More people are flying again. Here’s what to expect at airports and on planes.

flight on your phone. TSA has been making adjustments throughout the pandemic to address health and safety concerns of fliers. One of the most obvious adjustments is that travelers can expect to practice social distancing while waiting in line at airport security checkpoints. On May 7, TSA announced its staff members must wear face masks at screening checkpoints. Travelers are allowed to wear face masks throughout the screening process, however a TSA agent may ask the traveler to pull it down to confirm their identity. TSA is allowing passengers to carry on one container of liquid hand sanitizer, up to 12 ounces, until further notice. Passengers can also ask TSA officers to change gloves during their screening process. The agency recommends travelers be particularly vigilant about following rules for carry-on bags if they don’t want officers to have to touch their belongings more than necessary. “We are advising travelers to place personal items such as wallets, keys or phone in their carry-on bags to be screened through the X-ray system,” TSA said in a statement. “Anything that you’d hold up to your face that’s in your pockets — put those items in your carry-on bag, not in the bin.” As one of covid-19′s symptoms is fever, screening travelers’ temperatures with contactless infrared thermometers is becoming more common at airports around the world. Air Canada, Air France, Singapore Airlines, Malaysia Airlines, Cathay Pacific and others have announced temperature checks for passengers. London’s Heathrow Airport is carrying out the screenings at some departures, the BBC reported. Hong Kong has been temperature-screening arriving and departing passengers since April. As of now, the only U.S. airline planning to check the temperature of passengers is Frontier. Earlier this month, the carrier announced that starting June 1, anyone with a temperature of 100.4 degrees or higher would not be permitted to fly. Other airlines, including JetBlue and Southwest, are pushing for TSA to take passengers’ temperatures at the security check point. The International Air Transport Association is also a proponent of the practice for both travelers and staff. The choreography of boarding and deplaning may be different from what you are used to. Major airlines have announced changes in boarding procedures to encourage social distancing between passengers. To avoid the usual crowds gathering in front of the boarding gate, Delta is boarding customers 10 at a time. JetBlue is boarding passengers in the back of the


Children are falling ill with perplexing inflammatory syndrome thought to be linked to covid-19

that makes them less likely to become infected and have severe illness. In late April, a study funded by the National Institutes of Health described in a Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology letter how ACE2 expression was reduced in swabs of the nasal passages and throats of 11-year-olds with asthma. The researchers wrote that this unexpected finding may result in “decreased susceptibility to infection.” “It’s a great theory and a unifying theory,” said Steven Kernie, chief of critical care medicine at New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital and professor of pediatrics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Kernie said research also has shown that these receptors are highly expressed in adults’ kidneys, which have been severely damaged in a significant percentage of older coronavirus patients, but less concentrated in children’s kidneys. The presentation of covid-19 also differs between adults and children in severe cases, where people wind up in intensive care. In adults, the disease has been a shape-shifter even in how it kills: inducing cellular changes that lead to respiratory failure, blood clots in the legs, and other means. But in children, there appears to be somewhat less variety in critical cases. Many of those younger than 18 who were in intensive care during the first few weeks were either infants or teenagers who needed help breathing, as with traditional respiratory viruses, according to critical-care doctors. The Kawasaki-like cases came later. The syndrome, first described by a Japanese pediatrician in 1967, is characterized by persistent fever, red eyes, a rash, and swollen hands and feet that are signs of inflammation in the blood vessels. Its cause is unknown, but some researchers think it is a genetic susceptibility to a virus or other environmental stressor. There’s no cure, but there are effective treatments, including blood thinners and an immunoglobulin serum that can be used to stabilize most children. In rare cases, children may develop lifelong cardiac issues. Newburger, considered one of the world’s leading experts on Kawasaki, said some of the children tested positive for an active infection with the novel coronavirus while others did not. A third group did not have an active infection but had antibodies showing previous exposure. One working theory is that the condition could be a sort of post-viral syndrome occurring after infection. This is similar to the patterns researchers are seeing in some children presenting with peculiar “frost-bite”-like rashes on their toes and


the type of coronary findings. That’s when the global community said there has to be an overlap between this condition and Kawasaki disease,” Sable said. In one case, for instance, an 8-old boy who was admitted to Cohen Children’s Medical Center in Nassau County with Kawasaki-like symptoms in late April, was placed on a ventilator and eventually suffered heart failure. However, the boy has “essentially recovered” and “is doing very well,” said James Schneider, a pediatric critical care doctor at the hospital. “When it comes to Kawasaki disease, the main concern we have as physicians is that if is untreated, it could lead to injury to the coronary arteries — the arteries that feed the heart,” Schneider said. “Sometimes the heart muscle itself, the myocardial, can be affected and can be weakened or injured." These new Kawasaki-like cases differ in important respects from traditional presentations, doctors say — a situation that may provide clues about the virus, its biology and movement around the world. The first surprising thing from the data being collected on the children is that they are mostly ages 5 to 10. Most children with traditional Kawasaki disease are younger than 5. Nearly all the inflammatory syndrome cases have been in Europe and in the United States, about 50 total in cities including Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. A few were in Asia, and no one seemed to know of more than a single case on the West Coast. Some speculate different strains of the virus could be responsible for the differing incidence of such cases. Genome sequencing has shown most of those circulating on the West Coast appear to have originated from Asia while a different strain on the East Coast appears to have come from Europe. In addition, some children with the covid-19-related inflammatory syndrome have low blood pressure and gastrointestinal symptoms. including severe abdominal plan, vomiting and diarrhea, which are less commonly seen in Kawasaki. And while Kawasaki tends to affect Asian children disproportionately, some doctors say they are seeing the new syndrome in children of all races, while others have noticed a high number of children of African or Caribbean descent. What’s worrisome, Newburger said, “is that some of these children are sicker than in an average Kawasaki shock syndrome.” The good news, she said, is that many patients have been treated successfully and fully recovered. Although it’s still early, “so


April, was placed on a ventilator and eventually suffered heart failure. However, the boy has “essentially recovered” and “is doing very well,” said James Schneider, a pediatric critical care doctor at the hospital. “When it comes to Kawasaki disease, the main concern we have as physicians is that if is untreated, it could lead to injury to the coronary arteries — the arteries that feed the heart,” Schneider said. “Sometimes the heart muscle itself, the myocardial, can be affected and can be weakened or injured." These new Kawasaki-like cases differ in important respects from traditional presentations, doctors say — a situation that may provide clues about the virus, its biology and movement around the world. The first surprising thing from the data being collected on the children is that they are mostly ages 5 to 10. Most children with traditional Kawasaki disease are younger than 5. Nearly all the inflammatory syndrome cases have been in Europe and in the United States, about 50 total in cities including Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. A few were in Asia, and no one seemed to know of more than a single case on the West Coast. Some speculate different strains of the virus could be responsible for the differing incidence of such cases. Genome sequencing has shown most of those circulating on the West Coast appear to have originated from Asia while a different strain on the East Coast appears to have come from Europe. In addition, some children with the covid-19-related inflammatory syndrome have low blood pressure and gastrointestinal symptoms. including severe abdominal plan, vomiting and diarrhea, which are less commonly seen in Kawasaki. And while Kawasaki tends to affect Asian children disproportionately, some doctors say they are seeing the new syndrome in children of all races, while others have noticed a high number of children of African or Caribbean descent. What’s worrisome, Newburger said, “is that some of these children are sicker than in an average Kawasaki shock syndrome.” The good news, she said, is that many patients have been treated successfully and fully recovered. Although it’s still early, “so far, I think we can be optimistic for most patients.” Read more: ‘Frostbite’ toes and other peculiar rashes may be signs of hidden coronavirus infection, especially in the young Young and middle-aged people, barely sick with covid-19, are dying of strokes Coronavirus looks different in kids than in adults


Amazon vowed to crack down on coronavirus profiteering. Some sellers have figured out loopholes.

photos to make those claims. Amazon removed the product listings after The Washington Post asked about them. The company requires sellers to provide accurate information, and it has developed digital tools for the coronavirus outbreak “to scan the hundreds of millions of product detail pages for any inaccurate claims our initial block may have missed,” spokeswoman Cecilia Fan said in an emailed statement. All told, Amazon has blocked or removed more than 6.5 million products, she said. (Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Amazon has struggled for years to police its marketplace. That’s in large part because third-party merchants, not Amazon itself, account for the majority of physical merchandise sold on the site. That amounted to as much as 58 percent in 2018, Bezos wrote in a letter to shareholders last year. The company routinely grapples with a scourge of counterfeit products, so much so that the Trump administration announced plans in January to begin imposing fines and other penalties on merchants, warehouses and e-commerce marketplaces such as Amazon that facilitate the import and sale of counterfeits. The company forbids the sales of cannabidiol on the site, but creative sellers have figured out how to bypass Amazon’s detection, making CBD products easy to find. Former executives have said the company prioritizes selection over preemptively blocking merchants who might violate rules. Since the outbreak began, Amazon has worked to police rogue sellers who engaged in price gouging on vital items such as face masks. And the company has struggled to keep pace with the flood of orders from shoppers leery of venturing out of their homes during the pandemic. In February, Amazon warned sellers about “false claims in regards to COVID-19,” and said then it had blocked or removed more than 1 million products for suspect or misleading claims. The company also stopped letting sellers bid on the words “coronavirus” or “covid-19” as a keyword in search results. In mid-March, the company said it suspended more than 3,900 selling accounts in its U.S. store for violating its fair pricing policies. Despite those measures, sellers have sidestepped Amazon’s detection for coronavirus-protection claims with images that run along their products. The seller of Flightbird Disposable Hand Sanitizer Gel, for example, included an image that claims the product “effectively inhibits new coronavirus.” In a message, that seller said “the product effectively keeps hands clean.” Just as the coronavirus pandemic is exposing


