where the outbreak is growing and where the curve is being successfully flattened. The survey responses are sent to the researchers and aren’t accessible to Facebook. On Monday, the team at Carnegie Mellon is publishing its initial findings. They’re getting approximately 1 million responses a week in the United States, and the results are promising. They correlate with publicly available data on confirmed cases, which suggests this data can help predict where the disease will spread. They can also be used to build detailed county-by-county insights. The results indicate, for example, that in some New York City suburbs, an estimated 2 to 3 percent of people are experiencing covid-19-like symptoms. Using aggregate data from Carnegie Mellon’s results, Facebook produced its first report and new interactive maps, which we plan to update daily through this outbreak. This is work that social networks are well-situated to do. By distributing surveys to large numbers of people whose identities we know, we can quickly generate enough signal to correct for biases and ensure sampling is done properly. We’re partnering with faculty from the University of Maryland to expand this survey globally, and the team at Carnegie Mellon is building an application programming interface, or API, that will let researchers everywhere access the results. We’re hopeful that this will help governments and public health officials around the world who might not otherwise have this kind of precise data to make decisions in the weeks and months ahead. There are other ways data can help with the response. For example, we’ve released several new disease-prevention maps from our Data for Good program that show in aggregate where people are traveling and interacting between regions. Over the past few months, public health researchers have used these data sets to inform decisions across Asia, Europe and North America. Researchers in Taiwan have been able to identify the cities with the highest chance of infection; researchers in Italy are analyzing lockdown measures in relation to income inequality; and California officials are reviewing county-level data daily to steer public health messaging. We’ve also partnered with researchers from New York University and the Mila research institute in Montreal, using artificial intelligence to help hospitals better predict needs for scarce resources, such as personal protective equipment and ventilators. Data like this can unlock a lot of good. Since we’re all generating data from apps and devices every day, there will likely be


Mark Zuckerberg: How data can aid the fight against covid-19

where people are traveling and interacting between regions. Over the past few months, public health researchers have used these data sets to inform decisions across Asia, Europe and North America. Researchers in Taiwan have been able to identify the cities with the highest chance of infection; researchers in Italy are analyzing lockdown measures in relation to income inequality; and California officials are reviewing county-level data daily to steer public health messaging. We’ve also partnered with researchers from New York University and the Mila research institute in Montreal, using artificial intelligence to help hospitals better predict needs for scarce resources, such as personal protective equipment and ventilators. Data like this can unlock a lot of good. Since we’re all generating data from apps and devices every day, there will likely be many more opportunities to use the aggregate data to benefit public health. But it’s essential that this is done in a way that protects people’s privacy and respects human rights. It’s important that organizations involved in this work commit to doing it in a way that protects people’s information and that any data collected is used solely for responding to public health emergencies and for other crisis response efforts. Fighting the pandemic has required taking unprecedented measures across society, but it shouldn’t mean sacrificing our privacy. I’ve always believed that helping people come together as a community will help us address our greatest challenges — not just by sharing our experiences and supporting each other in crises but also by working together at scale to solve problems. The world has faced pandemics before, but this time we have a new superpower: the ability to gather and share data for good. If we use it responsibly, I’m optimistic that data can help the world respond to this health crisis and get us started on the road to recovery. The Opinions section is looking for stories of how the coronavirus has affected people of all walks of life. Write to us. Read more: Eric Topol: How digital data collection can help track covid-19 cases in real time The Post’s View: Location data could help fight covid-19 — but privacy must be protected Tim Searchinger, Anthony LaMantia and Gordon Douglas: Mass testing is the only sustainable solution Michèle Flournoy and Michael Morell: The 6 factors that determine coronavirus containment or devastation Bill Gates: Here’s how to make up for lost time on covid-19


Covid-19 is a wake-up call for India’s cities, where radical improvements in sanitation and planning are needed

Gregory F. Randolph is a PhD candidate in urban planning at the University of Southern California and founding partner of the The novel coronavirus is unveiling differences and structural fault lines in the cities it impacts. Urban centers in Italy and Spain have suffered high death tolls partly because of the rich public lives their elderly citizens enjoy, leaving them more exposed. The U.S. response reveals the pitfalls of its decentralized approach to governing, with cities forced into competing with one another for lifesaving equipment. In India, meanwhile, the spread of the virus is underscoring how unequal and unsustainable the country’s urbanization process has been for a long time. With their especially precarious combination of density, poverty and poor sanitation, India’s urban areas have long been susceptible to disease. The world’s first cholera pandemic began in Kolkata in 1817. And India saw excess mortality of 4.5 percent during the 1918 flu pandemic — almost twice as high as any other developing country for which data is available. India’s public health system has made tremendous progress since those pandemics. And the country’s response to covid-19 has arguably been swifter and more decisive than that of other developing countries. One of the world’s strictest “stay-at-home” orders has been in place since March 25. All domestic travel has been halted — including the country’s famous railway system, which carries 8.4 billion passengers annually. And yet, India’s battle with the coronavirus is being undermined by long-running failures of urban governance. Covid-19 is, first, highlighting the public health risks of a precarious urban economy powered by seasonal migrants. These “long-distance commuters” — numbering nearly 100 million, according to migration scholar Chinmay Tumbe — generally earn daily wages and work without contracts. Left without any income in the wake of India’s total lockdown, their only options were to undertake an arduous journey home on foot or crowd into inundated homeless shelters, both of which are likely speeding the spread of the virus. Most media coverage of internal migrants’ plight has failed to point out the structural reason these workers move seasonally, rather than permanently relocate to cities: The country’s social welfare programs are, in practice, tied to location. This locks poor people out of many government benefits when they move to cities. The public health consequences of slums have also grown stark. But the problem is not simply density, as portrayed in much of the media.


While it is undeniable that social distancing is practically impossible in a Mumbai neighborhood such as Dharavi, with a population density of at least 200,000 people per square kilometer (Manhattan’s is about 27,000 people per square kilometer), infrastructure deficits in these neighborhoods are the virus’s biggest ally. Families in informal settlements lack the sanitation facilities to protect themselves, relying instead on poorly maintained community toilets and accessing water from shared taps. Severe water shortages pose a major obstacle to the regular hand-washing now encouraged by public health officials worldwide. Poor ventilation, most especially in government-built slum rehabilitation projects, may also promote the spread of the virus. Finally, the coronavirus is an unwelcome reminder of how vulnerable urban Indians are to any respiratory ailment, given notoriously high levels of air pollution. With India hosting 21 of the world’s 30 most polluted cities, the long-run effects of poor air quality have left residents of cities such as New Delhi and Lucknow with deeply compromised immune, respiratory and cardiac systems, making them especially susceptible to the virus. Having exposed the stark structural issues that confront Indian cities, the pandemic could be the wake-up call that Indian policymakers and citizens need to change their thinking around urbanization. Signs of opportunity are emerging from state governments that have universalized the public system for subsidized food rations. In Delhi and Rajasthan, proving local residence is no longer a requirement for accessing these benefits. Even though this is a temporary measure under the lockdown, Mukta Naik from of the Center for Policy Research argues that it could represent an initial step toward something migration experts have long advocated: a truly portable social welfare system. Portable government benefits would make Indian cities far more inclusive for poor migrants. Similar opportunities to shift the policy conversation must be leveraged around housing and infrastructure. With middle- and upper-class Indians now afraid of covid-19’s spread in adjacent slum settlements, housing rights advocates have new ammunition for the argument that upgrading infrastructure in informal settlements serves the collective good in Indian cities, helping everyone stay healthier, including but not only the poor. And environmental activists in India now have unassailable evidence that curbing human activities, particularly private vehicle use, can give city dwellers breathable air. The skies over Indian cities are now clearer under lockdown. Of course, pollution will rise again when restrictions are lifted, but the politics of air pollution might


