Virus ‘does not spread easily’ from contaminated surfaces or animals, revised CDC website states

The coronavirus primarily spreads from person to person and not easily from a contaminated surface. That is the takeaway from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which this month updated its “How COVID-19 Spreads” website. The revised guidance now states, in headline-size type, “The virus spreads easily between people.” It also notes that the coronavirus, which causes the disease covid-19, “is spreading very easily and sustainably between people.” The CDC made another key change to its website, clarifying what sources are not major risks. Under the new heading “The virus does not spread easily in other ways,” the agency explains that touching contaminated objects or surfaces does not appear to be a significant mode of transmission. The same is true for exposure to infected animals. CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund said Thursday that the revisions were the product of an internal review and “usability testing.” “Our transmission language has not changed,” Nordlund said. “Covid-19 spreads mainly through close contact from person to person.” The virus travels through the droplets a person produces when talking or coughing, the CDC website says. An individual does not need to feel sick or show symptoms to spread the submicroscopic virus. Close contact means within about six feet, the distance at which a sneeze flings heavy droplets. Example after example have shown the microbe’s affinity for density. The virus has spread easily in nursing homes, prisons, cruise ships and meatpacking plants — places where many people are living or working in proximity. A recent CDC report described how a choir practice in Washington state in March became a super-spreader event when one sick person infected as many as 52 others. “Direct contact with people has the highest likelihood of getting infected — being close to an infected person, rather than accepting a newspaper or a FedEx guy dropping off a box,” said virologist Vincent Munster, a researcher in the virus ecology section at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, a National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases facility in Hamilton, Mont. Munster and his colleagues showed in laboratory experiments that the virus remained potentially viable on cardboard for up to 24 hours and on plastic and metal surfaces for up to three days. But the virus typically degrades within hours when outside a host. The change to the CDC website, without formal announcement or explanation, concerns Angela L. Rasmussen, a virologist at the Columbia University Mailman School of


What Trump got wrong in his letter to the WHO

a virus spreading in Wuhan. The first reports we published were from Chinese scientists on Jan 24, 2020.” The Jan. 24 Lancet study says “the symptom onset date of the first patient identified was Dec. 1, 2019,” with patients in the study hospitalized between Dec. 16 and Jan. 2. The White House did not respond to a request for an explanation. “On March 3, 2020, the World Health Organization cited official Chinese data to downplay the very serious risk of asymptomatic spread, telling the world that ‘COVID-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza’ and that unlike influenza this disease was not primarily driven by ‘people who are infected but not yet sick.’ China’s evidence, the World Health Organization told the world, ‘showed that only one percent of reported cases do not have symptoms, and most of those cases develop symptoms within two days.’” Tedros did say this at a March 3 briefing, as part of a presentation on the ways covid-19 was different from the seasonal flu. But he also said “covid-19 causes more severe disease than seasonal influenza. … Globally, about 3.4 percent of reported covid-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1 percent of those infected.” He urged governments to expand contact tracing because it would slow the spread of infections. “We can’t treat covid-19 exactly the same way we treat flu,” Tedros said, noting there would be no vaccine for some time. For the full fact check, click here. Sign up for The Post’s Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked within the newsletter are free to access. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who’d like it! If this email was forwarded to you, There’s a lot going on in this, one of the most unhinged attack ads we’ve ever seen. Of course, we gave it Four Pinocchios, but the whole story behind the ad is eye-popping and disturbing. Let’s start with Plame. She’s a former CIA operative whose name famously was revealed to reporters during the controversy over the George W. Bush administration’s claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Now, she is running for the Democratic congressional nomination in a New Mexico district. She tweeted out a link to an article posted on the Unz Review, a website that posts anti-Semitic diatribes. We will quote only briefly from it. The article suggested


How the coronavirus exposed health disparities in communities of color

The signs were there all along. As states across the United States began publishing preliminary coronavirus case and death data, a pattern emerged. In cities like New York, Chicago and the District, coronavirus deaths were disproportionately affecting black and brown communities. Additional data suggested that certain chronic health conditions, such as hypertension, diabetes and others, were associated with complications from covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. What once was perceived as a disease that affected only the elderly in a few areas was now wreaking havoc in the bodies of 20- and 30-year-old people of color across the nation. To assess which communities could be more vulnerable to covid-19, The Washington Post analyzed chronic health and social vulnerability estimates. The analysis looked at census tracts with above-average rates of six chronic health indicators: heart disease, diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and obesity. The analysis uses data provided by PolicyMap, a data analytics company, who used methods developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to estimate health risk across the nation, and data from the CDC’s social vulnerability index. Social vulnerability is defined as a community with a risk of being severely affected by a hazardous event like a natural disaster or disease outbreak. Examining underlying conditions is helpful for understanding the health implications an outbreak like the coronavirus, but health conditions tell only part of the story. Risk is increased when factoring in living conditions and access to health care. Communities of color may be more likely to live in densely populated areas in cities because of the history of racial segregation in the United States. And black and Latinx Americans are also two to three times more likely than white Americans to be uninsured, according to a report on covid-19 and race from the CDC. In the early days of the pandemic, few states published detailed demographic data on who was being affected by the virus. Some of this was because of the scale of the virus and the unexpected nature of its transmissions. Another hurdle was a standardized CDC form that takes an estimated 30 minutes to fill out, which may have put a strain on local agencies, CDC spokesman Scott Pauley told The Post. Without key demographic data, it could be difficult for local and state governments to marshal necessary resources for the hardest-hit communities. Furthermore, without this


affected by a hazardous event like a natural disaster or disease outbreak. Examining underlying conditions is helpful for understanding the health implications an outbreak like the coronavirus, but health conditions tell only part of the story. Risk is increased when factoring in living conditions and access to health care. Communities of color may be more likely to live in densely populated areas in cities because of the history of racial segregation in the United States. And black and Latinx Americans are also two to three times more likely than white Americans to be uninsured, according to a report on covid-19 and race from the CDC. In the early days of the pandemic, few states published detailed demographic data on who was being affected by the virus. Some of this was because of the scale of the virus and the unexpected nature of its transmissions. Another hurdle was a standardized CDC form that takes an estimated 30 minutes to fill out, which may have put a strain on local agencies, CDC spokesman Scott Pauley told The Post. Without key demographic data, it could be difficult for local and state governments to marshal necessary resources for the hardest-hit communities. Furthermore, without this data, these majority-minority communities — which often employ essential workers in places like hospitals, grocery stores and shipping facilities — will probably see more hardship as the virus spreads among vulnerable population “This basic demographic data is in everyone’s health records. It’s routinely collected all the time,” said Nancy Krieger, a professor of social epidemiology at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “It truly makes no sense in anyone’s pandemic planning or any just regular health record that these data would not be there,” Krieger said. She also noted that the lack of an online form that is easy to fill out increases the burden on the CDC because all forms need to be digitized afterward, prolonging up-to-date information on the demographics hardest hit by the pandemic. As of May 22, there are over 7,700 reported cases of the coronavirus in the District, claiming at least 412 lives according a Post tracker of deaths and cases. Black and Latinx Americans, who represent just over 57 percent of the city population, based on recent census estimates, account for 87 percent of all virus-related deaths. A majority of confirmed cases in the District are in some of the city’s densest


Immigrant workers have borne the brunt of covid-19 outbreaks at meatpacking plants

The country’s eyes have turned to our meatpacking plants as officials warn of possible shortages in our food supply chain amid the novel coronavirus pandemic. Meatpacking facilities have become major centers of covid-19 outbreaks. This has focused attention on the workers at these facilities, a majority of whom are immigrants and refugees. Although President Trump has ordered meat plants to remain open, his executive order did nothing to address the unsafe working conditions in these facilities and the vulnerability of these workers. All workers in grueling industries need and deserve better working conditions and wages that reflect the risks they take to perform essential work. But foreign-born workers face particular challenges — and they always have. In the early 20th century, social worker Sophonisba Breckinridge investigated the horrific conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. Then, as now, much of this labor was performed by immigrants. And then, as now, immigrants were an especially vulnerable group of workers. Far from entering a cultural “melting pot,” foreign-born workers struggled to survive a toxic stew of inadequate workplace protections, unwelcoming immigration policies and unscrupulous employment practices — often without the ability to speak or write English. Language barriers, combined with rudimentary safety measures, fostered dangerous working conditions. For instance, in 1906, a clubwoman wrote to Breckinridge about “a Polish Boy unable to read a word of English and therefore unable to read the signs of direction and warning on the machine at which he was placed who was killed caught in the machinery.” Legal difficulties dovetailed with financial need to pave the way for exploitative practices, including wage theft and sexual harassment. Breckinridge encountered a young immigrant woman who was “so eager for work … that she had taken the first job she could find — in a saloon,” only to be fired when the saloonkeeper “turned her out when he found that she was to become the mother of his illegitimate child.” Outrage at the situation prompted Breckinridge to establish the Immigrants’ Protective League in 1908. Although originally inspired by Breckinridge’s desire to address the problem of “lost immigrant girls,” the Immigrants’ Protective League served all of the Second City’s newcomers — women, men and children. One of the League’s first major accomplishments was establishing “a kind of immigration station” to welcome new arrivals. Agents provided new arrivals with information about employment opportunities, social services and evening classes. In only four years, the