More evidence emerges on why covid-19 is so much worse than the flu

Researchers who examined the lungs of patients killed by covid-19 found evidence that it attacks the lining of blood vessels there, a critical difference from the lungs of people who died of the flu, according to a report published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine. Critical parts of the lungs of patients infected by the novel coronavirus also suffered many microscopic blood clots and appeared to respond to the attack by growing tiny new blood vessels, the researchers reported. The observations in a small number of autopsied lungs buttress reports from physicians treating covid-19 patients. Doctors have described widespread damage to blood vessels and the presence of blood clots that would not be expected in a respiratory disease. “What’s different about covid-19 is the lungs don’t get stiff or injured or destroyed before there’s hypoxia,” the medical term for oxygen deprivation, said Steven J. Mentzer, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and part of the team that wrote the report. “For whatever reason, there is a vascular phase” in addition to damage more commonly associated with viral diseases such as the flu, he said. The research team compared seven lungs of patients who died of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, with lung tissue from seven patients who died of pneumonia caused by the flu. They also examined 10 lungs donated for transplant but not used. The lungs, acquired in Europe, were matched by age and gender. They did not look at blood vessels in organs such as the kidneys and heart, where other researchers have described finding attacks from the virus and unexpected blood clots. In larger blood vessels of the lungs, the number of blood clots was similar among covid-19 and flu patients, the researchers wrote. But in covid-19 patients, they found nine times as many micro-clots in the tiny capillaries of the small air sacs that allow oxygen to pass into the blood stream and carbon dioxide to move out. The virus may have damaged the walls of those capillaries and blocked the movement of those gases, the researchers wrote. They also found inflamed and damaged cells in the lining of blood vessels in the covid-19 patients. Most surprising was evidence that the lungs of people attacked by the SARS-CoV-2 virus grew new blood vessels. “The lungs from patients with covid-19 had significant new vessel growth,” a discovery the researchers described as


destroyed before there’s hypoxia,” the medical term for oxygen deprivation, said Steven J. Mentzer, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and part of the team that wrote the report. “For whatever reason, there is a vascular phase” in addition to damage more commonly associated with viral diseases such as the flu, he said. The research team compared seven lungs of patients who died of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, with lung tissue from seven patients who died of pneumonia caused by the flu. They also examined 10 lungs donated for transplant but not used. The lungs, acquired in Europe, were matched by age and gender. They did not look at blood vessels in organs such as the kidneys and heart, where other researchers have described finding attacks from the virus and unexpected blood clots. In larger blood vessels of the lungs, the number of blood clots was similar among covid-19 and flu patients, the researchers wrote. But in covid-19 patients, they found nine times as many micro-clots in the tiny capillaries of the small air sacs that allow oxygen to pass into the blood stream and carbon dioxide to move out. The virus may have damaged the walls of those capillaries and blocked the movement of those gases, the researchers wrote. They also found inflamed and damaged cells in the lining of blood vessels in the covid-19 patients. Most surprising was evidence that the lungs of people attacked by the SARS-CoV-2 virus grew new blood vessels. “The lungs from patients with covid-19 had significant new vessel growth,” a discovery the researchers described as “unexpected.” In an interview, Mentzer speculated that may have been an attempt by the lungs to pass more oxygen to hypoxic tissue. “That may be one of the things that gets people better,” he said. The researchers looked for genetic and other differences that might help predict who is most susceptible to severe illness from the virus but did not find any in their tiny sample. So far in the pandemic, covid-19 has hit certain groups, including older people, African Americans and people with underlying diseases such as diabetes, the hardest. “Patients who do fairly well have a purely respiratory disease, and the patients who have trouble have a vascular component as well,” Mentzer said. But efforts to determine or explain who will fall into each group have not panned out, he said.


Here’s what experts want you to know before taking a road trip during the pandemic

Memorial Day Weekend signals the beginning of vacation season for Americans, and with that comes barbecues, beach visits and travel. But with the world battling the coronavirus pandemic, and much of the country still closed as a result, our typical vacation rituals have been disrupted. Right now, the nation’s top health officials are still urging people to stay home to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. However, with different pockets of America reopening and people becoming impatient with stay-at-home orders, some are looking for ways to vacation despite the obstacles. Thanks to the pandemic’s upset of traditional travel, industry experts are saying this will be the year of the road trip. “I think Americans will take a wait-and-see-attitude about longer trips this summer, but they may be interested in taking road trips," says John B. Townsend II, a manager of public and government affairs for the American Automobile Association, AAA. “We’ve seen surveys that show that about a third of Americans say they plan to take a road trip this summer.” According to Townsend and Roger Dow, president and CEO of U.S. Travel Association, America’s interest in road trips has translated to a spike in RV rentals and purchases. “Companies, like Cruise America where you can rent an RV, their numbers are getting a tremendous increase,” says Dow. “I’ve watched some of [the RV companies'] stocks go up.” For those considering a road trip in their car or RV, know that taking one is not risk-free. Here’s what else you should consider ahead of pandemic travel. Health experts are warning against road trips this summer Before you set off on the road, ask yourself if your trip is essential. “We’re still in the middle of the pandemic,” says special pathogens expert Syra Madad, who was recently featured in Netflix docuseries “Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak.” “And, unfortunately, this is something that’s going to be with us for the foreseeable future.” With at least 1.5 million confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States and no available vaccine, experts say we’re still in a very critical stage, despite some parts of the country easing restrictions. “There’s still widespread community transmission all over the United States,” says Madad. “We understand people want to get out, but health and safety is paramount.” Madad’s advice to Americans mirrors that of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at this time, to stay home as


Maryland county acted early to enlist virus tracers

about it now, as they plan a pilot program with NORC,” Pittman said earlier this week. “We’ve been doing it.” County Health Officer Nilesh Kalyanaraman described the team’s mission as a mix of detective work and social work. Along with ferreting out who may have been exposed, contact tracers have found themselves consoling the grief-stricken and locating resources for families who need food, shelter, diapers, formula or medical assistance. “We should call it contact-tracing case management,” Pittman said. “We’re doing case management on every one.” Tracey Dill, a contact tracer, does a phone check-in. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post) Moran gathers details about her patients and anyone with whom they may have been in proximity for more than 10 minutes — the amount of time in which exposure is possible, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She calls daily to monitor their condition and remind them to remain isolated in quarantine. Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean for public health practice and community engagement at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, praised the county’s early launch of contact tracing and its focus on black and Hispanic communities and other vulnerable populations. Contact tracing for Anne Arundel’s first known case — a woman in her 70s from Montana, in town to visit relatives — centered on those family members. The trail in other cases has led to a party attended by an infected person, a military base and a doctor’s office. “We did put the people from the party on quarantine,” Karnes recalled. She said it is nearly impossible to pinpoint where an infected person was exposed, unless it is traced back to a family member or co-worker. But still, they try. “It’s kind of difficult,” she said of coming to a conclusion that a person may have become infected during a trip to the grocery store or the bank. “Even with salmonella, you ask: ‘You ate here? You ate there?’ You try to figure it out, but you really can’t.” [Coronavirus is ravaging one of the nation’s wealthiest black counties] One of the team’s most challenging cases originated in a house divided into four apartments. Sixteen people lived there. After a man in his 40s died and posthumously tested positive for the coronavirus, 13 other occupants — ages 8 through 70 — tested positive, too. The grieving relatives were reluctant to provide information to contact tracers, Karnes


The Technology 202: Apple and Google's coronavirus alert tools arrive amid doubts about their efficacy

watching for the negative impacts too) https://t.co/05Py7cB1i5 — jack (@jack) May 20, 2020 It has the potential to limit harassment, which has been a widespread issue on the social network. OneZero's Will Oremus: Twitter is testing a new feature that lets you limit who can reply to your tweets. This is very good news for the many users, particularly women and people of color, who can't tweet without triggering a cascade of harassing and condescending "reply guys." https://t.co/lVm6NJnMbt — Will Oremus (@WillOremus) May 20, 2020 The New York Times' Taylor Lorenz pointed out one workaround: Are reply guys just gonna become quote tweet guys now? https://t.co/KAAqnKO6RD — Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) May 20, 2020 It's most immediate value, however, were pranks. Twitter shut off replies for this tweet: reply if you want to be verified! — Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) May 20, 2020 Rapper Lil Nas X also had fun with the feature: FEELING GENEROUS❤ SENDING EVERYBODY WHO REPLIES TO THIS $100 ❤❤ — nope (@LilNasX) May 20, 2020 Who Will Build It? Google secured a lucrative deal with the Defense Department to help with its cyberthreat detection and response. Google's chief executive Sundar Pichai (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo) The deal, first reported by Axios, is in the "seven figures," the company said. The technology will still allow the Defense Department to use a mix of other cloud providers including Amazon's AWS and Microsoft's Azure. It's a lot less controversial that the Project Maven contract working on autonomous drones that Google pulled out in 2018. But it shows that Google is still in the game when it comes to the Pentagon. Where you won't be seeing Google's Cloud technology anytime soon is in building custom artificial intelligence tools to help with oil and gas extraction, Google said it will honor existing contracts but didn't say what they were. The statement followed a Greenpeace resort slamming Google, Microsoft and Amazon for helping major oil companies. The work has been a source of employee protest at both Amazon and Microsoft. Peter Thiel's Palantir also scored big again this month. The Department of Affairs awarded a $5 million contract to Palantir through a software reseller for a tool to "track and analyze covid-19" outbreak areas, TechCrunch reports. The firm was also awarded a contract with the National Institutes of Health for covid-19 data analysis following nearly $25 million in contracts in April. Hill happenings Republicans introduced


Trump used to scapegoat Mexico. Now it’s China’s turn.