Why Joe Biden could swing votes by campaigning to legalize marijuana

the map shows those results by state. You can see by doing so that statewide support for legalization ranges from about 55 percent in North Dakota to about 79 percent in Oregon and Washington. More importantly, the map shows that marijuana legalization is also popular in the handful of battleground states that will determine who wins the 2020 presidential election. Swing-state support for legal cannabis ranges from a low 65 percent in Minnesota to a high of 67 percent in New Hampshire. Undecided and third-party voters support legal cannabis Marijuana isn’t just popular in swing states. It’s also popular with swing voters. We can look at how small, but potentially pivotal, groups feel about legalization in the UCLA/Nationscape data, an enormous academic survey that has interviewed more than 200,000 registered voters since the summer of 2019. The graph above shows public opinion about marijuana legalization among undecided 2020 voters, third-party voters from 2016 and pure independents who don’t lean toward one of the two major parties. As you can see, independent and undecided voters support marijuana legalization by more than a 2-to-1 margin. Americans who voted for Gary Johnson and Jill Stein in 2016 — third-party candidates who both made marijuana legalization central to their presidential bids — even more strongly support legalizing cannabis. Marijuana legalization is important to voters It’s one thing to say that voters support legalizing marijuana. It’s quite another to say they would actually vote for a presidential candidate based on this policy. Americans rarely vote for president based on a single issue. Voters are much more likely to change their opinions about significant campaign issues based on their previous opinions about the candidates than they are to change their votes based on the candidates’ positions on issues. Nevertheless, a few issues arouse so much passion that candidates’ positions sometimes matter. Opinions about immigration policy, for example, strongly predicted voting for candidates from different parties in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections. Marijuana legalization appears to be one of these strongly held, gut-level issues, too. Political science research from the 1970s found that Americans as a whole held stronger views about marijuana than just about any other public policy. A much newer study also shows that marijuana legalization is one of the more important issues to voters. To better understand voter priorities, political scientists Lynn Vavreck, John Sides and Chris Tausanovitch embedded a series of innovative


The Finance 202: Most Americans aren’t ready yet to reopen the economy

Americans overwhelmingly believe the economy is in bad shape. But most are more concerned the lockdowns induced by the coronavirus will lift too early, allowing the disease to resurge, than they are about prolonging the economic damage in the meantime. That finding comes courtesy of a new Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll: 58 percent of respondents said they are worried the United States will lift restrictions too quickly, while 32 percent said they are more concerned the restrictions will last too long. President Trump lines up with the minority sentiment: He is encouraging and defending protesters who have gathered outside state government buildings to oppose the strictures. A plurality of Republicans do, too. By 48 percent to 32 percent, Republicans say they are more worried about keeping the economy on ice. People are absorbing the twin menaces of the pandemic and the economic shock it has brought with it. More than three-quarters of Americans now say the economy is in fair or poor condition; nearly as many say they are very or somewhat worried they or someone in their immediate family will contract the virus. No surprise then that 77 percent also say the pandemic has had a significant impact on their day-to-day to life. The poll’s findings back up other recent surveys. “In a poll released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, three-quarters of U.S. adults said the worst is yet to come with the coronavirus and two-thirds were worried that restrictions would be lifted too soon,” Ashley Parker writes. “And findings released Friday by the University of Michigan’s influential monthly consumer survey found that 61 percent were most concerned by the threat to their health from the virus, over isolation and financial impact.” And while Trump’s approval rating remains largely unchanged from pre-pandemic, with 46 percent approving and 51 percent disapproving, only 36 percent trust what he says about the coronavirus. As the Trump administration and Congress approach an agreement on a roughly $470 billion package of new economic relief, more than six in 10 respondents indicated the federal government needs to do more to ensure adequate testing and secure medical supplies for doctors and nurses. By roughly that margin, they approve of Washington taking a bigger role in the economy as it responds to the crisis. “At the same time, 48% expressed concern that the U.S. was spending too much and would drive up the deficit, while


The Technology 202: Coronavirus could change how social networks approach public health

coverage programs, etc.” They also recognized that covid-19 misinformation was a problem quickly – which made this different from their response to political interference. “What was really unique about this was how fast-moving the covid-19 crisis was,” Wojicki said. But actually enforcing these policies and removing the videos is a major challenge. Especially because the crisis forced the companies to send many of their content moderators home. The companies have acknowledged this could lead to more mistakes, both in leaving up content that should be removed and over policing posts that don’t break the rules. That could cause major problems as more people are spending more time online while stuck at home. You are reading The Technology 202 , our guide to the intersection of technology and politics. BITS: Facebook groups urging users in Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York to protest quarantine measures are the work of online guns rights activists, The groups provide a powerful online image of grass-roots dissent, even as polls suggest Republican opposition to stay-at-home orders is just around 30 percent. The groups, which have over 200,000 members combined, gained steam after President Trump supported such protests on his Twitter account. The explosion of online protest groups and events also challenge Facebook's aggressive stance toward removing coronavirus-related misinformation. “Unless government prohibits the event during this time, we allow it to be organized on Facebook. For this same reason, events that defy government’s guidance on social distancing aren’t allowed on Facebook,” said Andy Stone, a spokesman for the company. NIBBLES: The founders of Instagram launched a website that gives live updates on the spread of covid-19 in each U.S. state. They say the tool will given citizens a better way to assess local threats of infection as the economy reopens, Sarah Frier and Emily Chang at Bloomberg News report. The website, called RT.live, pulls data from a volunteer organization, the Covid Tracking Project. The organization uses a statistical model that assesses the threat of infection based on the average number of people who catch the virus from a single infected person, called an effective reproduction number. “We’re trying to take what is a complex topic and boil it down to a simple number that anyone can view from their home,” said Kevin Systrom, the co-founder and former chief executive officer of Instagram. “That’s why this dashboard is so important — because it gives you live insight