Belarus just ordered U.S. oil for the first time. It was a message to Russia.

past five months, capitalizing on a coronavirus-induced shock to oil prices. The U.S. deal is for one shipment. But few other oil agreements are so geopolitically significant that they prompt a statement from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who said it “strengthens Belarusian sovereignty and independence.” Pompeo visited Minsk in early February, when he first offered to sell American oil “at a competitive price.” It marked the first trip to Belarus by the top U.S. diplomat since Lukashenko took power. Then in April, the two countries formally reestablished diplomatic relations when Julie Fisher, a top State Department official for Europe, was named ambassador to Belarus — a position that had been vacant for more than a decade. The first order for 80,000 tons of U.S. oil is probably a test of logistics. The tanker carrying it is expected to arrive in a Lithuanian port in early June, with Poland also acting as an intermediary. If things go smoothly, more purchases may be on the horizon. Transporting oil through its Baltic neighbors could lead to Belarus improving relations with them in the long-term, analysts said. But in the short-term, perceived rifts with Russia could have domestic complications for Lukashenko, who is seeking a sixth term in August. Belarus’s economic fortunes remain closely tied to Russia, and Lukashenko could stir worries that he risking too much. After the standoff over oil prices earlier this year, the two countries reached a compromise agreement, and Russian state oil company Rosneft said May 15 that it expected to ship about 9 million tons to Belarus this year — about half the amount Belarus bought in previous years. Lukashenko is also facing criticism at home and abroad for his response to the coronavirus pandemic, which he has repeatedly downplayed. Lukashenko has ignored the World Health Organization’s suggestion for physical distancing measures, keeping businesses open even as the country’s confirmed cases have spiked to more than 33,000. A Russian state-run television channel aired a report this month from Belarus alleging that Belarusans mistrust their government’s official coronavirus figures. The Channel One correspondent and cameraman involved in the piece were deported, and the broadcaster’s entire film crew was stripped of accreditation. A Belarusan state broadcaster said it was because the Channel One segment contained “fake news” and “propaganda.” It’s not the first instance of the coronavirus inflaming the quarrel between Minsk and Moscow. In March, Lukashenko colorfully lashed


What grocery hauls look like around the world right now

in stock now. Flour and full-fat milk seem to be in short supply. Going to the supermarket in Manhattan has become a process that involves extensive planning. We make a list to ensure we get everything we need, plan our visits to coincide with quieter hours, make sure we wear face masks and bring hand sanitizer. In the store we practice social distancing along with everyone else, which means sometimes having to go the long way around the aisles to get to certain items. When we get home we spend at least 20 minutes cleaning the groceries. We used to shop more sporadically and pick up items as needed, but that’s changed. We have become a lot more organized with our grocery shopping as a result. While the Western world panicked over a lack of toilet paper, the only item to disappear from the shelves in Bangkok was eggs. They go in, on or with almost every meal, and it seemed people could not do without them. Then it was announced the sale of alcohol would be prohibited for a minimum of two weeks, and everyone rushed to buy as many cases of Chang beer as possible. For my own safety and peace of mind, I set a shopping schedule of Monday and Friday mornings to avoid the afternoon and weekend rush and to catch the shelves as they were being freshly stocked after, and before, said rush. Supermarkets tend to be crowded on evenings and weekends, as a lot of people are still following relatively normal work hours. Many jobs in Thailand cannot be performed from home, so only certain sectors have been shut down while others remain operational. After the security guard does a temperature check, the trip through the store is hurried. Armed with a list, I quickly get the items I need while trying to avoid the other shoppers. Packages are grabbed from the back of the shelves to lower the risk of getting pre-handled or sneezed-on items. With my basket full, I make my way to the checkout area, featuring social distancing markers that are definitely not spaced far enough apart. Arriving home is both a relief and the worst part of buying groceries. I stand there sweaty, before touching anything in my home, including the air conditioner, rubbing alcohol over every piece of packaging. Any unwrapped items, or items in mesh bags like onions


and garlic, I leave up to fate. I try to eat almost every meal at home. Most street food vendors and markets have closed or do takeout only. Through no fault of their own, most cannot afford single-use gloves or proper masks, and like many people, can be seen wearing the mask only over their mouth and not their nose, or handling their mask regularly throughout the day. As restaurants and food stalls reopen, how do we know when to return to “normal” life even if instructed to do so? For the foreseeable future, I will be sticking to my Monday and Friday trips to the grocery store. Before the coronavirus hit Honolulu, my family would buy groceries whenever we needed them, often multiple times a week. Now, it’s a planned event. To minimize my parents’ exposure, I’m usually the person who goes to minimize. I used to eat at restaurants a lot, but I’ve been eating mostly home-cooked meals lately. At least my wallet is happier. While the list varies depending on what my family is cooking that week, we always have bread, rice, vienna sausages, chocolate chip waffles, deli meat, chicken breasts, kimchi, eggs, some sort of milk, shoyu (soy sauce), sesame oil, and random fruits and vegetables. Even though I’m lactose intolerant, I always buy ice cream and pizza because I like to live life on the edge. I’ve also been trying to re-create foods I normally get from local restaurants, such as Spam musubi, pad thai, summer rolls and ramen. The one thing I can’t re-create is the dim sum I used to get almost every week from Duck Lee in Honolulu. It’s one of my favorite things in the world. Sadly, my cravings aren’t essential enough to drive 40 minutes into the virus hotspot of Oahu. My family also eats a lot of poke (the real local kind, not the fancy New York City version), but we’ve been laying off on it for the time being because it’s eaten raw. I dream of the day that I can have a spicy ahi poke bowl and pork hash again." For me, nothing has really changed. I am out working through the crisis, so the supermarket is my smallest worry these days. The supermarket is in my building, so I go there nearly every day because I’m very bad at planning what I will eat and always


Nora Caplan, who served for decades as a Maryland librarian, dies of covid-19

Nora Caplan, 93, of Sandy Spring, Md., had three goals she wanted to achieve: have children, travel to England to places she had read about in books, and publish a book of her own. She accomplished all three, said her daughter, before she died in late April at Friends House, a retirement community where family members suspect she contracted the novel coronavirus. Lisa Caplan Dane described her mother as a vibrant and friendly woman who enjoyed sharing stories of her childhood and travels in a column she wrote for a community newspaper. In the days before she died, Caplan would talk with a former minister who lived on her floor, her daughter said. A stroke had left the minister unable to speak, but Caplan did the talking and showed him pictures of her family. “His eyes lit up when she visited him,” Dane said. “All the talking was on her side, but he could hear, and up until the week before her death mom was motivated to connect with people.” Dane said her mother suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, kidney troubles and heart disease — all of which “compromised her immune system” — and had been in and out of the hospital since January. Dane called her mother’s death a “rugged ending you don’t want for someone you love.” “To see someone who is cognizant and loving people and then one week later is gone, it’s heartbreaking,” she said. “Covid-19 was the unexpected black swan.” Born and raised in Springfield, Mo., Caplan earned a bachelor’s degree in education from Southwest Missouri State in 1947. She taught English for a year at a rural Missouri high school, then came to Washington, where she worked as a clerk for the Department of Veterans Affairs. At the agency, she met her husband, Leon, and the two married Thanksgiving Day in 1949. They moved to Silver Spring and later to Rockville, where they had two children. Caplan went on to work at the Library of Congress and as a librarian at the Noyes Library for Young Children in Kensington, where she was employed from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s. She was recognized for starting a “Penny Theatre” program at several Montgomery County library branches. After her husband died in 1985, she traveled and stayed in more than a dozen hostels catering to older travelers, often visiting places her favorite authors wrote about


