you an exclusive item called a Dragon Orb. These can be used only when hovering over an Episode Battle with branching paths, as they make the secondary objectives easier to meet. Even though a lot of these objectives just require you to win within a certain time, using a Dragon Orb for a bit more leeway can be a big help. The only caveat is that you won’t earn victory rewards from it, but that’s not too bad of a trade-off to see some really fun what-if stories.
This option won’t pop up until you’ve come across an Episode Battle with potential branching paths. Although that occurs early on in Goku’s story, those who immediately spent a lot of time in multiplayer modes or received a free Shenron summon—depending upon which edition they purchased—would likely not have seen this. Make sure to keep an eye out for this option if you didn’t see it during your first summon(s)!
Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero doesn’t spend much time explaining the nuances of summoning the dragons, and leaves it all for us to discover. As fun as that idea is, nobody likes to feel like they made the wrong choice, especially with how rare it can be to see Porunga and Super Shenron.
The best choice for you depends entirely on preference and how far along you are, but you should be better equipped to select a more favorable option. Go out and make your wishes in confidence!
City leaders in Los Angeles have announced plans to take a limited amount of water from creeks that feed Mono Lake this year, a step that environmentalists say will help build on a recent rise in the lake’s level over the last year.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said it plans to export 4,500 acre-feet of water from the Mono Basin during the current runoff year, the same amount that was diverted the previous year, and enough to supply about 18,000 households for a year.
Under the current rules, the city could take much more — up to 16,000 acre-feet this year. But environmental advocates had recently urged Mayor Karen Bass not to increase water diversions to help preserve recent gains and begin to boost the long-depleted lake toward healthier levels. They praised the decision by city leaders as an important step.
“It’s a historic decision in the history of Mono Lake,” said Mark Gold, director of water scarcity solutions for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “I think it’s the first major environmental accomplishment for water in the Bass administration.”
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DWP officials detailed their expected water diversions from the region of the Eastern Sierra in an annual plan for the runoff year, which began in April.
Environmentalists said it’s the first time in 30 years that city officials have announced plans to take less water than the maximum amount allowed under a 1994 decision by the State Water Resources Control Board. However, DWP said in the plan that it will review water conditions in November, and at that point could still decide to export additional water if deemed necessary, up to the limit of 16,000 acre-feet.
“Major kudos to the Bass administration for not taking all the water that they’re entitled to,” Gold said.
“I think it’s the ultimate olive branch to the environmental community,” he said, and a “show of good faith on the part of the city.”
Gold and other advocates sent a letter to Bass in March, saying that not increasing water diversions this year would be a “meaningful action” the city can take at a time when supplies are ample following the very wet winter of 2023 and this year’s substantial snow and rain. They also said doing this would complement efforts toward long-term solutions for Mono Lake.
City leaders agreed.
“Mayor Bass has been clear that building a greener Los Angeles is one of her top priorities and protecting water resources certainly falls into that,” said Nancy Sutley, deputy mayor of energy and sustainability.
Sutley said in an email that the mayor and DWP “are working together to implement new ways to protect the environment in sustainable and efficient ways.”
The city has been diverting water from the Mono Basin since 1941, transporting it south through the Los Angeles Aqueduct.
For decades, the withdrawals of water from the area’s creeks led to dramatic declines in the lake. As the saline lake retreated, rock formations called tufa, which had formed underwater, were left exposed along the shorelines.
A 1994 ruling by the state water board called for raising the lake level to 6,392 feet — about 8 feet above the current level.
The lake’s level has risen about 5 feet since the start of 2023, when the historic snowpack in the Sierra Nevada sent large quantities of runoff streaming from the mountains.
The decision by city leaders this year will help preserve those gains, said Geoffrey McQuilkin, executive director of the Mono Lake Committee.
“Mono Lake will be three vertical inches higher than it would have been if DWP were to take the full 16,000 acre-feet of allowed export,” McQuilkin wrote in a blog post.
He said the step shows Bass’ “commitment to a sustainable relationship” between the city and Mono Lake, and a renewed commitment to achieve the lake level target mandated by the state water board 30 years ago.
“And though it is just a fraction of the 8 feet separating Mono Lake today from its required healthy level, the inches quickly add up as the years go by,” McQuilkin said.
The goal, he said, is to get Mono Lake back to a level that allows the ecosystem to thrive.
Mono Lake provides habitat for imperiled shorebirds such as Wilson’s phalaropes, which stop at saline lakes during their long migrations, feeding on brine flies and other invertebrates.
