Weather to make Saturday’s SpaceX launch of NASA astronauts another nail-biter

tall cumulus clouds which can be a source of turbulence and lightning. Either day’s launch could be aborted if any of a dozen weather rules are violated for various cloud, wind and precipitation scenarios. The majority of the rules relate to the presence of thunderstorms or thunderstorm clouds within 10 nautical miles to the launch site and flight path. These rules were designed to protect against lightning strikes to the in-flight rocket, triggered by the rocket’s interaction with storm clouds or unleashed by the storm itself. During Wednesday’s scrubbed launch, three weather rules were violated, including the presence of natural lightning and an attached anvil, which is the top of a towering thunderstorm that can generate an electric field and trigger lightning when in contact with a rocket’s plume. Past instances of rockets launching into stormy conditions have led to close calls and disaster. During the Apollo 12 launch, the Saturn V rocket was struck by lightning twice, causing damage to some nonessential components. Nevertheless, the crew was able to complete the mission to the moon. In 1987, the unmanned Atlas/Centaur-67 rocket was launched into rainy, overcast skies when lightning struck, sending it “tumbling out of control,” according to Reuters. Safety officers were forced to divert and destroy the rocket so its debris would not land in civilian areas. Atmospheric scientists have learned that rockets generate an electrically conductive exhaust plume that can trigger lightning when passing through a preexisting electric field — usually from clouds containing both water and ice. These are typically tall cumulus clouds or the anvils (or tops) of thunderstorm clouds. Capt. Jason Fontenot, a meteorologist with the Weather Squadron and spacelift weather operations flight commander, said his forecasting team has access to “one of the densest suites of weather sensors anywhere in the world” for monitoring conditions. They include wind sensors, lightning detection systems, a surface electric field system and radar. In addition to the weather at Cape Canaveral, sea states along the East Coast and across the Atlantic Ocean toward Ireland are being monitored in the unlikely event the capsule with the two astronauts aboard is forced to abort its launch because of an emergency and ends up in the ocean. Ocean conditions along the flight path, however, are not predicted to be out of the ordinary, with waves mostly in the range of three to six feet. Andrew Freedman contributed to this story.


Firefly festivals are canceled due to coronavirus, and lightning bugs might be pleased about it

lightning bugs will perform without a paparazzi-level audience. The closure will no doubt disappoint people who planned summer vacations around the annual lightning bug ritual — but it might not dismay the fireflies. Some scientists say the absence of human hordes could be a blessing for the bioluminescent beetles. “Everybody loves fireflies,” said Sara Lewis, an entomologist who specializes in lightning bugs at Tufts University. But the insects, she added “might be breathing a huge sigh of relief that they get a year to recover and do their whole mating dance behind closed doors, so to speak. Nobody’s watching them this year.” Increasingly, Lewis and other scientists have started to warn about the dark side of firefly tourism in the Smokies and other less-famous locales — a business that now accounts for some 200,000 visitors globally each year. For one thing, with people comes artificial light. From vehicle headlights and camp lanterns to flash photography and smartphone screens, all those extra photons make it more difficult for lightning bugs to attract and recognize mates — the reason fireflies flash in the first place. More people in the woods also means more accidental trampling of fireflies at a critical juncture in their lives. Before one of these beetles can turn into the hovering firework that heralds the arrival of summer, it spends a year or two as a larva burrowing through the dirt and leaflitter. In some species, such as the blue ghosts that also inhabit the Smokies, adult females lack wings entirely, making them vulnerable to squashing by the very tourists there to appreciate the bugs’ beauty. While the Smokies firefly extravaganza is on pause, other areas of the national park reopened on May 9. Almost immediately, a report emerged of visitors willfully ignoring barriers set up by park staff to ensure proper social distancing. Even so, the park opened more trails and scenic overviews later in the month. Second lady Karen Pence even stopped by for a visit. Before people could return en masse, firefly researcher Lynn Faust said she made several trips to the synchronous firefly area known as Elkmont to check data loggers that collect hourly temperature readings above and below ground. Together with a mathematical formula, the readings allow scientists to predict when the beetles will emerge. Faust called the experience of being virtually alone in half a million acres of wilderness “mind-blowing.” “I felt so


Skywatch: What’s happening in the heavens in June

glare. You can’t see it. The dazzling Venus — our other planetary neighbor — emerges low in the morning’s eastern sky in the middle of June. By June 20, early rising eastern beachcombers can enjoy it ascending the eastern heavens around 4:45 a.m. Just 10 days later, Venus rises close to an hour earlier. The bright Venus is -4.5 magnitude (very bright) on June 20 and becomes slightly brighter by June 30 (-4.7 magnitude), according to the observatory. Venus and the waning, old crescent moon enjoy a fast morning dance — close to the horizon — when they are less than a degree from one another June 19. See it before 5 a.m. For evening strolls, find the fleet planet Mercury in the western sky just after sunset, loitering with the constellation Gemini’s twins Castor and Pollux early in June. Quick Mercury will be at 0.66 magnitude (bright), but it sinks toward the horizon by mid-month. Officially marking the beginning of a hazy, hot and humid season, the Northern Hemisphere’s summer solstice starts June 20 at 5:44 p.m., according to the observatory. On the other side of the world, a penumbral lunar eclipse occurs for Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australia on June 5, according to retired NASA eclipse expert Fred Espenak. The full moon gently skims through Earth’s penumbral shadow and probably won’t be noticed. An annular solar eclipse also occurs on the other side of the world on June 21, when the new moon appears to scoot in front of the sun. It is not a total eclipse. Instead, the moon is farther back, so a “ring of fire” will form around the moon’s edges and probably bring about the fiery “diamond ring” effect. The eclipse can be seen from Africa, the Middle East, northern India, southern China on to the Pacific Ocean. The greatest part of the eclipse is 1 minute and 22 seconds, and it occurs over Pakistan and northern India, at 6:40 Universal Time (2:40 a.m. Eastern time), according to Espenak’s calculations. For more information, visit Espenak’s Eclipsewise.com. Tune in for a down-to-Earth event June 2: “Seeing the Unseeable: Capturing an Image of a Black Hole,” an online lecture by Sheperd Doeleman of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. The Exploring Space Lecture series event will be hosted by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (airandspace.si.edu) at 8 p.m. Link to the lecture: https://rb.gy/10eval.


On the Black Sea, Georgia rebrands as a holiday haven from the pandemic

Putin temporarily banned flights to Georgia and recommended that Russian tourists there return home after protesters tried to storm the Parliament building in Tbilisi, furious that a Russian member of parliament had given a speech from the speaker’s chair. In November, protesters blockaded the Parliament building in demonstrations over electoral reform that brought tens of thousands to the streets. But Georgia has seen a steady increase in tourists, from just under 3 million visitors in 2001 to more than 9 million last year. Turnava said the tourism sector accounts for nearly 12 percent of the country’s GDP. “ For a country that made headlines for its domestic turmoil in the past, its handling of the coronavirus revealed a surprising public trust in the government. Georgia was aggressive in its approach, closing schools after it had just three confirmed cases. It monitored the virus’s spread, suspending direct flights with “hot spots,” and installing health screenings at airports and at the borders. Around 7,000 hotel rooms were used to quarantine citizens who returned home after the first week of March. “This process has accumulated valuable experience and is an example of great flexibility for the Georgian hospitality sector to adjust with the new norms,” Turnava said. “That’s why we don't need additional time to adapt our tourist industry. That’s why we’re saying that Georgia might be one of the safest, because it’s all about following protocols.” In a 2016 episode of his CNN show “Parts Unknown,” Anthony Bourdain described Georgia as a place most Americans wouldn’t be able to locate on a map. With traditional European getaways such as Italy and France some of the hardest hit by the pandemic, Georgia’s promise of safety could stand out to a Westerners who may not have considered a trip there before, said Natalia Kvachantiradze, chair of the Georgia Tourism Association. Georgia will attempt to appeal to post-coronavirus travelers by pushing outdoor activities more conducive to distancing precautions, such as visiting the wine region or the national parks. The country is also labeling some resorts as “green zones,” keeping them exclusive to guests who want to be reassured about privacy and sanitary conditions. “We are in a new reality of tourism, and our country’s decision is to promote new destinations and new tourist products,” Kvachantiradze said. “When you’re traveling and want to rest, it’s important to feel free and to feel healthy and feel safe.”


Trump's exit from WHO met with dismay from global health experts

LONDON — Global health experts and government officials joined in criticism Saturday over President Trump's plans to cut ties with the World Health Organization and funnel U.S. money elsewhere. In the remarks made in the Rose Garden on Friday, Trump blamed China for the covid-19 pandemic and accused Beijing of effectively controlling the WHO and pressuring it to “mislead the world.” The United States is the single biggest financial contributor to the U.N. agency, and its exit will hit its budget even as it struggles with a global pandemic that has resulted in more than 364,000 deaths. Trump said that the annual $400 million that the U.S. contributes to the organization will be redirected “to other worldwide and deserving urgent global public health needs” without giving specifics. Jens Spahn, Germany’s health minister, tweeted in English on Saturday that Trump’s decision to sever ties with the organization was “a disappointing backlash for International Health.” Spahn added that the WHO “needs reform” if it is to make “any difference for the future.” Germany will take over the rotating E.U. presidency in July and the minister said finding a way for the European Union to “take a leading role and engage more financially” with the U.N. agency would be prioritized. South Africa’s health minister, Zweli Mkhize, called Trump’s move “unfortunate.” “Certainly, when faced with a serious pandemic, you want all nations in the world to be particularly focused … on one common enemy,” he told reporters, according to the Associated Press. A spokesman for the British government said the WHO had an “important role to play in leading the international health response” to the pandemic. “We have no plans to withdraw our funding,” the statement said. The European Union urged Trump to reconsider. In a joint statement, E.U. Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said that “as the world continues to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, the main task for everyone is to save lives and contain and mitigate this pandemic.” “Now is the time for enhanced cooperation and common solutions,” the statement added. “Actions that weaken international results must be avoided. We urge the U.S. to reconsider its announced decision.” A number of scientists and global health experts also stepped forward to voice their support for the organization. In Australia, Peter Doherty, the founder of the Doherty Institute, whose modeling has played a role in the government’s