As polls continue to show a steady lead for Joe Biden, President Trump is getting increasingly desperate. He has now committed himself to an election strategy that is centered on pointing the finger at China and its leader, Xi Jinping. Throughout January and February, Trump had showered praise on Xi, describing him as “strong, sharp and powerfully focused,” repeatedly emphasized the close Sino-American cooperation on covid-19, and praised Beijing for its “transparency.” As late as March 27, Trump tweeted, “We are working closely together. Much respect!” That was before it became clear that he had mishandled the outbreak in the United States, and before his approval rating began to drop. So he returned to a familiar pattern: blaming foreigners. If the 2016 campaign was centered around blaming Mexico, the 2020 campaign will clearly focus on scapegoating China. Trump surrogates are already insisting that China must pay for the damage it has done — which will presumably happen right after Mexico pays for the wall. Let me be clear: China engaged in a coverup of the initial outbreak in Wuhan. Local officials silenced whistleblowers. The entire Chinese Communist Party system was terrified that this bad news would slow growth, spook markets and reveal that it had mishandled a public health emergency. The CCP did the same and more during the SARS outbreak of 2003. [ Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic ] But the Chinese authorities also did some things right. They sequenced the entire genome of the coronavirus and released it to the world on Jan. 12, much faster than happened with SARS. They also realized, belatedly, that in this case their censorship and control were exacerbating the public health crisis. On Jan. 21, the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission posted a statement: “Whoever deliberately delays or conceals reporting for the sake of their own interests will be forever nailed to history’s pillar of shame.” (The post was later removed, probably because it revealed that people had been delaying and concealing reports.) In any event, by the end of January the World Health Organization had announced a global health emergency, and several places moved quickly to combat it. The United States was not one of them. Had Trump done so, the United States would be in a very different situation today. Taiwan, which gets millions of travelers from mainland China each year, didn’t close its borders


solving the security deposit dilemma

Kendra Davis and her daughter Kamila-Sky Davis, 9, stand outside their apartment in Cincinnati, Ohio. Davis works two jobs but ended up homeless because she was priced out of her own apartment and couldn’t afford the security deposit on a new one. (Luke Sharrett/for the Washington Post) CINCINNATI Despite working two jobs — one in retail at a hospital gift shop, the other in customer service for an airline — Davis said there was no way she could come up with that kind of money all at once. Priced out of her own apartment and blocked from securing a new one, she wound up homeless. She slept on a friend’s couch for nearly four months. Jeneya Lawrence had hoped to find an affordable rental with enough space that her school-age son and daughter would no longer be shoehorned into the same tiny bedroom. When she finally found a place with a monthly rate she could afford, she was ecstatic — until the landlord told her the security deposit was $1,100, up front. As a home health aide and community health worker with two children to feed, Lawrence said she knew she couldn’t come up with that much money at one time. She had to turn it down. It took months to find another place. [She was spotted smoking in ‘smoke-free’ rental housing. Now, she may be kicked out.] For low-income families, security deposits pose an often ignored but significant barrier to safe, decent, affordable housing. With household budgets stretched thin under the best of circumstances, the added challenge of coming up with a lump sum of hundreds or even thousands at one time is often more than low-income families can manage, preventing them from accessing housing, or trapping them in substandard housing even when they could otherwise afford to move. In a nation where six out of 10 of the most common jobs pay less than $28,000 per year, 40 percent of Americans say they would struggle to come up with the funds to cover an unexpected expense of only $400, according to a May 2018 Federal Reserve study. For many more, an expense of $1,000 or more is out of the question. But in Cincinnati, new legislation could help low-income renters like Davis and Lawrence. A first-in-the-nation law aimed at removing the barrier of security deposits will soon give renters payment choices to pay their security deposits in several


Fear, joy, grief, gratitude: The whiplash of parenting during existential chaos

reported in China but the disease spreading across the country was called covid-19. Since the pandemic was first declared in mid-March, Christena — who asked that her last name be withheld to protect her Honduran husband, who is in the process of applying for U.S. citizenship — has been consumed by fears for her family. Her husband was laid off from his longtime job at a popular D.C. restaurant, and their 3-year-old son, who has special needs, was separated from his preschool teachers and therapists. Christena’s mind is a constant swirl of questions, she says: Will they get evicted? How will they support their son? So when she sat down one afternoon to help her child with an assignment, she was apprehensive. “I didn’t have faith in myself that I could help him with the exercise,” she says. But she watched him count the turtles drawn on the page, circle the correct number and beam with pride. “I was really impressed with him,” she says. “To see how he learns, in real time — I felt closer to him.” As the severity of the pandemic grew more evident, Jamie Giloni, a 34-year-old mother in San Mateo, Calif., sat down at the folding table in her makeshift home office on April 1 and typed a message to her doctor. Giloni and her husband, who have a toddler, had planned to start trying for their second child in July. She wanted to know: Was it safe to get pregnant now? The response came an hour later, a summary of the potential complications and risks to pregnant women that were only just beginning to be understood. As Giloni sat there reading, “I started to get anxious,” she says. Without assured access to a vaccine, or her son’s day care, or family support, “what kind of world would we be delivering a baby into next spring or summer?” Brian May wonders this, too: What kind of world will greet his daughter, who is due in early June? He and his wife and their 3-year-old son, Russell, have been isolating from their families, and he’s come to recognize the pained look on his mother’s face at the end of every FaceTime call. “She tells me she just misses smelling Russell as she kisses him goodbye,” he says. The last time she was with her grandson, she wept, not knowing when she’d see him again or


Why a New Virus Cluster in China Is Triggering Alarms

A cluster of Covid-19 cases in China’s Rust Belt region has intensified worry over a second wave of coronavirus infections. The central and local leadership have instituted strict measures, including halting public transport services for more than 100 million people and sealing off residential compounds in some cities, as Chinese President Xi Jinping called for strengthened controls. While many other countries are still grappling with the first wave of outbreak, this re-emergence in China, while still small, is putting the world on alert. 1. How did the new cluster erupt? The first case was reported May 7 in the northeastern province of Jilin, on the border with Russia and North Korea, and as of May 21 had spread to at least 46 people, all linked with each other. Officials have yet to identify “patient zero,” but suspects include a woman who works in the laundry at a police station in the city of Shulan, and may have been in contact with one or more people from Russia, which is behind only the U.S. in number of confirmed cases. One of China’s top doctors said patients in Jilin appeared to be asymptomatic for a longer period than was usual in Wuhan, where the coronavirus emerged last year, but didn’t elaborate on what those findings were based on. He told state television the cases in the first two weeks seem to show damage mostly in the lungs, with only 10% developing into critical cases. 2. What’s the response been? The northeast cluster is tiny compared to the earlier outbreak in central Hubei province, where Wuhan is located. (More than 68,000 people were infected there; its 11-week lockdown ended April 8.) Yet Beijing is taking the outbreak just as seriously. Jilin city is already setting up an emergency response that could turn two stadiums into hospitals in 24 hours. The Chinese government is eager to show stability as its annual political meeting is set to convene this week, with top leaders gathering to assess economic growth in the wake of the pandemic. 3. Why is this outbreak such a worry? The pathogen’s makeup. These coronavirus cases are showing a different gene sequence from the outbreak in Hubei, while identical with imported cases from Russia. Changes in the virus’s genetic sequence could make it harder for officials to detect. It also would create hurdles for vaccine research and development for pharmaceutical companies that are


damage mostly in the lungs, with only 10% developing into critical cases. 2. What’s the response been? The northeast cluster is tiny compared to the earlier outbreak in central Hubei province, where Wuhan is located. (More than 68,000 people were infected there; its 11-week lockdown ended April 8.) Yet Beijing is taking the outbreak just as seriously. Jilin city is already setting up an emergency response that could turn two stadiums into hospitals in 24 hours. The Chinese government is eager to show stability as its annual political meeting is set to convene this week, with top leaders gathering to assess economic growth in the wake of the pandemic. 3. Why is this outbreak such a worry? The pathogen’s makeup. These coronavirus cases are showing a different gene sequence from the outbreak in Hubei, while identical with imported cases from Russia. Changes in the virus’s genetic sequence could make it harder for officials to detect. It also would create hurdles for vaccine research and development for pharmaceutical companies that are racing to stop the spread of Covid-19. Researchers worldwide are studying whether the virus is mutating in a significant way to become more contagious, but the likelihood of that has been called overstated in some early research. 4. What’s the economic impact? The relatively poor region is often viewed as China’s Rust Belt due to the decline of heavy industry there such as automobiles. In 2019, total gross domestic product of the three provinces in the region -- Jilin, Liaoning and Heilongjiang -- stood at less than half of prosperous Guangdong province to the south, home to many giant tech companies and factories. The virus outbreak could add further pressure to the economic redevelopment campaign for the area that central government has been focusing on for years. 5. What does this show about China’s approach? Since the Wuhan lockdown, China has been aggressive in virus testing, and is signaling that it will react with a hammer to every cluster, implementing stricter measures as needed to contain spread. That is a different approach from other economies such as South Korea and Hong Kong, which have refrained from any lockdown despite new clusters found in clubs and medical centers. Such harsh methods would be more complicated, however, if infections appear in more economically important provinces or the top cities. For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com ©2020 Bloomberg L.P.