The decision by city leaders “opens the door to have that conversation about how do we go forward in the years ahead and make sure we achieve the protection at Mono Lake that we’ve all agreed on implementing,” McQuilkin said.
Bruce Reznik, executive director of Los Angeles Waterkeeper, said the decision represents a big shift for the city and DWP.
“In the coming years, I would like to see more of the same,” Reznik said. “I’d like to see the city as they move forward, even if we’re not in as wet a year, do what they can to minimize what the take is from Mono Lake. Let it come back to health inch by inch.”
Reznik says California now has an opportunity to restore one of its ecological treasures while also lessening L.A.’s dependence on water imported from hundreds of miles away.
“We have to be more cognizant of local resilient water supplies that make us more water secure,” he said. “Let’s take this win, and see if we can build on it — on our move toward more local resilient water.”
“The more we accept the mindset that we just can’t keep taking water from everywhere, and that we need to invest locally, the more I think we’re going to see all the benefits,” he said.
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On June 3, 2021, a roughly 60-year-old man in the riverside city of Magdeburg, Germany, received his first COVID vaccine. He opted for Johnson & Johnson’s shot, popular at that point because unlike Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines, it was one-and-done. But that, evidently, was not what he had in mind. The following month, he got the AstraZeneca vaccine. The month after that, he doubled up on AstraZeneca and added a Pfizer for good measure. Things only accelerated from there: In January 2022, he received at least 49 COVID shots.
A few months later, employees at a local vaccination center thought to themselves, Huh, wasn’t that guy in here yesterday? and alerted the police. By that point, the German Press Agency reported, the man had been vaccinated as many as 90 times. And still he was not done. As of November, he said he’d received 217 COVID shots—217!
That’s according to a new paper published in The Lancet. After German researchers learned of the man from newspaper articles, they managed to contact him via the public prosecutor investigating the case. He was “very interested” in participating in a study Kilian Schober, an immunologist at Uniklinikum Erlangen and a co-author on the paper said in a statement. They pieced together his vaccination timeline through interviews and medical records, and collected blood and saliva samples to examine the immunological effects of “hypervaccination.”
The man’s identity hasn’t been revealed, and in the paper he’s referred to only as “HIM” (seemingly an acronym, though what it stands for is not specified). He is hardly the world’s only hypervaccinated person. A retired postman in India had reportedly received 12 shots by January 2022 and told The New York Times, “I still want more.” A New Zealand man, meanwhile, allegedly racked up 10 in a single day. But pause for a moment and consider the sheer logistics of HIM’s feat. In all, he received his 217 vaccinations over the course of just under two and a half years, which comes out to an average of seven and a half shots a month, although the distribution was far from even. For several weeks in early 2022, he received two shots nearly every day. He seems to have had a strong preference for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, but he also got at least one shot of AstraZeneca and Sanofi-GSK and, of course, Johnson & Johnson.
Why? you might wonder. The paper itself elides this question, saying only that he did so “deliberately and for private reasons.” Perhaps the most obvious explanation would be extreme, probably pathological COVID anxiety. News reports from April 2022 offer another possible explanation: that he did so to sell the vaccination cards. But German prosecutors did not bring charges once HIM’s scheme was uncovered, and he continued getting unnecessary shots.
Getting 217 COVID shots is very much not the public-health guidance in Germany or anywhere else. Yet the strategy seemingly panned out: HIM has never contracted COVID, researchers concluded based on antigen tests, PCR tests, and bloodwork. “If you ask immunologists, we might have predicted that it would be not beneficial to do this,” Cindy Leifer, an immunologist at Cornell University who wasn’t involved with the Lancet study, told me. They might have expected the constant action to exhaust the immune system, leaving it vulnerable to actual viral threats. But such worries came to nothing.
Still, immunologists cautioned against inferring any strong causal connection. He avoided the virus; he got vaccinated 217 times. He did not necessarily avoid the virus because he got vaccinated 217 times. In fact, the authors wrote, although hypervaccination seems to have increased the quantity of antibodies and T cells that HIM’s body produced to fend off the virus—even after 216 shots, the 217th still produced a modest increase—it had no real effect on the quality of the immune response. “He would have been just as well protected if he had gotten a normal number of three to four vaccinations,” Schober told me.
Nor did hypervaccination lead to any adverse effects. By shot 217, one might have expected to see some of the rare side effects associated with the vaccines, such as myocarditis, pericarditis, or Guillain-Barré Syndrome, but as far as researchers could tell, HIM was completely fine. Remarkably, he didn’t even report feeling minor side effects from any of his 217 shots. On some level, this makes total sense: As Schober reasonably pointed out, HIM probably would not have gotten all those shots if each one had knocked him out for a day. Fair, but still: 217 shots and no side effects? How?