We tested all our patients for coronavirus — and found lots of asymptomatic cases

As the novel coronavirus spread in New York City, pregnant patients developed severe symptoms of the coronavirus only after they were admitted to our labor and delivery unit, exposing health-care providers to the virus. We rapidly instituted a universal screening policy. This week, we published our findings after two weeks of universal screening at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center. In our area, which includes upper Manhattan and the Bronx, about 15 percent of patients who came to us for delivery tested positive for the coronavirus, but around 88 percent of these women had no symptoms of infection. That means 13.5 percent of all our patients during this time were infected with the coronavirus but weren’t exhibiting symptoms. Our findings may shed light on the overall rate of infected people in New York City. Our screenings suggest more people are infected with the virus but are not becoming sick. We cannot say for sure how our findings apply to the general population because our group was made up of young, relatively healthy, pregnant women in an area of high virus prevalence. But this is one of the first opportunities to understand covid-19, the disease the virus causes, in a somewhat random sample of the U.S. population. Our findings have huge implications for everyday life on a labor and delivery unit, as well as potential broader implications. For example, patients who test positive for the virus need to be managed with extra precautions to limit exposure and infection risk for other patients, support staff, their newborns and their health-care team members. Proper personal protective equipment must be worn, and patients must be isolated in private rooms, which require specialized cleaning. Pediatricians need to be informed of virus status so they can take proper precautions to limit the exposure of other babies. While most of our patients may be less likely to suffer from the severe consequences of covid-19, many of our health-care personnel are not, and we need to keep them healthy. The labor and delivery unit is different from other units in many ways. We routinely have multiple groups of providers in one space: nurses, obstetricians, pediatricians and anesthesiologists. Exposure leading to infection could take providers out of work and away from other areas of the hospital that they routinely cover — and where they are very much needed. Our patient population also is unique in that all will require


How China’s authoritarian system made the pandemic worse

SOMETIME IN November or December, a novel coronavirus infected a person in Wuhan, China, leading to an outbreak that became a global pandemic and exposed huge weaknesses in governance and leadership. In the case of China, the weakness was the system. A closed, authoritarian government repeatedly deceived and covered up the truth as the virus spread. It is wrong to accuse China, based on present evidence, of willfully releasing a plague on the world. It is right to point out that China’s system and its deceptions made the situation worse, and the proper remedy would be more transparency and full disclosure. The novel coronavirus probably went through natural selection — a series of mutations — that gave it the ability to infect and spread among humans. It could have evolved in animals, or after making the leap to people. Studies show that the genetic material in the current virus is an 82 percent match for the earlier SARS virus; another type of coronavirus found in bats is an 89 percent match. Some but not all of the early victims had visited a Wuhan seafood market where live animals were also sold, a so-called wet market. A more troubling explanation is that the coronavirus was inadvertently spread from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had carried out research on bat coronaviruses and possessed a biosafety level 4 facility, the most secure for handling highly pathogenic and infectious diseases. It is not beyond possibility that an accident or spill occurred. Most experts say there is no evidence that China deliberately engineered the virus as a weapon. Enough of that conspiracy talk. But whether the source was an animal or an inadvertent spill, more investigation is needed. China ought to be absolutely transparent about what it finds. After the 2002-2003 SARS disaster, in which the spreading infection was concealed, China put in place an infectious disease reporting system that was supposedly immune from meddling. The information would go straight to Beijing. But when unusual cases of illness that looked like pneumonia began to accumulate in Wuhan in December, the system broke down. Local officials attempted to clamp down on information. When eight doctors in the city expressed concern about the new sickness, they were reprimanded for spreading rumors. One of them, Li Wenliang, a 34-year-old ophthalmologist, later died of the virus. He had spoken up in an online chat group on Dec. 30.


Isolation and covid-19: ‘Will I be trapped in my house for what seems like forever?’

Minnesota’s center for infectious disease research and policy. “But it could save your life.” David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, who is advising presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on covid-19, agrees. “The virus is not gone,” he says. “It is lurking in people who are unaware that they carry it. The vast majority of us — an overwhelming percentage of the population — is still susceptible.” This makes it dangerous to relax social distancing, even if the curve of cases starts to flatten, or the numbers decrease with the onset of warm weather, experts say. “If the virus returns in the fall to the same extent it did this spring, people who never got infected will be in the same boat as they are right now,” says Robert T. Schooley, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of California at San Diego. This is disheartening to people like Kimberly Allen, 67, from Takoma Park, Md., a former strategic planning officer for the Law Library of Congress, who enjoyed an active retirement until mid-March. She went to dozens of Nationals home games, including those during the World Series. She regularly rode the bus to New York City to attend the theater. She met friends for lunch and dinner, and joined them for movies, shows and concerts. She did water aerobics at the YMCA. She participated in political protests. She drove to her second home in West Virginia for long weekends in the woods. Today, she rarely leaves the house. At her age, and suffering from high blood pressure, she risks severe covid-19 disease if she becomes infected. She hasn’t had any symptoms, nor been tested, but she assumes she is negative. But that also means she has no immunity, which worries her almost as much as the thought of becoming ill. No immunity — and with no vaccine likely for a year or probably longer — portends the likelihood of an indefinite solitary confinement. “Will I be trapped in my house for what seems like forever waiting until there’s a vaccine?” she says. “The whole thing seems so surreal. I feel like I’m in the middle of a science-fiction story. I like certainty. I like to know when something is going to end, whether it’s a movie or a show, or this. When I know, I can deal with it. It’s very hard for me


What to know about being pregnant during the covid-19 pandemic

said. But she and her multidisciplinary team of colleagues hope to change that in a hurry, as they compile a new national registry of pregnant women and new mothers who have tested positive or are being evaluated for covid-19. They plan to follow the women and their babies for up to one year, culling data about symptoms and outcomes. The response to their call for participants has been “incredibly humbling,” Afshar said. Within three weeks of their launch, about 1,000 women have signed up for the Pregnancy Coronavirus Outcomes Registry (PRIORITY), coordinated through UCLA and the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF). Normally, this kind of project can take a year or more to start providing data, Afshar said, but her team intends to start announcing findings this spring to help doctors coping with the void. While awaiting more certainty, researchers and front-line obstetricians have been advising patients as best they can and adapting policies as new evidence emerges. Several paused to respond to some of the most frequent questions they are hearing from worried pregnant women. What can I do to protect myself and my baby while I’m pregnant? Major national health organizations advise that pregnant women take the same precautions as everyone else. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) says you should: ●Avoid anyone who is sick. ●Stay home as much as possible. ●Stay at least six feet away from other people. ●Frequently wash your hands with soap and water, for at least 20 seconds. ●If you cannot wash, use a hand sanitizer containing at least 60 percent alcohol. ●Avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth. As of April 3, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been advising that everyone, including pregnant women, also cover their nose and mouth in public with a cloth face mask. In New York, Silvana Vergara, who is 22 weeks pregnant, said she and her husband took every precaution – working from home, avoiding public transportation and wearing gloves and masks – yet both still caught the virus. Coughing “24/7” and short of breath, she said she called the emergency room at her hospital but was informed that they didn’t have any tests. It was only after she made a second call to the same hospital’s maternity ward that she was told to come in, was tested and was also reassured. “I just want everyone to know


