From workers on top of a roof to a 13-year-old with a big sign for his favorite nurse at LMH Health — his mom — Lawrence took a moment on Tuesday to stop and watch a flyover that was designed to thank health care workers and first responders during the coronavirus pandemic. A total of 19 planes from two Kansas-City-based aviation clubs, BeechNutz and KC Flight, flew over Lawrence's hospital and fire stations ...
Look up to the Lawrence skies tomorrow to see a little bit of thanks for the frontline workers battling COVID-19. More specifically, brush that Sasquatch hairdo out of your eyes and you’ll see an old-fashioned flyover. A pair of aviation teams from Kansas City plan to take to the Lawrence skies near 1:30 p.m. to conduct a flyover to thank health care workers and others who are serving patients. The Lawrence ...
There are no shortages of industries to feel sorry for during this pandemic, but new figures suggest employees in the arts, entertainment and recreation sector may be the hardest hit in Kansas thus far. More than one out of every three workers in that industry are now likely unemployed in Kansas, according to the latest data. While the industry doesn’t have the largest number of actual people unemployed — ...
In the old days — i.e. two months ago — a T-shirt with a message on its back warning people to stay at least 6 feet away would have seemed crass. Somebody surely would have made a joke that it was a public health message. Now, of course, it actually is, and a Lawrence neighborhood is making and selling such shirts. The North Lawrence Improvement Association has partnered with North Lawrence-based Happy ...
Another 1,200 Douglas County residents filed for unemployment insurance last week, as nearly 60,000 Kansans received unemployment payments of some kind. In its weekly report, the Kansas Department of Labor says 30,786 people last week made initial claims for unemployment benefits. Those are still historically high numbers, but they represent a big decline from initial unemployment claims during the last two ...
A return to normal face-to-face classes this fall at the University of Kansas and other Regents schools is far from a certainty, the state’s higher education leaders were told Wednesday. Members of the Kansas Board of Regents heard a variety of updates on how schools are planning to deal with fall-semester classes in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. While university leaders did not provide specific details ...
LMH Health leaders are now expecting Douglas County’s surge of COVID-19 cases to occur near April 29, which is about 10 days later than once projected. But the hospital’s chief executive officer is expecting the impacts of the pandemic to last much longer at the hospital and in the community. “We have to be mentally preparing for not only the moment we are in, but for the next two or three or four or ...
It is already clear that the math on the job loss front is going to get pretty painful as the COVID-19 pandemic continues. But researchers at the University of Kansas have done some calculations that show that the pain may be higher in Douglas County than in many parts of the state. Using unemployment data from just the last three weeks, researchers at KU’s Institute for Policy and Social Research are ...
Updated at 5:45 p.m. Monday Kansans seeking to file unemployment claims are now facing even larger hurdles as the state’s website became all but inoperable over the weekend. On Monday morning, a leader with the Kansas Department of Labor — which oversees the unemployment system — was urging people to call the department rather than use the website. That is the opposite of what labor department leaders ...
Updated 7:40 p.m. Thursday I don’t know much about peaks, other than I reached my one for growth in the sixth grade and, some say, the one for intellect a year earlier. The one everybody is trying to measure now, of course, is when COVID-19 will peak so that I can get more than a peek inside my favorite hamburger joint. A journalist — especially a hungry one — shouldn’t be the person to declare when ...
Millions of additional unemployment dollars did start flowing to Kansans last week, according to the latest numbers from state officials, but technology problems are still stopping many from applying for the benefits. Kansas paid $14.8 million in unemployment benefits for the week ending April 4, which was up from $3.8 million the week before, according to the weekly report from the Kansas Department of Labor. ...
One of Lawrence’s largest manufacturers will be shut down for at least another three weeks, and many of its approximately 800 employees will need to start filing for unemployment. Hallmark confirmed that its Lawrence production center would be closed until April 27. The company temporarily closed the greeting card plant, which is near the West Lawrence interchange on the Kansas Turnpike, on March 23. At that ...
More advice — and more pleas for patience — are flowing from the state officials responsible for getting Kansans signed up for unemployment benefits. “Thank you for your patience with us,” Delía García, secretary of the Kansas Department of Labor, said in a webcast Tuesday. “We know we have a lot of things to go through and fix to make sure we are serving you.” The department has been dealing ...
We all probably will have plenty of feelings about 2020, although I likely won’t be able to quote many of them in a family-friendly newspaper. It may be worth remembering, though, that at the beginning of the year we seemed optimistic. At least the latest sales tax numbers from the state suggest Lawrence shoppers were in a spending mood. The state has released its March sales tax report, and it generally was ...
Officials with Kansas’ unemployment program are now working on adding an extra $600 per week to unemployment checks of Kansas residents, after previously having waited to start the process until they heard more from federal officials. When Kansas residents, though, will start seeing the larger unemployment checks is still unclear. In a video posted to its Facebook page Monday, the Kansas Department of Labor ...
There are plenty of signs that the restaurant industry is hurting in Kansas, but less clear is that the state’s manufacturing sector is also getting hammered. In fact, the latest numbers from state officials suggest it was a more brutal week for the manufacturing sector than it was for even the restaurant and hospitality industry. The latest numbers from the Kansas Department of Labor show that, for the week ...
That big empty building at the entrance to the city’s newest business park — Venture Park on the east edge of Lawrence — soon will have its first tenant. Whether the deal will provide a big boost in employment for the city, though, is still a bit unclear. Plastikon Healthcare has signed a deal to take 22,000 square feet in the 153,000-square-foot building that is near the corner of 23rd Street and ...
A major Lawrence manufacturer has confirmed that an employee has tested positive for the COVID-19 virus, but it has no plans to temporarily close the plant, which employs about 800 people. A spokesperson with Berry Global confirmed that the manufacturer of plastic cups and packages received notice on Friday that an employee at its Lawrence facility had tested positive for the virus. “In alignment with ...
Here is a fact you may want to take notice of in today’s COVID-19 world: In Douglas County, there is no guarantee you will ever know when one of your co-workers tests positive for the virus. As the Journal-World did reporting this week to confirm a positive case at Lawrence manufacturer Berry Global, it became clear that most area workers basically are at the mercy of their employers to voluntarily disclose ...
Numbers can make you dizzy if you look at them long enough. (If you watch them while standing around a roulette wheel, you can have the fun of being both dizzy and broke.) If you are feeling that way now, I probably can’t fix those conditions, but I can provide you some new ways to look at the state’s COVID-19 numbers. The big number The figure most focused on is the number of new cases ...