As bad as the coronavirus pandemic has been, it probably hasn’t yet made much of a dent

spread. To continue the admittedly tedious forest-fire analogy, in those places that have seen high numbers of infections, it’s theoretically harder for the virus to spread, given that there are now a number of people who are immune to infection. Eventually, the hope is to hit “herd immunity,” when there are so many people who are immune to the virus that embers can’t flare up, since there’s nowhere for the fire to spread. Ideally that will happen because of a vaccine — because the underbrush is cleared away before the fire starts. The more problematic way to hit herd immunity is by having the virus spread broadly, infecting a big chunk of the population who then can’t transmit the virus — by having the underbrush burn. On Thursday, researchers from Imperial College London released estimates of how widely the virus had likely spread in each state. Nationally, the report estimated that 4.1 percent of the country had probably already been infected, though the likely range of infections was 3.7 percent to 4.5 percent. In 14 states, the virus had spread more broadly, particularly in New York and New Jersey, where it had probably reached more than 16 percent of the population. In an additional 14 states, the researchers estimated that it had reached fewer than 1 in 100 residents. Given the novelty of the virus, this is probably the full extent of immunity that exists (assuming that those who’ve been infected are now immune, which is still something of an open question). There’s no vaccine that can spread immunity in a more controlled way, just infections and recoveries. So how close is this to herd immunity? The density of an immune population for determining what might effectively constitute herd immunity ranges from 70 percent to 90 percent. Meaning that, even in New York and New Jersey, we’re not very close. There are some important qualifiers here. One is that there are places in New York — specifically, the city — where the percentage is higher. Another is that even some immunity might slow the spread of the virus in some places. That there has been so little relative exposure, despite the million-plus confirmed cases, means there is still plenty of opportunity for the virus to spread. While Trump would like to portray the situation as controlled and largely behind us, and while Birx would like to offer evidence that we’ve


Homeowners stopped paying mortgages in record numbers in April

Record unemployment caused by the coronavirus pandemic led to the largest one-month increase in mortgage delinquencies ever recorded. The number of borrowers who stopped paying their home loans spiked by 1.6 million last month, new data shows. Not even during the Great Recession did delinquencies rise this fast. During that time, it took 18 months before there was a single-month increase as large. The national delinquency rate soared to 6.45 percent in April, up from 3.06 percent in March and three times the previous single-month record set in 2008, according to data released this week by Black Knight, a real estate data and analytics company. The 3.6 million borrowers who are past due are the most since 2015. The data represents homeowners who didn’t make a mortgage payment in April, including those who are in forbearance plans. It comes from the company’s loan-level database representing a majority of the national mortgage market. “This is truly uncharted territory,” Andy Walden, economist and director of market research at Black Knight, wrote in an email. “During the last financial crisis, it took more than a year and a half before we saw the first 1.6 million homeowners fall past due on mortgages as a result. In the economic fallout from Covid-19, that many people became past due in April alone. “Given that just 21 percent of the now 4.75 million homeowners in forbearance have made their May payments so far, this is a trend that is likely to continue.” You only need to look at the job market to understand why so many people aren’t paying their mortgages these days. The U.S. economy shed 20 million jobs in April and the unemployment rate soared to its highest level since the Great Depression as many businesses nationwide shuttered. The impact has been swift and severe: An additional 2.4 million Americans filed jobless claims last week, the Labor Department announced, pushing the nation’s nine-week total past 38 million. “Since 2006, there has been a very clear correlation between unemployment and past dues,” said Marina Walsh, an economist with the Mortgage Bankers Association. The rapid rise in delinquencies is in contrast with the Great Recession. Back then, they were more spread out over a longer period of time. “When you think of the Great Recession, it really started in 2007, 2008, but delinquencies didn’t peak until 2010,” Walsh said. “With the Great Recession, quite frankly, it


The Technology 202: The tech industry’s shift to remote work will forever change Silicon Valley

Anti-Defamation League still had an active presence on Facebook, according to researchers at the Tech Transparency Project, a research initiative of the left-leaning corporate and government accountability nonprofit group Campaign for Accountability. Those organizations were associated with a total of 153 Facebook pages and four Facebook groups. More than half the pages were automatically created by Facebook, Researchers also found active pages sharing similar posts or having similar names to four of the 14 pages that Facebook removed from its platform for violating its policies on white supremacy. Facebook is reviewing the content raised in the report, including pages with the same titles as those Facebook previously removed from the platform, according to spokeswoman Sarah Pollack. Facebook banned 250 white-supremacist organizations, Pollack said. But its criteria for hate-based groups differs from SPLC and ADL, she noted. Civil rights advocates say Facebook shareholders need to address the findings at their annual meeting next week. “We will see who is comfortable profiting off hate and who has the courage to stand up for the lives of those who are threatened by it,” Jessica J. González, co-founder of Change the Terms and co-CEO of Free Press, said in a statement. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy: Their new bill directs the agency to report scams targeting seniors during the coronavirus pandemic to Congress as well as update its website to given better information to seniors and their caretakers about how to access law enforcement and protective agencies. The Protecting Seniors from Emergency Scams Act is endorsed by AARP, the Elder Justice Coalition, American Society on Aging, and the National Adult Protective Services Association. More Hill news: The community information-sharing app has flown out officials on all-expenses-paid trips, asked them to serve as ambassadors for the product for other police departments and asked them to sign non-disclosure agreements about their work, CityLab's Sarah Holder reports. It's a familiar playbook for tech companies working with police departments, but advocates say it raises a troubling trend. “Police are supposed to be impartial civic servants,” Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that advocates for digital civil liberties, told CityLab. “You want a police officer who has the best interests of their specific community at heart. You don’t want a police officer who’s brand loyal.” More privacy news: Happy anniversary to our favorite TikTok account! (Yes, we’re biased.)


The Health 202: Americans are deeply divided by party about timing of reopening their states, per new poll

from new maladies, and that testing deficits made it particularly easy to miss deaths from people infected by the coronavirus.” “Jennifer Lighter, a pediatric infectious diseases doctor at NYU Langone, said younger children with the condition seem to have symptoms that look more like traditional Kawasaki, which is characterized by inflammation of the blood vessels,” Ariana Eunjung Cha and Chelsea Janes report. “But teens and young adults have more of an ‘overwhelming’ response involving the heart and multiple organs.” Some doctors worry the syndrome has been underdiagnosed in adults. That may be in part because doctors who treat adults may not have seen Kawasaki disease, which is a childhood disease. “The syndrome appears to be rare, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — which recently dubbed the condition MIS-C, or multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children — has expressed alarm about the rapid decline of patients with the illness,” Ariana and Chelsea write. “… At least four children, three in New York state and a 15-year-old girl in Maryland, have died of apparent MIS-C in recent weeks.” Blue Flame Medical, a supply company started by a pair of well-connected Republican operatives, was meant to fulfill a $12.5 million contract to provide medical equipment. But Maryland officials canceled the contract, saying the company didn’t deliver medical masks and ventilators on time. “The firm’s lawyer, Douglas Gansler, a former Maryland attorney general, said Thursday that Maryland officials made a mistake,” Tom Hamburger and Juliet Eilperin report. “Gansler said 27 of 110 mechanical ventilators promised by Blue Flame were delivered Thursday to a Maryland Emergency Management Agency office in Sparrows Point, a sign of the company’s good-faith effort to fulfill its obligation.” But a spokesman for the state’s department of general services said the delivery was not accepted “pending legal deliberations,” citing “separate federal, state and congressional inquiries.” The Justice Department launched a probe into the company less than a month ago after it learned about concerns from Maryland as well as from California. He said, “No,” when asked by reporters yesterday if he was considering ousting CDC Director Robert Redfield. Tensions between the agency and the White House have increased in recent weeks, as Felicia Sonmez and Darryl Fears have reported. CNN’s Kristen Holmes reported this week ttheCDC leader recently “grew concerned he may have a target on his back, according to a source familiar with the dynamic. CDC officials dismissed