cases closely resembled the pattern for patients who are not pregnant, with 86 percent of cases being mild and only 14 percent severe or critical. Still, that’s no reason to throw away the masks, particularly since other research suggests that pregnant women hospitalized for severe or critical cases of respiratory illnesses including covid-19 infection may be at greater risk of pregnancy complications. A new meta-analysis combining a variety of studies of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), and different types of coronavirus infections among pregnant women suggested that in severe cases, most of which included pneumonia, these illnesses can cause greater risks of preterm births, preeclampsia, C-sections and perinatal death. What should I do if I get covid-19 while pregnant? Once again, major U.S. health organizations offer no separate guidance for pregnant women other than to stay in close touch with their doctors. The CDC guidelines for anyone infected with the virus say you should: ●Stay home except to get essential medical care. ●Avoid public transportation. ●Consult with your health-care team by phone before going to the office. ●Get care right away if you feel worse. ●Separate yourself from other people in your home. ●Wear a face mask whenever you are with other people. If I do get the virus while pregnant, will I give it to my baby? Mother-to-child transmission of coronavirus during pregnancy is unlikely, according to the CDC. The virus has not been detected in amniotic fluid, and none of the babies in the recent New York study tested positive immediately after birth. Doctors had worried about reports that some babies in China had tested positive for the virus shortly after birth, yet it is still unclear when those babies became ill, said Neil Silverman, an expert on obstetric infectious diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles. In this case, experience with other illnesses is promising. “As a respiratory disease, the coronavirus is different than HIV and hepatitis B, both of which carry risks of high levels of virus in the mother’s bloodstream that can pass the infection from the mother to the baby,” Silverman said. He added that a “big takeaway” from the latest information is that “there is no evidence of direct fetal infection or birth defect due to this virus.” Should I see my doctor less often while I’m


personal protective equipment (PPE) for providers, Silverman said. “For deliveries, we have always worn standard surgical masks, face shields and gloves,” he said. “What’s a little different now is that everyone in the hospital is wearing standard surgical masks.” At the UCLA hospital and many other facilities, expectant women enter the hospital through a door far away from the emergency entrance and are immediately given a mask to wear. At Sibley Memorial Hospital in Northwest Washington, maternity patients enter through the front door, avoiding the emergency room, and they must then be buzzed through to the labor and delivery unit, said Constance Bohon, an obstetrician-gynecologist in the District. Bohon said all obstetric patients are masked until their covid-19 test results are available, typically within two to four hours. All providers and staff in labor and delivery units wear masks at all times, and both masks and face shields are used by anyone within six feet of the patient when she is in the active stage of labor. Many U.S. hospitals now require that all incoming patients have their temperatures taken and symptoms screened at the door. As tests for the virus become more available and in more common use at metropolitan hospitals, some doctors urge they should be standard practice everywhere. “This is a hot topic among hospitals now,” said Chaur-Dong Hsu, chair of the Wayne State University Obstetrics and Gynecology Department in Detroit. Similarly to the population at large, as many as eight out of ten pregnant women who have covid-19 may be asymptomatic yet contagious, he noted, meaning they could pose an extra danger to other women and providers if they aren’t identified. How will my delivery be different if I have the virus? Typically, hospitals now have special isolation rooms for women in labor who have tested positive for covid-19, Silverman said. Some are equipped with “negative pressure,” meaning that the ventilation system is sealed off from the rest of the building. Hospital policies vary throughout the country, but in some cases, due to the risk of infection for babies, new mothers testing positive for covid-19 may be separated from their newborns for up to two weeks, Silverman said, with the separation ending once the test comes back negative. This too is controversial, given the many benefits of skin-to-skin contact between a mother and a newborn. The CDC says such separations should be made on a case-by-case


Patients with heart attacks, strokes and even appendicitis vanish from hospitals

70 percent of the appendicitis on my service right now are late presentations. What happens when you present late with appendicitis is, we can’t operate on you safely.” Yet the 700-bed hospital is only about 60 percent full because, like most facilities, MUSC discharged everyone it could to make room for the expected coronavirus surge. So far, that hasn’t materialized. The hospital has not had more than 10 covid-19 patients admitted at any time, he said. “We have five covid patients in the hospital right now, and we have five appendicitis cases” with complications from waiting too long to come in for care, Eriksson said. Much of the reporting about missing patients is anecdotal — in medical chat rooms and on doctors’ social media accounts. Doctors say it’s unlikely there has been a decline in most of these conditions, which suggests that at least a few people may be dying at home, although there is no data yet to corroborate that. In the case of severe heart attacks, the evidence is mounting that a large percentage of patients with symptoms that typically prompt urgent interventions are simply not showing up. A report to be published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology on nine high-volume cardiac catheterization labs across the country found a 38 percent drop in patients being treated for a life-threatening event known as a STEMI — the blockage of one of the major arteries that supplies oxygen-rich blood to the heart. The study compared what happened this past March, when covid-19 cases were climbing, with the treatments delivered from Jan. 1, 2019, through February 2020. Those results — from hospitals across the country — are counterintuitive, physicians say. The stress caused by the pandemic would lead them to anticipate an increase in heart attacks. Covid-19 is also an inflammatory disease that can damage the heart muscle. “We should have higher incidences of these events, but we are seeing dramatically fewer in the hospital system,” Puskas said. “That has to mean they are at home or in the morgue.” A Gallup online poll taken March 28 to April 2 asked people with different conditions how concerned they would be about exposure to the coronavirus if they needed “medical treatment right now” at a hospital or doctor’s office. Eighty-six percent of people with heart disease said they would be either “very concerned” or “moderately concerned.” Among people


