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Current as of Sept. 21, 2020, at 7:45 a.m.
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COVID-19 Testing Sites in Florida
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Drive-Thru Testing sites available are listed by county. Each walk up site can test up to 200 individuals per day. Access the list here.
Safe. Smart. Step-by-Step.
Graphs, Charts, and Real-time Tracking of COVID-19
Data Sources
Data Sources on Social Media
Other Resources
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Current Statistics
- Fatality rate in Florida - 2.0%
- Covid fatality rate in FL by age group:
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15-24 years old - .03%
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25-34 years old - .07%
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35-44 years old - .21%
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45-54 years old - .51%
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55-64 years old - 1.6%
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65-74 years old - 5.4%
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75 and up - 17.1%
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Seasonal influenza mortality rate in the US (2017 CDC) 18-49 yo - .02%
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Median age of new Covid cases - 36 years old
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Emergency department visits w/ COVID-like illness - 19% decrease
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ICU beds available in Florida - 26%
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Hospital beds available in Florida - 28%
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Vaccine Tracking
Last updated: September 18, 2020 10:15 PM PST
212
vaccines are in development.
33
are now in clinical testing.
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The opening of the NFL season last weekend represented a milestone of sorts for sports. The NFL was one of the last major professional sports leagues to get back into action in the Covid-19 world. With lockdowns beginning last March in Europe and Asia and then spreading to the United States and elsewhere, sports leagues worldwide paused as the virus fanned out, and the cancellation of games cost leagues billions of dollars.
The road back, starting in early May with soccer in Germany, seemed fraught with peril, as critics—including sportswriters, medical experts, players, and politicians—warned that it was dangerous and irresponsible to start up again. Since then, the coronavirus has loomed heavily over the coverage of pro sports, with practically every case of a player testing positive making headlines.
What’s received much less attention, however, are the medical outcomes. Despite hundreds of thousands of tests, vanishingly few serious cases have been reported among professional athletes. Most players testing positive had apparently few or no symptoms.
Considering the fears and uncertainties the leagues have faced, it’s a remarkable story—one that much of the media has strangely seemed uninterested in telling. Why?
There was no shortage of drama and even panic as the sports world confronted Covid earlier this year. A March headline in the New York Times sports section asked ominously, “Does Coronavirus Mean the End of Sports as We Know Them?” The Washington Post warned, “No Sports Until 2021? It’s Possible.” As talk emerged of how and when professional leagues might get restarted, the San Jose Mercury News demanded, “Shut Down Sports During COVID-19 Pandemic.”
Some political leaders concurred. At the end of April, French president Emmanuel Macron, not waiting to see how the virus played out in Europe, announced that he was cancelling the already-suspended season of Ligue 1, the country’s top soccer league.
Reports added that Macron was lobbying other European nations to follow suit. A week later, when Germany’s top soccer league, the Bundesliga, announced that it would attempt to come back later that month, Macron apparently tried to get German officials to shut it down. Later, when it became clear that authorities in most countries wouldn’t let fans return to games, media critics found yet another reason not to go forward. “Sports without fans will be dreadful, and we all know it,” the Chicago Tribune argued. “Write off the 2020 season.”
As the leagues got ready to reopen, most teams gave players the opportunity to opt out. A few with worries, such as players with babies at home or with underlying health conditions, took advantage of the offers, but most didn’t. Professional athletes are among the healthiest and best-cared for people on the planet, with few of the health problems that produce the worst outcomes from the disease. In the United States, for instance, the Centers for Disease Control has reported that 94 percent of those who died from Covid had contributing factors or characteristics including diabetes, obesity, and cardiac disease—conditions rare among top athletes. One study estimated that just 0.1 percent of all Covid deaths in the U.S. occurred among individuals without underlying conditions between the age of 20 to 29—the age demographic most characteristic of professional athletes. Even so, the press was filled with doubts from media critics and others. USA Today devoted a story to NFL legend Joe Montana’s claim in August that he would have opted out of playing because “this thing is killing people everywhere.”
From the moment sports started back up, the media seemed alarmed, or determined to alarm its audience. When ten German soccer players tested positive just days after officials announced plans to restart the league, the news caromed around the world. England’s Premier League did 14 rounds of Covid testing between the middle of May, when teams began training again, and mid-July—and each round that brought even a single positive test was followed by extensive headlines. In the U.S., the NBA and the professional men’s and women’s soccer leagues took a different approach from Europe, putting players in isolation in training camp-type environments and playing all games in a few nearby venues.