Behind the scenes as FAA prepares for Space X launch

commercial space traffic by allowing air traffic controllers to see rockets just as they do airplanes. The shift would mean the agency could monitor traffic with great accuracy, potentially reducing the length of time that airspace must be closed off for space launches. “The past paradigm is that you just close off areas of airspace for hours at a time,” Freer said. But once SDI becomes operational, expected later this year, Freer said those closures may shorten because “we’re going to be able to be more dynamic because we’ll be able to see the vehicle and see where it is and we’ll be able to react quicker.” Freer is part of a team of air traffic and commercial space transportation experts working on SDI. Four hours before launch, members of the Joint Space Operations Group (JSpOG,) made up of representatives from FAA’s air traffic organization and office of commercial space transportation, are expected to arrive at the Warrenton center to begin coordinating with air traffic control facilities and with the 45th Space Wing, the military unit responsible for all space launch operations from the East Coast. Freer said planning for the Space X launch began several weeks in advance with the development of an airspace management plan. The FAA works with partners including Airlines for America, the International Air Transport Association and the National Business Aircraft Association on a plan that ensures a safe launch that also seeks to limit the impact on the commercial aviation system. For the launch of Space X’s Dragon capsule, SDI will operate in shadow mode, allowing FAA’s team to determine whether it was conforming to expectations, or as Freer put it, “Doing what we expect it to do.” Telemetry data received from the launch and reentry operator, which will allow FAA’s team to watch the rocket’s progress, will also help experts more quickly identify potential “hazard areas” — another key component of ensuring safe pre- and post-launch operations. Should there be any issues with the launch, JPpOG will be poised to act. The team will be closely monitoring an array of large screen displays and monitors that show aircraft hazard areas and live air traffic in areas around the launch site. They use handsets to communicate with each other. Given concerns about the spread of the novel coronavirus, the team will practice social distancing. The room also is cleaned before and after the missions.


Washington region’s airports are reeling from impact of coronavirus pandemic

The presentation to the board that runs Dulles International and Reagan National airports was a grim summary of an average travel day in May vs. a year ago: Takeoffs and landings down 75 percent. Concessions sales down 90 percent. Passengers screened by the TSA down 95 percent. Parking revenue down 97 percent. The list went on, each figure another sobering reminder of the economic impact the coronavirus pandemic has had on the nation’s airports. “Oh how quickly things have changed,” said A. Bradley Mims, a member of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority board, after chief executive Jack Potter concluded the report. Indeed. Not long ago, MWAA officials were in a celebratory mood. Passenger traffic at both airports was booming. National was in the midst of a $1 billion building program that would add new security checkpoints and a concourse with 14 new gates. After years of floundering, Dulles had finally found its footing and was expanding its international offerings with new nonstop flights to Hong Kong and Tel Aviv. Even with reports of growing outbreaks of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China, air traffic remained relatively stable at the two airports. In January, passenger traffic was up 8.7 percent over the previous year (though airport officials noted that some of that growth may have been partly attributable to the bad weather and the government shutdown in January 2019). And this past February, despite the Trump administration’s ban on travel from China and Iran, Dulles and National posted 6.1 percent growth in passenger traffic. Just a month later, however, after the Trump administration restricted travel from 26 European nations, the bottom began to drop out as airlines moved to ground virtually all of their international flights. Domestic air traffic also took a hit as states issued stay-at-home orders and urged people not to travel. In March, the most recent month for which statistics are available, passenger volume dropped by more than half at both Dulles and National, compared with the same period in 2019. Roughly 456,000 passengers flew through National in March, down from just over 1 million in 2019 — a 56.5 percent drop. Passenger traffic at Dulles dropped by more than a million to 928,709 — less than half of what it was last March. The biggest decline at both airports came among international travelers. It’s a pattern that has played out at airports across the country. Flights and


SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launch is scrubbed due to weather

the coast of the Carolinas. The early components of Tropical Storm Bertha had battered the Florida Panhandle over the weekend and parked over coastal areas of North and South Carolina on Tuesday and Wednesday, leaving the risk of isolated thunderstorms or pockets of clouds hovering around the rocket’s launch site. With lightning seen in the area 17 minutes before the scheduled 4:33 p.m., launch time, the flight’s weather officer made the call to “scrub” the flight. The Crew Dragon’s mission, known as Demo-2, operated under an “instantaneous launch window,” or a narrow period during which the International Space Station is lined up with the rocket’s flight trajectory. Any sort of delay would cause the rocket to miss that period. The mission’s next launch window is scheduled for Saturday at 3:22 p.m., from historic launchpad 39A, the same facility that launched the first astronauts to the moon aboard Apollo 11 in 1969. The flight would have culminated years of work and the fulfillment of a risky bet by NASA under the Obama administration to entrust the private sector to fly astronauts. For SpaceX, it was the crescendo of an improbable odyssey that began in 2002 when founder and chief executive Elon Musk set out to start a space company. Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are both former military pilots who previously had each flown two missions on the space shuttle. Once the spacecraft is launched, it is scheduled to travel to the space station, 240 miles above the Earth. That journey is expected to take about 18 hours. But their ride to space this time will be on a vastly different spacecraft: a fully autonomous, next-generation capsule outfitted with Tesla-like touch screens and temperature controls that allow astronauts to keep the cabin at between 65 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Even with a successful launch, their mission is far from complete. The spacecraft needs to catch up with the space station and match the altitude of the laboratory, which orbits the Earth at 17,500 mph, and dock with it in a risky and carefully choreographed dance. The mission is a test flight designed to ensure the rocket and spacecraft can fly humans safely. Once complete, NASA and SpaceX will review the data and certify the spacecraft for additional missions that would regularly fly as many as four astronauts to the space station and back. Below are the updates from Wednesday’s almost-launch.


Following SpaceX launch, Trump’s speech discordant with earlier tweets

a Minneapolis policeman on May 25. Those protests included a demonstration outside the White House on Friday night that saw clashes between protesters and the Secret Service. Saturday morning Trump took a defiant rather than conciliatory stance toward those protesters. “I was inside, watched every move, and couldn’t have felt more safe,” the president tweeted. “They let the ‘protesters’ scream & rant as much as they wanted, but whenever someone have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen.” He later seemed to urge his supporters to show up outside the White House on Saturday night to counter the protesters. “Tonight, I understand, is MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE???” he wrote. But in Florida, Trump struck a theme of unity that was at odds with his tweets, emphasizing the pain over the death of Floyd, the disturbing images of which were captured on video by people on the scene. “Yesterday I spoke to George’s family and expressed the sorrow of our entire nation for their loss. I stand before you as a friend and ally to every American seeking justice and peace,” he said before moving on to address the successful rocket launch. “Healing, not hatred, justice, not chaos, are the mission at hand.” Trump also mentioned the “pain” caused by the coronavirus pandemic that spread across the country, killing more than 100,000 Americans and devastating the economy. “The same spirit of American determination that sends our people into space will conquer this disease,” Trump said. Trump made his comments in the cavernous vehicle assembly building, made famous during the space shuttle program. About 300 people — many politicians, but also NASA and SpaceX engineers and their family members — were in the audience. Most of them wore masks, but there was no social distancing, and some — such as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — did not wear masks. The loudest applause, along with two sustained standing ovations, went to SpaceX owner Elon Musk. “Thank you, Elon,” Trump said when Musk took a couple of bows from his seat with the audience. Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley rode a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. They are headed to the International Space Station. Saturday’s launch was the first time since July 2011, when the space shuttle program ended, that American astronauts have lifted off from American soil.


Dar’Yana Dyson, a teen who loved music and wanted to become a cosmetologist, dies of complications of covid-19

At 28 weeks, barely the size of an eggplant, Dar’Yana Dyson was ready for her early entrance. “She was that determined to enter the world,” her mom, Kandice Knight, said, recalling her daughter’s premature delivery. “She wanted to make her mark.” Knight, who was then 15 years old, traveled by taxi from her Southeast Baltimore home to Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center’s neonatal unit each day for two months to feed her newborn daughter. Dar’Yana Dyson, of Dundalk, with her mother Kandice Knight. Dar'Yana, 15, died May 16 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Dar’Yana is the youngest victim of covid-19 in the region. (Family photo) “I wanted my baby home so bad,” Knight said. “The nurses said I was spoiling her. . . . I was just doing anything to get her home.” Knight, whose own mother was in jail when she became pregnant, thought that with her daughter in her life, she “would never be lonely.” Now, 15 years later, Knight is struggling to make sense of Dar’Yana’s death. Dar’Yana, 15, who loved music and dancing and had dreams of becoming a cosmetologist, died May 16 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, the youngest person in Maryland, and one of the youngest across the country, to die of complications of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Dar’Yana, the oldest of four children in the Baltimore County family, was originally diagnosed with covid-19 and Kawasaki disease, a rare illness that causes swelling in medium-size arteries throughout the body. Knight said doctors now say Dar’Yana didn’t have Kawasaki. The doctors at Johns Hopkins, Knight said, were perplexed by Dar’Yana’s case. “They don’t understand why she died so young and so healthy,” Knight said. “They say this is the most rare case they have ever seen. . . . I don’t understand why, why God took her.” The vast majority of those younger than 18 who are infected with the novel coronavirus have mild symptoms or none at all. Dar’Yana’s symptoms began with a stomachache about a week before she died. She didn’t have an appetite and had developed a reddish-rash near her armpit. Knight also noticed that she wore a patent-leather jacket inside. Her stepfather asked her why she was wearing it, and she said she was cold, Knight said, which signaled a fever. Knight took Dar’Yana to Union Memorial on May 11, a Monday, but doctors there


