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- Written by: Lake County News reports
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – The Lake County Sheriff’s Office this week took a Lucerne man into custody on multiple felony charges after a witness identified him as the gunman in a noninjury drive-by shooting on Saturday at Highland Springs Reservoir.
Michael Anthony Dore, 18, was arrested on Monday following a traffic stop, according to Lt. Corey Paulich.
The investigation that led to Dore’s arrest began on Sunday. At 5 p.m. that day, Paulich said the sheriff’s office was contacted by a male subject who reported that his residence in Lakeport had been burglarized sometime between Sept. 18 and 20, and several firearms were taken.
Paulich said the burglary victim believed Dore was responsible for the theft as he had recently been at the residence.
Deputies contacted Dore at his residence in Lucerne and questioned him about the burglary. Paulich said Dore denied any involvement with the theft of the firearms and consented to a search of his residence. Deputies located several types of ammunition but did not locate any firearms.
Then, at approximately 9:30 p.m. on Sunday, the burglary victim contacted deputies telling them Dore had recently shot at a male subject at Highland Springs Reservoir. The burglary victim was able to provide information related to the identity of the person Dore shot at, Paulich said.
Paulich said deputies were able to contact the shooting victim, who told them that at 11 p.m. Saturday he was attending a party at Highland Springs Reservoir. A vehicle drove towards him and he saw Dore was a passenger. Dore pointed a handgun at him, fired three shots at his feet and then left the area.
At 1:10 a.m. Monday, a sheriff’s deputy conducted a traffic stop on a vehicle for traffic violations on Highway 20 near 16th Avenue in Lucerne. Paulich said the driver of the vehicle was Dore. Paulich said the deputy questioned Dore regarding the shooting at Highland Springs Reservoir. Dore admitted to being at the reservoir but denied shooting at anyone.
Dore was arrested and booked at the Lake County Jail on charges related to the shooting, Paulich said.
At 7:30 a.m. Monday, employees from the Lake County Public Services Department reported finding a loaded firearm near the Lucerne Community Garden, which was near the location where Dore had been stopped in his vehicle, Paulich said.
Paulich said a sheriff’s deputy recovered the Glock handgun and discovered it had been reported stolen almost a year ago from a residence in Lucerne.
The deputy contacted Dore at the jail and questioned him about the gun. Paulich said Dore admitted throwing the gun out of his vehicle just prior to being stopped by the deputy.
Dore told the deputy he had found the gun in an old marijuana grow in Upper Lake approximately a year ago, Paulich said.
Dore remains in custody at the Lake County Jail on charges of carrying a loaded firearm in public, possession of a stolen firearm, shooting from a vehicle, assault with a deadly weapon, carrying a concealed firearm, and removing serial numbers from a firearm. His bail is currently set at $250,000.
Anyone who has information about the shooting at Highland Springs Reservoir is asked to contact Det. Richard Kreutzer at 707-262-4233.
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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
The Tuesday morning vote was unanimous, with Rob Brown and Bruno Sabatier – who had voted against the ordinance last month – joining the rest of the board, explaining that they wanted to follow the normal verification process, which would ultimately determine whether or not the board needs to take action.
The other option was for the board to vote to rescind the ordinance, passed on Aug. 18. It was to have gone into effect 30 days from approval but it is now suspended because of the referendum petition’s submission, said County Counsel Anita Grant.
The ordinance, set to sunset on Oct. 1, 2021, unless the board extended it, would enforce state and local Public Health orders related to COVID-19, including masking, social distancing, mandated hygiene requirements and failure to close specific business sectors when required.
A combination of education and training is to be the first approach for compliance before using an administrative fine process of up to $100 for a first violation, up to $200 for a second violation of the same ordinance within one year of the first violation and not more than $500 for each additional violation of the same ordinance within one year of the first violation.
The ordinance only applies to the unincorporated county, Grant pointed out Tuesday.
“There are existing administrative fine ordinances in both the city of Lakeport and the city of Clearlake, which have been in effect for some time,” said Grant. “Those are unaffected.”
