A federal court in Washington has halted jury trials until late January 2022 because of the increase in COVID-19 cases driven by the Omicron CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus variant. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia suspended jury trials at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Criminal trials resumed about a year later, and civil trials restarted in June. But the state of the pandemic in the nation’s capital has shown the need to suspend trials again, Chief Judge Beryl Howell, an Obama nominee, said in a Dec. 30 order. While case counts have fluctuated in the city over the course of the pandemic, in the last month “the Omicron variant has caused an alarming explosion of cases,” Howell wrote. On Dec. 27, for instance, the daily case rate was 273.6 per 100,000 residents—a jump from 13.2 per 100,000 a month prior. Additionally, hospital …
RSS Feed | The Epoch Times