Nitrous oxide, often called laughing gas, makes a serious impact on the Earth

Even though much of the world is focused on the novel coronavirus outbreak, Earth Day should be a reminder that there’s another issue that deserves our attention: climate change. But you might be wondering, what is climate change, exactly? “The way I often talk about it is that it’s too much of a good thing,” said Claudia Wagner-Riddle, an environmental scientist and professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. The Earth has a collection of gases that reaches high above into the sky known as the atmosphere. And while the gases allow sunlight to pass through, they also trap heat, like a blanket does. Without our atmosphere and the gases it contains, the temperature would hover around zero degrees, said Wagner-Riddle. As it is, the atmosphere keeps the planet at a balmy average of about 60 degrees. The trouble comes when human activities add more of those gases to the atmosphere than there used to be. The gases build up and trap even more heat, triggering global changes in climate. Carbon dioxide, which is produced by cars, trucks and factories, is one of those gases humans keep adding more and more of. Methane is another culprit, much of which comes from the burps of cows in the beef and dairy industries. But there’s another gas that’s much less talked about in relation to climate change. It’s nitrous oxide. Often called laughing gas, most people know it as something dentists give patients so they don’t feel pain during a procedure. Formed from two nitrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, the gas is present in much smaller quantities in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide or methane. But on a molecule-by-molecule basis, Wagner-Riddle says, nitrous oxide is mighty in its ability to change the climate. And once nitrous oxide gets into the atmosphere, it can stay there for more than 100 years. Nitrous oxide is created by naturally occurring bacteria in the soil. But people are accelerating how much nitrous oxide is present by adding nitrogen fertilizer to croplands. This helps us grow greater quantities of grass, corn, soybeans and apples, said Wagner-Riddle, but it also supercharges those bacteria and creates excess nitrous oxide. So what can kids do to change all of that? Surprisingly, Wagner-Riddle said, there is something you can start doing today. “Number 1 is to not waste food,” she said. Between 30 percent and 40 percent of


Trump says government will step up coronavirus testing efforts, after governors blast federal inaction

House officials did not respond to requests for details about how the measure would be implemented. As of Sunday evening, there was no official paperwork released showing that the Defense Production Act had been invoked for swabs. Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, also announced that nursing homes will be required to inform the CDC when they confirm a positive case of covid-19 in their facilities. Some of the most severe outbreaks have occurred in those facilities. The pushback from governors came on a day that the total number of confirmed U.S. deaths from covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, passed 40,000. Although some states have reported a leveling off in the number of deaths and new infections, nationally those figures are still rising. More than 749,000 confirmed infections have been reported as of Sunday night. Experts say the number of tests has not kept pace with the severity of the pandemic. Nationally, the number of tests has plateaued at an average of about 146,000 per day. But some state officials, business leaders and public health experts say that is woefully short of the several hundred thousands or perhaps even millions of daily tests it might take to safely restart the economy. Some governors said only the federal government had the authority to make decisions that could speed up the deployment of testing kits. Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, said his state’s “big problem” is that the federal Food and Drug Administration has not prioritized companies that are “putting a slightly different formula together” for their testing kits. If the FDA would do that, DeWine told NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” he could “probably double, maybe even triple testing in Ohio virtually overnight.” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) said on NBC that her state has “the capacity to double or triple the number of tests that we are doing, but we need some of these supplies.” “The reagents and the swabs are absolutely essential,” she said. “You can’t process all these tests if you can’t take the sample and protect it and move forward through testing. And so while our capabilities are there, these important supplies are not.” In Massachusetts, where covid-19 infections are surging, Republican Gov. Charlie Baker emphasized that states need “guidance” from federal agencies, including the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “especially the ability to put


With help of robots, Maryland medical school to vastly expand state’s testing for coronavirus — if swabs can be found

As the coronavirus began stampeding across Maryland in recent weeks, scientists tucked away in a University of Maryland research lab in Baltimore got an idea about how to put their high-tech robots to use. They could retool the machinery and significantly increase Maryland’s capacity to test people for covid-19 — testing that will be critical to any plan to eventually “reopen” the state. The robots can significantly expedite the complex process of analyzing samples taken from Marylanders who get a prescription to be swabbed. The machines can search for the virus’ genetic material in many samples at once. “We knew we could do a lot of tests very quickly,” said Jacques Ravel, associate director of the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. The state — which is currently testing about 3,000 people a day — jumped on the offer. The university lab will begin adding tests in coming weeks that eventually could add roughly 20,000 to the daily total. But for all the scientific firepower, there’s a hitch. In Maryland and elsewhere, there aren’t enough basic cotton swabs to take samples from people’s noses and throats. The lack of these supplies may already be limiting the number of tests performed at other labs in Maryland, including one at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and across the country. There are other problems mucking up the works, including lack of other supplies such as the agents used to transport and process samples. More lab capacity is needed, too, and more money to pay for it all. But the dearth of swabs is causing states to scramble, and last week led the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to seek an accord with private firms and foundations to produce a polyester-based Q-Tip-type swab in bulk. This week, Gov. Larry Hogan (R) is expected to begin to outline the steps in his plan to eventually end some of the restrictions he’s imposed over the past 5 1 / 2 weeks to limit the spread of the deadly virus. It is sure to involve stepped-up testing. Hogan has said the state needs to test more than 10,000 people a day for the coronavirus before he can consider lifting restrictions on businesses or gatherings. That’s more than three times the current rate. In live-streamed remarks Friday to the pro-business Economic Club of Washington, Hogan said testing needs to show two weeks of decline


Outbreak of tornadoes and severe storms slams South for second straight Sunday

as it traveled into southern Alabama. Many of the same areas affected by tornado activity in southern Mississippi and southern Alabama were also under flash flood warnings at times, with high water rescues reported in Hattiesburg, Miss. Tornado warnings continued to be issued for storms in southern Alabama, the Florida Panhandle, and southwest Georgia late into Sunday night, including some for twisters which had been confirmed by either radar or storm spotters. Earlier Sunday, storms struck the Dallas-Ft. Worth with large hail while storms west of Galveston and Houston also produced large hail as well a tornado. The outbreak came exactly a week after more than 130 tornadoes tore up much of the South and Southeast amid a deadly severe weather event. With a preliminary tally of 69 deaths, 2020 is the nation’s deadliest year for tornadoes since 2012 — and it’s only mid-April. The repeated threat of dangerous storms underscored the challenge of living in storm-prone areas during the springtime, particularly at the same time as the coronavirus pandemic. It also demonstrated the importance of having a severe weather plan in place to know what to do when the time comes. “I think Alabamians are tired of dealing with COVID-19, and after last Sunday, tired of dealing with severe weather,” James Spann, the chief meteorologist for the ABC affiliate in Birmingham, wrote in a Facebook post outlining Sunday’s severe weather threat. “We don’t do this to scare anyone, or make them more anxious, but at the same time we have to let you know there is a risk of severe thunderstorms. … We will get through the day together.” Spann and other meteorologists emphasized the importance of having a way to be notified of any warnings issued. A battery-backup NOAA weather radio is ideal while you ensure wireless emergency alerts are activated on your phone and the “do not disturb” mode is disabled. The storms stemmed from a pocket of spinning upper-level cold that was digging south off the California coast as late as Saturday morning. It then swung across the Four Corners region toward the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, where it started the day early Sunday. Ahead of this axis of “vorticity,” or spinning air, an influx of Gulf of Mexico air overspread much of the South. That approaching area of spin fostered rising motion ahead of it, kindling the development of strong to severe thunderstorms. Meanwhile, a