A little solitude during isolation

After setting up a tent in her yard, the author read to an attentive beagle. When you camp out back, plan for a special night by packing items that make all your campers happy, whether it’s a book, telescope, solar lights, crayons, ukulele, scary movie or dog treats. (James Haworth) “I’m headed into the wilderness,” I said. I looked at Hammy, who, the previous day, I’d discovered halfway submerged in a bag of flour, looking like Casper the Friendly Beagle; Georgie, a young foster bunny who had recently eaten my third-to-last piece of fresh fruit; and James, the human I’d invited to be my quarantine (Dan Savage wittily rhymes it with “valentine”). “There’s no reception. No texting.” “When will you be back from your trip?” James asked, playing along. I shrugged. “Maybe never,” I said, smiling impishly. Then I slipped on my flip-flops, picked up my pillow and canvas bag, and opened the back door. With the house and monotonous quarantine life in my wake, I took a deep breath, scanned my surroundings and headed into the wilds of my 11-foot-wide backyard. Until I began planning a camping trip behind my house, an acceptable loophole to stay-at-home orders, I didn’t realize the extent of my longing for a trip — and for the excitement that comes with its anticipation. Until I made the decision to camp solo, I didn’t understand how much I was craving alone time. Isolation isn’t exactly what most people are hungry for during this pandemic, but if you’ve spent the past couple of months sheltering with other people, well, that’s a lot of together time. I figure I’ve spent more hours this spring with James, my partner, than I’ve spent with any other human in a single season since childhood. Cooking together. Cleaning together. Walking together. Video conferencing together. My introvert warning system alerted me to impending unrest. Must. Be. Alone. [Pre-covid, the ‘van life’ was a free, easy and trendy lifestyle. Now, its practitioners are pariahs.] I shared my camping plan with a friend, who understood my need for creative space and the importance of solitude. “It’s the opposite of a man cave,” she said. But it’s not a she-shed. It’s a she-tent.” When I last slept in my backyard, I was a kid in the suburbs. I remember the delight of getting cozy in the pop-up trailer with my sister or a friend and


The Health 202: Nursing homes repeatedly fell short on preventing infections. That's deadly under covid-19

they will collect the data weekly and publish it online, along with the names of nursing homes, by the end of May,” my colleague Maria Sacchetti reported. “The data will offer a first look at the impact in such states as Texas and Virginia that have declined to identify nursing homes with covid-19 infections.” “It’s going to be ugly,” Brian Lee, executive director of Families for Better Care, a national watchdog group for nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, told Maria. “The lid is about to blow off.” Andy Slavitt, former CMS administrator, had some thoughts about the elderly: Protecting older people and the most vulnerable Americans is part of our responsibility.And we have failed miserably with 10s of thousands of un-necessarily deaths.2/ — Andy Slavitt @ 🏡 (@ASlavitt) May 20, 2020 The move follows troubling reports of equipment and staff shortages in some facilities, a lack of transparency for patients and their family members, and steep death tolls. In one New Jersey nursing home, bodies piled up. In Maryland, nursing home workers struggled to obtain sufficient protective equipment and managers played down the severity of the coronavirus outbreak. Vice President Pence and members of the coronavirus task force also “We really believe that all 1 million nursing home residents need to be tested within the next two weeks as well as the staff,” task force coordinator Deborah Birx told the governors, according to the Associated Press. White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx listens as Trump speaks during an event on vaccine development in the Rose Garden. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) Some governors have come under fire for their nursing home policies and the high covid-19 death toll in these facilities. Cuomo, along with the governors of California and New Jersey, required nursing homes to admit residents who tested positive for the coronavirus, raising safety concerns among residents and staff members. The approach was in contrast to policies in Connecticut and Massachusetts, which designated certain facilities for covid-19 patients alone. The covid-19 nursing home spread was particularly acute in New York, accounting for one-fifth of all nursing home deaths nationwide. Cuomo initially appeared to shrug off his policy — saying “it’s virtually impossible” to keep the virus out of nursing homes — but this month revised it, saying hospitals can’t release patients into nursing homes unless they test negative for the virus. Cuomo again addressed the criticisms yesterday, appearing to


isolation facilities are available, local officials are finding fewer people taking advantage of them than expected. It’s a reflection, experts said, of cost and conflicting priorities, of cultural norms and mistrust of government.” “We just don’t have enough civic trust, in many different ways, to make that something people are going to let happen with confidence,” Michael Fine, former director of the Rhode Island Department of Health, told The Post. “You can see that in people on the right, you can see that from the perspective of people of color, and others.” Conservative groups are recruiting “pro-Trump” doctors that will go on TV to push for reopening. These doctors will call for reopening the nation without waiting to meet standards proposed by public health experts, including the CDC, the Associated Press’s Michael Biesecker and Jason Dearen report. President Trump is greeted by Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, as the president arrives to speak Feb. 29 at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Md. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP) “The plan was discussed in a May 11 conference call with a senior staffer for the Trump reelection campaign organized by CNP Action, an affiliate of the GOP-aligned Council for National Policy,” they write. “… CNP Action is part of the Save Our Country Coalition, an alliance of conservative think tanks and political committees formed in late April to end state lockdowns implemented in response to the pandemic. Other members of the coalition include the FreedomWorks Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council and Tea Party Patriots.” About a sixth of the nation relies most on the president for information about the pandemic. New data That’s compared with a quarter who said they relied on national news media the most, and 18 percent who cited public health professionals as a go-to source. (Evan Vucci/AP) “Unsurprisingly, there were wide partisan differences among those groups,” Philip Bump writes. “Two-thirds of those who said they rely most on the national news media identified as Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents — meaning about 17 percent of all respondents were Democrats/leaners who rely most on the national media. More than 9 in 10 of those who rely most on information from Trump and the White House were Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, meaning about 15 percent of all respondents were Republicans/leaners who rely most on the president’s team for information.” Coronavirus latest Here are a few more stories


Margaret Sullivan

(Amazon founder and CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Stahl, the show’s longest tenured correspondent, also offered a few words on her own bout with Covid-19, which landed her in the hospital for a week. “It’s a target-rich environment, unfortunately,” Owens told me, because every part of American life has been affected by the pandemic, offering abundant story possibilities. The show has dug deep into the troubles of farmers, rural hospitals, and the newly unemployed. But it has also provided uplifting moments, such as a General Motors line worker described his satisfaction in helping to make ventilators; and poignant ones, such as musician Wynton Marsalis paying tribute to jazz pianist father Ellis, who had died from covid-19. The program may be at its best when it takes on a potentially dry subject — like how the pandemic might affect climate change — and makes it both accessible and moving, as in Jon Wertheim’s piece featuring climate activist Bill McKibben. I asked Owens, who was Fager’s second-in-command, about the tumultuous time just after he was named. “It was totally chaotic, network-wide,” he said. He took it one week at a time, staying focused on the next deadline and then the next one. Meanwhile, the outside world demanded attention, starting that same month with the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, then the release of the Mueller report soon thereafter, followed by Trump’s impeachment and acquittal. “There’s been,” he noted wryly, “a lot of news.” Never more so, though, than in the past few months. On several Sundays, all of the program’s three segments have centered on some aspect of the pandemic. That intense focus has proved the right call, though Owens predicted that coming weeks may bring a broader topic mix. “Whether or not the ratings followed,” he said, “the journalism has made us proud.” That the ratings have followed speaks volumes about the hunger in this moment for credible information, and about Americans’ desire to understand more deeply what has befallen us — and what looms ahead. READ MORE by Margaret Sullivan: The media is helping Trump turn the bogus ‘Obamagate’ into the 2020 version of Clinton’s emails Facebook has a huge truth problem. A high-priced ‘oversight board’ won’t fix it. 50 years ago, a local newspaper dominated the story of the Kent State tragedy. Could that still happen? For more by Margaret Sullivan visit wapo.st/sullivan


Flight attendants yearn to get back in the air | Voices from the Pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic has grounded thousands of flights worldwide. Some flights attendants from major U.S. airlines share one wish: getting back in the sky.