Still, just making it into these so-called “bubbles” seemed a race against time; 25 NBA players tested positive in the weeks leading up to their isolation. The wisdom of trying to play games seemed doubtful when an outbreak of cases on the Miami Marlins baseball team prompted Major League Baseball to cancel a series of games. “As More Players Test Positive, Can MLB Be Trusted to Protect Them?” the Los Angeles Times asked.
Virtually all this reporting exclusively involved positive tests. But even calling these “cases,” as the media often do, is a stretch, because that implies disease or a condition where medical treatment is needed. The truth: actual cases have been rare, at least as far as we know. Few statistics exist on this because many leagues, often in the name of protecting player privacy, have offered little follow-up to their announcements about test results. What’s clear from the statistics that are made available, though, is that the infection rate for those athletes involved in return to play is vanishingly small, and that they may have been more protected by resuming work with their teams, especially as societies gradually reopened. The Premier League, for instance, ran some 20,500 tests in its 14 rounds between the middle of May and mid-July. According to the league’s own website, only 20 players tested positive, a rate of just 0.1 percent, or about one in 1,000 tests—lower than most estimates for the virus’s spread throughout the general population.
In the rare cases where more detailed reporting is available, it’s notable that even among the small number of positive cases, few players developed symptoms. Though news of the first ten German players to test positive prompted speculation that the league would call off the restart, none of those ten displayed symptoms. Shortly before the European women’s Champions League was to resume in mid-August, officials announced five positive tests among players at Spain’s Athletico Madrid, but subsequent reporting showed that all five were asymptomatic. When 16 NBA players tested positive in late June heading to the league’s “bubble” in Orlando, league commissioner Adam Silver noted all were either asymptomatic or displayed mild symptoms.
Given the media alarm about mere positive results, it’s unlikely that many actual cases would have gone unreported in the press, especially if they involved something as serious as hospitalizations. Yet searching worldwide databases of news articles, one can find few accounts of professional athletes who developed anything remotely approaching grave sickness. In March, 30-year-old Brazilian soccer player Dorielton, playing in China’s second division of professional soccer, was hospitalized after falling sick while away in Bangok after his league suspended play due to the virus. In late April, 23-year-old French soccer player Junior Sambia was hospitalized for Covid while Ligue I was suspended; doctors later placed him in an induced coma. He recovered and returned to training with his team in mid-June.
But with each new stage in the worldwide return-to-play, the media’s largely speculative panic has amped up. The NFL’s new season represents the latest danger because, as the argument goes, many players are highly vulnerable. An early August article in the Charlotte Observer, for instance, labeled nearly half the players on the Carolina Panthers at “severe risk” from Covid because of underlying conditions. The chief problem, the article said, was that many players are obese, and that makes them twice as likely to be hospitalized from the virus as the general population, research shows. Obesity is clinically defined as individuals with a body mass index higher than 30, which describes many of the footballers. Yet professional athletes are hardly representative of the average “obese” person because the players are often highly conditioned.
The article quoted the players’ union medical director saying that it was a myth that being in shape would protect NFL players—yet in scientific circles, criticism of the BMI index for precisely this reason are common. “BMI doesn’t take into account the increased weight of muscle compared with fat—some athletes have high BMIs, despite being very fit, for example,” an article from Britain’s National Health Service points out. The Observer article offered the example of Denver Broncos linebacker Von Miller, who contracted Covid in the spring and had difficulty breathing. But Miller has asthma, a condition far less common among athletes than a BMI above 30.
The NFL offered players the choice to opt out of the season and still get paid—$350,000 if a player is considered to have risk factors and $150,000 if he has none. Some 67 players did so by the deadline in late July. Meantime, among those playing, the NFL conducted nearly 45,000 tests at the end of August—with just one positive.
Exactly why sports media have been so uninterested in the success that most leagues have had in getting started again is unclear—but many fans have noticed. Clay Travis, the radio host, sportswriter, and founder of the iconoclastic sports website Outkick, has dubbed sports journalists who relentlessly lobby to shut down sports “coronabros.” In a Twitter poll he hosted, some 77 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that sports media are “rooting against sports coming back.” When journalist Darren Rovell, who covers sports and business and has been among those accused by Travis of being a “coronabro,” brought the survey to his Twitter followers, 48 percent agreed with Travis’s statement.
Many leagues in Europe are already getting ready for another season, having finished their suspended ones over the summer. That should produce a burst of optimism. Yet headlines more often warn, “New Premier League season at risk of chaos” and “Covid chaos.” When six players from French soccer team PSG tested positive after going on vacation, a headlined proclaimed, “PSG decimated by coronavirus,” though all seemed asymptomatic and quickly returned after quarantine.