one of the youngest across the country, to die of complications of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Dar’Yana, the oldest of four children in the Baltimore County family, was originally diagnosed with covid-19 and Kawasaki disease, a rare illness that causes swelling in medium-size arteries throughout the body. Knight said doctors now say Dar’Yana didn’t have Kawasaki. The doctors at Johns Hopkins, Knight said, were perplexed by Dar’Yana’s case. “They don’t understand why she died so young and so healthy,” Knight said. “They say this is the most rare case they have ever seen. . . . I don’t understand why, why God took her.” The vast majority of those younger than 18 who are infected with the novel coronavirus have mild symptoms or none at all. Dar’Yana’s symptoms began with a stomachache about a week before she died. She didn’t have an appetite and had developed a reddish-rash near her armpit. Knight also noticed that she wore a patent-leather jacket inside. Her stepfather asked her why she was wearing it, and she said she was cold, Knight said, which signaled a fever. Knight took Dar’Yana to Union Memorial on May 11, a Monday, but doctors there couldn’t figure out what was wrong. They gave her a test for novel coronavirus, which came back negative, so they transferred her to Johns Hopkins. At Hopkins, Dar’yana spent five days moving from a regular room to the covid-19 floor back to a regular room and finally in isolation. Knight said doctors told her on Thursday night that a test showed that Dar’Yana had antibodies for the coronavirus. [Those we have lost to the coronavirus in Virginia, Maryland and D.C.] At every step, Knight was by her side. A prankster, Dar’Yana got her hands on Knight’s cellphone that Thursday and sent a message to her younger sister, Dyneira Dyson, who had asked her mom to buy her a dress. Dar’Yana, impersonating her mom, told her sister that she wasn’t getting the money. A day later, Dar’Yana’s breathing was starting to become heavy. On the morning of May 16, a Saturday, health-care workers decided to intubate her. While they were putting her on the ventilator, she flatlined but was brought back. Within hours, Dar’Yana passed away. Her mom was lying in the bed beside her. “No parent expects to bury their child,” Knight said, her voice cracking. “You expect them to


Could covid virus lead to chronic fatigue?

In the fall of 2009, one of us, Beth, was hit by an illness she suspects was H1N1 flu, which was circulating then. In 2012, the other, Brian, developed a sudden fever, which his doctors said was also likely of viral origin. Neither of us recovered, and we’re both disabled to this day. [I was once a hard-working person. Now, I’m disabled with a mysterious illness. ] The long-term illnesses that can follow viral infections can be devastating — and are devastatingly common. In 2015, the nation’s top medical advisory body, the Institute of Medicine, estimated that between 800,000 and 2.5 million U.S. residents live with the illness or illnesses awkwardly named myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). An estimated three-quarters of these cases were triggered by viral or bacterial infections. Now, as a new pandemic virus is burning through the world and causing many deaths, researchers are raising alarms that the novel coronavirus and the covid-19 disease it causes will also leave in its wake a potentially large population with post-viral problems that could be lifelong and, in some cases, disabling. Avindra Nath, left, the head of clinical neurology at NIH’s Clinical Center who is gearing up to study covid-19 patients, examines Brian Vastag in 2017 during a study on the biology of ME/CFS. (Beth Mazur) At the National Institutes of Health and elsewhere, scientists who have been studying post-viral ME/CFS are seizing the opportunity to focus on covid-19 patients. They want to understand what biological factors separate those who regain their health from those who remain sick. “We want to look at who recovers and who doesn’t,” said Avindra Nath In addition to emerging reports of damage to lungs, kidneys and hearts, covid-19 patients are complaining of ongoing crushing fatigue, muscle pain, cognitive problems and other symptoms that anyone with ME/CFS is very familiar with. “I’m 69 days after my first symptoms and still feeling fatigued,” wrote Canadian comedian Wayne Jones on Twitter, saying he has tested positive for the new coronavirus. “I also have sore eyes, and weakness and headaches that come and go. All signs point to post-viral fatigue.” Sometimes a precursor to ME/CFS post-viral fatigue syndrome can occur after virtually any viral infection. Symptoms wax and wane; a person can feel fine one day and terrible the next. Exercise or other usual activities can bring fever and often symptoms rushing back. Although there is no known


treatment, these problems often resolve on their own. But patients who have experienced post-viral fatigue syndrome advise the newly ill to rest, rest and rest some more, as returning to normal activities can trigger relapses. If symptoms continue for six months or longer, post-viral fatigue syndrome can convert to a diagnosis of ME/CFS, which is usually lifelong and often devastating. Up to 25 percent of ME/CFS patients are housebound or bedbound for years. There are no treatments approved by the Food and Drug Administration. A survey organized by a group of covid-19 patients called the Body Politic shows that many coronavirus symptoms overlap with those of post-viral fatigue syndrome. Fatigue, including severe fatigue, brain fog — problems with concentration and thinking — chills and sweats, and sleep problems were commonly reported among 640 respondents, who were recruited from online support groups. The Body Politic, which includes some patients with expertise in survey design and statistics, calculated that respondents had just a 20 percent chance of being symptom-free 50 days after the illness began. The group cautioned that while the survey suggests many respondents had long illnesses, the results may not apply to the broader population of covid-19 patients. The novel coronavirus is too new to say whether such lingering symptoms represent an extended covid-19 illness or a post-viral syndrome. But researchers suspect at least some covid patients will remain sick and eventually develop post-viral ME/CFS. Their suspicions are grounded in previous research. Studies on other outbreaks [Doctors keep discovering new ways the coronavirus attacks the human body] After the first SARS epidemic, which sickened 8,000 people worldwide in 2002-2003, one study found that 27 percent of 369 survivors of that variety of coronavirus met the criteria for chronic fatigue syndrome several years later. If figures like this are seen with this novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, which epidemiologists warn will eventually infect 50 to 70 percent of all U.S. residents, our nation is on track for a devastating wave of millions of patients with chronic post-viral illnesses. “The most important study of several we’re starting is to get coronavirus-infected patients and follow them over time to see if they convert to ME/CFS,” said Ron Davis, a geneticist at Stanford University. His adult son, Whitney Dafoe, is seriously ill with the disease. “If you point out the fact that you might not ever get over covid-19, it’ll put people’s attention on this problem,”


understand the rate of ME/CFS and other problems that may be present. We’re going to learn things we never learned with SARS and MERS,” the two previous illnesses caused by different coronaviruses earlier this century. One challenge, Breen said, is differentiating post-viral fatigue syndrome and ME/CFS from the lingering effects of being in an intensive care unit or on a ventilator, which are known risk factors for long-term ill health. Speed the search for drugs Mady Hornig, an immunologist at Columbia University’s Center for Infection and Immunity, said her group plans to follow covid-19 patients with neurological symptoms, including loss of smell, to see who develops ME/CFS. She plans to recruit African American, Hispanic and American Indian patients, who are underrepresented in ME/CFS research. Hornig herself has had covid-19 symptoms for six weeks, including a racing heart beat, which can signal issues with the autonomic nervous system. At Stanford, Davis is partnering with the nonprofit Open Medicine Foundation. Already, clinics funded by the OMF are collecting blood from covid-19 patients and asking them to wear activity tracking devices. “We want to study them at three months, six months, longer, and see who will be diagnosed with ME/CFS,” Davis said. Hornig and Davis both say that watching covid-19 patients could speed the search for drugs to reverse whatever goes awry in post-viral illnesses. “Scientifically I think the most important thing to look at is . . . why they convert to ME/CFS. What’s different about them?” Davis says. “That could be extremely valuable, that could give us a valuable clue to . . . how to treat it.” The personal and societal costs of ME/CFS are devastating. In 2015, the Institute of Medicine estimated a $24 billion annual U.S. burden in medical costs and lost productivity. For Beth, who was working as a product manager for a software company in San Francisco with a computer science degree from MIT, her lost earnings potential over the past decade can likely be measured in the millions of dollars. Instead of paying taxes on those lost wages, she is drawing monthly Social Security Disability Insurance. For Brian, the week before he became suddenly ill, he wrote a front-page story for The Washington Post, where he was a science writer, on a major advance in theoretical physics, the discovery of the Higgs boson. Six months later, his undiagnosed post-viral illness had gotten so bad he


U.S. Cases Rise; Trump G-7 May Draw Fewer Leaders: Virus Update

QuickTake, click here. U.K., France Mull G-7 as Germany Skips (5 p.m. NY) The Covid-19 outbreak may deter German Chancellor Angela Merkel from attending a Group of Seven leaders meeting in the U.S., but other leaders are still in talks with the host, President Donald Trump. Trump spoke with French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday with “progress on convening the G-7” among the topics, the White House said. On Friday, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Trump “discussed the importance of leaders meeting in the U.S. in person, if possible,” according to Johnson’s office. A Merkel spokesman on Saturday said “she’s unable to confirm her personal participation” given the current state of events. The meeting was planned for Trump’s Doral resort in Florida, was moved to Camp David then became a video conference because of the pandemic. Trump is pushing the G-7 leaders to travel to the U.S. for an in-person meeting. U.S. Cases Rise 1.7%, Above Week’s Average (4 p.m. NY) U.S. cases increased 1.7% from the same time Friday, to 1.76 million, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University and Bloomberg News. The national increase exceeded the average daily increase of 1.3% for the past week and was the biggest percentage rise since May 22. Deaths climbed 1.2% to 103,389. • New York reported 1,376 new cases, for a total of 369,660, with 67 deaths -- the same as Friday and the fifth day of fatalities under 75. Deaths totaled 23,848. • New Jersey had 910 new cases, pushing the total to 159,608, with 113 new deaths for a total of 11,634, Governor Phil Murphy reported. • California reported 2,992 new cases, for a total of 106,878, and added 88 deaths, with the fatality count at 4,156. • Pennsylvania reported 680 new cases, for a total of 71,415, and 73 new deaths, to total 5,537, the state health department said. • Florida’s cases rose 1.7% to 55,424 and deaths rose to 2,447, the health department said. Greece Allows More Flights from Mid-June (3:30 p.m. NY) Greece will allow visitors from more nations, including the U.S. and U.K., to arrive at Athens and Thessaloniki airports starting June 15, the Foreign Ministry said. After July 1, flights can land at all Greek airports.The government will use the European Union Aviation Safety Agency’s list of airports to determine testing for arriving passengers. If travel originates at an airport not on