We have to reopen — for health reasons

virus is a silent killer. Estimates suggest that each one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate translates into a 1 percent increase in suicide deaths and a more than 3 percent increase in opioid deaths, which means this virus-induced recession will likely cause tens of thousands of excess deaths. One study of the 1982 recession found that Americans who faced higher unemployment suffered approximately 40,000 excess deaths by age 65 — as well as more divorces and having fewer children. Shortening this economic crisis through a safe reopening could save thousands of lives. Meanwhile, at a time of social stress, states are seeing a decline in reports of child maltreatment, which is likely going unreported because children are isolated from teachers and others who can help keep an eye on the vulnerable. On Monday, the president, first lady and vice president joined me and other administration leaders to discuss these challenges and potential solutions with governors. The covid-19 response has also restricted access to health care. Data suggests the numbers of Americans receiving important preventive services are down significantly, with mammograms down 87 percent and colonoscopies down 90 percent. More than 1.7 million new cancer cases are diagnosed per year in the United States. If we’re seeing an 80 percent drop in cancer cases identified, approximately, we could already have 200,000 or more undiagnosed cancer cases as a result. According to Medicare data, breast cancer surgeries are down approximately two-thirds since January. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report found that vaccine administrations were down approximately 60 percent from early January to mid-March; that puts millions of American infants and children at risk for serious illnesses. Forgoing all of these services also devastates our health-care system and the front-line heroes who have kept it running. Many health-care workers have been furloughed, and hospitals are seeing as much as 60 percent revenue declines from the cancellation of elective procedures. Hospitals in rural America operate on about a 2 percent to 3 percent profit margin, and urban hospitals have about a 5 percent to 6 percent margin. Extended disruption to our health-care system may permanently close some institutions, with lasting impacts on access to care, especially where access is a challenge already. [ The Opinions section is looking for stories of how the coronavirus has affected people of all walks of life. Write to us. ] How can we avoid


Live updates: Fauci says he hopes White House restores his coronavirus updates to the public

Anthony S. Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, said he’s hopeful that Americans will begin hearing directly from him and Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, on a more regular basis. Since Trump ended his daily briefings, the public hasn’t heard nearly as frequently from Fauci or Birx. "I think you’re probably going to be seeing a little bit more of me & my colleagues,” Fauci told CNN. “They realize we need to get some of this information out … Hopefully you’ll be seeing more of us.” More than 93,000 people have died in the U.S. from covid-19, according to state health departments and tracking by The Washington Post. There have been more than 5 million confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide, including more than 1.5 million in the United States. Here are some significant developments: More evidence has emerged on why covid-19 is so much worse than the flu. Researchers found evidence the coronavirus attacks the lining of blood vessels there, a critical difference from the lungs of people who died of the flu, according to a report published Thursday. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) on Thursday further reopened the state, announcing that theaters, child-care facilities and summer camps can resume operations, as the cases there climb and hospitals say they are running out of intensive care beds. Experts warned that the push to reopen the United States could lead to a second wave of infections across parts of the South and Midwest. A severe and puzzling inflammatory syndrome linked to covid-19 previously seen only in children is also afflicting young adults, doctors say. President Trump visited a Ford manufacturing plant in Michigan, whose officials appealed to him to wear a mask in compliance with the governor’s order. Afterward, Trump told reporters he wore a mask for a bit of the tour. But he wasn’t wearing one when the cameras were on. A new study from Columbia University epidemiologists suggests that enacting social distancing measures a week earlier in the United States could have saved 36,000 lives. Sign up for our coronavirus newsletter | Mapping the spread of the coronavirus: Across the U.S. | Worldwide | Which states are reopening | Have you been hospitalized for covid-19? Tell us whether you’ve gotten a bill.


Tentative moves toward loosening shutdowns

golf courses and tennis courts, worship services with no more than 10 people, and curbside service for nonessential retailers. Summer camps, pools, gyms or indoor entertainment venues should not be included in the first phase of recovery, the task force said. “It’s not an on and off switch. We will not be able to go back to life as we enjoyed in February,” said Bowser, who is set to make her final decision Tuesday. In the immediate term, social distancing measures continue to govern life in the nation’s capital, with the National Park Service announcing Thursday that it would cancel in-person commemorations for Memorial Day. Instead of the live events, Park Service officials will give remarks and lay wreaths at the sites in prerecorded ceremonies this week. Those recordings will be shown online on Monday. The National Memorial Day Concert on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol, shown here in 2006, was moved online and will be performed remotely because of the coronavirus pandemic. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post) The park service also said the National Memorial Day Concert will not be held on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol, as per tradition, but will be organized remotely and broadcast on PBS on Sunday from 8 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., and live-streamed on YouTube, Facebook and the PBS website. Arlington National Cemetery remains closed to the public but will open to family pass-holders over the holiday weekend. Maryland reported 1,208 new infections and 36 new deaths Thursday, increasing the state’s seven-day average for new infections to 1,090, up from a low of 888 on Sunday. Prince George’s County has the most infections of any county in the state, with a caseload of 12,830, though officials there note that hospitalization and death rates are starting to decline. This week, hospitals in the county have averaged 184 coronavirus patients, down from 208 last week. “We are cautiously moving toward a modified phase one reopening by June 1,” Alsobrooks said. In Baltimore County, where 5,135 residents have been infected, officials initially held back on reopening measures that took effect in other parts of the state last Friday. But Olszewski said Thursday that the county had made sufficient progress in areas such as testing capacity to launch a modified version of Gov. Larry Hogan’s “Phase 1” reopening. [What’s open in Maryland, and how did officials decide?] Starting Friday, nonessential retail stores will be


With possible meat shortages looming, a dietitian talks substitutes

Customers in some parts of the country are finding empty meat cases when they go grocery shopping. It’s not because people are hoarding hamburger along with toilet paper (though there is some of that going on), but because there are disruptions in the meat supply chain. Meat-processing plants around the nation have had to close temporarily because of coronavirus outbreaks, meaning meat could be less available and more expensive throughout the summer. On May 8, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) reported a 40 percent drop in pork production capacity and a 25 percent drop in beef production capacity. It said at least 10,000 workers at meat-processing plants had been infected or exposed to the coronavirus, and at least 30 had died. Millions of animals have been euthanized because of the bottleneck in processing. Whether you’re having trouble sourcing or paying for meat, or you’ve been thinking about exploring a more plant-based diet, now is a good time to pivot to some meatless meals or try out strategies for stretching out the meat you do buy. Here’s some information about beans, soy and mock meats to keep in mind. Check out the links for recipe ideas. Beans Although beef, chicken and pork provide protein, iron and zinc, these nutrients can be found in a wide variety of other foods, such as low-cost legumes like beans, lentils and soy. These environmentally sustainable options are also rich in fiber, which many Americans fall short of. (There’s no fiber in meat.) Studies show that people who eat more beans and soy may have a lower risk of heart disease than people who consume fewer legumes. According to the U.S. Dry Beans Council, the most popular beans among Americans are pinto, navy, great northern, red kidney and black beans. I add garbanzo beans (chickpeas) to my list, too. All of these varieties have about 11 to 14 grams of protein per 6-ounce serving (cooked) and can be purchased canned or dry depending on your budget and cooking skills. [Taking care of yourself during the pandemic, from head to toe] Canned beans cost about 9 cents per ounce and can be used right out of the can — no cooking skills required! Dry beans, which are less expensive at about 7 cents per ounce, require more finessing. They need to be soaked and boiled before eating (see instructions here), which can take


The Energy 202: Oil wells on federal lands got a break on payments. Renewables got big past-due bills.

haywire and render certain landscapes unlivable.” Coronavirus fallout National parks continue to reopen. Second Lady Karen Pence visited the recently partially reopened Great Smoky Mountains National Park and called on people to get back outside. #MoreThanEverBefore your #MentalHealth is just as important as your physical health. As parks such as the beautiful @GreatSmokyNPS safely reopen, the great outdoors provides ample space to social distance and serves as a place of respite and healing in times of challenge. pic.twitter.com/082TuDkG1s — Second Lady Karen Pence (@SecondLady) May 20, 2020 “There’s plenty of opportunity there (in the park) to practice your social distancing. … So, we’re saying come, come to the park,” she said this week, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel. But some groups are still calling on visitors to avoid a possibly crowded park. David Lamfrom, southeast regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association, told the publication: “Karen Pence’s visit to Great Smoky Mountains National Park downplays the risks of visiting a crowded park … When people learn that the vice president’s wife visited the park, they may believe it is safe for them to visit over the long weekend. It’s not.” Oil check The Trump administration is considering new sanctions as well as other moves to block Iranian oil sales to Venezuela. “The possibility of new U.S. sanctions and legal action comes as five Iranian gasoline tankers make their way toward Venezuela, offering a potential lifeline to the embattled regime of President Nicolás Maduro,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “Iran has warned it will retaliate against the U.S. if it blocks its ships. As crude markets recover from the disarray of a demand-eroding coronavirus pandemic and a devastating price rout, the Islamic Republic has seized an opportunity to use its oil to curry favor with U.S. rivals, including Venezuela and Syria.” News from Alaska The National Park Service finalized a rule loosening hunting regulations in Alaska. On Wednesday, the agency finished its reversal of another Obama-era regulation and struck rules forbidding certain hunting methods on federal land in Alaska that many scientists and conservationists call cruel and inhumane. A brown bear walks along the beach during sunset in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve in Alaska (National Park Service) As Darryl Fears wrote in 2018, when the changes were first proposed, they include letting “Alaskan game officials decide whether bear cubs can be killed alongside their mothers, caribou can