As veterans face heightened unemployment risk, ‘Call of Duty’ lends a hand

Over the last nine weeks, more than 38.6 million Americans have filed unemployment claims as the covid-19 pandemic continues to impact the U.S. economy. Massive layoffs due to the novel coronavirus have caused a historic unemployment rate of nearly 15 percent. Given already heightened underemployment rates, out-of-work military veterans feel that pain acutely, according to Dan Goldenberg, executive director of the Call of Duty Endowment (C.O.D.E.). C.O.D.E., a foundation backed by video game publisher Activision Blizzard and framed around its Call of Duty series, works with organizations in the U.S. and U.K. to provide jobs to veterans. The organization saw a 50-percent increase in veterans asking for help in March, according to internal data. “We don’t see this problem, unfortunately, going away any time soon,” Goldenberg said. Since 2009, C.O.D.E. has raised funds for organizations that seek to find employment for military personnel after their service ends, and it has placed 69,000 veterans in jobs according to their website. The endowment now serves 10 U.S. veterans organizations and, more recently, two U.K. organizations, in an effort to close the unemployment gap, which Goldenberg says predates the current pandemic climate. In a study sponsored by C.O.D.E. and Zip Recruiter, the authors found veterans’ underemployment rates are 15 percent higher than nonveterans. Based on census data, veterans are 50-percent more likely to be self-employed and cumulatively own 2.5 million small businesses. Part of the issue, according to Goldenberg, a retired Navy captain, is red tape. Medics and hospital corpsman in the Navy, despite having years of experience in the medical field, have to start from square one should they wish to pursue a career in medicine. Without having additional schooling, they’re unable to come out of the military and become an EMT or paramedic. The same goes for truck drivers. While they’re used to driving 18-wheelers in less-than-ideal conditions, they can’t automatically qualify to drive tractor trailers on roads in the U.S. because they haven’t been taught how to reverse the vehicle unassisted. (In the military, two soldiers are always assigned to such vehicles.) “It’s a field people think is very well-transferrable and it turns out to not be, so much,” said Nathalie Grogan, a research assistant at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “Just because you did something in the military for eight years in very stressful conditions doesn’t qualify veterans for those types of


Las estadísticas del coronavirus en México. Argentina y el "default". Crisis para las universidades

En este episodio, Valeria Moy, directora del centro de pensamiento "México, ¿cómo vamos?"; Salvador Di Stefano, consultor económico argentino, y los rectores de la Universidad de los Andes y de la Universidad Icesi en Colombia


How a small Michigan company reopened, averting a coronavirus outbreak

the economy before there is an effective vaccine, our public health, government, and business leaders need information about who has COVID-19, who needs to be isolated or quarantined, and who may be immune due to previous infection,” Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said recently in a statement. “The only way to get that information is testing: ubiquitous, fast, free testing, which must be followed by precise contact tracing efforts and the integration of data from national surveillance systems.” The Harvard Global Health Institute said the country needs to test 900,000 people a day to have a better understanding of the extent of disease spread and where resources should be concentrated. At United Precision Products, however, wedged between an Auto Zone franchise and a used car establishment, the focus is on its own workplace. It has made some changes to make workers feel less afraid. Even before the pandemic, the factory placed machinery so operators were more than six feet apart. The loading dock switched to one person instead of two. Visitors now need to be buzzed in. There are different shifts for eating in the cafeteria to create more room between people. “The good thing about this type of testing is you’re going to have the ability to set up on a weekly or biweekly basis and continue to test your work staff so that you’re sure they’re not bringing it into the workplace,” Bloom said. If it’s costly, it’s still worthwhile for many businesses. DxTerity’s Terbrueggen says one of his customers is a pharmaceutical plant, which is testing its workers twice a week. “If 30 people at a pharma company are making product worth millions upon millions of dollars, you don’t want to shut it down,” Terbrueggen said. DxTerity’s test costs between $75 and $125 each, depending on the size of the order. Bloom said frequent testing also helps deal with “the fear factor that everybody has, even those who don’t have the virus.” “They get just the little symptom and they really wonder whether they’re coming down with it,” he said. Winkler and Bloom are interested in the Swedish model, where the government has taken a relatively hands-off approach to the pandemic and is assuming that enough of the population will be lightly infected and acquire “herd immunity” that would blunt the virus’s impact. So far, however, Sweden’s


Seeking: Names for four baby cheetah cubs at National Zoo’s facility in Virginia

Awwww. Four cheetah cubs at the National Zoo’s facility in Virginia need names, and officials are asking for the public’s help. The 6-week-old cubs — three males and one female — were born April 8 at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conversation Biology Institute in Front Royal. Keepers said each cub is identified by a small shaved marking on its body. The cubs have been regularly checked and have gotten a “clean bill of health,” officials said. Voters can pick their favorite names through Wednesday on the zoo’s website. The potential names were selected from suggestions that came from the zoo, the institute and the zoo’s membership group, Friends of the National Zoo. Officials said the winning names will be announced Thursday. The name choices for the female cub are: · Amabala, which is Zulu for spots. · Vivace, a musical term that means short, lively and brisk. · Iambe, one of the two daughters of the mountain nymph Echo in Greek mythology. For the males, the name suggestions are: · Jabari, which is Swahili for “fearless” or “brave one.” · Hasani, which is also Swahili and means handsome. · Phoenix, a reference to the “mythical bird associated with the sun that regenerates or is otherwise born again from its own ashes,” as the zoo describes it. · Erindi, which is a “protected reserve in Namibia where many cheetahs are rereleased.” · Tolbo, which is Mongolian and means “spot.” Earlier this year, experts at the zoo’s institute performed a successful in vitro fertilization resulting in two cubs. The four new cheetah cubs were born to Echo. She is a first-time mom at 5 years old. They were sired by 4-year-old Scott. They have been closely monitored by the zoo staff, and zookeepers said in a statement that “as the cheetah cubs continue to grow, they will spend more time outside the den.” The zoo’s institute in Front Royal studies and breeds more than 20 species at its facility, which has more than 3,200 acres. In the wild, cheetahs live in sub-Saharan Africa and stay in small, isolated populations. Their populations face troubles due to “human conflict, poaching and habitat- and prey-base loss,” officials said. There are up to 10,000 cheetahs in the wild. The International Union for Conservation of Nature says cheetahs are “vulnerable to extinction.”


If we can resist quarantine fatigue, we can shorten lockdowns

normal. In thinking about what that normal might need to be, we should in particular remember the edge that the people of Byzantium gave themselves in combating the infection by staying home even when there were no government restrictions on their movements. The plague traveled westward from eastern Asia along the international trade route that connected east to west via the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea to ports in the Mediterranean. Countless merchants and workers were constantly involved in close contact with one another and their customers as they imported the pepper, spices and silk that the Roman world craved. Ships at sea became nests of infection, which then traveled inland when the goods were offloaded for delivery. From the eastern Mediterranean, the disease then migrated across North Africa and into Europe. A form of bubonic plague (Y. pestis), it infected human beings not only through the bites of fleas who had sucked the blood of infected rats, but also likely through aerosol transmission from person to person. Cities were the first to be affected because of their population density, but the devastation eventually extended to rural populations as well. Seasonal weather changes brought no relief. Climate change — cooler temperatures caused by dust in the atmosphere from massive volcanic eruptions — seems to have allowed the bacteria to thrive even during summer months. Several contemporary eyewitnesses recorded the unpredictable fate of those who became infected. Many people didn’t even initially realize that they were ill; they experienced a mild elevation in their temperature, but their skin wasn’t flushed and they didn’t otherwise feel sick. Doctors told these people without symptoms not to be worried — and then a day or two later they became violently ill. Painful, tumor-like swellings — buboes — erupted on their bodies, especially in their groins. Some even suddenly collapsed or became comatose, while others vomited blood or became delirious; still others turned randomly aggressive. The illness was so disorienting that some people saw demons that they believed were infecting them or dreamed that monsters told them they were going to die. Health-care workers became exhausted. No universal treatment could be found; what seemingly helped one patient would destroy the next. Some died without lingering, while others suffered for days. Some who recovered then contracted the disease a second time. Total uncertainty continued to prevail about everyone’s fate as the plague made its way


New mobile games aim to help medical professionals treat coronavirus

decision (such as asking about medical history or ordering tests) is broken down into action points you can spend each turn. “The whole goal of [this game] is we don’t want [medical professionals] to do what we call the shotgun approach,” Gantwerker said. “The shotgun approach in medicine is essentially asking all the questions, doing all the exams, doing all the tests possible and then coming down, but that’s not a proper use of resources." Some levels are so realistic that they caused a stress response and increased the heart rate of a physician who helped test the game before release. In the level the physician played, a patient is admitted to the hospital for injuries related to a car accident and tests positive for coronavirus. It’s a “really difficult case,” Gantwerker said. The patient’s oxygen drops significantly, and little can be done. The emotional response experienced by the physician is encouraging on the education front, Gantwerker explained. “Emotion and processing information are very strongly tied,” Gantwerker said. “When you have a very strong emotional response during the information, during the experience, there’s a much higher likelihood that you’re going to retain that information.” Development for “Pulm Ex” and “Airway Ex’s” coronavirus updates began in early March, as cases started to grow within the United States. When development kick-started, resources on best practices for emergency care were slim, and Glassenberg turned to “a bunch of disparate PDFs in Italian” that had been put together by SIAARTI, the Italian Anesthesia Society. At the time, Italy was the world’s epicenter for the virus. Later came guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, the American Society of Anesthesiologists and more, all of which were used to build these new coronavirus updates. And while Level Ex’s team felt an ethical responsibility to help during the pandemic, Glassenberg and Gantwerker also cite personal reasons. Much of Glassenberg’s family works within the medical world, and he recently had to build makeshift personal protective equipment out of a snorkel and C-PAP filters for his wife, who works as a pediatrician. Gantwerker, who is also a practicing ear, nose and throat doctor, felt a call to action as he examined the bleak situation his colleagues and friends were facing. “I have lots of friends that are on the front lines and I have friends who have colleagues that are dying,” he said.