37.6 billion-euro ($41.7 billion) stimulus package to combat the economic toll of the global pandemic, according to an interview with Le Soir. The aid would target catering, cultural and health-care industries, he said. Iran Reports Fewer New Cases (6:12 a.m. NY) Iran’s infection tally rose to 148,950 as the daily number of new cases dropped to 2,282 from 2,819 on Friday, the highest daily number of cases in eight weeks. The virus death toll reached 7,734 with 57 more deaths overnight. S&P Sees Abu Dhabi, Bahrain Economies Shrinking (5:20 p.m. HK) Abu Dhabi’s economy will contract 7.5% this year, S&P Global Ratings said, citing lower oil production and the pandemic. Bahrain’s economy will shrink 5% this year because of low oil prices, although government stimulus measures should provide some support, S&P said. The ratings company expects Bahrain’s economy to rebound in 2021 as oil prices recover and regional activity increases. Indonesia Gears Up for Post-Holiday Return (5:02 p.m. HK) Indonesia’s capital Jakarta is anticipating one million vehicles will enter the city as people return from Eid al-Fitr holidays. Traffic, including motorcycles, is projected to peak from Saturday to Monday, according to a Cabinet Secretariat statement. While the figure is lower compared to the 2.8 million vehicles recorded last year, the flow of so many travelers is raising concern as the nation’s coronavirus cases grow. Indonesia now has the highest coronavirus death toll in Southeast Asia, with 1,573 people succumbing to the disease as of Saturday. New cases have more than doubled in May, with the total reaching 25,773. Uzbekistan Extends Lockdown (3:36 p.m. HK) The Uzbek government has decided to extend lockdown restrictions until June 15. Central Asia’s most populous nation has confirmed 3,513 cases of infection of the coronavirus, with 14 deaths and 2,728 recoveries. Singapore Reports 506 New Cases (3:30 p.m. HK) Singapore reported 506 new infections as of Saturday, according to a statement from its Health Ministry. A vast majority of the additional infections are of work permit-holders who live in foreign workers’ dormitories, according to the statement. The ministry is expected to provide additional details in the evening, it added. Chinese Vaccine Expected to Begin Mass Output This Year (3:25 p.m. HK) A front-running Covid-19 vaccine being developed in China is expected to be available as soon as the end of this year, according to a report published in the official Wechat account of the State-owned


My Corner of London Starts to Wake From Lockdown Coma

down from the fish-and-chip shop, on the other side of a closed nail salon, the Holloway Food Express opened for business a couple weeks ago with a shiny new facade and a sign proclaiming “Under New Management.” Even the pandemic wasn’t enough to derail Gurcam Killi’s plan to launch a new convenience store — a business he bought from his cousins that had been deteriorating for nearly a decade. Convenience stores have been big winners during the lockdown. Independent grocers and corner shops in the U.K. saw sales soar by more than 60% in the three months to May 17, according to retail analysis firm Kantar. Gurcam says he missed out on the initial burst of panic buying that accompanied lockdown, but that sales are improving day by day. “You need to have the passion to do well,” he says. Over the road, Cookies and Scream has been selling gluten-free, vegan brownies, donuts and cookies from 130 Holloway Road for the past four years. The business started in 2010 in Camden Market; not long after the Holloway café opened, a fire destroyed the original premises. After closing for just one week at the start of lockdown, the bakery reopened with a one-customer-at-a-time policy, to sell takeaway food and drink on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Manager Kane Pope says it’s hard to estimate how much the store’s revenue has declined. “It’s going all right,” he says. “There are lots of people around. But reopening fully feels a long way away.” At the Chip Inn Fish Bar, Mahut also has a strict policy of only allowing a single customer in at once, with the rest forced to queue on the street outside. As a result, even with London basking in good weather that stretches into the evenings, he reckons turnover is down by about 40% since he reopened. But he’s determined to pull through. “We’ve been here since 1962,” he says, proudly pointing to a sign testifying to the longevity of the business. “We’ll survive.” This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Mark Gilbert is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering asset management. He previously was the London bureau chief for Bloomberg News. He is also the author of “Complicit: How Greed and Collusion Made the Credit Crisis Unstoppable.” For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion ©2020 Bloomberg L.P.


than 9 million last year. Turnava said the tourism sector accounts for nearly 12 percent of the country’s GDP. “ [Researchers ponder why covid-19 appears deadlier in the U.S. and Europe than in Asia] For a country that made headlines for its domestic turmoil in the past, its handling of the coronavirus revealed a surprising public trust in the government. Georgia was aggressive in its approach, closing schools after it had just three confirmed cases. It monitored the virus’s spread, suspending direct flights with “hot spots,” and installing health screenings at airports and at the borders. Around 7,000 hotel rooms were used to quarantine citizens who returned home after the first week of March. “This process has accumulated valuable experience and is an example of great flexibility for the Georgian hospitality sector to adjust with the new norms,” Turnava said. “That’s why we don't need additional time to adapt our tourist industry. That’s why we’re saying that Georgia might be one of the safest, because it’s all about following protocols.” A view of fields outside Tbilisi. (Zurab Kurtsikidze/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) In a 2016 episode of his CNN show “Parts Unknown,” Anthony Bourdain described Georgia as a place most Americans wouldn’t be able to locate on a map. With traditional European getaways such as Italy and France some of the hardest hit by the pandemic, Georgia’s promise of safety could stand out to a Westerners who may not have considered a trip there before, said Natalia Kvachantiradze, chair of the Georgia Tourism Association. Georgia will attempt to appeal to post-coronavirus travelers by pushing outdoor activities more conducive to distancing precautions, such as visiting the wine region or the national parks. The country is also labeling some resorts as “green zones,” keeping them exclusive to guests who want to be reassured about privacy and sanitary conditions. “We are in a new reality of tourism, and our country’s decision is to promote new destinations and new tourist products,” Kvachantiradze said. “When you’re traveling and want to rest, it’s important to feel free and to feel healthy and feel safe.” Read more Cheburashka was the beloved misfit of Soviet animation. It’s now a missing treasure for Russia. In Russia’s pandemic struggles, even Putin couldn’t speed bonuses to health workers Mapping the worldwide spread of the coronavirus Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news


Eager pandemic exercisers rack up new injuries

would say that’s literally 95 percent of what we’re selling right now.” Farley said his most memorable recent customer was former Washington Redskins safety Ryan Clark. He hadn’t done much distance running before and quickly developed problems with his feet and knees. He had been running in old shoes that were too broken down to support the new activity. Don’t get so bored that you’ll try anything “I’m bout to be a runner!” Clark tweeted after getting his new shoes. “Gotta find someway to combat these snacks!” Ercole said a 40-something colleague who works in his practice’s corporate office was sitting on a stool competing in a virtual bike race using a virtual-reality headset. She leaned over too far going around a virtual curve, fell off the stool and sustained a very real shoulder injury. “That’s how crazy this has gotten,” Ercole said. “People are looking for things to do, and they haven’t done these things, ever. Next thing you know, funny things like that happen.” Fortunately, not everyone calling a health-care professional about exercise is already hurt. Matthew Matava, chief of sports medicine and professor of orthopedic surgery and physical therapy at Washington University of St. Louis, said he and the colleagues he spoke with had not heard from a lot of newly injured people, but they were getting a lot of calls from patients who wanted to make major lifestyle changes and didn’t know how to start. He recommended that sedentary people and those with previous injuries talk to their doctors before beginning an exercise program to make sure they’re starting safely. “I’ve had several patients who want to use this as a sort of reset of their life,” he said, “to get in shape, to exercise more, to drink less, to eat less, to perhaps stop smoking.” Liz Joy sees all kinds of people who are starting from scratch in her role as senior medical director for wellness and nutrition overseeing four medical fitness centers in Utah. Her practice helps people with preexisting health problems learn to exercise safely, and she spends most of her time prodding people to move more. But she also treats people who have eating disorders and use excessive exercise as a coping mechanism, and this stressful time is causing some of them to push too hard. “We’re kind of seeing both extremes,” Joy said. “There’s a lot of people who are sitting


Elon Musk and SpaceX pull off another feat few thought possible

Cape Canaveral, Fla. — The goal was always to fly humans. So even when SpaceX built a spacecraft designed to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station — but not astronauts — the designers added a curious feature designed to make a point: a window. Inside SpaceX, that window became a symbol of its larger ambitions and a reminder to its workforce that human spaceflight was the ultimate goal, the reason Elon Musk started the company to begin with, as it works to eventually get people to Mars. Since its founding in 2002, SpaceX has achieved remarkable feats few thought possible. It was able to design rockets that not only propelled their payloads to orbit, but landed back on Earth to be reused. It launched the Falcon Heavy, a monster of a rocket with three boosters and 27 engines. It opened up the Pentagon’s launch market, which for a decade had been dominated by a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing. But for all the successes over the years, and all the hype the company has generated along the way, it had never flown a single person. Until Saturday. At 3:22 p.m., SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from the same launchpad that sent Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon in 1969. On board were two of NASA’s finest, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, a pair of friends whose job was to test the systems of the Dragon spacecraft. While the launch was delayed on Wednesday because of bad weather, Saturday’s flight went off without a hitch on a steamy Florida afternoon, and the spacecraft achieved orbit, sending Behnken and Hurley on a trip to catch up to the International Space Station, whizzing around the globe at 17,500 mph. With the successful flight, SpaceX now joins rarefied company. Only three nations have sent humans to orbit. And while NASA has for years relied on contractors to build the rockets and spacecraft that have flown its astronauts, this launch was done under an unusual arrangement. Under what NASA calls its “commercial crew program,” it is relying on two contractors, SpaceX and Boeing, to design and build spacecraft to ferry its astronauts to the space station. While NASA oversees the program and has deep insight into the rockets and spacecraft, the companies own and operate the hardware, not NASA. For NASA, the launch was validation