The board’s discussion of the matter came on the same day that Public Health Officer Dr. Gary Pace released a video in which he said that Lake County’s recent increase in COVID-19 cases has landed it in the state’s most restrictive tier in its recovery blueprint, and so could see new restrictions implemented if numbers don’t improve over the next two weeks.
Over the past week, the county’s COVID-19 caseload grew by nearly 100 to a total of 516 on Tuesday, with four deaths reported for the week, for an overall total of 11.
County Administrative Officer Carol Huchingson said her office received the referendum petition on Sept. 16. Approximately 2,507 signatures were submitted.
During the meeting, Frank Dollosso, who filed the petition, said he collected more than 400 additional signatures to make sure there were enough.
Huchingson told the board that it would likely want to have the Registrar of Voters Office verify the signatures. The registrar has 30 working days from the petition’s submission to determine if it’s sufficient.
If there were enough qualified signatures, Registrar of Voters Maria Valadez would then certify the results to the board, at which time the board could rescind the ordinance in its entirety or present it to the county’s voters.
If there aren’t enough signatures, Huchingson said the board would need to take no action and the ordinance would take effect.
Board supports following the established process
During public comment, several members of the audience, both those speaking in person in the board chambers and those taking part virtually, wanted to return to the debate over the effectiveness of masking and other measures that have been directed at the state level to protect against COVID-19, and which Lake County has adopted in its own health orders.
The supervisors also heard from concerned residents that the enforcement ordinance is pitting businesses and people against each other, with businesses reporting some customers becoming violent and threatening when told they need to comply with masking requirements.
Grant, however, repeatedly reminded the board and public that comments needed to be limited to the agenda item – whether or not to rescind the ordinance or direct signature verification. She said the board didn’t have the ability to change state law.
Bryan Dobrowski, representing a group calling itself the Konocti Patriots, told the board it had a choice, to respect the voice of its constituents and rescind “this ridiculous ordinance” or ignore them.
He followed up by telling Supervisor Tina Scott that they only needed to collect 1,900 signatures to start a recall against her and that they only needed 450 to begin a recall against Board Chair Moke Simon.
Dollosso told the board he filed the referendum because of his issues with the vague language regarding who is responsible for enforcement. He said the ordinance isn’t limited to just masks but any order by local and state health officials.
He said the board had good intentions but went about it the wrong way.
Scott said she was concerned that the petitioners didn’t want the signatures verified, and she and Sabatier both said they wanted to have the Registrar of Voters Office move forward with the verification process.
“The referendum is not complete until the signatures are counted. Right now it’s just a piece of paper that’s unverified,” said Sabatier.
In reference to an unnamed commenter on Zoom who misquoted numbers on tuberculosis deaths as a way of arguing against masking, Sabatier said, “We really need to stop pulling numbers out of our butts that make no sense at all,” offering accurate numbers and asking people to do proper research and reading.
Sabatier also wanted to talk to Valadez about whether or not she would need extra help, as he didn’t want the signature verification process to impede her preparations for the presidential election on Nov. 3.
Pointing out that prior boards have taken similar action with having referendum petition signatures verified, Brown said, “It’s just part of the process.”
In response to Sabatier’s concerns about Valadez needing help, Brown said she could come to the board if she wanted a conversation and needed help.
Brown said that, whether he agreed with the ordinance or not, he joined with the rest of the board in supporting signature verification, saying that simply rescinding it without that step is not how the process works.
“Out of respect for the process, we have to run its course,” he said.
Supervisor EJ Crandell agreed and moved to direct the registrar of voters to conduct the signature verification, which Scott seconded and the board approved 5-0.
The Board of Supervisors last had an ordinance challenged by the referendum process in early 2014 when a petition was filed against Ordinance No. 2997, which the board passed in December 2013 to regulate and restrict the cultivation of medicinal marijuana.
The board voted in February 2014 to put that ordinance on the ballot that June, when voters passed it as Measure N.
Measure N was the third referendum the county faced over a nearly three-year period – from the fall of 2011 to the summer of 2014 – with all of them related to marijuana.