The Daily 202: New models, reports and polls underscore the magnitude of coronavirus challenges

with Mariana Alfaro Columbia University epidemiologists estimate in a new study that enacting social distancing measures a week earlier, on March 8 instead of March 15, could have saved up to 36,000 lives in the United States. That’s about 40 percent of the current reported fatalities from the novel coronavirus. The study found that imposing the social distancing measures on March 1 that would ultimately go into effect two weeks later could have saved about 54,000 American lives. At least 92,317 deaths from the virus have been reported in the United States since Feb. 29. The White House responded to Columbia’s research with a statement that attacked the Chinese government and the World Health Organization for not being more transparent while praising President Trump for showing “bold leadership.” The Columbia study is one of several fresh data points that illustrate the cascading fallout from the contagion and the continuing challenges for the response at home and abroad. The United States is on track to reach 113,000 deaths by mid-June. The number of confirmed cases worldwide The Labor Department “McConnell then told House lawmakers on Wednesday that Republicans had to ‘clean up the Democrats’ crazy policy that is paying people more to remain unemployed than they would earn if they went back to work,’ according to a person familiar with the remarks, which were first reported by Politico. McConnell added of extending the unemployment increase: ‘This will not be in the next bill.’” Waitress Martha Valilee takes a breakfast order from Kurt and Edie Hoppe at Tom Sawyer’s as it opens for business in Boca Raton, Fla. (Joe Cavaretta/South Florida Sun-Sentinel/AP) A research team that uses cellphone data to track social mobility and forecast the virus's trajectory is warning that Dallas, Houston, Southeast Florida’s Gold Coast, the entire state of Alabama and several other Southern places that have been rapidly reopening their economies are in danger of a second wave of infections over the next month. “A presentation prepared by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Emergency Management Agency — and reviewed by The Post — suggests new waves could be steep enough in some places to overwhelm ventilator capacity. For instance, the data indicates that only 866 ventilators are in use in Georgia, which has pursued one of the most aggressive reopening plans. But the state’s supply of 2,853 ventilators could be outstripped as soon as


away from the virus at a Virginia retirement home. (Laura Vozzella) Ralphy Campos, a prolific graffiti artist from Chicago known as “Redr,” died from the virus at 38. (Chicago Sun-Times) Quote of the day “I survived everything because I was determined to survive,” said 108-year-old Sylvia Goldsholl, who has endured the 1918 influenza, the Great Depression, two world wars and, now, the coronavirus. (Today) Cascading foreign fallout A gravedigger rests Monday in São Paulo’s Vila Formosa cemetery. (Fernando Bizerra/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) Trump is considering a Brazil travel ban. “São Paulo, the largest city in the Western Hemisphere, is emerging as the coronavirus pandemic’s latest global hot spot. Confirmed cases in the city have soared 34 percent and at least 510 people have died in the past week as the public health infrastructure buckles and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro continues to shrug off the crisis,” Marina Lopes reports. “Across Brazil, more than 1,000 people died of the coronavirus on Tuesday alone. The country now ranks third worldwide with 255,000 confirmed cases, trailing only the United States and Russia. … Trump, who has maintained friendly ties with Bolsonaro, a fellow populist, said he was considering banning travel from the country. ‘Brazil is having some trouble, no question about it,’ Trump told reporters at the White House. ‘I don’t want people coming in here and infecting our people.’” Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf Arab countries are seeing a sharp spike in cases. This has prompted governments to reimpose some restrictions that had been lifted late last month ahead of Ramadan. (Sarah Dadouch) There are no daily public displays of gratitude for Russian doctors and nurses. Instead of applause, they face hostility. (AP) Bolivia’s health minister was arrested in a corruption probe following a look at overpriced ventilators. Marcelo Navajas was detained in connection with an investigation into a $4.2 million contract to buy ventilators valued at about a quarter of that price. (Katie Shepherd) A top Tokyo prosecutor resigned after a magazine revealed that he allegedly broke Japan’s strict coronavirus restrictions to illegally gamble with newspaper reporters twice this month. (Shepherd) The Tokyo Olympics will be canceled if they can’t be held in 2021, the International Olympic Committee's president said. (Simon Denyer) As U.S.-China rhetoric grows hotter, new risks emerge – and Taiwan is drawn into the mix. “In the span of several hours, the feud swung from Taipei to Beijing to the Internet,


Facebook Survey Shows 31% of Small Businesses Stopped Operating

One-third of U.S. small businesses have stopped operating, while another 11% expect to fail in the next three months if Covid-19 conditions persist, according to an April survey. “The numbers are devastating,” said Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook Inc., which helped conduct the survey of 86,000 business owners and employees, in partnership with the Small Business Roundtable. Most of the closed businesses don’t know how they will find the money to reopen, and don’t expect to rehire employees that they had to cut. “That’s because they think they can’t -- it’s not that they don’t want to,” Sandberg said in an interview. In normal times, small businesses account for two-thirds of U.S. job growth, she said. Facebook and the Small Business Roundtable planned to do the monthly survey before coronavirus hit, expecting it to paint a much brighter picture of their impact on the economy. The vast majority of Facebook’s advertisers are small businesses, using Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to communicate with their customers. Now, those companies are increasingly relying on the internet. More than one-third of the businesses surveyed say their sales have moved completely online. Facebook has raced to build new tools for them, such as digital gift cards and food delivery buttons, so that they can recover more quickly. Businesses that are still operating have had to become creative about their strategy, as well. Restaurants are selling to-go cocktails, grocery stores are building plastic shields to protect their workers at the checkout counter, and hair stylists are providing home cutting tips over video chat. Of the businesses that are closed, 19% are still paying at least partial wages to employees who can’t work. Smaller Classes Sam Lee, who operates a ceramic studio and store in San Francisco, has been renting out pottery wheels to members, and picking up their creations curbside. Her decision has helped the business stay afloat. Meanwhile, in her studio, Dusted and Blue in San Francisco, she’s been moving wheel stations six feet apart, preparing for the time she’s allowed to operate. Lee also worries people will lose out on some of the conversation and community the studio was meant to foster. “We’ll likely have to do smaller classes,” she said. “We’re still waiting to hear what we’ll have to do. What are the regulations going to be? How long is it going to last?” Hospitality and event-based businesses may take


as digital gift cards and food delivery buttons, so that they can recover more quickly. Businesses that are still operating have had to become creative about their strategy, as well. Restaurants are selling to-go cocktails, grocery stores are building plastic shields to protect their workers at the checkout counter, and hair stylists are providing home cutting tips over video chat. Of the businesses that are closed, 19% are still paying at least partial wages to employees who can’t work. Smaller Classes Sam Lee, who operates a ceramic studio and store in San Francisco, has been renting out pottery wheels to members, and picking up their creations curbside. Her decision has helped the business stay afloat. Meanwhile, in her studio, Dusted and Blue in San Francisco, she’s been moving wheel stations six feet apart, preparing for the time she’s allowed to operate. Lee also worries people will lose out on some of the conversation and community the studio was meant to foster. “We’ll likely have to do smaller classes,” she said. “We’re still waiting to hear what we’ll have to do. What are the regulations going to be? How long is it going to last?” Hospitality and event-based businesses may take longer to recover. Veronyca Kwan, co-founder of Bella Belle Shoes, said her wedding shoe business saw sales drop 75% in April. “If weddings are not happening, people are not going to buy bridal shoes,” she said. Without pop-up sales events and wedding showcases, which drive a lot of the interest in the brand, Kwan has turned to Instagram and tried to improve the company’s placement on search engines. The survey shows the majority of small business owners and employees are still optimistic about the future. Bella Belle was approved for a small business loan from the government, and said declines in May weren’t as sharp as feared. “It’s a rollercoaster,” she said. Meanwhile, 29% of workers and owners of small businesses were concerned about bringing the coronavirus home, as the vast majority of small business employees don’t have access to paid sick leave or paid time off. Among hotel, cafe and restaurant employees, more than 90% lack paid leave. The struggle has been especially acute for women, who still shoulder the majority of the household work in addition to their businesses, and have had to stop working at a higher rate than men in order to balance it. “If we


Copyright bots and classical musicians are fighting online. The bots are winning.

explaining their anticipated disappearance in advance. Camerata Pacifica members perform in early 2020: Martin Owen on horn, William Woods on contra bassoon, Ani Aznavoorian on cello, and Judith Farmer and William Short on bassoons. (Timothy Norris) “I have no protection for my own produced material,” Spence says. “If you want to put a copyright claim against me, I’m happy to take the time to write back to you and say, ‘This is an erroneous claim and here’s why.’ But when you’re immediately blocking videos or streams, that’s negatively impacting our very mission in a time where this now has become mission critical.” These systems aren’t just disrupting the relationships between classical organizations and their audiences; they’re also impacting individual musicians trying to stay musically present — and financially afloat — during the crisis. Michael Sheppard, a Baltimore-based pianist, composer and teacher, was recently giving a Facebook Live performance of a Beethoven sonata (No. 3, Op. 2, in C) when Facebook blocked the stream, citing the detection of “2:28 of music owned by Naxos of America” — specifically a passage recorded by the French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, whom Sheppard is not. The takedown led Sheppard into what he describes as “a byzantine web of ridiculousness” starting with Facebook’s dispute form: “Beethoven died in 1827,” he responded. “This music is very much in the public domain. Please unblock it.” Baltimore-based pianist, composer and teacher Michael Sheppard. (Britt Olsen-Ecker) And this wasn’t Sheppard’s first run-in with Facebook, which has blocked or muted past performances of Fauré, Chopin and Bach for being too digitally reminiscent of other performances of Faure, Chopin and Bach. Frustrated with the intrusive claim of infringement, the imposed busywork of defending himself, and the helplessness he felt trying to get these issues recognized and resolved, Sheppard took to Twitter. “Dear @naxosrecords,” he tweeted May 9, “PLEASE stop muting portions of works whose composers have been dead for hundreds of years. It does 0% of people any good, especially musicians like myself who are trying to make a living in time of crisis. #UnmuteBeethoven.” Two days later, Naxos tweeted back, thanking Sheppard for his request and confirming that his video had been “whitelisted.” “There are people worse off than me whose only income is their performances,” says Sheppard, who accompanies his streams with a “virtual tip jar.” “But if it’s muted, what’s the point? Other people are doing the same thing