Life in D.C. takes step toward normal

People dined alfresco at il Canale on Saturday, which might scarcely be worth mentioning except that it was the first time the Georgetown pizzeria and other D.C. restaurants have served customers on their premises since the coronavirus pandemic hit. The restaurant had seven tables set up on the sidewalk, and all but one was filled. “We knew our customers would be happy to be back,” said manager Alessandro Farruggio, who stepped away for a moment to remind a diner to wear a mask when going inside the restaurant on 31st Street NW. “What’s worrisome is driving around and seeing so many closed buildings. I do the accounting, so I understand the hardships.” Farruggio, whose family owns the restaurant, was also recording the names and contact information of at least one diner at every table, as required by city regulations. That’s in case someone — a customer or an employee — is sickened by the novel coronavirus and health workers need to reach others who could have been infected, too. With the pace of infections slowing from the earliest days of the pandemic, the region’s governments have begun to relax stay-at-home orders designed to slow the spread of the virus. D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) lifted the stay-at-home order Friday but continued to restrict gatherings of more than 10 people and the operation of certain businesses. Maryland and Virginia have also taken steps to ease stay-at-home orders, with both states allowing jurisdictions more leeway on when to fully reopen. Montgomery County, Md. D.C. restaurants reopened for outdoor dining this weekend. (Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post) (Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post) [Businesses stock up on hand sanitizer in preparation for reopening] The region has tallied more than 104,000 infections. As of Saturday, the District, Maryland and Virginia reported an additional 2,284 confirmed cases and 57 deaths. The District recorded 179 more cases and two additional deaths, while Virginia added 1,078 cases and 12 deaths, most of which are centered in Northern Virginia. Maryland reported 1,027 additional cases and 43 deaths. On Saturday, the region appeared to be moving a little closer to normal but also remained out of kilter in telltale ways. Near the Lincoln Memorial, a boy and his little sister ran across the grass, towing a kite too stubborn to fly. On the Duke Ellington Bridge, not far from Connecticut Avenue NW, a fawn emerged from the undergrowth onto


Dragon capsule achieves orbit, heads towards International Space Station

shuttle mission blasted off. Hurley, a retired Marine Corps Colonel, was a crew member on that last shuttle mission, which took off in July 2011, also from pad 39A. It was the end of the shuttle’s 30-year life span, and a devastating blow to an agency that suddenly had no way to fly its astronauts anywhere. Despite repeated warnings by NASA to stay home because of the coronavirus, fans lined the beaches to watch a historic moment, but the space agency drastically limited attendance at the Kennedy Space Center. Sunday’s docking will be handled autonomously by the spacecraft, though Hurley and Behnken have the ability to take over the controls manually if needed. The mission, known as Demo-2, was a test flight designed to ensure the rocket and spacecraft can fly humans safely. Once complete, NASA and SpaceX would review the data and certify the spacecraft for additional missions that would regularly fly as many as four astronauts to the space station and back. In 2014, NASA awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX, worth $6.8 billion combined, to design and build spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the station. Previously, it had hired the private sector to fly cargo and supplies there. But outsourcing human space flight to companies was considered a risky and even reckless move in some quarters, even among NASA’s leadership. Along the way there had been a number of stumbles that delayed the first flights from 2017. Boeing, the aerospace behemoth that had been by NASA’s side since the dawn of the Space Age, was considered the favorite to fly first. But it stumbled when the test flight of its Starliner spacecraft encountered trouble almost immediately upon reaching orbit. Boeing and NASA officials scrambled to fix software problems that prevented the spacecraft from reaching the space station and instead ending the mission early. SpaceX also ran into a series of problems. In 2015, one of its Falcon 9 rockets exploded on a cargo resupply flight to the station. The next one, another rocket blew up, this time on the launch pad before an engine test. Then, last year, its Crew Dragon spacecraft blew up during a test of its abort engines. But it has since investigated and remedied those failures to NASA’s satisfaction, and in the days leading up to the launch, the space agency praised the company many in the agency once looked upon skeptically.


Watch the historic full launch of the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule

NASA’s first human space launch in nearly a decade is a success. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, with astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley aboard, separated from the Falcon 9 rocket’s second stage booster and entered a stable low-Earth orbit on its way to meeting the International Space Station.


A beloved parishioner at St. John’s in Georgetown dies of covid-19

brother died at a very young age,” said her friend Laura Button-Cain. “She had to have radiation and, I think, two hip replacements. She was a survivor.” So, when Wilson tested positive for the novel coronavirus on April 10, many assumed she would soldier through as she had done so many times before. But on April 16, Wilson died in an assisted-living facility in Northern Virginia. She was 76. “Martha was this tall drink of water,” said Button-Cain, a former parishioner at St. Johns. “She was very tall and slender and gregarious.” But Wilson’s high cheekbones and impeccable style cloaked her biting humor and acerbic wit. She had a habit of telling hard truths, which could catch some off guard. “You always knew where you stood with her,” said the Rev. Gini Gerbasi, the rector at St. John’s, “and there’s something just incredibly refreshing about that.” [Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.] A Washington native, Wilson was the daughter of a longtime Foreign Service officer. She spent her childhood hopscotching the world with her father on his various postings, growing up in places like India, Israel and England. “I’m sure that moving around probably had its difficulties,” said Abbie Fosburgh, Wilson’s cousin. “But I also think Martha loved being a person of the world.” When Wilson returned to the United States, she stayed for good. She attended Chatham College, now Chatham University, in Pittsburgh. After graduating, Wilson returned to the D.C. area, splitting her time between an apartment in Arlington and the Adirondacks, where her family owned a home. [Has someone close to you died of covid-19? Share your story with The Washington Post.] “She loved the Adirondacks more than anywhere else in the world,” Fosburgh said. “It was her constant. It was like the home they didn’t have.” Above all, Wilson found a home at St. Johns. A member for many decades, Wilson served on the vestry and chaired the church’s annual fundraiser, the Georgetown House Tour. “She ended up with the family she made,” Gerbasi said “and they were fiercely devoted to her.” Though the community is still reeling from the loss, the memory of Wilson remains as sharp as her wit. “She was fun, just fun,” Gerbasi said. “She was the opposite of what you think of like an old church lady.”


Wave of rage and anguish sweeps U.S. cities

later said his remarks were based on “information given to us by state and local law enforcement.” Minnesota officials, meanwhile, said they were investigating whether white supremacists from out of state had infiltrated the demonstrations. But arrest records since Friday in the county where Minneapolis is located suggest a vast majority of those who were taken into custody are from Minnesota. Of the 57 people arrested in protest-related incidents through Saturday morning, 47 provided a Minnesota address to authorities, said Jeremy Zoss, a spokesman for the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office. Most of them provided addresses from Minneapolis and St. Paul, according to data provided to The Washington Post. The 10 other arrests were of people from other states or the state wasn’t provided, Zoss said. Arrest data itself does not provide conclusive evidence of the demographics of thousands of demonstrators, and it is unclear if any people provided false addresses. Trump, who spent much of Saturday tweeting about the protests, spoke briefly to reporters before leaving for Florida for the SpaceX launch. After proclaiming in a tweet that Saturday was “MAGA night” at the White House, seeming to anticipate chaos in the heart of Washington, he denied inciting violence, saying, “I was just asking, but I have no idea if they’re going to be here.” Stanislav Vysotsky, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, said laying blame on outside agitators, in the absence of more convincing evidence, served to “distract from the underlying issues, which are people’s frustrations with a number of different structural conditions that begin with police violence against people of color.” “Add to that the economic inequality exacerbated by covid-19, and long-simmering anger becomes explosive,” he said. Antifa in particular, he said, had become “a convenient symbol and way to delegitimize protest by aligning it with what’s seen as antisocial violent crime.” So far, Vysotsky said, he had only seen anecdotal evidence of some far-right advocates for a race war mobilizing in Minneapolis, but local protesters had largely been able to “identify them and keep them at arm’s length.” Robinson, of Color of Change, said there were legitimate questions about the composition of the protests. “We’re seeing some forces who have nothing to do with what we’re working for or fighting for,” he said. At the same time, he welcomed new faces to the fold, saying activism in recent years has successfully created new allies.