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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – With Lake County seeing a rise in cases in recent weeks, the Public Health officer said Tuesday that the community could face increased restrictions due to moving into a higher tier on the state’s COVID-19 blueprint.
“Recently we have been seeing an upsurge in cases,” Dr. Gary Pace said in a Tuesday video, which can be seen above.
On Tuesday, Lake County’s case total had risen to 516, an increase of 98 – or 23 percent – over the previous Tuesday.
Of those total cases, 97 are active, one is hospitalized and 408 are recovered.
To date, there have been 11 deaths, four in the last week alone and three of those from an outbreak at the Lakeport Post Acute skilled nursing facility.
Pace said Lake County’s case rate as of Tuesday was 8.8 percent, which puts it in the purple tier – the most restrictive – on the state’s Blueprint for a Safer Economy, while the county’s 5.7-percent positivity rate puts in the red tier, the second most restrictive.
While case numbers around the region and state have been improving in recent weeks, Pace said Lake County’s cases have been rising. Those cases include the outbreak at Lakeport Post Acute.
While that outbreak now appears to be slowing down, it has led to a total of seven deaths, Pace said. The facility has a COVID-19 ward and is “following all of the protocols recommended,” he said.
Pace said Public Health currently is analyzing the data to see how much of Lake County’s rate increase is due to the skilled nursing facility outbreak and how much is due to community spread.
He said the outbreak appears to have started with community spread with a worker contracting it outside of the facility and then bringing it to work.
Pace said another facility also has an outbreak. The state identified that second facility – which has both patients and staff with the virus – as Rocky Point Care Center in Lakeport.
For many weeks, Lake County has been in the red tier, the second-most restrictive tier in the Blueprint for a Safer Economy, Pace said.
However, on Tuesday, Pace said the state notified Lake County that its case data has landed it for the first time in the purple tier, the most restrictive.
If Lake County’s case outlook doesn’t improve in two weeks, it will be forced entirely into the purple tier, Pace said.
If that happens, Pace said indoor dining at restaurants and indoor movie theaters must stop, places of worship will have to go to outdoor-only services, with gyms and fitness centers also required to move activities outdoors. Museums also would be closed and retail would only be open at 25-percent capacity, with the exception of essential businesses.
“This could happen as early as next week,” Pace said.
He said the county is talking to the state to see if there might be an exception in its tier ranking due to the skilled nursing facility outbreak. As part of those discussions, the county is seeking another week to prepare in order to bring case numbers down.
“Once we would get on the purple tier, we would have to stay on it for a minimum of three weeks,” he said.
All of Lake County’s six school districts are now open for school, with two districts – Lucerne Elementary and Upper Lake Unified – having in-person classes while the rest are conducting classes online, as Lake County News has reported.
If the state moves Lake County into the purple tier, the schools that are open could remain so, but any other districts would have to wait to open their doors until the county moves back into the red tier, Pace said.
He said the majority of Lake County’s cases continue to happen in households or in social gatherings where people don’t use the proper precautions.
The pandemic and the lockdown have been impacting Lake County for six months and Pace said it’s understandable that people are getting tired of it.
However, he said more is now known about controlling the virus.
Pace said the best way to prevent contracting the virus is to increase precautions, including masking, social distancing and staying away from group settings, including indoor ones.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
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- Written by: Liz Essley Whyte, Center for Public Integrity
The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates betrayals of public trust. Sign up to receive our stories.
As deadly Ebola raged in Africa and threatened the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pinpointed a problem: The agency had many sources of data on the disease but no easy way to combine them, analyze them on a single platform and share the information with partners. It was using several spreadsheets and applications for this work — a process that was “manual, labor-intensive, time-consuming,” according to the agency’s request for proposals to solve the problem. It spent millions building a new platform.
But at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the CDC still struggled to integrate and share data. The system it had built during the Ebola crisis wasn’t up the task. An effort to modernize all of the agency’s data collection and analysis was ongoing: One CDC official told a congressional committee in March that if the agency had modern data infrastructure, it would have detected the coronavirus “much, much sooner” and would have contained it “further and more effectively.”