If nothing else, HIM is one hell of an advertisement for the vaccines. Worried about side effects from your third booster? Well, this guy’s gotten more than 200, and he’s a-okay. Travis Kelce has been called Mr. Pfizer, but he’s got nothing on HIM. Scientifically, things are somewhat murkier. The results of the HIM study were largely unsurprising, researchers told me, but the mysteries at the margins—such as the absence of any side effects—are a good reminder that four years after the pandemic began, immunology is still, as my former colleague Ed Yong wrote, “where intuition goes to die.”
At the end of the paper, the authors are very clear: “We do not endorse hypervaccination as a strategy to enhance adaptive immunity.” The takeaway, Leifer said, should not be the more shots, the better. Schober told me he even tried to personally convey this message to HIM after his 216th shot. “From the bottom of my heart as a medical doctor, I really told him that he shouldn’t get vaccinated again,” Schober said.
HIM seemed to take this advice seriously. Then he went and got shot No. 217 anyway.
COVID-19 and flu are rising across California, sparking new warnings from health officials to take precautions as the wider winter holiday season looms.
The uptick is modest and not wholly unexpected — wintertime surges have been an annual occurrence since the coronavirus first emerged. But experts say lagging uptake of the latest reformulated vaccines has left some populations particularly vulnerable to severe health outcomes that are largely preventable at this point.
Over the week that ended Dec. 9, 2,449 Californians were newly admitted to hospitals with a coronavirus infection, up 40% over the last month, according to federal data.
California was considered to have “high” viral illness activity level as of Dec. 9, among the worst designations in the country, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
As of Dec. 9, California was considered to have a “high” level of flu-like illness, which includes viral illnesses such as COVID-19 and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.
(U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention )
“Respiratory illness activity is rapidly increasing across the United States,” the CDC said in a bulletin Thursday afternoon. “Millions of people may get sick in the next month or two, and low vaccination rates mean more people will get more severe disease. Getting vaccinated now can help prevent hospitalizations and save lives.”
A rise in viral illness is expected this time of year, but the prevalence of COVID-19 adds a considerable health burden that didn’t exist before the pandemic. COVID-19 remains the primary cause of new respiratory hospitalizations and deaths nationally, causing 1,000 fatalities a week.
“COVID is still causing the most number of cases, the most number of hospitalizations and the most, unfortunately, number of deaths that we’re seeing week over week,” Dr. Mandy Cohen, director of the CDC, said in an online discussion Tuesday. “So while we all wish we could leave COVID in the rearview mirror, it is still here with us, and so we need to make sure we are continuing to take it very seriously.”
Cohen last week urged people to take precautions such as getting vaccinated, avoiding people who are sick and staying home when ill, regular hand-washing, improving air ventilation and wearing a mask.
“And get tested, so you know what you have and you can get treatment,” she said. “Getting tested and treated early can prevent you from getting severely ill, being hospitalized and can potentially save your life.”
Relatively speaking, COVID-19, flu and another ailment — respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV — aren’t at the heights they were this time last year, when their simultaneous circulation spawned a “tripledemic” that stressed healthcare facilities across the state, especially children’s hospitals.
Kaiser Permanente Southern California began noticing more COVID-19 illness starting in mid-November, with the rise accelerating after Thanksgiving, said Dr. Nancy Gin, regional medical director of quality and clinical analysis for the health system.
Coronavirus levels in Los Angeles County wastewater were at 38% of last winter’s peak for the week that ended Dec. 2, the most recent data available. That’s exactly the same as the height seen late this summer, when the region experienced a prolonged uptick in infections.
The latest figure signals a “medium” level of concern, as defined by L.A. County health officials.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, coronavirus levels in the San Jose watershed’s sewage have been at a “high” level for weeks.
Rising viral levels in wastewater is “like the canary in the coal mine,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, a UC San Francisco infectious diseases expert. Higher concentrations could be followed by more illness, potentially severe enough to require hospital care.
“I’m just worried that it’s going to translate into hospitalizations around Christmastime,” he said.
Chin-Hong said he’s particularly concerned about seniors who haven’t received their updated vaccinations this autumn. Among Californians ages 65 and older, just 27% have received the latest COVID-19 vaccination that became available in September. Uptake is even lower in Los Angeles County — 21% — but higher in the Bay Area, where it’s around 40% in the most populous counties.
Seniors who have not gotten the latest vaccine are “the population we’re seeing in the hospital,” Chin-Hong said, and, especially those who are older than 75, “the population that’s dying.” It’s also likely that many of those who are dying aren’t getting anti-COVID drugs in time.