Space Taxis

of about 220 miles, (354 kilometers). That’s well within what’s known as low-Earth orbit, which extends to 2,000 kilometers out. SpaceX launched the first private resupply run to the station in 2013, and Orbital Sciences Corp. (now part of Northrop Grumman Corp.) began making deliveries in 2014. They’ll be joined as well by Sierra Nevada. Musk’s SpaceX is revolutionizing the rocket industry by re-landing booster rockets for reuse rather than letting them burn up while re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. By recycling machinery as expensive to build as a Boeing 737 jet, Musk hopes to drive down costs to the point where consumers can become space explorers. Since SpaceX stuck its first successful re-landing on Dec. 21, 2015, the feat has almost become routine. On Feb. 6, 2018, the company launched the world’s most powerful rocket in 45 years, then flew two of its spent boosters back to the Florida coast for a spectacular, simultaneous upright landing. The Background NASA is fostering a commercial space industry by subcontracting the work of sending humans to low-Earth orbit, technology it pioneered a half-century ago. The strategic shift started when President Barack Obama’s administration in 2010 scuttled plans to build a shuttle replacement and revisit the moon. After NASA’s manned missions ended, its astronauts began heading to the space station on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft for a fare of now roughly $80 million per trip. That arrangement turned fraught after the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russia over its annexation of Crimea in 2014. Russia responded by threatening to halt rocket engine exports to the U.S. and to stop collaborating on the space station. The Russian deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin, even suggested that the U.S. could deliver astronauts to the space station “with a trampoline.” Tensions eventually died down. The Argument Private competition is bringing down the cost of space exploration. But the risks — and costs — are higher when human lives are at stake. Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, designed to take visitors to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere rather than into orbit, suffered a fatal crash during a test flight in 2014. A similar accident with passengers on board could be financially devastating to the nascent commercial space industry. So spacecraft are being designed with safety systems to push capsules away from malfunctioning rockets. NASA’s turn to private firms is designed to save capital for projects that will answer the question: “How far


Former Terps guard Varun Ram is helping coronavirus patients stay connected to loved ones

across the country, and when he reached out to them, they said this was a huge problem.” Connect for Covid-19 and similar volunteer groups such as COVID Tech Connect and Covid Connectors aim to address the problem by collecting new and used smart devices from individuals and corporations and then delivering them to hospitals, nursing homes and other health-care facilities. After a donation from Princeton, Connect for Covid-19 focused its early efforts in New Jersey, one of the states hardest hit by the disease. The group has since raised more than $45,000 and donated more than 500 new and used smart devices to roughly 150 health-care facilities across the United States. Anyone who wishes to donate a device is asked to fill out a form on the Connect for Covid-19 website, and all monetary donations go toward the purchase of devices to be donated. Last week, Ram and another Connect for Covid-19 team member, Rohan Piple, delivered 12 tablets and five used iPhones to Howard University Hospital, where they were greeted by hospital CEO Anita Jenkins. Fellow Connect for Covid-19 team member and regional digital health lead Jillian Ross, a medical student at Howard, helped coordinate the delivery. “I anticipated it to be very rewarding, but it was like 100-fold what I expected,” said Ram, a fan favorite at Maryland who made the game-sealing steal in the Terrapins’ win over Valparaiso in the 2015 NCAA tournament. “It made me want to try to do even more. Just to see the reaction and to see some of the patients, and knowing how much of an impact this would make to them and their family. Being there in person and witnessing it firsthand, it was ineffable.” Ram joined Deloitte as a consultant in 2017 after graduating with degrees in neurobiology and physiology. When the pandemic hit, he moved out of his small D.C. apartment and back into his childhood home in Howard County with his parents. He has continued to work remotely full-time while using some of the time he would normally spend traveling back and forth between client sites to coordinate device pickups and drop-offs. He plans to apply to business school in the fall with an eye toward a career in the digital health space. In an effort to grow Connect for Covid-19’s outreach efforts in the region, Ram has been in contact with D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s team


‘I’m missing it all’: Grandparents grieve over loss of visits with grandchildren

town can sometimes make things easier for all ages, not just when it comes to babies. But only if the infection rate is low, Malani says. Where she lives, in southeastern Michigan, infections have dropped “to a very low level . . . and we are seeing few admissions to our hospital,” she says. Her 19-year-old son, for example, a student at the University of Michigan, moved home temporarily after his school closed but decided to return to his campus apartment and his roommates. He saw his grandparents — who live locally — before returning to campus, but hasn’t seen them since. “If he wanted to go now, I’d think twice about it,” she says. “And I’d also stick a mask on him.” Out-of-town travel is more complicated. To be sure, being in a car limits exposure to others, but rest stops may be shuttered or crowded. If you must stop, put a barrier between such public surfaces as doorknobs, faucets and toilet and gas pump handles, or use a disinfectant wipe before touching them. For Chasen and Spero, a lengthy road trip also means finding a charging station for their electric car. “This is a concern, as well as an added half-hour,” Chasen says. People also may feel nervous flying, or going by bus or train. Many airlines now disinfect aircraft between flights, but it’s not always possible to know ahead of time how many passengers will be on board. A packed plane raises the risk. “I wouldn’t be flying right now,” Tan says. “On trains you might be able to spread people out, but a bus is such an enclosed space that if one person were ill, it would very rapidly spread to all the other passengers. I wouldn’t want to be on a train or bus either.” Grandparents will not find any of this advice comforting. But without a vaccine or better treatments, “it all comes down to managing risk, and in no case can you decrease the risk to zero,” Malani says. “This is the tragedy of covid-19, the loneliness and isolation, especially for older people.” It’s still safest to connect virtually for now, experts say. “The whole country is using these modalities,” Malani says. “If you’re not comfortable with the technology, get the kids to help you. If you can’t see them in person, there are other ways to be close and stay in touch.”


As sports return, at-risk athletes may face ‘heavy decision’ on whether to play

The messages started piling up in Scott Alexander’s phone, links to studies and news articles sent by friends and family. They detailed the possible links between diabetes and dangerous complications from the novel coronavirus because of how elevated blood sugar can suppress the immune system. Alexander, a reliever for the Los Angeles Dodgers who has diabetes, had not worried about placing himself at higher risk than any of his teammates if he returned to baseball. But he called the Dodgers’ doctors to ask for advice. “All the conversations that I’ve had with our medical staff and our team doctors have basically said that as long as I do what I would normally do as far as keeping myself healthy, they said that I wasn’t really at any higher risk than any other person,” Alexander said. “That’s kind of been my mind-set. I trust what they’re saying. I know this is an ever-evolving situation.” Alexander is in a class of professional athletes that adds a layer of complication and caution to the already dizzying task of sports leagues returning to play. Young and in peak physical condition, athletes are in the demographic least likely to face severe effects even if infected by the coronavirus. But among them are cancer survivors, diabetics, sufferers of autoimmune diseases and other immunocompromised players who may be at greater risk of catching the virus or more susceptible to the worst of covid-19, the disease it causes. There may be only a handful of players who face potentially elevated health risks in each sport. But the leagues must handle them as a crucial component of return-to-play plans because the stakes for them could be literally life and death. Leagues and players’ unions also must come to an agreement on how players who might opt out for health reasons should be handled from contractual and roster standpoints. Would they be placed on injured lists? Denied salaries? Those are issues leagues have yet to sort through. “People see professional athletes as these kind of invincible robots where they’re always in the best shape and there’s no kind of chink in their armor, but that’s not really the case,” Cleveland Browns offensive lineman and NFL Players Association president JC Tretter said this month in a conference call with reporters. “There are a lot of guys with underlying conditions and problems that we have to look out for. That’s something we’re


While we miss the games, athletes miss their other families: Their teammates

Be honest: On your sometimes overwhelming list of concerns right now, where does missing your office mates rate? Sure, we would all like to return to some sense of normalcy, but Zoom calls and Slack threads are sufficient temporary substitutes for most of us, right? Most of us, though, don’t eat two or three meals a day with co-workers. Or work out with them. Or travel with them. Or, um, shower with them. “There’s really nothing like the locker room,” Washington Capitals forward Tom Wilson said. “Guys that retire, they say that’s the thing they miss the most: just going in and hanging with the guys.” “It’s a support base that complements your family,” Washington Nationals outfielder Adam Eaton said. “At the end of the day, your family is your family. But the boys at the ballpark are another whole team of support.” And for months, that support has — poof — just evaporated. Among the problems across the world right now, athletes missing their teammates as they are scattered about because of the novel coronavirus pandemic ranks fairly low, if at all. But as we have written and read about all manner of athletes in every sport you can think of improvising ways to train while in isolation, the dynamic of the team — and what’s lost when it’s not there — can be overlooked. These players now have a vacuum with which they are wholly unfamiliar. The structure they rely on is gone. There are ramifications. “As a hockey player, it’s very rare that you’re entirely by yourself,” said Wilson, who headed home to Toronto in early April after the NHL paused its season March 12. “Even in the offseason, you leave your Capitals team and go home, but you have a team there that supports you in workouts and in preparation for the next season. Now you go from 100 to zero where you’re spending every day with your brothers, and all of a sudden you’ve got to go home — and stay home.” For their entire lives, Eaton and Wilson — and so many athletes like them — have gained a measure of their identity from the teams on which they played. Eaton was a Kenton Ridge High Cougar and a Miami (Ohio) RedHawk and a Mobile BayBear long before he became a Washington National. Wilson was a Plymouth Whaler and a Hershey Bear before he


Crowded protests spark concerns about fresh outbreaks of the deadly coronavirus

NEW YORK — Outside Brooklyn's Barclays Center, thousands of protesters churned this weekend in tightly packed crowds, casting aside social distancing to express their rage and grief. In Minneapolis, ungloved demonstrators held hands as they marched. In Las Vegas, demonstrators roared their anger into the faces of police lined up just a few feet away. And in nearly two dozen U.S. cities, police grappled physically with more than 2,500 people arrested during often-violent protests over the death of a black man, George Floyd, in the custody of Minneapolis police on Memorial Day. The rules of the covid-19 pandemic, so recently learned at considerable inconvenience, have been discarded on the streets in recent days. Protesters frequently find it impossible to stay six feet apart, to avoid hand-to-hand contact or to dodge the respiratory droplets of their shouting, chanting comrades amid the swirling chaos. And because the virus can be spread by people with no symptoms, it can be impossible to figure out whom to avoid. Officials are clearly worried about the possible impact of the protests on the health crisis. As of Sunday, the United States had recorded 1.7 million coronavirus infections and 103,000 covid-19 deaths — a disproportionate number of them black and brown people. D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said she is concerned about renewed outbreaks caused by large demonstrations in the nation’s capital. And Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D) urged her city’s demonstrators to seek tests for the virus as soon as possible. “If you were out protesting last night, you probably need to go get a COVID test this week,” Bottoms said at a news conference Saturday. “There is still a pandemic in America that’s killing black and brown people at higher numbers.” Experts said it remains to be seen whether the protests will produce a surge in infections. Given the behavior on the street, they said, there is cause for concern. “Crowded protests, like any large gathering of people in a close space, can help facilitate the spread of covid-19, which is why it’s so important participants wear masks, eye protection and bring hand-gel,” Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, wrote in an email. “Shouting and screaming, as some studies have shown with singing, can project droplets farther, which makes the use of masks . . . and eye protection . . . that much