Bach says Tokyo Games will be held in 2021 or not at all

A security guard officer wearing a protective face mask walks past the Tokyo 2020 Olympics decoration board during the spread of the coronavirus disease earlier this month. (Issei Kato/Reuters) TOKYO — If they cannot be held next summer because of the novel coronavirus pandemic, the Games will have to be canceled, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach told the BBC on Thursday. Bach said Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has told him that next year is “the last option.” “Quite frankly, I have some understanding for this, because you cannot forever employ 3,000 or 5,000 people in an organizing committee,” Bach told BBC Sport. “You cannot every year change the entire sports schedule worldwide of all the major federations. You cannot have the athletes being in uncertainty. “You cannot have so much overlapping with a future Olympic Games, so I have some understanding for this approach by our Japanese partners.” [The Tokyo Olympics could hinge on a covid-19 vaccine. One Japanese scientist has his doubts.] Bach’s comments underline Abe’s gamble that the world will look different by next summer and ideally that a vaccine will be available by then. http://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/keeping-the-dream-alive-how-athletes-are-dealing-with-postponed-olympic-games/2020/03/24/8c0bf7ab-f356-47c4-898c-d31d92663b98_video.html (REF:ribasjl/The Washington Post) Abe said last month it would be “difficult” to hold the Games in July and August next year if the virus has not been contained, and he has stressed his strong desire to stage the event “in a complete form,” meaning with spectators. Many medical experts, including the head of the Japan Medical Association, say that will be tough unless effective vaccines against covid-19 are available. The president of the Japanese organizing committee, Yoshiro Mori, told the Nikkan Sports newspaper late last month that the Games would have to be canceled if the pandemic is not under control by next summer. But Mori has also expressed misgivings about Abe’s decision to opt for a one-year delay rather than a two-year delay. He told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper that Abe has insisted on a one-year delay and has predicted that a vaccine would be available by then. Mori described it as a “gamble” by the prime minister. Abe’s three-year term as president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party ends in September 2021, and next year may represent his last chance to preside over the Games. Bach declined to say whether a vaccine was essential for the Games to go ahead. “For this question, we are relying on the


Banks Get a Glimpse of the Post-Coronavirus Future

Like all businesses upended by the pandemic lockdowns, banks were forced to reorganize with little time. They managed to shutter large parts of their branch networks and to send most of their employees to work remotely. So far, the experiment has been largely free of glitches — and instructive. By redeploying armies of staff, lenders were mostly able to adapt to the unprecedented surge in client inquiries that accompanied the rollout of emergency state-backed loans and mortgage holidays. On top of that, banks also got a glimpse of their digital future. Now comes the hard part: hanging on to the most useful changes as the lockdowns ease. A survey of retail bank customers in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Portugal and the U.K., carried out by McKinsey & Co. in mid-April, shows that online bank use rose in all of the countries, from a 7% increase in Italy to 19% in Portugal, with a similar pattern in mobile access. More than one in five customers in Spain and Britain tried online banking for the first time. A shift to digital use of this magnitude would probably have taken at least a couple of years without the Covid-related branch closures, according to McKinsey. Equally telling is how notes and coins were easily replaced. Though largely imposed by the need to prevent the coronavirus’s transmission, the trajectory toward more digital payments has been set. In a BCG survey of U.K. clients that captured activity during three weeks in April, 63% of respondents said they’d reduced their use of cash since the start of the crisis, while 43% sent more payments through social media messaging apps. What’s more, one in five respondents plans to do less in branches or to stop using them altogether after the crisis. For the more affluent customers, dealings with relationship managers jumped almost threefold, according to the BCG study. Why go to a branch if you can get the same advice on a video chat from the comfort of your home? For European lenders plagued by high expenses, declining revenue, an expected surge in pandemic-related credit losses and competition from fintech upstarts, the greater use of technology will be critical to controlling costs. Under its Covid-19 recovery scenario, in which the euro zone’s gross domestic product would drop by 11% in 2020, McKinsey sees European banks suffering a bigger setback than in the aftermath of the financial and sovereign


No one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong.

“firm-fixed price” contract, one that forces contractors to be efficient. That’s long been one of SpaceX’s trademarks; it reuses not only its rockets but in the early days it repurposed all sorts of materials, even a 125,000-gallon liquid nitrogen tank that an employee found scrapped at an old abandoned Cape Canaveral launch site. “We had to be super scrappy,” Musk once told The Washington Post. “If we did it the standard way, we would have run out of money. For many years, we were week to week on cash flow, within weeks of running out of money. It definitely creates a mind-set of smart spending. Be scrappy or die: Those were our two options. Buy scrap components, fix them up, make them work.” Boeing, by contrast, was used to the cost-plus contracts often used on big government programs, such as its Space Launch System rocket, that allowed for greater expenditures and longer timelines. Still, building a spacecraft designed to fly humans is an enormous challenge, and both companies suffered setbacks and delays that pushed back the original launch date from 2017. SpaceX had two Falcon 9 rockets explode, and it struggled with the parachute system that slows the spacecraft down as it flies back to Earth. Last year, its Dragon capsule was completely destroyed during a test of its emergency abort system. Since then, however, SpaceX has discovered the root causes of all problems and fixed them, NASA says. Boeing, meanwhile, has continued to struggle. Late last year, its test flight without any astronauts onboard its Starliner spacecraft went terribly awry from the moment it reached orbit. The spacecraft’s onboard computers were off by 11 hours, making the autonomous spacecraft think it was in a different part of the mission. Controllers on the ground had trouble communicating with it. Later, the company discovered another software glitch — one that would have affected the separation of the crew module from the service module. As a result, Boeing will re-fly the test mission, a flight it says would probably happen toward the end of this year, meaning its first launch with crew wouldn’t happen until 2021. Inside the company, officials were embarrassed by the setback — another bit of bad news that followed the fatal crashes of two 737 Max airplanes. It also triggered a role reversal. Boeing, once the trusted partner, was now under renewed scrutiny by NASA, which said it


Va. church backed by Justice Dept. loses suit over restrictions on large gatherings; Montgomery County strikes deal with private lab for tests

The number of known coronavirus cases in the District, Maryland and Virginia was 85,456 on Thursday, with 43,531 cases in Maryland, 34,137 in Virginia and 7,788 in the District. The number of virus-related deaths reached 2,159 in Maryland, 1,099 in Virginia and 412 in the District, for a total of 3,670 fatalities. Here are some of the most significant recent developments as the region responds to the pandemic of the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease covid-19: • A Christian church, whose pastor was charged with violating Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s prohibition on large gatherings after holding a Palm Sunday service last month, lost a First Amendment-based bid in federal court Thursday to stop the governor’s order. • The District could begin a phased reopening next Friday, May 29, barring unexpected spikes in infections, city officials said Thursday. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) is set to make her final decision next Tuesday. Prince George’s County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks announced Thursday afternoon that the county is on track to be ready for a modified reopening June 1 if current trends continue. • Montgomery County officials said they have signed a contract with a private lab that will start providing 7,500 tests to the county per week immediately and up to 20,000 tests per week beginning in mid-June. • About 85,000 unemployment claims were filed last week in the District, Maryland and Virginia, according to figures released Thursday by the Labor Department. More than 1.3 million claims have been filed in the three jurisdictions since social distancing measures shut down much of the economy in March. When will D.C. reopen?


New York hospital threatens legal action against Wall Street Journal for covid-19 exposé

findings, the ACGME wrote in a letter to Montefiore last week, “adequately addressed the concerns raised” to the council. “The Sponsoring Institution and program will not be charged with noncompliance with ACGME’s covid-19 Requirements, and the ACGME will not take any further accreditation action in relation to the information we received. The matter is closed,” reads the May 15 letter. Hospital spokeswoman Hilary Lefebvre said that both the hospital’s internal investigation and the ACGME investigation interviewed “every single resident” who worked a shift in Northwest 7 in March “and no resident raised an issue or concern about any case that might have fit this description.” Residents at Montefiore were demoralized by the story and expressed concern that leaders weren’t defending them, Skae said. Montefiore did not comment on the allegations for the Journal’s story, though it had 13 days to do so. Lefebvre said that it would have been premature to comment on a wide-ranging internal investigation, and that the hospital’s interaction with the Journal for a previous story had been disappointing. “All of the engagement with them was unhelpful and made it clear that they didn’t understand hospitals or how hospitals worked,” she said. Two doctors with Montefiore’s department of family and social medicine sent a letter to the editor of the Journal, updating the newspaper on the results of its internal investigation. “We found no case that matched the description provided by your reporter. ... Residents in our family medicine program universally described disbelief that an intern would be managing a ventilator independently,” read the letter, in part. No thanks, responded the newspaper. “We won’t publish a letter attacking our journalism and making claims that we don’t believe to be true,” wrote Judi Walsh, a newsroom standards editor at the Journal, in reply to the Montefiore doctors. The paper’s standards unit had reviewed the piece, “and we are confident that it is accurate,” continued Walsh. Furthermore: “The article didn’t say that residents were asked to independently manage a ventilator,” wrote Walsh. No, it “merely” said that residents independently botched that job. From the story: "[A] patient died on a ventilator with a setting turned too high by residents who didn’t know how to operate the device, according to residents there.” The Erik Wemple Blog asked the Journal about the letter rejection: “Our article was robustly sourced, fair and accurate and we stand by the reporting. We do not