Flu vaccination rates are slightly lower than they were at this time last year, according to data shared by the CDC. As of early November, 36% of U.S. adults had received their flu shot, compared with 38% at that time last year. And for RSV, just 16% of adults ages 60 and older had received the newly available vaccine as of Dec. 2.
Alarmed by low vaccination rates, the CDC issued a health advisory on “the urgent need to increase immunization coverage for influenza, COVID-19 and RSV.” The agency asked healthcare providers to strongly urge immunizations, noting that “low vaccination rates, coupled with ongoing increases in national and international respiratory disease activity … could lead to more severe disease and increased healthcare capacity strain in the coming weeks.”
The CDC recommends virtually everyone ages 6 months and older get the latest flu and COVID-19 vaccinations. Adults ages 60 and older are also eligible to be vaccinated against RSV, which can be especially risky for older people with heart disease. There are two vaccines available for older adults: Abrysvo, made by Pfizer; and Arexvy, made by GSK.
The CDC also recommends the Abrysvo vaccine for pregnant people and immunizing babies against RSV with an antibody known as nirsevimab, also known by the trademarked name Beyfortus.
The agency is also urging doctors to recommend antiviral drugs for flu and COVID-19, such as Tamiflu and Paxlovid, for eligible patients. These “antiviral medications are currently underutilized, but are important to treat patients, especially persons at high-risk of progression to severe disease with influenza or COVID-19, including older adults and people with certain underlying medical conditions,” the CDC said.
Such antiviral drugs “are most effective in reducing the risk of complications when treatment is started as early as possible after symptom onset,” the CDC said.
So far, hospitals in Southern California and the Bay Area appear to be in fairly stable shape. More people are becoming ill, but so far, many aren’t needing to be hospitalized, Chin-Hong said.
Kaiser Southern California has been noticing more people ill with COVID-19 in its clinics and urgent care centers, “but they’re not landing in the hospital nearly as much compared to last year, certainly compared to two years ago,” Gin said. “Time will tell if the numbers that we see continue to go up.”
The health system, which serves 4.8 million members and operates 16 hospitals throughout the region, has observed a bit of a rise in the use of ventilators and intensive care units related to COVID-19, “but it’s certainly nothing dramatic,” Gin said.
But cases of influenza type A virus nationally “are really shooting up quite a bit. We are seeing that as well,” Gin said.
As for RSV, levels rose steadily from the end of September through mid-November. In the last few weeks, however, that virus seems to have flattened out at “less than half of what we saw last year at this time, at least by our testing numbers. So that’s a good sign,” Gin said.
Increasing coronavirus transmission is probably being assisted by waning immunity from past infections and older booster shots.
Officials are also monitoring the rapid rise of the JN.1 subvariant. Because of its unusually high number of mutations, this subvariant — described as a closely related offshoot of the BA.2.86, or Pirola strain — might be able to more easily infect people who had previously caught an older version of the coronavirus or haven’t yet received an updated shot.
Nationally, JN.1 is estimated to account for about 21% of coronavirus cases for the two-week period that ended Dec. 9, up from 8% in the prior two-week period. It’s the fastest-growing subvariant being tracked.
JN.1 is on the ascent while the current most dominant subvariant, HV.1, is declining. A descendant of the XBB subvariants that were dominant over the summer, HV.1 was estimated to account for 30% of coronavirus specimens for the most recent two-week period, down from 32% in the prior comparable period.
The rise of the new subvariant should encourage people, especially those who are older, to get the new vaccine, as outdated booster shots or natural immunity from past infections may not be protective enough. The new vaccine will replenish antibodies, Chin-Hong said, which will be especially important for at-risk people.
“Most people have gotten a previous infection, like during the summer, with one of the XBBs,” Chin-Hong said. The rise of JN.1 “just makes the clock tick faster before they’re more susceptible [to another coronavirus infection]. In other words, if the XBBs were the main game in town, you might have had a little bit more time before you would get infected again.”
The CDC said available vaccines, tests and antiviral medication continue to work well against JN.1.
The Kaiser Family Foundation recently reported that the annual cost of family health insurance jumped to nearly $24,000 this year, the greatest increase in a decade. While insurance executives and employers may cite a plethora of reasons, one of the chief culprits is lack of oversight over the Wild West of healthcare prices.
My friend encountered a dramatic example of this last year after her 4-year-old daughter had the misfortune of suffering the same injury twice in the same day.