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 with 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,” the researchers wrote, a discovery they


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,” the researchers wrote, a discovery they 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.


Ohio county apologizes for ‘offensive’ guide urging minorities to avoid ‘gang symbolism’ on masks

department’s on Tuesday, pledging to devote more resources to addressing health inequities in minority communities. “Racism has been a pandemic long before the current coronavirus pandemic,” Franklin County Commissioner Kevin L. Boyce said in a statement. The coronavirus pandemic has only exposed and exacerbated those disparities, as black people all over the country are dying from the disease at rates disproportionate to those of white people. The same has been true in the state of Ohio, which has seen at least 30,167 cases and 1,836 deaths. Although African Americans make up about 13 percent of Ohio’s population, they account for at least 26 percent of covid-19 cases, 31 percent of hospitalizations and 17 percent of deaths, Gov. Mike DeWine (R) revealed in a Thursday news conference. “The health disparities didn’t occur overnight. They are complex and present complex challenges,” he said, pledging that his Minority Strike Task Force would release a report next month. “The current coronavirus pandemic has brought into high contrast these troubling issues.” Public health experts in Ohio and elsewhere have explained that the coronavirus racial disparities are likely due to higher rates of chronic disease, such as heart disease and diabetes, among black Americans compared to white Americans. Yet those disparities are in turn largely because of decades of inequitable access to health care in minority communities, experts have said. “We hear more and more that people are clamoring to return to normal,” said Joy Bivens, director of the Franklin County Department of Job and Family Services, during this week’s county commission meeting, the Columbus Dispatch reported. “Our community can never return to normal. Normal was not working for them. Black people and people of color were in crisis before covid hit our community.” Health disparities have not been the only way in which black Americans have been disproportionately affected throughout the covid-19 crisis. Black people have been arrested or cited for social distancing infractions at disproportionate rates compared to white people in some jurisdictions, as The Washington Post recently reported. And after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended last month that everyone wear masks in public, some black Americans felt discomfort that white Americans could not relate to: fear that donning a face covering could subject them to racial profiling. On April 4, the day after the CDC released its facial-covering recommendations, Columbus resident Aaron Thomas described that fear in a viral tweet:


Democrats are falling into a familiar trap on China

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. 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 to China until after the United States, yet


How to avoid a second wave of infections

saw benefits. Civilians, who even in densely populated places are far more spread out today than soldiers were in overcrowded World War I barracks, should benefit from control measures. SARS also teaches a lesson about best practices. Health-care workers accounted for 21 percent of SARS cases worldwide and 51 percent of cases in Toronto. At the George W. Bush administration’s very first meeting held to develop recommendations to mitigate a pandemic, the infection control chief from the single hospital in the world with the best record for protecting staff from SARS explained that he followed the same procedures as other hospitals, but he made certain his staff adhered to those procedures. They did not get sloppy. His people stayed healthy; elsewhere they got sick and many died. The lesson in both cases: compliance matters. Modern influenza studies also hold lessons. Influenza and covid-19 transmit the same way, and a careful study of seasonal influenza transmission found that a combination of masks and hand-washing reduced illness dramatically after six weeks, while an analysis of multiple studies of mask use and hand-washing during the 2009 swine flu pandemic concluded the same thing: the combination of the two provided significant protection. Even more important in interrupting transmission is social distancing. Simply talking face to face seems to be a major mode of transmission. Although quantifiable data supporting that statement has not yet been extracted and analyzed, that is the view of an emerging consensus of public-health experts. Distancing oneself, using masks, washing hands, taking such other preventive actions as avoiding public bathrooms (bowel movements and toilet flushing expel airborne virus), and, of course, staying home when sick are not magic bullets, but they all impact spread. As in army barracks in 1918, as in SARS among health-care workers, compliance matters. Individuals who employ all these measures can greatly enhance their chances of avoiding infection, and, even in the absence of adequate testing and tracing, can have considerable impact on society-wide spread. Such measures are not ideological, even if the great irony in this pandemic is that they have become so. Read more: Joseph Allen: Airplanes don’t make you sick. Really. Lyman Stone: The key tool to a safe opening is not social distancing Leana S. Wen: We’re retreating to a new strategy on covid-19. Let’s call it what it is. Eugene Robinson: 80,000 Americans have died. Trump is still engaged in magical thinking.


Ukraine’s citizens worry about covid-19. And they still have to worry about the war.

In the covid-19 fight, at what point do people think the cure is worse than the disease? Our new survey evidence from Ukraine shows that for countries in conflict, economic fears aren’t the only issue. National security threats may pose significant barriers to slowing down the virus. How we did our research All countries face short-term trade-offs between fighting the virus and keeping the economy going. We wanted to uncover people’s priorities in a country that also faced an immediate security threat, as do many of the world’s countries. Ukraine fits this bill. Not only are economic choices hard there — we document that 58 percent of all citizens found it difficult to afford clothing as of April 2020 — but Ukraine’s ongoing war with Russia-backed insurgents in the Donbas has claimed over 14,000 lives since 2014. To learn how Ukrainians prioritize these concerns against battling the pandemic, we partnered with the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) as part of our international and multi-university project on Identity and Borders in Flux: The Case of Ukraine. KIIS included a series of our questions in their April 22-24 telephone “omnibus” tracking survey of a nationally representative sample of 2,024 adult residents of Ukraine. Spare the economy — but don’t sacrifice security We first confirm the pandemic indeed strikes fear among Ukrainians. Our results indicate most people in the country (57 percent) are “very” or “somewhat” afraid of contracting the new coronavirus. But a substantial 17 percent are “not too afraid” and 23 percent “completely unafraid.” At the same time, we find large majorities believe the government’s efforts to fight the virus should be tempered by economic and security concerns. In fact, only 31 percent of the population would combat the virus regardless of economic cost. That said, just 19 percent would prioritize the economy over fighting covid-19. More Ukrainians (26 percent) would prioritize security and territorial integrity over anti-pandemic measures, with only 20 percent believing security and territorial concerns should not limit the battle with the coronavirus at all. Potential limitations are about not just budget, but also the focus of government attention, where and how medical personnel are mobilized, and military activity that compromises social distancing. Who puts economy and security over public health? When we look at who takes these different positions, we find a striking divergence between people who are subjectively and objectively at risk. People who are


of Ukraine. Spare the economy — but don’t sacrifice security We first confirm the pandemic indeed strikes fear among Ukrainians. Our results indicate most people in the country (57 percent) are “very” or “somewhat” afraid of contracting the new coronavirus. But a substantial 17 percent are “not too afraid” and 23 percent “completely unafraid.” At the same time, we find large majorities believe the government’s efforts to fight the virus should be tempered by economic and security concerns. In fact, only 31 percent of the population would combat the virus regardless of economic cost. That said, just 19 percent would prioritize the economy over fighting covid-19. More Ukrainians (26 percent) would prioritize security and territorial integrity over anti-pandemic measures, with only 20 percent believing security and territorial concerns should not limit the battle with the coronavirus at all. Potential limitations are about not just budget, but also the focus of government attention, where and how medical personnel are mobilized, and military activity that compromises social distancing. Who puts economy and security over public health? When we look at who takes these different positions, we find a striking divergence between people who are subjectively and objectively at risk. People who are subjectively at risk — those who personally fear infection for any reason, valid or not — tend more often to give free rein to the coronavirus fight. But people who are objectively more at risk than others, including urban and older populations who are more vulnerable, are on average more likely to prioritize the economy and security over fighting the virus. From the perspective of limiting the pandemic’s spread, this finding is particularly worrisome as it relates to the economy. It suggests people who are actually most likely to die of the virus (older people, in particular) are more likely to take risks, for example by engaging in economic activity that brings them into close contact with other people. Interestingly, poor people (those finding it difficult to buy clothing) are not much more likely on average than anyone else to favor saving the economy over fighting the covid-19 virus. This group does, however, tend to oppose giving security top priority. For Ukraine’s poorer citizens, it seems, the virus and the economy both are on average more immediate concerns than national security. People who would place national security and territorial integrity over public health are often also those who reject compromise


