In the most heroic act of journalism since George Smalley's horse took a bullet at Antietam, Nick Welsh showed up for duty on Newsmakers TV on Friday despite suffering the miseries of a bout against Covid.
As the Omicron variants cuts like a scythe through Santa Barbara County, testing the capacity of hospitals, medical professionals and ICU units, the Angry Poodle his own self was stricken with the Covid this week. Intrepid reporter that he is, he nonetheless joined the gang from quarantine to reprise his reporting on how the latest tortuous twist of the pandemic has hit health workers -- including more than 100 nurses and other workers at Cottage Hospital and one-fifth the staff of Santa Barbara Neighborhood Clinics.
As for the ongoing economic impacts, Josh Molina has the latest on the outrage among State Street restaurant owners, who are fuming about a proposed new ordinance to widen the promenade to twenty feet for public safety reasons, forcing business owners to spend major bucks to retrofit outdoor dining structures for which they've already shelled out tens of thousands.
And Ryan P. Cruz details his jaw-dropping Indy piece about new forecasts showing a looming crisis in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease patients, whose numbers are expected to double, in Santa Barbara and across California, in less than 20 years, with Latino families being particularly hard hit amid an expected dearth of services.
Plus: a look at the Independent's in-depth cover package about the demise of the oil industry in the county; the latest on the wide-open competition for the Second District Board of Supervisors seat; a look at the many unanswered questions about the first elections by district for the Santa Barbara Unified School District and the Historic Landmarks Commission's finicky dismantling of a long-in-the-works plan to upgrade De La Guerra Plaza.
All here, right now on Newsmakers TV.
JR
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time to recall the city council, leave the dinning alone for another year or at least until the dictator rescinds this unilateral emergency power and sets us free again.