The girl’s parents were getting her ready for school one morning when, as her hand was pulled through a shirt sleeve, she experienced severe pain. They took her to the children’s emergency department down the road from their home in the Bay Area, where she was diagnosed with “nursemaid’s elbow” or, more technically, a “radial head subluxation.” Common in young children, whose ligaments are looser than adults’, the partial dislocation is straightforward to diagnose and treat. A simple maneuver of the elbow put it back in place in seconds.
After coming home from school that afternoon, my friend’s daughter was playing with her babysitter when her elbow got out of place again. They went back to the same emergency department and went through the same steps with another doctor.
My friend, who is fortunate enough to have good insurance and the means to pay her share, knew the bills wouldn’t be cheap. What she wasn’t expecting was such a stark illustration of the arbitrary nature of medical billing.
While the bill for the first visit was $3,561, the second was $6,056. Same child, same hospital, same insurance, same diagnosis, same procedure, same day — and yet the price was different by not just a few dollars or even a few hundred dollars, but nearly double.
How do we make sense of this? How can a patient be charged such wildly different prices for the same treatment on the same day?
Emergency room billing consists of hospital fees and professional services fees. The hospital fees include a “facility fee” that is part of every emergency room visit and coded at one of five levels. Level 1 is the simplest — someone needing a prescription, for example — while Level 5 is the most complicated, for problems such as heart attacks and strokes that require significant hospital resources. And of course there can be additional hospital fees for X-rays, medications and the like, which weren’t necessary in the case of my friend’s daughter.
The professional services fees are for the emergency physician and other providers such as radiologists. In this case, there were no fees for professionals other than the emergency room doctor.
But the itemized charges showed the two visits were billed completely differently. The first was charged a Level 1 facility fee and a Level 3 professional fee. And the bill tacked on additional fees, including hospital and professional charges for taking care of the patient’s injured joint.
The second visit, meanwhile, was charged a Level 2 facility fee and a Level 4 professional fee, both higher than that morning. But in contrast to the earlier visit, no other charges appeared.
Why was the same injury coded as more complex and expensive to treat the second time than the first? Why did the coding and billing company decide to charge for additional services for the first visit but not the second?
I know both of the physicians who treated my daughter’s friend; they work in the same group, use the same billing and coding company, and charge the same rates. So the different doctors don’t explain the discrepancy. In my practice, even treating physicians have no access to information about how billing for our services is determined.
My friend and I contacted the hospital’s billing department repeatedly, but they proved unable to provide any rational explanation.
Unfortunately, this isn’t new. About a decade ago, I published a series of studies showing how arbitrary medical billing can be. Hospitals charged fees ranging from $10 to $10,169 for a cholesterol test; $1,529 to $182,995 for an appendicitis hospitalization without complications; and $3,296 to $37,227 for a normal vaginal birth.
Only uninsured patients are asked to pay these sticker prices. But despite the “discounts” granted to insured patients through their insurance companies, these charges end up sneaking into higher premiums and other costs. Medical bills are responsible for about 59% of U.S. bankruptcies.
There are few certainties in life, but one of them is that we will all need healthcare at some point. And another, at least for those of us living in America, is that we have no idea what it will cost or why. This would never be tolerated in any other industry.
What can we do about it? Here’s where we could benefit from a government agency like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which helps regulate banks and other financial entities that perpetrate what have been called “injustices against everyday Americans.” We need someone to regulate the injustices inflicted on Americans every day at the hands of the healthcare system too. Recent efforts by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice to police healthcare mergers and address other anticompetitive behavior in the industry could also help.
More government regulation and oversight won’t address the more fundamental problem that we keep trying to treat healthcare as a market good, which it clearly isn’t. But it could help ensure that treating a minor injury one afternoon doesn’t cost twice as much as it did that morning.
Renee Y. Hsia is a professor of emergency medicine and health policy at UC San Francisco as well as a Soros fellow and a Public Voices fellow at the OpEd Project.
The scorched remains of a World War II blimp hangar in Tustin are being razed as air quality officials call nearby asbestos levels “below any level of concern” while continuing to urge neighbors to take safety precautions.
The enormous wooden military relic went up in flames Nov. 7, showering ash and debris — later found to contain asbestos — on nearby residential neighborhoods.
The 17-story hangar smoldered for more than a week, and residents have struggled to get information about the fallout on air quality and airborne contaminants, including when debris will be removed from their properties. While the property is owned by the Navy, a mix of government agencies have been involved in the firefight and aftermath, including the Orange County Fire Authority and the South Coast Air Quality Management District.
“Our biggest frustration overall is that there’s just nobody in charge,” nearby resident Jeff Lawrence told The Times.