U.S. Olympic officials resort to layoffs amid grim projections

With the Tokyo Games postponed a year and the novel coronavirus pandemic crippling much of the Olympic world, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee reduced its staff this week by roughly 20 percent through layoffs and voluntary buyout packages. Sarah Hirshland, the organization’s chief executive, said in a memo to staff Thursday that 51 USOPC employees were laid off and 33 others were furloughed. An additional 23 temporary employees also were let go, and the organization gave buyouts to nearly 40 others. “I am overwhelmed by the magnitude of this change,” Hirshland wrote. “It is significant.” The USOPC had employed around 500 people, and Hirshland said this month the USOPC was working on an “expense reduction plan” that would be unveiled by June 1. In her memo Thursday, she said “the revenue we projected to collect this year, and in future years, would decline.” “As a result of that, we decided to proactively reduce our expenses by 10-20% over the 2020-2024 time frame to ensure we will be able to deliver against our mission and serve Team USA athletes for years to come,” she wrote. The USOPC was expecting a windfall of nearly $200 million this summer, its share of U.S. media rights that NBC pays to the International Olympic Committee. That money will not arrive until the conclusion of the Tokyo Games, which have been postponed to 2021. The coronavirus pandemic also is affecting agreements with corporate sponsors, a key revenue stream. “It has become clear that it will take months, and not weeks, for us to return to full operation,” Hirshland wrote, “particularly at our training centers in Colorado Springs and Lake Placid. We are adapting, even more than we had imagined, to a new way of operating and we cannot predict how long it will take before we have clarity on what the future holds.” The memo does not specify which positions were eliminated, but Hirshland indicated the cuts were strategic, aimed at minimizing the impact on athletes preparing for Olympic competition. The postponed Tokyo Games and economic downturn rocked the Olympic movement in the United States. With events postponed or canceled throughout the spring and summer, revenue streams dried up. Most of the national governing bodies received federal payroll loans but are still projecting to lose millions of dollars during the crisis. Max Cobb, head of the USOPC’s National Governing Bodies Council, told The Washington Post


The Daily 202: More churches rebel against state orders, as Trump reverses course on releasing reopening guidelines

microscopic blood clots and appeared to respond to the attack by growing tiny new blood vessels … 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 Mentzer, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and part of the team that detailed their findings in the New England Journal of Medicine. “For whatever reason, there is a vascular phase,” he said, in addition to damage more commonly associated with viral diseases such as the flu. “A 20-year-old is being treated for the condition in San Diego, a 25-year-old has been diagnosed at Northwell Health’s Long Island Jewish Medical Center, and several patients in their early 20s are hospitalized with the syndrome at NYU Langone in New York City,” Ariana and Chelsea Janes report. “Jennifer Lighter, a pediatric infectious diseases doctor at NYU Langone, said younger children with the condition seem to have symptoms that look more like traditional Kawasaki, which is characterized by inflammation of the blood vessels. But teens and young adults have more of an ‘overwhelming’ response involving the heart and multiple organs. ‘The older ones have had a more severe course,’ Lighter said. … “Many of the patients have antibodies to the coronavirus — suggesting they may have been infected weeks earlier and the condition may be a delayed immune response. While the overall number of covid-19 patients has dropped off sharply in New York City and other early hot spots, the number of children and young adults with the inflammatory condition continues to mount. … The cause of Kawasaki has long been a mystery, and the same is true of the inflammatory syndrome linked to covid-19. But doctors say they suspect some people are born with a genetic predisposition for an overactive immune response to the coronavirus that triggers a Kawasaki-like syndrome. The New York State Health Department is conducting genetic tests of patients’ DNA to figure out whether there is a common link among the children who have the condition.” The CDC is “combining test results that diagnose current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether someone has ever


infected person goes on to infect — above the critical threshold of one. “The researchers found higher reproduction numbers were geographically clustered in the South and the Midwest, suggesting epidemics may be just starting in some states. Among those most likely to have an R number higher than one were Texas, Arizona, Illinois, Colorado and Ohio,” Adam Taylor reports. “This suggests that other interventions are necessary if mobility begins to increase in these states as stay-at-home orders are eased,” said Juliette Unwin, one of the report’s authors. She added that rapid testing, contact tracing and behavioral precautions will avert their worst-case scenario. “A new analysis of one of the first of a handful of U.S. contact-tracing apps, North and South Dakota’s Care19, finds it violates its own privacy policy by sharing citizen location and other personal data with an outside company,” Geoffrey Fowler writes. “The states turned to North Dakota app maker ProudCrowd to make Care19 for free. ProudCrowd confirmed to me that some data from its iPhone app goes to Foursquare, a prominent location-data provider for marketers — but says it isn’t used for commercial purposes. … Still, ProudCrowd says it plans to change Care19’s privacy policy and will share less data in the future.” Republican Gov. Larry Hogan’s office said Maryland has hired 650 contact tracers who will be “fully operational” by next week. But Anne Arundel, a largely suburban county of more than a half-million people on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, is already paying almost 100 school nurses and others to do the work, Ovetta Wiggins reports. “In two months, the team grew from six registered nurses to 86 nurses, health assistants, bilingual support staffers and behavioral health specialists. … 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. … 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.” Gone are the days “of trying on makeup or playing with toys in the aisles. The focus now is on making shopping faster, easier and safer to accommodate long-term shifts in consumer expectations


Maryland to begin universal testing at prisons and juvenile detention facilities; children’s hospital says it is treating 23 with inflammatory syndrome

The number of known coronavirus cases in the District, Maryland and Virginia was 82,782 on Wednesday, with 42,323 cases in Maryland, 32,908 in Virginia and 7,551 in the District. The number of virus-related deaths reached 2,123 in Maryland, 1,074 in Virginia and 407 in the District, for a total of 3,604 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: • Twenty-three children from the Washington region are being treated at Children’s National Hospital for an inflammatory syndrome associated with covid-19, a hospital spokesperson said Wednesday night. The syndrome has been linked to the death of a 15-year-old in Baltimore County. • Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) said he has received some requests from localities in Northern Virginia that want to loosen aspects of the coronavirus-related restrictions, but he wants to keep the region on unified footing. Meanwhile, officials in Maryland’s Montgomery County may lift some social distancing restrictions within the next week, according to county health officer Travis Gayles. • Under pressure from unions and advocates for prisoners and young people, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) announced Wednesday the state will begin universal testing at prisons and juvenile detention facilities. The move follows an outbreak detected Friday that infected about 40 people at Silver Oak Academy, a 60-bed home for youth in Carroll County. • Virginia, Maryland and the District on Wednesday reported 1,657 new coronavirus cases and 82 additional deaths. When will D.C. reopen?


Fact-checking Trump’s letter blasting the World Health Organization

2019 “referring to a virus or outbreak in Wuhan or anywhere else in China.” The sentence in Trump’s letter could have been imprecisely phrased. The Jan. 24 Lancet study says “the symptom onset date of the first patient identified was Dec. 1, 2019,” with patients in the study hospitalized between Dec. 16 and Jan. 2. The White House did not respond to a request for an explanation. “By no later than December 30, 2019, the World Health Organization office in Beijing knew that there was a ‘major public health’ concern in Wuhan. Between December 26 and December 30, China’s media highlighted evidence of a new virus emerging from Wuhan, based on patient data sent to multiple Chinese genomics companies. Additionally, during this period, Dr. Zhang Jixian, a doctor from Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, told China’s health authorities that a new coronavirus was causing a novel disease that was, at the time, afflicting approximately 180 patients.” Doctors in Wuhan suspected person-to-person transmission of the new disease in mid- to late December, and one company even completed genomic sequencing of the novel coronavirus on Dec. 26, according to a Chinese media report. But the letter uses sleight of hand to suggest Zhang knew at the time that 180 patients were sick. “On December 27, Zhang Jixian, a doctor from Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, told China’s health authorities that the disease was caused by a new coronavirus,” reported the South China Morning Post. “By that date, more than 180 people had been infected, though doctors might not have been aware of all of them at the time.” “By the next day, Taiwanese authorities had communicated information to the World Health Organization indicating human-to-human transmission of a new virus. Yet the World Health Organization chose not to share any of this critical information with the rest of the world, probably for political reasons.” This is in dispute. On Dec. 31, the WHO was alerted to a potentially new virus in China. That same day, the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control said it sent an email to the WHO regarding rumors of at least “seven cases of atypical pneumonia,” which it said is code in China for “a disease transmitted between humans caused by coronavirus.” Taiwan is not a member of the WHO, and the WHO says the email never mentioned human-to-human transmission. “Public health