By April, with coronavirus cases spiking in the U.S. and officials scrambling to wrangle information about the pandemic, the CDC had a proof-of-concept for a new system to pull together all of its various data streams. But it was having trouble figuring out how to securely add users outside the agency, as well as get the funding and political backing needed to expand it, according to two sources with close knowledge of the situation.
So the CDC turned to outsiders for help. Information technology experts at the federal Department of Health and Human Services took control of the project. Five days later, they had a working platform, dubbed HHS Protect, with the ability to combine, search and map scores of datasets on deaths, symptoms, tests, ventilators, masks, local ordinances and more.
The new, multimillion-dollar data warehouse has continued to grow since then; it holds more than 200 datasets containing billions of pieces of information from both public and private sources. And now, aided by artificial intelligence, it is shaping the way the federal government addresses the pandemic, even as it remains a source of contention between quarreling health agencies and a target for transparency advocates who say it’s too secretive.
The Center for Public Integrity is the first to reveal details about how the platform came to be and how it is now being used. Among other things, it helps the White House and federal agencies distribute scarce treatment drugs and supplies, line up patients for vaccine clinical trials, and dole out advice to state and local leaders. Federal officials are starting to use a $20 million artificial intelligence system to mine the mountain of data the platform contains.
People familiar with HHS Protect say it could be the largest advance in public health surveillance in the United States in decades. But until now it has been mostly known as a key example of President Trump’s willingness to sideline CDC scientists: In July, his administration suddenly required hospitals to send information on bed occupancy to the new system instead of the CDC.
The Trump administration has added to the anxiety surrounding HHS Protect by keeping it wrapped in secrecy, refusing to publicly share many of the insights it generates.
“I want to be optimistic that everything is happening here is actually a net improvement,” said Nick Hart, CEO of the Data Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for open government data. “The onus is really on HHS to explain what’s happening and be as transparent as possible... It’s difficult to assess whether it really is headed in the right direction.”
A long history of data frustration
To hear some tell it, the reason behind the CDC’s long struggle to upgrade its data systems can be learned in its name: the Centers — plural — for Disease Control and Prevention. Twelve centers, to be exact, and a jumble of other offices, each with its own expertise and limited funding: the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, for example, or the Center for Preparedness and Response. Scientists at each myopically focus on their own needs and strain to work together on expensive projects to benefit all, such as upgrading shared data systems, experts familiar with the CDC said. A 2019 report from the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists found that the agency had more than 100 stand-alone, disease-specific tracking systems, few of them able to talk to each other, let alone add in outside data that could help responders stanch outbreaks.
“CDC has been doing things a certain way for decades,” said a person familiar with the creation of HHS Protect who was not authorized to speak on the record. “Sometimes epidemiologists are not technologists.”
The U.S. government knew for more than a decade it needed a comprehensive system to collect, analyze and share data in real time if a pandemic reached America’s shores. The 2006 Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act directed federal health officials to build such a system; in 2010 the Government Accountability Office found that they hadn’t. A 2013 version of the law required the same thing; in 2017 the GAO found again that it hadn’t happened. Congress passed another law in 2019 calling for the system yet again. In 2020 the coronavirus struck.
“We’ve had no shortage of events that have demonstrated the importance of bringing together both healthcare and public health information in a usable, deeply accessible platform,” said Dr. Dan Hanfling, a vice president at In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit with ties to the CIA that invests in technology helpful to the government. “We’ve missed the mark.”
In fighting a pandemic, the nation struggles with data at every turn: from collecting information about what’s happening on the ground, to analyzing it, to sharing it to sending information back to the front lines. The CDC still relies on underfunded state health departments using antiquated equipment — even fax machines — to gather some types of information. The agency for years has also had ongoing, formal efforts to upgrade its data processes.
“There’ve been a lot of false starts in this area,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, the head of the CDC during the Obama administration. Frieden blamed money already spent on existing systems and local governments unwilling to make changes, among other reasons. “We had decades of underinvestment in public health at the national, state and local levels, and that includes information systems.”