Deconstruction of the hangar should be completed in the next day or two, Tustin officials said Saturday. Plans call for extinguishing all remaining hotspots of the fire, using heavy equipment excavators to remove debris and clearing roadways so water trucks can reach all areas of the hanger.
The trucks equipped with nozzles and hoses will be used for fire suppression and dust abatement throughout the process. The hangar doors and their supporting concrete pillars will be stabilized and left in place for the time being.
“Since monitoring began, all particulate matter from smoke and fire data at community sites are well below any level of concern,” the city said in a statement. “Asbestos sampling data received to date are also well below any levels of concern.”
Most schools in the area have been cleared for on-campus instruction attendance, but a few are still being inspected by asbestos consultants, the Tustin Unified School District said on its website Sunday.
Most public parks are open, but Centennial Park and Veterans Sports Park remain closed until further notice, parks officials said.
The Orange County Healthcare Agency recommends people who believe their neighborhood has been affected by fire debris take such precautions as keeping doors and windows closed and not running air conditioning systems that draw in outside air. Avoid activities that will displace debris related to the fire, such as sweeping, leaf blowing, mowing and gardening.
Blocks of the city where bulk debris from the fire has been collected are shown a map on the city website.
Times staff writer Hannah Fry contributed to this report
This story is part of our new Future of Gaming series, a three-site look at gaming’s most pioneering technologies, players, and makers.
The Top 10 Most-Played Games On Steam Deck: August 2023 Edition
Video game fashion is often uninspired, Hot Topic-adjacent fare: T-shirts with a game logo ironed on the front, or zip-up sweatshirts with a garish all-over print of an animated character. It’s rare to see a piece of merch that feels like it’s pulled from a game-world (like the Disco Elysium jacket) or one that’s subtle enough you could wear it out to dinner without anyone knowing you’re repping your favorite RPG.
When I first saw “The Lands Between,” the Elden Ring-inspired collection from luxury streetwear brand ARK/8, I felt like I was looking at the future of game-related fashion. Nothing is so high-concept that it’s unwearable (the line is still firmly rooted in a streetwear aesthetic) but the entire collection could easily be worn by someone strutting through SoHo, or captured and posted on Instagram by Watching New York and no one would know it references a video game.
A lush, blood-red faux-fur coat that looks like the lion draped over Godfrey’s shoulder, an oversized, menswear-inspired crisp white button-down with Queen Marika stretched across the back, a few elegantly distressed crewnecks—all if it is so chic and so effortlessly cool that I can’t help but get excited looking at everything.
I was so curious about the person behind the designs that I reached out via email to ARK/8’s creative director, Dimitri van Eetvelde, to learn what inspires him and what he thinks is the future of gaming fashion.
Image: ARK/8
Finding fashion inspiration in Elden Ring
First, van Eetvelde made one thing very clear: ARK/8 isn’t a video game merch company, it’s a “fashion brand with gaming and pop culture as its DNA.” He likened it to how “skate is part of the DNA of brands like Supreme or Vans.” For him, too many pieces of game-related clothing are “very safe” items like “printed basics or pieces that are more suited for cosplay and gaming conventions.”
“The problem is that most of the licensed companies don’t care about gaming, it’s just a business decision. They sell the same T-shirt, whether it’s Jack Daniels or Iron Maiden or Assassin’s Creed,” he said. Van Eetvelde understands this approach, because he’s done it before—his first fashion company, Level Up Wear, was a printed tee and outerwear line started back in 2007, which focused on printing branded content on high-quality t-shirts. For him, Level Up Wear “was the inception of the concept of gaming and quality together,” though he soon reached a creative limit, and wanted to find a way to further explore high-quality garments and game-inspired designs. That’s when ARK/8 was born, fully materializing in 2019 after several iterations (including, briefly, as Italian-made high-end jewelry).
Image: ARK/8
The Lands Between collection marries high-end fashion with gaming, but not reductively—though items like the Boss Door t-shirt or the Queen Marika button-down clearly feature more obvious game references, there’s a sense of evocation at play here, as well. “We wanted to create a collection that didn’t feel like a repeat of the gaming merch template focusing on key characters or iconography, or using heavily illustrated prints,” van Eetvelde said. “Elden Ring was going to be approached not from a traditional asset/graphic perspective, but from a texture, world immersion angle.”