“WHO headquarters in Geneva first learned about the outbreak in Wuhan not directly from Chinese authorities, but rather from the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED), a U.S.-based open-source platform for early intelligence about infectious disease outbreaks,” according to a comprehensive timeline issued by the Congressional Research Service. Headquarters then “asked the WHO China Country Office to request ‘verification of the event’ from the government of China.” WHO acted under regulations that it “take into account reports from sources other than notifications or consultations” by countries. CRS noted “it appears China may not have proactively notified WHO of the outbreak.” There is strong evidence Chinese officials were slow to act in response to reports from medical professionals starting in mid-December about a strange new disease. “A bureaucratic culture that prioritizes political stability over all else probably allowed the virus to spread farther and faster,” The Washington Post reported on Feb. 1. “On January 14, 2020, the World Health Organization gratuitously reaffirmed China’s now-debunked claim that the coronavirus could not be transmitted between humans, stating: ‘Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCov) identified in Wuhan, China.’ This assertion was in direct conflict with censored reports from Wuhan.” Trump here cites a tweet by the WHO. But in a news briefing that same day, Maria Van Kerkhove, acting head of the WHO’s emerging diseases unit, told reporters: “From the information that we have it is possible that there is limited human-to-human transmission, potentially among families, but it is very clear right now that we have no sustained human-to-human transmission. It is still early days, we don’t have a clear clinical picture.” Van Kerkhove added, however, that human-to-human transmission would not be surprising given the WHO’s experience with SARS, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and other respiratory pathogens. The Telegraph in Britain headlined its article on the news conference: “WHO refuses to rule out human-to-human spread in China’s mystery coronavirus outbreak.” “On January 21, 2020, President Xi Jinping of China reportedly pressured you not to declare the coronavirus outbreak an emergency. You gave in to this pressure the next day and told the world that the coronavirus did not pose a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Just over one week later, on January 30, 2020, overwhelming evidence to the contrary forced you to reverse course.” Note the use of


Trump, according to news reports, was initially skeptical and worried about provoking China after signing a major trade deal. But his national security and public health experts convinced him that the move would buy time to put in place effective prevention and testing measures. (Then the administration failed to ramp up testing for weeks.) As for Trump’s claim that the WHO’s skepticism about travel restriction preventing other countries from taking action, we have previously calculated that 38 countries imposed similar or tougher restrictions on travel from China before or at the same time the U.S. restrictions were put in place. “On March 3, 2020, the World Health Organization cited official Chinese data to downplay the very serious risk of asymptomatic spread, telling the world that ‘COVID-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza’ and that unlike influenza this disease was not primarily driven by ‘people who are infected but not yet sick.’ China’s evidence, the World Health Organization told the world, ‘showed that only one percent of reported cases do not have symptoms, and most of those cases develop symptoms within two days.’” Tedros did say this at a March 3 briefing, as part of a presentation on the ways covid-19 was different from the seasonal flu. But he also said “covid-19 causes more severe disease than seasonal influenza. … Globally, about 3.4 percent of reported covid-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1 percent of those infected.” He urged governments to expand contact tracing because it will slow the spread of infections. “We can’t treat covid-19 exactly the same way we treat flu,” Tedros said, noting there would be no vaccine for some time. His remarks might have been directed at Trump. In late February and early March, Trump was still minimizing the threat posed by the coronavirus. “This is a flu. This is like a flu,” Trump said on Feb. 26. The day before Tedros’s news conference, Trump even speculated at a meeting with pharmaceutical executives that a flu vaccine would work well against the coronavirus. (About our rating scale) Send us facts to check by filling out Sign up for The Fact Checker The Fact Checker is a verified The Washington Post Fact Checker is working with the CoronaVirusFacts/DatosCoronaVirus Alliance, a coalition of more than 100 fact-checkers who are fighting misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Learn more about the alliance


An undertaker’s view of London’s coronavirus outbreak

LONDON — Kafil Ahmed is a front-line caregiver whose duties begin when nurses and doctors can do no more. His work is essential at all times, but especially during a pandemic, when the greatest caution and kindness are necessary — yet he’s not among the first celebrated in national rounds of applause. Ahmed is an undertaker. He runs Al-Birr Islamic Trust Funeral Service out of the back of the Greenwich Islamic Center, a prominent mosque in southeast London. Even as someone accustomed to seeing death up close, he has witnessed things during the novel coronavirus outbreak that he never could have imagined. On a run to Queen Elizabeth Hospital, he was surprised to find a row of refrigerated trucks parked at the back exit. The scene inside the hospital was even more unsettling. “There were dead bodies everywhere: in the corridors and passageways, in the chillers,” he said, recalling the rows of the recently deceased, all in white zippered bags. “It was very tough, very difficult." In normal times, Ahmed and others who volunteer at the funeral service, a charity operation, would prepare and bury three or four bodies a month. During the peak of the coronavirus deaths in London last month, Ahmed brought six to his mortuary on a single day. The pace has slowed since then. “I’ve gone three, now four days without a burial,” Ahmed said. But it’s still far from normal. Islam, he noted, permits a departure from certain burial practices in times of calamity, such as natural disaster and plague. Traditionally, a body is washed; wrapped in simple linens; prayed over; and buried quickly, usually within a day. Often, before the pandemic, relatives and friends would assist in preparing the body. But now, Ahmed and his volunteers don’t unzip the body bags, except to check the wrist bracelet to make sure they are picking up the right person. They no longer wash the dead. Instead, they sprinkle clean sand over the body bag and drape a shroud over it before placing the deceased in a coffin. Only five family members are allowed at the gravesite, standing six feet apart. The whole time, Ahmed and his helpers are wearing full personal protective equipment — gowns, visors, gloves and masks. “It’s a highly risky job. We feel we are front line of the front line,” Ahmed said. “You must be very, very careful in all that you


Guides to the other side: The problem-solvers who will get us through the pandemic

It’s been eight long and lonely weeks since the coronavirus pandemic shut down most of America: eight weeks of crowded emergency rooms and empty schools, of avoiding one another at the grocery store and waiting in mile-long lines for donated food. Normal life already seems a distant memory, a return to it still impossible to comprehend. Amid this darkness, there are people working to light a path through. They are immigrants and the children of immigrants, public servants, people on their second careers. They are planners and problem-solvers. What they lack in swagger they make up for in empathy, skill and statistical rigor. Their greatest power is their ability to learn from the mistakes of the past. They are the right people in the right place at the right moment, like physician-researcher Andre Kalil, a veteran of past epidemics trying to find a cure for this pandemic, and Anar Yukhayev, a New York obstetrician-gynecologist who was severely ill with covid-19 when he enrolled in a clinical trial for an untested treatment. “If there was any chance it could potentially help someone,” Yukhayev said, “it was the least I could do.” They don’t offer easy answers or miracle cures; they know there is no resurrecting the lives they once had. Still, they’re giving what they can to a moment that demands it. When it is most difficult to imagine the world getting better, they’ve summoned the creativity — and the courage — to invent the world anew. Scientists have a word for populations threatened by a virus they’ve never seen before: naive. It describes patients whose immune systems lack the tools to fight off the pathogen, whose bodies are caught unaware. How quickly those patients can muster their biological defenses determines whether they survive. Society, too, has been caught off guard. In a matter of months, a virus one-thousandth the width of a human eyelash has emptied the national medical stockpile, shattered the health system and brought the global economy to a standstill. Now, matters of life and death depend on the speed with which people rise to the occasion. Some people, such as emergency management specialist Kristina Laboy, 29, have spent their careers bracing for moments such as this. She holds two master’s degrees in crisis management and last year led a major rewrite of the 188-page pre-disaster recovery plan for Montgomery County in suburban Maryland. After reviewing the document


determination to do better this time that can exist only in someone who has seen failure. Kalil, an infectious-disease clinician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, knows that feeling all too well. His university is home to the National Quarantine Center, the only federally funded containment unit of its kind. During the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, three infected Americans were evacuated to the evacuated to the University of Nebraska’s medical facilities for treatment. One of them didn’t survive. Kalil, 54, is still haunted by what he considers an inadequate response from the medical community to the Ebola crisis, which killed more than 11,000 people. Pharmaceutical companies and doctors tried a multitude of drugs on thousands of severely sick and dying patients — some of them the same therapies being tested in patients with covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. But the experiments were haphazard and hampered by their lack of a control group. “You wind up with a situation where certain drugs are being given, and no one knows if they work or not,” said Kalil, a native of Brazil. By the time a large team of doctors, including Kalil, launched a rigorously controlled clinical trial for a drug called ZMapp, it was too late, Kalil said. The epidemic subsided, and there were no more sick patients. This time, he and his colleagues, as well as officials at the National Institutes of Health, went into a full-on sprint at the first sign of another viral outbreak with global implications. By early February, they were drawing up protocols and applying for approvals from ethics boards for a rigorously controlled clinical trial of an experimental antiviral therapy called remdesivir. Weeks later, when 13 people from the Diamond Princess cruise ship off the coast of Japan were brought to the national quarantine unit, one of the passengers became the trial’s first patient. Kalil recalled entering the patient’s room wearing full protective gear, including a fan-powered respirator that fully enclosed the top of his head and face and made it difficult to communicate. In a muffled voice, he said, he guided the patient through the consent forms, described the clinical trial regimen, and explained how the study drug would be administered and the risks of side effects. To avoid removing potentially contaminated documents from the containment room, Kalil then held each of the completed consent forms up, one