I was prepared to be a pantry warrior. Instead, it’s takeout sushi.

creating delicious food from limited ingredients. In my reality, I drive to the grocery and buy essentially whatever I want. I know that’s not true everywhere. But here in Albany, food shortages so far mean that I can’t find the right brand of all-purpose flour. I’d love to bake a war cake, but the truth is I still have butter, eggs and milk. At the store the other day, masked and sanitized, I stared at the Earl Grey tea. I had run out. But shouldn’t I just work my way through my endless stash of nameless teas? Am I supposed to stock up or make do? Or am I supposed to splurge? Not only can I still buy almost all the usual ingredients, but I’m also being told that to keep the economy going and my local restaurants in business, I should order takeout (#takeouttuesday #thegreatamericantakeout). Takeout! Due to modest disposable income and habitual thrift, takeout is a big treat in our house, requiring the parenting equivalent of two-man control for a missile launch. But just because we can from time to time, does that mean we should? The kids say, “Yes, please.” But I can’t figure out the ethics of it. Ordering takeout helps restaurants stay in business, but it also puts cars on the road and people into contact with each other. Is it right to keep people employed or wrong to put them in harm’s way? And I can’t figure out my feelings, either. It’s a war out there. The casualties are horrific: The death toll in my state has climbed beyond 10,000, and still people are dying. People are struggling to care for their families. People are struggling to breathe. And then there are the soldiers: people risking their lives to save others and people risking their lives to stock grocery shelves for people like me. Shouldn’t I at least have to make dinner? During World War II, people on the home front survived on rations, for heaven’s sake. The government urged them to scavenge scrap metal and plant victory gardens. For us (unless we can sew), it’s stream Netflix and order victory sushi. Fine. Let’s do this. Order your roll combos, kids. But don’t throw away the extra wasabi — I think I can make something with that. Read more: Tamal Ray: I spend my day working in the hospital. Then I come home and


Coronavirus outbreaks at Mexico’s hospitals raise alarm, protests

The coronavirus outbreak in Mexico’s steel capital started at the very place that was supposed to help stop it. Social Security Hospital No. 7, a towering 240-bed facility, is the main public medical center in the northern city of Monclova. But when a 42-year-old truck driver arrived with pneumonia-like symptoms last month, the hospital didn’t isolate him. Within two weeks, he was dead of covid-19. Soon, a doctor and an administrator had also perished. Ultimately, 41 employees of the hospital wound up testing positive for the virus. It was the first in a series of outbreaks at hospitals that have rattled Mexicans and raised questions about the Social Security Institute, the country’s biggest public health network. Nurses and doctors have held protests around the country. The governor of Baja California, Jaime Bonilla, lashed out at federal authorities for the lack of protective gear in his border state, saying doctors were “dropping like flies.” Medical personnel in other pandemic hot spots, such as Italy and Spain, have also expressed outrage about working without proper equipment. But Mexico is particularly vulnerable, because it has many fewer doctors and nurses per capita. “The European systems are better financed per capita, and much bigger as a percentage of GDP,” said Eduardo González-Pier, a former deputy health minister. Mexico’s public health system has been underfinanced in recent years, he said, leaving it “more fragile, less well-equipped.” At least 686 people in Mexico have died of covid-19, according to authorities. About 9 percent of the country’s confirmed cases — 535 people — are employees of the Social Security Institute, known by its Spanish acronym IMSS. They make up around half the Mexican medical professionals who have been infected, officials say. Unlike in the United States, most people in Mexico receive health care through the government. And no provider is more important than the IMSS, which serves about half the population. It operates more than 350 hospitals and thousands of clinics, the largest public health network in Latin America. The Monclova hospital, less than three hours from Eagle Pass, Tex., is one of those hospitals. The truck driver, who was admitted in mid-March, was sent to a bed in the emergency department. He remained there for days until it was confirmed that he had covid-19, said Roberto Bernal, the health secretary for Coahuila state. Few coronavirus tests were available in Mexico at the time. “It’s three shifts


The western U.S. is locked in the grips of the first human-caused megadrought, study finds

North America, the 19-year drought that began in 2000 and continued through 2018 (this drought is still ongoing, though the study’s data is analyzed through 2018) was worse than almost all other megadroughts in this region. The researchers, who painstakingly reconstructed soil moisture records from 1,586 tree-ring chronologies to determine drought severity, found only one megadrought that occurred in the late 1500s was more intense. Historical megadroughts, spanning vast regions and multiple decades, were triggered by natural fluctuations in tropical ocean conditions, such as La Niña, the cyclic cooling of waters in the tropical Pacific. “The megadrought era seems to be reemerging, but for a different reason than the [past] megadroughts,” said Park Williams, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. Although many areas in the West had a productive wet season in 2019 and some this year, “you can’t go anywhere in the West without having suffered drought on a millennial scale,” Williams said, noting that megadroughts contain relatively wet periods interspersed between parched years. “I think the important lesson that comes out of this is that climate change is not a future problem,” said Benjamin I. Cook, a NASA climate scientist and co-author of the study. “Climate change is a problem today. The more we look, the more we find this event was worse because of climate change.” The study is part scientific grunt work, involving sifting through drought records to find past instances of comparable conditions, and part sophisticated sleuthing that employs computer models to determine how climate change is altering the likelihood of an event like this one. Cook said the researchers analyzed climate models for the region, which showed warming trends and changes in precipitation. They compared soil moisture with and without global warming-induced trends, “and we were able to determine that 30 to 50 percent of the current drought is attributable to climate change.” That conclusion is a first, says Jonathan Overpeck, a climate researcher at the University of Michigan who did not participate in the new study. “They are the first to show conclusively that we’re experiencing our nation’s first megadrought of the instrumental era,” he said via email. “The real take home,” Overpeck said, “is that the Southwest is being baked by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities, and the future implications are dire if we don’t stop climate change.” In