Brilliantly, the design team leaned into “exploration and content discovery” which van Eetvelde noted is a key part of Elden Ring gameplay. From there, two visual themes emerged: maps and the Tarnished aesthetic. “The map is so beautifully made,” van Eetvelde said, “The challenge was a technical one at that point, as getting it to look vibrant and detailed on different fabrics took a few tries.” The resulting “Our Lands Between Bomber Jacket,” however, is pretty wild—a “seemingly infinite print” of the in-game map, swirling colors across the model’s torso. The Tarnished aesthetic shows in the distressed but robust crewnecks, which van Eetvelde suggested mimic how players start out their Elden Ring experiences. “You start at the bottom in the game, your clothes are ragged. It’s rough, like in most FromSoftware experiences, but there’s also that robustness, that persistence of getting up and dusting yourself off, death after death.”
The future of video game fashion
With individual items ranging from $145 to $2500, it’s a gorgeous—albeit pricey—collection that elevates game-related fashion, and according to its chief designer, The Lands Between is just the beginning for ARK/8. The Elden Ring collection is the brand’s “guinea pig,” according to van Eetvelde—he gave me a sneak peek at a cool, splashy Overwatch drop coming soon that features a D.Va bodysuit I simply must have and a very cool Genji-inspired zip-up.
Image: ARK/8
“ARK/8’s mission is to establish a platform to elevate the conversation around gaming and the incredible art, music and narratives that underpin these amazing entertainment creations,” van Eetvelde said. “There’s a constant to it, it’s not just a one-off like most collabs. Fashion is a way to express our passion and show gaming in a new light.”
During our chat, he cited a few other examples of the somewhat dissonant worlds of fashion and gaming meeting and making something incredible. “I liked the Han Kjobenhavn X Diablo IV runway pieces for example, as they did push the envelope. I think the LOEWE X GHIBLI one was also really good because Jonathan Anderson really has a passion for Ghibli movies and it reflects on the whole collection. It’s brimming with details and complex executions. I want to see more of that.”
For game developers and fashion brands, ARK/8’s ethos can and should be mined for future collaborations. I want to see more high-concept runway pieces, more elevated streetwear looks, and less gaudy, ironed-on 1-Up mushrooms and zip-up sweatshirts meant to look like Samus’ power suit. Video games are visual marvels, brimming with color and creativity—lets make more clothes and accessories that speak to that.
Sunset Boulevard might be getting its own orb-like structure that doubles as a billboard and broadcasting space, but the project is not trying to be the next Sphere. The Las Vegas venue has its ginormous globular eye on it.
The proposed project was previously named “The Sphere,” but its legal spokesperson, Wayne Avrashow, told The Times his clients were contacted by representatives of Sphere in Las Vegas, “who informed us that there was the potential of conflict and confusion.”
Avrashow said his clients would, as a result, change the name of the project, though they haven’t yet landed on a new moniker.
“We will do that internally and in consultation with the city,” Avrashow said.
In a statement to The Times, Sphere Entertainment said, “We will defend our products against any entity that purposefully tries to steal our IP and trade off of Sphere’s worldwide recognition.”
Similar names aside, Sphere is a dome-shaped structure and Vegas’ newest performance venue, and the West Hollywood project is spherical in shape. Sphere’s outer shell is an LED screen that displays images of a blinking eyeball, the Earth and artificial-intelligence-generated art by Refik Anadol.
The Las Vegas building reaches 366 feet high and 516 feet wide. The West Hollywood structure would be a great deal smaller, at 49 feet in diameter.
If approved, the new structure would sit between the Pendry West Hollywood and Best Western hotels on 8410 Sunset Blvd.
The project is still in its early stages. It’s undergoing review by the city of West Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard Arts & Advertising subcommittee.
Included in the proposed development are three billboards. Two would be placed on the surface of the circular structure, replacing two digital billboards currently at the site; the third is described as a “discreet vertical billboard.”
According to the project documents, the orb would be built onto an existing apartment building whose entrance is on De Longpre Avenue, which runs parallel to Sunset Boulevard.
The proposed glass sphere would have “exterior pedestrian-oriented amenities and interior spaces built around broadcasting in real time.”
The structure itself would have three levels and hover eight feet above a privately owned public-oriented plaza at the ground level, with an existing basement level below.
It’s proposed that two of the three levels house a green room and rooms for broadcasting and podcasting.
The next steps for the project are further review by the Arts & Advertising subcommittee in January, where applicants are expected to provide information on topics including potential light pollution from the project and how the building would be maintained.
Then the project eventually would go before the city planning commission and City Council.
Call of Duty fans’ passions run hot when it comes to the series’ multiplayer maps, which have been the topic of discussion and controversy since United Offensive, the 2004 expansion pack that added multiplayer to the original Call of Duty. Maps are so integral to the Call of Duty experience, so important to each new game’s success, that favorites often get spruced-up and re-released—the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, for instance, is bringing back every single map from 2009 smash Modern Warfare 2.