Maybe with the NFL’s heavier-than-average players, or with cold-weather virus conditions returning in Europe and the U.S., the media’s coronabros will yet have their day. Still, it’s striking to watch a substantial part of the sports media bet against itself and the industry that it covers. Between the hyper-politicization of the players themselves and the media’s apparent desire to shut down the games, it’s a strange time to be a sports fan.
Nearly one third of recorded Covid-19 victims in July and August actually died from other causes, Oxford Uni researchers have found.
Around 30 per cent of coronavirus fatalities died primarily from other conditions, the team's startling analysis shows.
The researchers found that anyone who suffered from a heart attack or died in a car crash may have been included in the Office for National Statistics' figures if they had tested positive for the respiratory disease.
People may also have been recorded as Covid victims if medics believed the virus exacerbated an underlying condition.
In July and August, the disease was not actually the main cause of the death in 28.8 per cent of all registered coronavirus fatalities.
That figure is 7.8 per cent since the start of the pandemic earlier this year, the Telegraph reports.
This comes after the World Health Organisation (WHO) said deaths should not be recorded as Covid-related if the virus did not cause the fatality even if it appeared as a “significant condition”.
Oxford University's team uncovered the figures after comparing registered deaths where Covid was not the main cause to the ONS data.
They fear the problem with overcounting will get worse as more people contract the coronavirus.
Dr Jason Oke, of the Centre of Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford, said people had been dying “with” the disease rather than “from” it.
He said: “At the beginning of the epidemic we only saw this in a few cases, but this is increasing because a lot more people have now had Covid.
"The true death rate is an important thing to know because it gives us an idea of impact.
“The impact now seems to be lessening, and if that is true – which it certainly looks like at the moment, because there doesn’t seem to be the same fatality rate – then that will guide decisions in managing risk, so it's important to get this number right."
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Florida’s monthly unemployment rate plunged to an unexpected 7.4% in August as businesses across the state reopened from COVID-19 lockdowns and recalled large numbers of workers.
The state Department of Economic Opportunity said Florida’s nonagricultural employment totaled 8,525,100 last month, an increase of 57,900 jobs over July, when the jobless rate was 11.3%.
A total of 753,000 Floridians were jobless in labor force of 10,138,000, the agency said in its monthly jobs report released Friday.
All three South Florida counties saw their jobless rates dip below double digits, with Broward’s falling to 8.1% from 14.5% in July. Palm Beach County’s rate dipped to 8% from 11.6%, while Miami-Dade’s fell to 9.3% from 13.3%, the DEO said.
“The unemployment rate’s return to the single digits, Phase 2 reopenings and an uptick in hiring for the tourist season suggest that recovery is gaining some traction,” said Julia Dattolo, interim president and CEO of CareerSource Palm Beach County, the nonprofit job search agency.
But the state has lost 456,100 jobs since August 2019, a decrease of 5.1%. The latest jobless rate was still substantially higher than a year ago, when 4.4% of Floridians in the workforce were in the market for jobs.
“In a normal year a 7.4% unemployment rate would be a huge cause for concern,” said William Luther an economist and assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University’s College of Business. “But just a few months ago we were staring down the barrel of a 19% unemployment rate. That we are back to 7.4% so quickly is good news. It doesn’t mean that everything is okay today. A lot of people are still unemployed. Some of those people don’t have jobs to return to because businesses have failed or down-scaled.”
Although most industries showed job recoveries between July and August, the numbers were not nearly enough to contribute to a strong year-over-year rebound.
For example, leisure and hospitality, among the hardest hit by the pandemic, showed a gain of 2,600 jobs month to month. But when measured against August 2019, those jobs declined by 289,400.
The same applied to the trade, transportation and utilities sector, a category that showed a month-to-month gain of 6,600 jobs, but a year-over-year decline of 54,500, according to DEO figures.
In a news briefing Friday, Adrienne Johnston, the DEO’s chief of the bureau of labor market statistics, said the decline in unemployment reflected the reopening of businesses and the ability of many parents to return to work because their children are going to back to school.
“We know that the schools will be starting to open back up even though they were moving to virtual," she said. "I think that’s a significant factor that contributed to this. It opened opportunities for parents to go back to work as well.”
Johnston said those returning to work may not be filling the same jobs they left after the pandemic hit. But the key, she said, "is that people are getting back into the labor market and they are getting back into jobs. That is what the rest of the country is experiencing.”
And staffing firms are seeing significant improvements in demand for financial professionals and workers with skills in manufacturing, construction and real estate, said Chad Leibundguth, district president of Robert Half in Florida and Louisiana.