An Olympic pole vaulter needed a place to train, so she and her father built one

On a recent Friday evening, the residents of a South Carolina neighborhood received an email instructing them to click on a peach envelope. Once the digital invitation opened, a track-themed placard offered details of the following day’s event. Olympian Sandi Morris planned to pole vault, and her family welcomed their neighbors to come watch. The next day at 5 p.m., about 100 spectators, spread around the field to adhere to social distancing guidelines, gathered in the community space that features tennis courts, a pool, a pavilion and a soccer field. And, thanks to Morris’s family and the need to keep her training on track, a pole vaulting pit. As Morris practiced, the neighbors watched, expressing their awe each time the 2016 Olympic silver medalist hurled her body over the bungee cord that acted as the bar. “Everybody’s hungry for something to do,” said Morris’s father, Harry. Not long ago, this soccer field was empty. With the novel coronavirus pandemic prompting universities to close, Morris’s usual training space at the University of Arkansas was no longer an option, so she headed to her parents’ house. With her dad and some neighbors, she embarked on an ambitious project: building a 120-foot runway and a pole vaulting setup fit for an Olympian. Morris, 27, usually returns home once or twice a year, seeing her parents more often when they travel to her competitions around the world. But for the foreseeable future, her training will continue in Piedmont, a small town outside Greenville. Harry Morris, a former college decathlete, works with pole vaulters as a volunteer coach at Clemson. When Arkansas closed its facilities, Clemson’s remained open. He briefly thought his daughter could train there. But then Clemson closed, and so did other colleges, prompting the question: Where could an elite athlete train? “The answer is nowhere,” he said. “You can go make do at a high school, but most high schools were going to be in the same situation.” The family had discussed building their own pole vaulting facility for a few years, but “this situation kind of pushed us into action,” Sandi Morris said. She returned home to South Carolina, bringing along her two dogs, two birds and one of her three snakes. Harry Morris, a geologist, always has been handy with projects around the house. Sandi Morris jokes that her dad should start an Etsy account. When she was a child,


In Baltimore, some neighborhoods are not getting the message on social distancing

Todd Oppenheim is a supervising attorney in the Baltimore city public defender’s office. These opinions are his own. It shouldn’t be shocking that not only does Baltimore have more than 100 homicides barely five months into the year, but the city also contains one of the leading Zip codes in Maryland for documented novel coronavirus cases, in 21215 (Northwest). We’ve disconnected segments of the population in places such as Northwest, a mainly African American area, through poor governmental oversight, horrible schools and a lack of employment, which all contribute to the historic violence. Now, to fuel deadly viral infections in those same spots, add an institutional inability to properly instruct and inform citizens. Two weeks into Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s (R) stay-at-home order, a group of young men, mostly African American, continued to participate in organized football workouts supervised by coaches on the turf field next to and operated by the YMCA on 33rd Street. The group was larger than 10 people. Social distancing was disregarded, even though senior apartment buildings are within spitting distance. It was stupid and dangerous. The Y said the group and others that used the space were trespassing. About a week later, “no trespassing” notices went up, and the field cleared. Take a drive around the city, and you’ll still see others ignoring the pandemic rules. Forget our failed national leadership. On a local level, messaging on fighting the virus has been unclear at best but mainly nonexistent, especially in poor, black areas — apropos of a city that has long abandoned many of its inhabitants. I have been a public defender in the city for more than 15 years. I am a white man living in a predominantly black neighborhood. A major issue for my clients, most of whom are black, is encounters with Baltimore Police Department (BPD) officers who violate Fourth Amendment guarantees of freedom from illegal stops and searches. To put it bluntly, Baltimore police officers rarely shied from an encounter with a black person they deemed “suspicious.” Now, when everyone’s health is at risk, simply having a conversation with some young men playing football is problematic for law enforcement because the police department lacks credibility. However, people need to be thoughtfully advised about staying home, social distancing, contact tracing and stopping the spread. The police can’t seem to do it. Our elected officials aren’t doing too well, either. What does this


Before the state acted, this Maryland county launched a contact-tracing army

Carrie Moran made the cold call while Maria Ramirez, a Spanish-speaking health assistant, crouched over the speakerphone at the edge of the desk. “Did they call you yet with your results?” Ramirez said, interpreting for the Maryland man in his 30s on the other end of the line. He said no. “We’re calling to let you know that you tested positive for covid-19.” “Oh, sí,” the man replied softly after a pause. “Sí,” Ramirez repeated. Thirty-five minutes later, Moran, a school nurse supervisor whose schools are closed because of the pandemic, had notes about the man’s symptoms, his living arrangements, his job and his whereabouts since he fell ill. Similar calls are being made across the country, from California to Massachusetts. As states start to emerge from the strict shutdowns imposed as part of the effort to fight the novel coronavirus, they are scrambling to hire tens of thousands of people to trace the path of the deadly infection. Notifying those who have been exposed — and persuading them to isolate and get tested — has been a vital part of curbing the pandemic in countries around the world, including South Korea and Germany, public health experts say. Local leaders in Maryland and top Democrats in Annapolis have accused Gov. Larry Hogan (R) of moving too slowly to hire contact tracers through the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC). Filling the gap, for now, are people like Moran, part of an army of school health workers deployed by the Anne Arundel County government. Over the course of a week, Moran and her colleagues made contact with the 30-something man’s relatives and tried to track down his boss, along with hundreds of others exposed to infected patients. Some of their targets do not return calls. Some say they cannot afford to stay home from work or are reluctant to give information for contacts. And others have no idea when or where they may have contracted the virus, making it hard to determine who they might have infected. Karen Karnes, supervisor of the county’s epidemiology program, said people have abruptly hung up on contact tracers, then called back to apologize. She said she understands that it sometimes takes time for people to process the fact that they are infected and what that might mean. “It can be a real struggle,” she said. “It’s important that contact tracers are really good


For many fans, the absence of sports feels like a loss. Psychologists say that’s normal.

he feels while watching the White Sox with his Twitter feed open. “There’s still that void,” Hylton said. For Hylton, recent Sundays became “ritualistic.” He would dress in Chicago Bulls gear as he counted down the hours to the next installment of “The Last Dance,” the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan and the Bulls that drew additional interest because it aired during a time without sports. It intensified nostalgic feelings and provided fans a bond. “You re-create the social magic of that moment,” Montez de Oca said. “A lot of people are trying to re-create the world that existed prior to the pandemic by watching old sports.” But even the documentary, Zillmer said, is an inadequate replacement on a deeper layer. In his studies, Zillmer noticed that organized spectator sports are a feature exclusive to civilizations and societies at the highest level of functioning. In that way, they are nothing less than a symbol of a society’s subsistence: If you have sports, you’ve made it. Losing them is disturbing on a foundational level. “At the archetypal level, sports represents living,” Zillmer said. "When you don’t have it, it’s like a death. I study Carl Jung. I’m a shrink. People don’t talk about it like that. But you can feel it.” Recently, Edel scrolled through her phone and found a picture from the last day of the 2019 baseball season. She and a friend had found a way to get into Citi Field on the cheap. It was a glorious day, and the Mets won. It was a blissful memory, and it made her sad that she doesn’t know when it might happen again. Edel’s father, Peter, died in early April. He underwent heart surgery in January and developed an infection in a nursing rehab facility. (He tested negative for the coronavirus, Edel said, but showed many symptoms.) Edel’s best memories of her father involve the Mets: attending the last game at Shea Stadium together, eating Italian ices in the seats. Edel visited her father in early March, around the time she was laid off from her job. The first thing Peter mentioned was Pete Alonso’s ragged start to spring training and whether Tim Tebow had a chance to make the Mets’ Opening Day roster. “It sucks to go through this stuff and know it would be a really big comfort to have [Mets games] and not have that available at


Trump administration to withdraw from Open Skies treaty in a further erosion of arms control pacts with Russia

previously served as CIA director. Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, described the administration’s decision to withdraw as reckless. He said Congress mandated that the administration provide a review period before withdrawing from the treaty and accused the administration of risking violating the law by failing to do so. “The timing of the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw is clearly tied to the political calendar,” Menendez said in a statement. “By rushing this abrupt withdrawal, it is clear the Trump Administration is attempting to bind a future administration from participation in this long-standing and valuable treaty for our nation.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in April that the Trump administration is averse to any limits on its military, particularly over U.S. territory. “The Americans, the current administration, conceptually, fundamentally have an aversion to any kind of control over American military activity, especially when that control is exercised on or over U.S. territory,” Lavrov said. He said he doubted that other countries would withdraw. “Will other countries follow the Americans? I doubt it,” he said. “Europeans seem to me to understand that the agreement has added value as an instrument of trust, an instrument of predictability, transparency, and that is how we see it.” Trump’s envoy said Thursday that the United States would not hesitate to engage in a costly nuclear arms race with Russia and China. He said he had agreed with top Russian arms control officials on a time to begin negotiations on a new pact and urged China to agree to negotiations, as well. “We know how to win these races, and we know how to spend the adversary into oblivion, and if we have to, we will, but we sure would like to avoid it,” Billingslea said. Led by former White House national security adviser John Bolton, the Trump administration has moved quickly to rip up legacy arms-control agreements with Russia, arguing that there’s no sense in remaining in treaties if Russia isn’t going to comply and that only by withdrawing can the United States lay the groundwork for new deals calibrated to the modern era. Members of the arms-control community, however, have argued that these pacts took a long time to negotiate and Washington may not be able to agree on any substantive follow-on pacts with Moscow. They see little progress on new arms control pacts in the