The desire to break out of lockdown is understandable. But caution remains necessary.

be easy to throw caution to the wind and forget about washing hands, wearing face masks and avoiding indoor crowds. The desire to break out of lockdown is understandable. But caution remains necessary to interrupt chains of virus transmission. A study of 42 states (and the District) that imposed some kind of stay-at-home order in March found that the infection rate fell by 58 percent as a result. Social distancing works. It is wrong and irresponsible to cast these precautions as political, as President Trump implied by retweeting a post of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden wearing a mask. The Republican governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum, put it exactly right. “If someone is wearing a mask, they’re not doing it to represent what political party they’re in or what candidates they support. They might be doing it because they’ve got a 5-year-old child who’s been going through cancer treatments. They might have vulnerable adults in their life, who currently have covid and they’re fighting.” He added that if someone is wearing a mask, “you should look at them and say that person’s wearing a mask because for them, there’s additional risk in their life.” To which we would add: They are also being considerate of those around them. One person can spread the virus to many. Tom Frieden and Christopher Lee write in Emerging Infectious Diseases that during the 2003 SARS outbreak, one hospitalized patient was the source of four generations of transmission to 76 others. In the MERS outbreak in South Korea, five patients led to 154 secondary cases. And it is now happening with covid-19. A patient who had recently traveled to Europe and had symptoms visited the emergency department for a few hours March 9 at St. Augustine’s, a private hospital in Durban, South Africa. Eight weeks later, 39 patients and 80 staff had been infected, and 15 patients died. For the most part, a study by Richard Lessells and colleagues found, the virus was transmitted by the medical staff, from one patient to another, across five hospital wards, including on surfaces of medical equipment. Smaller outbreaks spilled over from this one, including a nursing home and dialysis center. All told, as many as 135 infections began with one person. The next phase in this trial by pandemic requires everyone to be smart. Exuberance is fine, but recklessness carries a price. Wear a face mask


Pandemic’s overall death toll in U.S. likely surpassed 100,000 weeks ago

deaths and those attributed to covid-19 has narrowed significantly since the early weeks of the outbreak. In the week ending March 28, only about half of the excess deaths were attributed to covid-19. In the week ending May 2, the proportion had risen to 81 percent. That is a common pattern in an epidemic, said Robert N. Anderson, chief of mortality statistics at the NCHS. “In the early stages, when physicians are less familiar with the disease and not looking or testing for it, cases are more likely to be misdiagnosed and attributed to other causes,” Anderson said. “As the epidemic progresses and physicians see more and more cases, they are increasingly likely to correctly diagnose the disease and report it accordingly.” The NCHS is conducting its own analyses of excess deaths during the pandemic and has also reported numbers well beyond the government’s official covid-19 death toll, but with a wider range of estimates. The agency estimates there were between 89,257 and 119,706 excess deaths from Feb. 1 to May 9. The NCHS analysis differs from the Yale estimates in several ways: The government analysis does not account for the intensity of flu epidemics, and it seeks to account for the lag in death reporting by estimating the number of deaths that will eventually be tallied when data is complete. The Yale-led team found with 95 percent confidence that the number of excess deaths during the period under study falls within the range of 97,500 and 105,500. The 101,600 figure is the midpoint of that range. The NCHS model also calculates a range of excess deaths with 95 percent confidence. The agency publishes only the midpoint and low numbers from that range. It does not publish the higher end. Anderson said the higher number could be misleading. It would include many deaths that could be due to normal variation, he said. Steven H. Woolf, a professor at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, said it is unusual to for scientists to publish only the lower and middle points of a range. “The customary thing in most scientific publications, including most results that come from CDC and NCHS, is to present the full 95 percent confidence interval,” said Woolf, who is not part of the Yale-led effort. Lenny Bronner, Jacqueline Dupree and Thomas Johnson contributed to this report. A research team led by the Yale School of Public Health


the midpoint and low numbers from that range. It does not publish the higher end. Anderson said the higher number could be misleading. It would include many deaths that could be due to normal variation, he said. Steven H. Woolf, a professor at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, said it is unusual to for scientists to publish only the lower and middle points of a range. “The customary thing in most scientific publications, including most results that come from CDC and NCHS, is to present the full 95 percent confidence interval,” said Woolf, who is not part of the Yale-led effort. Lenny Bronner, Jacqueline Dupree and Thomas Johnson contributed to this report. A research team led by the Yale School of Public Health used historical data on all deaths between 2015 and early 2020, published by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), to model the number of deaths that would normally be expected each week from March 1 to May 9. The estimate takes into account seasonal variations, intensity of flu epidemics and year-to-year variations in mortality levels. NCHS data are collected from state health departments, which vary significantly in how quickly they report deaths. The Yale analysis adjusts the baseline in each state to reflect those differences. In states that have been slow to report deaths to the NCHS, the baseline for expected deaths in recent periods is adjusted downward. Details on the team’s statistical approach can be found on GitHub, where it has been posted by Weinberger. Also on GitHub, The Post has published additional details about the data and methodology. The numbers of overall deaths and covid-19 deaths are not modeled or estimated. They are observed deaths. These data were obtained from provisional death data published weekly by the NCHS, which are based on the state in which each person’s death occurred, not on the state of the person’s residence. For privacy reasons, the NCHS does not publicly report deaths from states that had fewer than 10 covid-19 fatalities in any given week. For those weeks in those states, the Yale-led analysis used data compiled by The Post from state health departments. Figures for North Carolina and Connecticut were not up to date, and those states are not included in this analysis. Pennsylvania is reporting deaths after a significant lag and actual death counts for 2020 are most likely underestimated, according to the NCHS.


SpaceX capsule on its way to its historic rendezvous with the space station

Girl from Ipanema” and, finally, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” They boarded the Dragon capsule at 12:35 p.m., as it began raining at the launch site. Those conditions passed, though, at around 2:35 p.m., and flight engineers signaled a go for launch. As the flight countdown clock continued to tick, technicians fueled the two boosters of the Falcon 9 rocket and armed Dragon’s emergency abort system. Less than an hour later, SpaceX Flight Director Mike Taylor declared the mission a go for launch, and at 3:22 p.m. — precisely on time — the Falcon 9′s first-stage engines ignited, shoving the spacecraft away from its support beams and into the air. Accelerating rapidly at more than twice the speed of a gunshot, Falcon 9 tore through the humid Space Coast sky, leaving a blazing fireball and smoky trail in its wake, shaking the Earth and unleashing a deafening roar audible for dozens of miles. Two and a half minutes after liftoff, Falcon 9′s first booster stopped firing and separated from the second stage, landing seven minutes later on a barge floating in the Atlantic Ocean named “Of Course I Still Love You.” The second stage ignited and shot the Dragon capsule toward orbit. Twelve minutes after launch, it too dropped away — the signal that the Dragon capsule was on its way to orbit. Raucous applause erupted from space officials at NASA facilities in Florida and Texas, and at SpaceX’s mission control offices in Hawthorne, Calif. “We have done it,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine declared on NASA’s live-stream broadcast. Despite repeated warnings by NASA to stay home because of the coronavirus, fans lined the beaches to watch a historic moment, but the space agency drastically limited attendance at the Kennedy Space Center. The flight was the fulfillment of a risky bet by NASA under the Obama administration to entrust the private sector to fly astronauts, and Trump’s administration has made human space exploration a priority. Trump turned the Air Force’s Space Command into the Space Force, its own branch of the military, and named Pence the chairman of the National Space Council. He has pushed NASA to conduct a lunar landing mission by 2024 as a steppingstone for a mission to Mars. Pence has said the U.S. will return to the moon “by any means necessary.” For SpaceX, it was the climax of an improbable odyssey that began in 2002. Musk continues to


SpaceX launch is just the beginning of Crew Dragon’s journey

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The launch was a success, but the mission is far from complete. On Saturday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center, sending two astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, into orbit. But that was only the beginning. What comes next is a 19-hour journey to the International Space Station and, if all goes well, a rendezvous and docking with that floating laboratory orbiting the earth at 17,500 mph. It’s a carefully choreographed dance — and a dangerous one. There are three people aboard the station — two Russian cosmonauts and NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy — and the spacecraft has to avoid a collision. “This endeavor is the culmination of not only years and years of experience, and time and work, but hundreds of thousands of hours of tireless effort to bring us here,” Benji Reed, SpaceX’s Commercial Crew Program manager, said in the days leading up to the launch. “And it’s all focused on the safety and reliability of the system.” The spacecraft is designed to perform the docking on its own — but if anything were to go wrong, the astronauts could take control. To test their ability to do that, Behnken and Hurley, two of NASA’s best who have spent five years training for the mission, will take manual control of the spacecraft briefly as it closes to within about 150 meters of the space station before the spacecraft resumes the docking sequence. As it gets closer to the station, the spacecraft will slow, relative to the space station, in a series of deliberate steps, ensuring along the way that all the systems are functioning normally, and that it is safe to proceed. Leading up to the launch, Behnken said they would be ready to take control, using the spacecraft’s touch screen technology. “The docking task, to come close to the space station and fly in proximity and then slowly come into contact, is maybe a little bit different than what you should see flying a space shuttle or flying an aircraft,” Behnken said. If at any time, controllers on the ground sense something is wrong, they could order the spacecraft to hold its position, or even back off. SpaceX has a fair amount of experience sending spacecraft to the space station. Since 2012, it has sent more than 20 cargo ships, delivering supplies and experiments. On those missions,