The CDC attempted to fix at least some of those problems — joining and analyzing and sharing data from disparate sources — with the system it built during Ebola, known as DCIPHER. The system saved the agency thousands of hours of staff time as it responded to a salmonella outbreak and lung injuries from vaping. But it couldn’t keep up with the coronavirus. It was stored on CDC servers instead of the cloud and couldn’t handle the flood of extra data and users needed to fight COVID-19, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation.
So CDC officials handed the proof-of-concept for a new system to the chief information officer of HHS, Jose Arrieta. The CDC was having trouble figuring out how to approve and ensure the identities of new users from outside the agency, such as the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and give them appropriate permissions to view data, according to two sources with close knowledge of the situation. Arrieta and his team solved the technical problems, stitching together eight pieces of commercial software to build the platform and pulling in data from both private and public sources, including the CDC.
“Our goal was to create the best view of what's occurring in the United States as it relates to COVID-19,” said Arrieta, a career civil servant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, speaking for the first time since his sudden departure from HHS in August. He said, and a friend confirmed, that he left his job primarily to spend more time with his young children after months of round-the-clock work. “It changes public health forever.”
HHS Protect now helps federal agencies distribute testing supplies and the scarce COVID-19 treatment drug remdesivir, identify coronavirus patients for vaccine clinical trials, write secret White House Coronavirus Task Force reports sent to governors, determine how often nursing homes must test their staffs for infection, inform the outbreak warnings White House adviser Dr. Deborah Birx has been issuing to cities in private phone calls — and more.
The system allows users to analyze, visualize and map information so they can, for example, see how weakening local health ordinances could affect restaurant spending and coronavirus deaths in mid-size cities across America. Arrieta’s team assembled the platform from eight pieces of commercial software, including one purchased via sole-source contracts worth $24.9 million from Palantir Technologies, a controversial company known for its work with U.S. intelligence agencies and founded by Trump donor Peter Thiel. CDC used the Palantir software for both the HHS Protect prototype and DCIPHER, and it works well, Arrieta said; contracting documents cited the coronavirus emergency when justifying the quick purchase.
And now a new artificial intelligence component of the platform, called HHS Vision, will help predict how particular interventions, such as distributing extra masks in nursing homes, could stanch local outbreaks. Arrieta said HHS Vision, which is not run with Palantir software, uses pre-written algorithms to simulate behaviors and forecast possible outcomes using what experts call “supervised machine learning.”
Though many of the datasets in HHS Protect are public, a scientist who wanted to use them would have to hunt for them from many agencies, clean them and help them relate to one another. That work is already done in HHS Protect.
“It is a big leap forward,” said Dr. Wilbert van Panhuis, an epidemiologist at the University of Pittsburgh who is working to get access to the platform for a group of 600 researchers. “They are making major progress in this pandemic.”
But the new system became a source of controversy this summer when officials told hospitals to stop reporting information on beds and patients to a well-known and revered CDC system, the National Healthcare Safety Network, and instead send it to Teletracking, a private contractor connected to HHS Protect. Observers feared the move undermined science and was another example of political interference with the CDC’s work. In August, hospital bed data from Teletracking sometimes diverged wildly from what states were reporting, though now it aligns more closely, said Jessica Malaty Rivera, science communication lead for the Covid Tracking Project, a volunteer organization compiling pandemic data.
“If there’s one major lesson we have from emergencies in the last 20 years… it’s not to try to create a new system but take the most robust system you have and scale it,” Frieden said. “The way to make Americans safer is to build on, not bypass, our public health system.”
Some familiar with the switch from the CDC to Teletracking said it allowed the federal government to compile more data on more hospitals. It happened, they said, because the White House task force members asked for more hospital information to prepare for the winter. Teletracking was able to start collecting extra data from hospitals in a matter of days, while the CDC said it would take weeks to make those changes.
"Our goal was to create the best view of what's occurring in the United States as it relates to COVID-19."