“The West Palm Beach-Fort Lauderdale area seems to be moving along pretty fast," he said. "The Miami market may be a little bit slower because of the COVID rates down there. But you go up north to Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton and West Palm, and that market seems to be picking up quite a bit of steam.”
This month, Florida informed the U.S. Department of Labor that fewer layoffs have been occurring in the agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, construction, manufacturing, wholesale trade, retail trade and service industries.
But available jobs in tourism and transportation — the chief engines of the tri-county area’s economy — are likely to take a hit if the airlines make good on their pledge to start cutting staffs on Oct. 1, the first day they are allowed to do so under payroll-financing agreements they cut with the U.S. Government.
Besides continued hotel and restaurant furloughs, rental car agencies are shedding employees as they adjust to expected downturns in year-over-year visits by tourists. This week, for example, statewide staff reduction notices placed by Avis Budget appeared on the DEO’s list of layoff notices.
Compared with the rest of the state, South Florida’s job market remains at a disadvantage after Gov. Ron DeSantis delayed authorizations for the economies of Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties to ease public health restrictions and reopen businesses that rely on person-to-person contact. The upshot has been double-digit unemployment rates in all three counties throughout the summer.
Yet, the state and regional job markets are recovering from the pandemic-driven lockdowns, economists say. But employment won’t return to pre-pandemic levels for at least another two to three years.
“Job growth will help ease the damage to the labor market from the lockdown,” said Sean Snaith, director of the Institute for Economic Forecasting at the University of Central Florida in a recent report. “But the road to recovery will take several years. The economy was closing in on full employment, with acceleration of wage growth before the self-inflicted recession took its toll.”
Eventually, he said, the state’s unemployment rate will drop below 4% to as low as 3.9% — by 2023.
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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who served for 27 years on the U.S. Supreme Court, has passed away.
When her longtime friend and fellow opera fan, Justice Antonin Scalia, died in February 2016, Ginsburg lamented that the high court would be a “paler place” without her ideological opponent and debate partner.
The court will be an even paler place without Ginsburg too. She died Friday after a long struggle with cancer. She was 87.
“Saturday Night Live” introduced a Ginsburg character with the catchphrase “Ya just got Ginsburned!” and the animated TV show “Futurama” has a character, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Head, that says things like “You Ruth Bader believe it!”
In short, the public became invested in Ginsburg in a way that’s unmatched for Supreme Court justices.
After the news broke that she had been hospitalized for broken ribs in November 2018, supporters took to Twitter offering to donate their ribs or launch a GoFundMe fundraising site to purchase a giant bubble to keep the fragile justice safe.
Long before she became a cultural icon, though, Ginsburg was a formidable force, a feminist trailblazer who inspired women across the ideological spectrum, and a towering individual–despite her diminutive stature–who commanded respect and admiration from all who knew her.
On opening night at the opera, the crowd would rise to its feet in raucous applause when she entered the room, and singers were giddy at the prospect of getting their photograph taken with her following the performance.
Ginsburg’s jurisprudence also left a lot to be desired for conservatives. During a joint interview, Scalia once quipped about his dear friend, “What’s not to like–except her views on the law[?]”
As we prepare for what may be the most contentious showdown over a Supreme Court vacancy in history, it is right that we take a moment to review the legacy of a giant in the legal profession: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
To paraphrase William Shakespeare, we shall not look upon her like again.
She was born Joan Ruth Bader in Brooklyn, New York, on March 15, 1933. Her mother worked in a garment factory and her father in the fur trade. Her mother was a strong figure in her life—placing a premium on education and teaching the future justice the importance of controlling her emotions and being independent.
After her mother passed away from cancer while Ruth was in high school, she went on to Cornell University, finishing first in her class. It is also where she met her future husband, Marty Ginsburg. They married and started a family before she joined him at Harvard Law School in 1956.
Ginsburg was one of nine female students in a class of 500. The dean of the law school allegedly asked these women to “justify taking a place … that otherwise would have gone to a man.” Ginsburg is said to have replied, “I’m at Harvard to learn about [my husband’s] work. So that I might be a more patient and understanding wife.”
This self-deprecating remark notwithstanding, Ginsburg excelled as a student, becoming the first female member of the prestigious Harvard Law Review.
While at Harvard, Marty was diagnosed with testicular cancer, and she attended his classes and helped him complete school while raising their daughter Jane and continuing her own studies. Upon Marty’s graduation, the family moved to New York City, and Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School to complete her degree, finishing in a tie for first place in her class.