The historic SpaceX launch of NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley

class of 2000 on their first try. Both have been to space twice before. Both are fathers to a young boy. | Behnken is married to Megan McArthur, a NASA astronaut and oceanographer; Hurley is married to Karen Nyberg, who recently retired from the NASA astronaut corps. The two astronauts were lifted to the space station by a booster and spacecraft operated by SpaceX, founded by tech billionaire Elon Musk. The mission heralds a monumental moment in human space exploration: the first launch by a private company of people into orbit. It marks the end of the era where only government-owned spacecraft achieved such heights and represents another major step in the privatization of space. “We cannot be complacent about technology development,” Musk told The Washington Post in a preflight interview. “We have to really drive innovation hard and say, ‘Okay, let us go as fast and as hard as possible to get humanity back to the moon and there to stay and have a base on the moon, maybe [a] city on the moon, to have a base on Mars, a city on Mars to … make life multi-planetary.’" Both President Trump and Vice President Pence, the chair of the National Space Council, were in attendance to mark a new era of space flight. Trump, who has made human spaceflight a priority of his first term turned the Air Force’s Space Command into the Space Force, its own branch of the military, and has pushed NASA to conduct a lunar landing mission by 2024 as a steppingstone to a mission to Mars. Pence has said the U.S. will return to the moon “by any means necessary.” | After the launch, President Trump addressed the crowd at Kennedy Space Center, saying “You can’t be number one on earth if you are number two in space.” The first booster of the Falcon 9 rocket successfully landing on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean was a positive sign as the rocket’s second-stage booster and Crew Dragon capsule continue their launch trajectory into orbit and toward the International Space Station. The Crew Dragon capsule is expected to dock with the International Space Station at approximately 10:30 a.m. Sunday. There are three people on board the station — two Russian cosmonauts and NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy — and the spacecraft has to avoid a collision. The spacecraft is designed to perform the docking on


Coronavirus Andes Peru Ecuador Bolivia Tibet high altitude

Men dressed as Andean Ukukus or Pabluchas, traditional characters who act as vigilantes imposing social order, brandish whips as a threat to compel people to maintain their distance and remind them to wear face masks and gloves near Cusco, Peru. (Jose Carlos Angulo/AFP/Getty Images) When tourists from Mexico, China and Britain became the first covid-19 fatalities in Cusco, Peru, it seemed as if the onetime capital of the Inca Empire might be headed for a significant outbreak. Nestled in a picturesque Andean valley, the high-altitude city of 420,000 residents, the gateway to the cloud forest citadel of Machu Picchu, receives more than 3 million international visitors per year — many from pandemic hot spots, including the United States, Italy and Spain. Yet since those three deaths, between March 23 and April 3, at the start of Peru’s strict national lockdown, there has not been another covid-19 fatality in the entire Cusco region, even as the disease has claimed more than 4,000 lives nationally. Infections have also remained low. Just 916 of Peru’s 141,000 cases come from the Cusco region, meaning its contagion rate is more than 80 percent below the national average. The relative dearth of cases and deaths in the internationally connected but high-elevation region has prompted speculation here that the coronavirus gets soroche, the Quechua word for altitude sickness. Similar results have been seen elsewhere in the Andes, and in Tibet. [Peru took early, aggressive measures against the coronavirus. It’s still suffering one of Latin America’s largest outbreaks.] Scientists warn that the apparent pattern might not last. But the as-yet-unexplained phenomenon has them intrigued. Researchers are starting to investigate a possible relationship between the coronavirus and altitude. In one peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Respiratory Physiology & Neurobiology, researchers from Australia, Bolivia, Canada and Switzerland looking at epidemiological data from Bolivia, Ecuador and Tibet found populations living above 3,000 meters (9,842 feet) reported significantly lower levels of confirmed infections than their lowland counterparts. They found that Tibet’s infection rate was “drastically” lower than that of lowland China, three times lower in the Bolivian Andes than in the rest of the country and four times lower in the Ecuadoran Andes. Ecuador has suffered one of Latin America’s worst outbreaks, with more than 38,000 reported cases and more than 3,300 deaths, according to official figures. But it has been centered on the Pacific port of Guayaquil. Bolivia’s 8,387 cases


SpaceX and NASA docking live updates: ‘We have docking’: Dragon docks with space station, another mission milestone

SpaceX has completed the first part of its historic flight to the International Space Station Sunday morning, when its Dragon spacecraft successfully docked with the orbiting laboratory at 10:16 a.m., a few minutes earlier than planned. Before opening the hatch and entering the station, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will conduct a series of pressure and leak checks to ensure their safety. Then they will join fellow NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and two Russian cosmonauts aboard the station. The docking was a delicate and dangerous part of the mission. The spacecraft chased down the space station, traveling in orbit at 17,500 m.p.h., but then approached very slowly in a series of carefully choreographed maneuvers. The mission went smoothly, ground officials said, following a picture-perfect launch some 19 hours earlier from the Kennedy Space Center. Photos and videos from Saturday’s historic launch from Kennedy Space Center Bob Behnken, Doug Hurley: The astronauts aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule Watch the live stream of SpaceX NASA’s Endeavour capsule docking with the International Space Station


Coronavirus hindering visits for grandparents

same town can sometimes make things easier for all ages, not just when it comes to babies. But only if the infection rate is low, Malani says. Where she lives, in southeastern Michigan, infections have dropped “to a very low level . . . and we are seeing few admissions to our hospital,” she says. Her 19-year-old son, for example, a student at the University of Michigan, moved home temporarily after his school closed but decided to return to his campus apartment and his roommates. He saw his grandparents — who live locally — before returning to campus, but hasn’t seen them since. “If he wanted to go now, I’d think twice about it,” she says. “And I’d also stick a mask on him.” Out-of-town travel is more complicated. To be sure, being in a car limits exposure to others, but rest stops may be shuttered or crowded. If you must stop, put a barrier between such public surfaces as doorknobs, faucets and toilet and gas pump handles, or use a disinfectant wipe before touching them. For Chasen and Spero, a lengthy road trip also means finding a charging station for their electric car. “This is a concern, as well as an added half-hour,” Chasen says. People also may feel nervous flying, or going by bus or train. Many airlines now disinfect aircraft between flights, but it’s not always possible to know ahead of time how many passengers will be on board. A packed plane raises the risk. “I wouldn’t be flying right now,” Tan says. “On trains you might be able to spread people out, but a bus is such an enclosed space that if one person were ill, it would very rapidly spread to all the other passengers. I wouldn’t want to be on a train or bus either.” Grandparents will not find any of this advice comforting. But without a vaccine or better treatments, “it all comes down to managing risk, and in no case can you decrease the risk to zero,” Malani says. “This is the tragedy of covid-19, the loneliness and isolation, especially for older people.” It’s still safest to connect virtually for now, experts say. “The whole country is using these modalities,” Malani says. “If you’re not comfortable with the technology, get the kids to help you. If you can’t see them in person, there are other ways to be close and stay in


Face masks are here to stay

cast these precautions as political, as President Trump implied by retweeting a post of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden wearing a mask. The Republican governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum, put it exactly right. “If someone is wearing a mask, they’re not doing it to represent what political party they’re in or what candidates they support. They might be doing it because they’ve got a 5-year-old child who’s been going through cancer treatments. They might have vulnerable adults in their life, who currently have covid and they’re fighting.” He added that if someone is wearing a mask, “you should look at them and say that person’s wearing a mask because for them, there’s additional risk in their life.” To which we would add: They are also being considerate of those around them. One person can spread the virus to many. Tom Frieden and Christopher Lee write in Emerging Infectious Diseases that during the 2003 SARS outbreak, one hospitalized patient was the source of four generations of transmission to 76 others. In the MERS outbreak in South Korea, five patients led to 154 secondary cases. And it is now happening with covid-19. A patient who had recently traveled to Europe and had symptoms visited the emergency department for a few hours March 9 at St. Augustine’s, a private hospital in Durban, South Africa. Eight weeks later, 39 patients and 80 staff had been infected, and 15 patients died. For the most part, a study by Richard Lessells and colleagues found, the virus was transmitted by the medical staff, from one patient to another, across five hospital wards, including on surfaces of medical equipment. Smaller outbreaks spilled over from this one, including a nursing home and dialysis center. All told, as many as 135 infections began with one person. [The Opinions section is looking for stories of how the coronavirus has affected people of all walks of life. Write to us.] The next phase in this trial by pandemic requires everyone to be smart. Exuberance is fine, but recklessness carries a price. Wear a face mask Read more: Jennifer Rubin: Masks will become the new norm — everywhere Leana S. Wen: How do we prevent the next 100,000? Norman Leahy: Gov. Northam’s mask order covers more than you think Paul Waldman: Trump’s accidental culture war over wearing masks Megan McArdle: If conservatives want a less intrusive government, they should wear masks


Asthma causes nearly 10 million doctor visits each year

Telltale signs of asthma — coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath — afflict about 25 million U.S. residents. That includes 19.2 million adults and 5.5 million youths, or roughly 8 percent of the population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Asthma symptoms, also known as an asthma attack, are the result of a person’s airways becoming inflamed, narrowed and mucus-laden, restricting the flow of air to and from the lungs. However, asthma can vary greatly from person to person, with differences in severity and frequency of attacks as well as what triggers those attacks. For some, it’s exposure to allergens such as dust, pollen or pet dander. Cigarette smoke, smog or the smell of paint or perfume may bring on attacks. For others, triggers may be exercise, especially in cold air, or sudden changes in the weather. Though no cure exists for asthma, which is a chronic condition, symptoms usually can be controlled, starting with avoidance of known triggers. Treatment options include quick-relief inhaled medications, which ease attack symptoms by swiftly relaxing muscles around the airways to allow better air flow, and long-term control medication, which can help prevent attacks or at least make them fewer and milder. Most asthma medicines are taken by breathing them in, via an inhaler or nebulizer, a method that gets the medication quickly to the lungs, but some medicines are taken as a pill. Working closely with your doctor on a treatment plan is advised for anyone with asthma because severe symptoms, or untreated ones, can be life-threatening. The CDC reports that asthma causes 9.8 million doctor visits each year, as well as 1.6 million trips to the ER. — Linda Searing