Navy official’s fiery speech deepens a political crisis as warship battles coronavirus

while there were no reported cases within hundreds of miles. According to relatives of sailors on board the vessel, crew members weren’t issued any particular warning about the possibility of contracting covid-19, the disease the virus causes, even as people in some parts of Vietnam were wearing face masks to avoid getting the virus. Less than a week after the ship left Vietnam on March 9, the nation’s government mandated that people wear face masks in public spaces. Modly said in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt last week that the Navy didn’t know who was “case zero” on the ship, and that the outbreak might not even have originated in Vietnam. “They’re flying in and out from all over the place,” Modly said. “You know, this could have been contracted by a crew member who was in San Diego on leave before he arrived on the ship. We just don’t know.” Whatever its origin, the outbreak became apparent within days. On March 24, Modly informed the public that three individuals aboard the Theodore Roosevelt had tested positive and been evacuated from the carrier. He said others aboard the vessel who had contact with them had been identified and quarantined. “This is an example of how we are able to keep our ships deployed at sea and underway, even with active Covid-19 cases.” Soon, Modly’s confident portrayal of the Navy’s handling of the situation aboard the aircraft carrier would be undercut. According to one relative of a sailor aboard the ship, many crew members didn’t find out about the covid-19 cases until reading media reports. For many, the revelation was unnerving. The social distancing that health experts had begun advising in the United States was all but impossible aboard the carrier, where crew members are housed in tight spaces, share restrooms and dining facilities, and often bunk together. As the crisis mounted, the Navy leadership grouped the crew into those who were deemed essential to continue operating the carrier and those who were considered nonessential. Many of those deemed essential were piled into a gym aboard the carrier and given cots to sleep on. But according to the relatives of two sailors who were moved to the gym, crew members weren’t tested or screened for the virus first. Soon enough, positive cases of covid-19 began showing up among the group that was put there. They were told they would


quarantined. “This is an example of how we are able to keep our ships deployed at sea and underway, even with active Covid-19 cases.” Soon, Modly’s confident portrayal of the Navy’s handling of the situation aboard the aircraft carrier would be undercut. According to one relative of a sailor aboard the ship, many crew members didn’t find out about the covid-19 cases until reading media reports. For many, the revelation was unnerving. The social distancing that health experts had begun advising in the United States was all but impossible aboard the carrier, where crew members are housed in tight spaces, share restrooms and dining facilities, and often bunk together. As the crisis mounted, the Navy leadership grouped the crew into those who were deemed essential to continue operating the carrier and those who were considered nonessential. Many of those deemed essential were piled into a gym aboard the carrier and given cots to sleep on. But according to the relatives of two sailors who were moved to the gym, crew members weren’t tested or screened for the virus first. Soon enough, positive cases of covid-19 began showing up among the group that was put there. They were told they would soon be moved to hotels on Guam, even as they crowded together for meetings, in contradiction of public health guidance.  Crozier and his superior officers, meanwhile, were struggling to reach a consensus on a plan of action, according to three people familiar with the discussions. Among them were Rear Adm. Stuart Baker, who was embarked on the ship as its strike group commander, and Adm. John Aquilino, the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Both admirals favored smaller mitigation efforts than Crozier wanted because of concerns about taking the carrier out of action and jeopardizing the mission, while Crozier wanted a more aggressive effort up front in the hope that it would protect his crew’s health and allow the ship to return to sea more quickly. On March 30, Crozier sent his letter to Navy officials. While Modly described it at one point as a “blast-out email” to 20 to 30 people, a person close to Crozier said many of the people who received it were on the captain’s staff. “The characterization that he did not go through the chain is not accurate,” the friend of Crozier’s said. “He did not route it to them for distribution because they


Maryland receives 500,000 coronavirus tests from South Korea; deaths in D.C., Md. and Virginia reach 996

The number of known coronavirus cases in the District, Maryland and Virginia was 25,642 on Monday, with 13,691 cases in Maryland, 9,020 in Virginia and 2,931 in the District. The number of virus-related deaths was 588 in Maryland, 303 in Virginia and 105 in the District, for a total of 996 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: • After Maryland first lady Yumi Hogan helped to negotiate, the state received 500,000 coronavirus tests from South Korea on Saturday morning, state officials said Monday. The tests that arrived at Baltimore-Washington International Airport will help to dramatically expand Maryland’s ability to identify patients sickened from the virus. • The total number of infections in the District, Maryland and Virginia sailed past 25,000 on Monday as the death toll climbed to 996. Maryland added 855 new cases — its highest number in nearly two weeks. • D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said Monday that D.C. police will take over the city’s only commercial firearms business. It comes after the licensee stopped accepting new business last month. • On the heels of a protest to reopen Maryland, a coalition of grass roots organizations is urging Gov. Larry Hogan (R) to continue to heed the advice of scientists and public health experts to determine when and how to lift restrictions. In Virginia, the state’s GOP echoed President Trump’s call to “liberate” the state and lift a stay-at-home order. What a stay-at-home order means for you


Despite not hitting the White House benchmarks, Georgia scales back social distancing measures

Less than three weeks ago, some new information was presented to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R). The novel coronavirus, it seems, could be spread even by people who weren’t showing symptoms. Therefore, he had little choice but to implement a statewide effort to encourage people to stay at home, in the hope of limiting the virus’s spread and reducing the number of people afflicted by covid-19, the disease the virus causes. As we reported at the time, that Kemp was suddenly made aware of the possibility of asymptomatic transmission was strange: Experts had been identifying that sort of transmission for months. The day before Kemp’s announcement, we even wrote a lengthy article detailing what was known about the virus’s ability to be transmitted by people who weren’t showing symptoms. The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told NPR that same week that perhaps a quarter of those infected with the virus wouldn’t show symptoms. The CDC, of course, is headquartered in Georgia. On Monday, Kemp had another announcement. The measures he’d implemented to reduce the spread of the virus would be scaled back, with some businesses able to reopen as soon as Friday. This by itself isn’t surprising. Kemp is a staunch conservative and was clearly never terribly enthusiastic about closing the state in the first place. What’s more, the White House last week presented metrics by which states could evaluate whether they were ready to reopen. If Georgia met those benchmarks, the White House task force estimated it was ready to reopen for business. Georgia doesn’t meet the benchmarks. The metrics set by the federal government include measures of both the spread of coronavirus symptoms and actual cases. If a state saw a downward trend in reports of influenza-like illnesses to the CDC as well as a decline in covid-19-like illnesses, it met the benchmark on symptoms. If it further saw a decline in either daily cases or the rate at which people were testing positive, it met the benchmark on cases. The only available data on covid-19-like illnesses is offered regionally. In Georgia’s region, there has been a two-week downward trend in reports of covid-19-like illness. But in Georgia itself, the most recent public data on flu-like illness, confirmed case increases and positive tests all indicate that Georgia isn’t ready to reopen. (The lines on the chart below indicate two weeks and one week before