Despite her outstanding academic record, and much like her contemporary Sandra Day O’Connor, Ginsburg struggled to find employment upon graduation in 1959. She eventually landed a clerkship with Judge Edmund Palmieri, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and went on to teach at the Rutgers and Columbia law schools.
At the time, she was one of the few tenure-track female law professors in the country, and she eventually became the first female tenured professor at Columbia Law School, where her daughter Jane Ginsburg teaches today.
In 1972, Ginsburg started the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project, where she devised a successful litigation strategy for advancing women’s rights in the law that both President Bill Clinton and Scalia aptly compared to the storied legacy of Thurgood Marshall in advancing the cause of African Americans.
She argued six sex discrimination cases before the Supreme Court, winning five, including the landmark Reed v. Reed (1971) in which the court held that the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex.
In order to advance women’s equality, her strategy was to attack laws that discriminated against men. For example, in Frontiero v. Richardson (1973), Ginsburg successfully challenged a statute that provided benefits to the wives of service members on behalf of a married female Air Force officer.
During the Supreme Court argument, she declared, quoting abolitionist and suffragette Sarah Grimké: “I ask no favor for my sex. … All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”
In reminiscing about her role in this movement during a 1988 commencement speech, Ginsburg was characteristically modest, stating that
the litigation of the 1970s helped unsettle previously accepted conceptions of men’s and women’s separate spheres, and thereby added impetus to efforts ongoing in the political arena to advance women’s opportunities and stature. An appeal to courts at that time could not have been expected to do much more.
Her career took a different turn in April 1980 when President Jimmy Carter nominated Ginsburg to the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where she would serve for 13 years. Following Justice Byron White’s retirement in the summer of 1993, Clinton nominated Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. The Senate confirmed her by a vote of 96-3, and Ginsburg became the second woman to serve on our nation’s highest court.
Once there, she quickly became known for her work ethic and commitment to the job. While it’s common today for a new justice to be assigned a relatively straightforward case for his or her first majority opinion, Ginsburg’s first opinion, John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co. v. Harris Trust & Savings Bank (1993), involved a particularly thorny issue of statutory interpretation that drew dissenting votes from Justices Clarence Thomas, O’Connor, and Anthony Kennedy. By comparison, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh both wrote short unanimous opinions for their maiden Supreme Court majority opinions.
In subsequent terms, Ginsburg often was the first out of the gate to author a majority opinion, sometimes referring to herself as “Rapid Ruth” for the speed with which she could crank out opinions. Ginsburg dedicated herself wholeheartedly to the job.
Until 2019, she never missed an oral argument—a remarkable testament to her commitment to the job given that she previously battled cancer in 1999 and 2009, lost her beloved husband in 2010, and underwent a heart procedure in 2014. Even when hospitalized for a gallbladder infection during the COVID-19 pandemic, she participated in oral arguments, asking questions from her hospital bed.
Following the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens in 2010, Ginsburg enjoyed the most senior position on the court’s “liberal” wing. Throughout President Barack Obama’s administration, she fended off calls for her retirement, pointing first to Justice Louis Brandeis’ service until age 82 and then to Stevens’ own service until 90 as benchmarks.
Ginsburg occasionally courted controversy. She made headlines for publicly commenting on a range of hot-button cases while they were pending in the federal judiciary, chastising her male colleagues for having a “blind spot” on women’s issues, and criticizing then-candidate Donald Trump and joking that she might move to New Zealand if he was elected. She later walked back her statements and, of course, never moved.
On occasion, Ginsburg joined her conservative colleagues in various opinions. She often teamed up with Scalia and Thomas in the area of criminal law.
For example, she joined Scalia and Thomas in dissent from the court’s decision not to hear Jones v. United States (2014), involving the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial, and she joined Scalia’s majority opinion in Kyllo v. United States (2001), finding that police use of a thermal-imaging device constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment.
In Michigan v. Bay Mills Indian Community (2014), Ginsburg joined Thomas, Scalia, and Alito in dissent over the court’s extension of tribal sovereign immunity to prohibit suits over a tribe’s commercial activities outside its territory. And she wrote for a unanimous court in Cutter v. Wilkinson (2005), upholding a federal law that bars the government from burdening prisoners’ religious exercise against an Establishment Clause challenge.
When Time magazine honored Ginsburg in 2015 by naming her one of the 100 most influential people in the world, Scalia wrote that it was “apparent for all to see” that Ginsburg’s opinions were “always thoroughly considered, always carefully crafted and almost always correct (which is to say we sometimes disagree).”
But, Scalia added, “[w]hat only her colleagues know is that her suggestions improve the opinions the rest of us write, and that she is a source of collegiality and good judgment in all our work.”
Requiescat in pace.
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