Jose Arrieta, former chief information officer of HHS
A CDC official familiar with the situation disputed those claims, saying that the National Healthcare Safety Network provided excellent data without overburdening already-stressed hospitals. Making the switch to HHS Protect, he said, is “like taking a veteran team off the field to replace that team with rookies. You get a lot of rookie mistakes.”
The hospital data dust-up aside, some CDC officials remain skeptical of HHS Protect.
“It is a platform. It isn’t a panacea,” said a CDC official familiar with the system who didn’t want his name published because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the media. Some of the outside data sources HHS Protect depends on — including the hospital data from Teletracking — aren’t reliable, the official said, sometimes showing, for example, that a hospital had a negative number of patients in beds. “We’re seeing enough of it to warrant overall big-time concerns about the hospital data quality.”
Some are also concerned about the system’s ability to guard patient privacy: More than a dozen lawmakers sent a letter to HHS Secretary Alex Azar in July questioning how HHS Protect would protect individuals’ privacy.
But officials say HHS Protect contains no personal information on patients or others. It tracks users’ every interaction with the data and blocks them from datasets they don’t have authority to see, allowing the federal government to guard privacy and prevent data manipulation, sources familiar with the system said.
Under wraps
The Trump administration adopted data principles in 2018 that include promoting “transparency… to engender public trust.” But much of the data in HHS Protect remains off limits to the public, glimpsed only in leaked reports and occasional mentions by White House task force members. The platform’s public web portal displays the hospital bed data that caused so much controversy this summer but little else. Observers of all stripes, from Frieden to the conservative Heritage Foundation, have called for the Trump administration to make more of its data public.
Van Panhuis said HHS Protect clearly was designed with federal government users in mind, not academic researchers or the public.
“It’s a bit disappointing,” he said. “Currently we have to invent that part of the system.”
Basic data about the pandemic contained in HHS Protect remains secret and is sometimes obscured even from local public health officials. The White House task force’s secret recommendations to governors use HHS Protect data on cities’ test positivity rates, but the White House does not release those reports. And that national dataset is still nowhere to be found on any federal website. When asked, an HHS spokesperson could not point to it.
Some secrecy surrounding HHS Protect data exists for good reason, officials said: Some private companies share their data with HHS on the condition that it will be used to respond to the public health crisis and not be revealed to competitors. And releasing some of the data, even though they contain no personal information, could trigger privacy concerns, forcing officials to redact some of it. For example, it might become obvious whose symptoms were being described in data from a small, rural county with one hospital and one coronavirus patient.
But the secrecy around HHS Protect frustrates transparency advocates who want government data to be shared more openly.
Ryan Panchadsaram, who helps run the coronavirus data website Covid Exit Strategy, would like HHS Protect to publish in one location information on cases, test results and other metrics, for every city and county in the U.S., in an easily accessible and downloadable format.
“Making it available to the public shouldn’t be that difficult,” he said. “It's a political and policy decision.”
People looking for county-level information — to make decisions about whether to visit grandparents, for example — are often out of luck. And if they want a one stop-shop for state-level data, they must turn to private sources: Panchadsaram said that even employees of state and federal agencies visit Covid Exit Strategy for information on the coronavirus. The state of Massachusetts uses his site’s data to decide which travelers must quarantine when they arrive.
“It is shocking that they come to us when the data is sitting in its purest form” in HHS Protect, he said.
Federal officials, attempting to deliver on at least some transparency promises, say they are working to set up congressional staffers with logins to HHS Protect. Staffers monitoring the pandemic say they have yet to be granted access, though some states are using the system.
The secrecy surrounding HHS Protect also means that outsiders also can’t evaluate whether the platform is living up to its promise. Despite repeated requests from Public Integrity, HHS and CDC spokespeople did not make any officials available for on-the-record interviews regarding HHS Protect.
“The federal government has an obligation to make as much data and information public as possible,” said Hart, of the Data Coalition. “HHS should consider ways to improve the information it’s providing to the American people.”
Zachary Fryer-Biggs contributed to this report.
This article first appeared on Center for Public Integrity and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.