Here’s what you can (and cannot) do outside in the D.C. area

This story has been updated with new information. Here’s what’s new as of Friday, May 22: - Shenandoah National Park is partially reopening starting Saturday, May 23. Skyline Drive and most trails will be open but there are some exceptions. The trail to Old Rag Mountain is closed, for example. For more information, go here. - Arlington County parks are reopening on a limited basis. Playgrounds, athletic courts, dog parks and other facilities are still off limits. The county said people can exercise or sit with members of their household. It’s spring in the nation’s capital. The trees are green, the birds are chirping, but the region is still in a holding pattern, with stay-at-home orders for the District, Maryland and Virginia. Warm weather and exercise are great for these unprecedented times, but when it comes to going outside, what is and isn’t allowed varies place to place. For all the activities below, especially those that require some planning, you should look for recent updates before heading out. We’ll update this article with more information as local officials change the orders and provide other recommendations. If you have larger questions about when to wear face masks, how restaurants are impacted or whether you can travel for work, please read here. Yes. Maryland, the District and Virginia’s directives allow for walking, biking, dog-walking, hiking and running outside as long as you remain six feet away from people with whom you’re not living. Various experts actually recommend that people under self-quarantine build exercise into their routines to keep physically and mentally healthy. The Washington Post’s Karin Brulliard reported last month that there’s no evidence animals transmit the novel coronavirus to humans or play a significant role in its spread. On its website, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists that based on the limited information available “the risk of animals spreading covid-19 to people is considered to be low." Still, pets — like any member of a household — should uphold social distancing and remain at least six feet away from other people and animals when outside, one veterinary expert told The Post. Don’t pet other people’s animals but, if you do, wash your hands afterwards. Public playgrounds in the District remain closed. In Maryland, Gov. Larry Hogan (R) opened playgrounds in state parks last week, but left it up to local jurisdictions to decide whether to open other playgrounds. Most


or whether you can travel for work, please read here. Yes. Maryland, the District and Virginia’s directives allow for walking, biking, dog-walking, hiking and running outside as long as you remain six feet away from people with whom you’re not living. Various experts actually recommend that people under self-quarantine build exercise into their routines to keep physically and mentally healthy. The Washington Post’s Karin Brulliard reported last month that there’s no evidence animals transmit the novel coronavirus to humans or play a significant role in its spread. On its website, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists that based on the limited information available “the risk of animals spreading covid-19 to people is considered to be low." Still, pets — like any member of a household — should uphold social distancing and remain at least six feet away from other people and animals when outside, one veterinary expert told The Post. Don’t pet other people’s animals but, if you do, wash your hands afterwards. Public playgrounds in the District remain closed. In Maryland, Gov. Larry Hogan (R) opened playgrounds in state parks last week, but left it up to local jurisdictions to decide whether to open other playgrounds. Most have decided to keep them closed. Playgrounds at Virginia state parks are closed. Playgrounds in county parks will depend on the restrictions in place by local jurisdictions. In April, the District announced five locations in parts of the city will have expanded sidewalks for pedestrians. The city’s transportation department is evaluating adding more locations in all eight wards. Supporters of the idea are using the hashtag #WidenDCSidewalks to close streets to nonresidential traffic. In Maryland, Montgomery County officials have closed portions of Beach Drive, Little Falls Parkway and Sligo Creek Parkway during the evenings Friday through Sunday. All District parks (including dog parks) are closed in accordance with the stay-at-home order. D.C. residents can still walk, run and bike through parks and trails around the city as long as they are moving, not in groups, and stay six feet away from anyone nearby. City officials caution against any close contact with individuals outside your household. Rock Creek Park grounds are open but all the facilities are closed. Here’s an in-depth list from the National Park Service. The Washington Monument is closed and parking along the Mall is restricted. In late March, D.C. police closed the streets near the Tidal Basin


Nearly 1 in 10 nursing homes nationwide report coronavirus cases

Nearly 1 in 10 nursing homes in America have publicly reported cases of the coronavirus, a count that has soared in the past three days as several hard-hit states released the names of facilities after weeks of pressure from families, journalists and watchdog groups. Through state reports and media accounts, The Washington Post has compiled a nationwide list of more than 1,300 nursing homes, with a death count that has spiraled into the thousands. The list is far from complete. More than half a dozen states with significant outbreaks — including Maryland and Virginia where dozens of nursing home residents have died — have not released the names of facilities with cases of the virus. On Sunday, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced new reporting requirements, mandating that nursing homes inform residents, their families and the federal government about cases of covid-19. Under the new rules, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will collect the information. CMS Administrator Seema Verma said Monday that the data, including deaths among residents and staff members, would be publicly released “in short order.” Some nursing home watchdog groups, however, said the guidance was vague and that facilities can’t accurately report covid-19 cases without a sufficient number of tests. For weeks, reporting gaps have outraged families and patient advocates, who say transparency is a key tenet of public health. “The failure to require early reporting in specific facilities was responsible for making the spread of the virus worse in nursing homes,” said Charlene Harrington, a sociology and nursing professor at the University of California at San Francisco who has studied nursing homes for more than 30 years. States including Louisiana, Michigan, Texas and Pennsylvania have not released the names of nursing homes, in some cases citing patient confidentiality. None of the states that have so far released the names of facilities have identified patients. Though officials in New York reported that more than 300 nursing homes have positive cases, the state has released the names of only 74 facilities — those with five or more deaths. Even states that have publicly identified nursing homes have drawn criticism. Some have released facility names but no death counts. Others said they erroneously listed facilities without cases of the virus while leaving affected facilities off the list. Officials in Ohio put up an online list last Wednesday and abruptly took it down two days later,


How U.S. Olympians are training at home

Before the United States moved step by step toward a shutdown, before the International Olympic Committee announced the Tokyo Olympics would be delayed by a year, before the scope and reach of the novel coronavirus was understood widely in this county, Olympic athletes felt the impact as their meticulous training routines were disrupted. Gyms and pools closed, and social distancing guidelines kept athletes from interacting with coaches and trainers. Each has had to find his or her own way. The finish line has moved, but the goal remains the same. Here are some examples of how U.S. athletes are adapting with their normal training routines disrupted and their Olympic dreams deferred for a year. When her usual training space at the University of Arkansas was no longer an option, Morris headed to her parents’ house in South Carolina. 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. Read more here The 14-year-old California skateboarder’s family is looking to expand its backyard skatepark to allow her to practice more tricks, even if there’s a tree and some plants poking through an opening in the middle of the bowl. Read more here Accustomed to swimming about eight miles per day, the 28-year-old, two-time Olympian has had to improvise without a pool, so she turned to beer and wine — using full bottles as weights. “Nothing too heavy, but that was the best I could think of,” she said. Read more here As someone who has suffered from asthma since childhood, the 22-year-old understands the importance of social distancing during this pandemic. But as someone who loves being center stage, perhaps no member of Team USA misses the spotlight more. “Now we’re just randomly lifting weights in a park,” Lyles said. Read more here Eichfeld still manages to get out on the water in North Carolina, albeit not at the U.S. National Whitewater Center, which has been closed. The other 20 or so hours a day are when the pandemic hits home. “I’m getting a little peek at what it’s going to be like after I retire,” he said. Read more here Without a pool since Purdue closed its facility, Johnson leans heavily on weight training to build core strength, stretching to maintain flexibility and rehab exercises to help his shoulders and surgically repaired feet. He’s doing