Some maps in Call of Duty’s extensive multiplayer offerings are thoroughly mid (Quarry) or downright awful (Piccadilly, honey, I’m sorry), but many CoD maps represent the absolute best in video game level design, with distinct movement lanes, great sightlines, and beautiful visuals. These maps are the GOATs, the standouts, the reminders that the franchise is so popular for a reason, and today I’ve tried to pick the 10 best of the bunch.
A lot of the maps on my list are on the smaller end, as smaller maps tend to highlight the best features of CoD’s multiplayer mechanics and gunplay. And many of them are also “three-lane” maps, which describe setups that offer three different directions for players to take from their spawn points, which are often divided by buildings or obstacles that nearly cut them off from one another, but don’t completely isolate them.
You’ll also find that these maps are all from older Call of Duty games—that’s because I believe more recent titles (like Modern Warfare 2019 and Vanguard) have larger, more visually complicated maps that don’t play to the series’ strengths. CoD is at its best when it’s a little frenetic, a little chaotic, and a ton of fun—and running through maps that have myriad sightlines and far too many directions to get attacked from is only fun in Warzone, not multiplayer.
Ready? Here are the 10 best Call of Duty maps of all time, in no particular order.
Economists don’t much like presidential-campaign seasons. For them, it’s a bit like seeing their manicured gardens getting trampled by schoolchildren having a water-balloon fight.
Robert Brusca, the president of consulting firm FAO Economics, predicted that the political discussion of the U.S. economy in the 2024 campaign would be “a farce.”
Talk of inflation is likely to dominate the Aug. 23 Republican debate, for example.
Republicans, eager to lay the blame for higher prices at the feet of President Joe Biden, are going to make the strongest case they can for that. For them, it is a happy coincidence that inflation started to pick up right when Biden was sworn into office.
Larry Kudlow, a former top economic adviser to President Donald Trump, put it succinctly. “I have numbers. The consumer-price index is up 16% since February 2021. Groceries are up 19%. Meat and poultry up 19%. New cars up 20%. Used cars up 34%,” Kudlow said in an interview on the Fox Business Network.
Unlike Kudlow, the Federal Reserve doesn’t usually measure inflation over 29 months. Instead, the central bank favors using inflation data that looks at the past 12 months.
By that year-over-year measure, CPI is up 3.2%. Groceries are up 3.6%. Meat and poultry prices are up 0.5%. New-vehicle prices are up 3.5%, but prices of used cars and trucks are actually down 5.6%.
Economists, meanwhile, tend to like even shorter measures, such as the three-month annualized rate. They think the 12-month rate says more about the rate a year ago than it does about what is happening today.
“Looking at year-over-year [data], the only new piece of information is the current month. You are looking at 11 months that you already know,” said Omair Sharif, president and founder of research company Inflation Insights.
Using the shorter metric, headline CPI for the three months ending in July is up 1.9%, while food at home rose 1.1% and meat and poultry is down 4.5%, he said.
Trends have been favorable in recent months, but that might not last. “It’s been a good summer,” Sharif said. “But unfortunately, the winter data won’t be as pleasant.”
What caused the spike in inflation?
Economists tend not to blame one political party or the other for spikes in inflation.
In the 1970s, for example, the culprit was increases in oil prices by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
This time, there was no one single factor. While the debate is not yet over, economists tend to focus on the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the move to end reliance on fossil fuels in order to combat climate change.
Brian Bethune, an economics professor at Boston College, said prices started to rise when the healthcare industry had to adjust to a new, unforeseen risk. There were steep costs to dealing with the deadly coronavirus and developing vaccines.
People working in frontline industries were able to command higher wages. And demand outstripped supply for many things, as shelves were emptied by consumers and supply chains were strained.
Bethune also stressed recent moves toward renewable energy. The best way to explain inflation to your grandmother, he said, is to look at a chart of electricity prices.
Uncredited
The steady increase stems from efforts to move closer to a carbon-free economy, Bethune said. And those prices get passed along “right through the whole cost pressure of the economy,” including the price of refrigerated foods.
Inflation boomed and is now coming off its peak, said Brusca of FAO Economics. Prices are still rising, but not at the same rapid clip. And they won’t roll back to prepandemic levels.
“Consumers are caught in a trap,” he said. “If prices are going to come down, you have got to have deflation.”
Deflation comes with its own unique set of woes. It can make the cost of borrowed money, like mortgages, much more expensive. And it can lead to serious economic weakness.
“All of this is why the Fed targets price stability,” Brusca said.