With focus on testing, Maryland buys 500,000 coronavirus test kits from South Korea

equipment at institutions serving the vulnerable. City officials say their public health lab has the capacity to test up to 500 a day but does not get that many requests. They are encouraging anyone with symptoms to seek tests — not just those in high-risk groups. Officials are watching for declines in reports of flu-like illnesses, in addition to lab-confirmed coronavirus cases, and monitoring the availability of personal protective equipment for health professionals, as it weighs whether and when to lift restrictions. Under current orders, nonessential businesses will remain closed at least until May 15 in the District, May 10 in Maryland and May 8 in Virginia, which has a stay-at-home through June 10. Maryland has extended school closures at least through May 15, while the District and Virginia have closed schools through the end of the academic year. Officials also are monitoring the number of people hospitalized to gauge the progress of the pandemic. Virginia reported 600 new hospitalizations over the past week, while Maryland reported about 1,000. Neither state showed significant declines in the number of daily admissions. More than 400 people were hospitalized with covid-19, the disease the virus causes, in the District as of Monday, with 120 in intensive care units and 59 requiring ventilators. That’s an increase from 295 hospitalized as of last Monday, with 94 in intensive care and 31 requiring hospitalizations. Officials say D.C. hospitals are running at about 70 percent capacity and have not needed the extra hospital beds originally projected to be needed in mid-April. The city is turning its downtown convention center into a care facility for patients with mild covid-19 symptoms. By early May, the center should be able to treat up to 500, officials said. The District, Maryland and Virginia on Monday reported a total of 66 new covid-19 fatalities and more than 1,400 positive test results received. Those results generally reflect tests taken a week ago or more, and infections contracted a week or more before that. The three jurisdictions have reported roughly 60 to 70 deaths daily for the past five days. The District added 134 covid-19 cases and nine new fatalities, pushing the city’s death toll to 105. Maryland added 855 new cases, its highest single-day increase in two weeks. More than a quarter of the cases are located in Prince George’s County, which leads the state in both infections and deaths. The county added


As MLB shutdown continues, team employees are wondering how long they’ll be paid

With employees of some teams, including the Washington Nationals, uncertain of their employment status beyond the end of the month, Major League Baseball on Monday made it easier for teams to institute layoffs, furloughs or pay reductions as the 2020 season remains delayed by the novel coronavirus pandemic. The suspension of MLB’s Uniform Employee Contracts paves the way for teams to begin reducing payroll costs, though it does not require it. Language in those standard contracts grants Commissioner Rob Manfred the power to suspend them in the event of a national emergency, which President Trump declared March 13. “Our clubs rely heavily on revenue from tickets/concessions, broadcasting/media, licensing and sponsorships to pay salaries,” Manfred wrote in an email Monday, a copy of which was obtained by the Associated Press, which first reported the move. “In the absence of games, these revenue streams will be lost or substantially reduced, and clubs will not have sufficient funds to meet their financial obligations.” The 2020 season has been on hold since the rest of spring training was canceled March 12, and there is no firm indication as to when or if the regular season can begin. Various teams have taken different approaches to guaranteeing paychecks to UEC-covered employees — including major league and minor league managers and coaches, scouts and some front-office personnel — during the shutdown. The Nationals are among those that have promised to pay employees through the end of this month. In an email sent to full-time staff April 13, managing principal owner Mark Lerner sought to allay concerns. “We know it has not been easy,” Lerner said in the email, according to people who had seen it. “We are so grateful for your dedication and commitment to this team. We know this is a very unsettling time for everyone. … [We] are doing all we can to make sure we are committed to the health and well-being of our employees. With that singular goal in mind, we want to assure you that full-time front office staff will receive their full pay and benefits through at least April 30.” Though Lerner wrote the club wanted to “alleviate some of the worry” employees might have, some employees remain unsettled and took the email to mean their pay could be curtailed as soon as May 1. Several employees in various positions across the organization, all of whom spoke on the condition of


Centuries-old Ramadan traditions and practices upended by coronavirus

CAIRO — Across the Muslim world, the fasting month of Ramadan that begins this week will be unlike any other in memory as the coronavirus pandemic alters the rituals and rhythms of centuries-old traditions and practices. Egyptian religious authorities have barred charity tables, which over the generations have offered free sunset meals on street corners and beside mosques for those breaking the daytime fast. Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti has said prayers during Ramadan — including the evening prayer typically held in mosques overflowing with worshipers — and the Eid al-Fitr festivities that follow the end of the fasting month should be held at home. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was practically apologetic as he asked Iranians on Sunday not to visit holy shrines during Ramadan or participate in iftar gatherings, the festive evening meals. “In the holy month of Ramadan, we won’t have the usual ceremonies, like iftar,” Rouhani told the nation’s coronavirus task force, his comments later released publicly. Holy shrines and mosques, he said, “will be closed for another two weeks pending new meetings.” But clerics claiming the mantle of righteousness have in some places challenged the official prohibitions. In Pakistan, where the government ruled that only groups of five or less could attend prayers at mosques, security forces broke up a handful of large prayer gatherings, igniting clashes between worshipers and police. And the country’s religious establishment has pushed back against the restrictions, with a group of 50 prominent clerics issuing warning to the government last week to ease them and stop the arrests. On Saturday, the government gave in and dropped the limits on mosque attendance. “The people want to see their political and religious leaders on the same page and any conflict would be counterproductive,” President Arif Alvi told reporters Saturday, according to local Pakistani news outlet Geo News. From Egypt to Malaysia and beyond, the coronavirus has cast a long shadow over the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims as they prepare for the holiest month of the year. In many countries, authorities have enacted comprehensive lockdowns, imposed curfews and ordered travel bans in addition to suspending mosque prayers and banning other religious gatherings. The strict measures, combined with closures of borders and airports, have hit the poor especially hard as unemployment soars and food prices spike just as Ramadan starts. Over the weekend, Egyptian religious authorities urged that any charity be given to the poor before


Hospitals tiptoe toward restarting non-emergency surgery and procedures

Some hospitals in communities less affected by the novel coronavirus moved cautiously Monday toward resuming non-emergency surgeries and procedures — a hopeful sign for patients awaiting that care and a medical system badly in need of the revenue those services provide. Acting on guidance released Sunday night by federal officials, medical centers with relatively few covid-19 patients readied some cancer, heart and other care that has been postponed by a nationwide call to halt such procedures. The federal government issued those voluntary guidelines March 18 to address the critical shortage of protective gear for front-line health-care workers and ensure that hospitals had enough beds for the anticipated surge in covid-19 patients. A month later, some hospitals are confident they can handle a resumption of some non-emergency work. “Now we’re in a very different place,” said Donald M. Yealy, chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “We have come to realize that we have plenty of those assets.” Across the 5,500 beds in the 40-hospital UPMC system Monday, there were just 116 people admitted for covid-19 disease, the illness caused by the virus.Those patients occupied just7 percent of intensive care beds and used 6 percent of ventilators, Yealy said. Yet the volume of surgeries performed by the system has declined 70 percent from its pre-pandemic level. “We think we’re able to serve what’s really a pent-up demand,” Yealy said. “There’s a lot of necessary care that can be scheduled. There’s even some urgent care that has been put off.” Hospitals depend on scheduled work such as cancer surgeries, knee replacements and non-urgent heart procedures to bring in money and balance the costly care they must provide to walk-ins and emergency patients. With much of the scheduled work canceled, they have been losing billions of dollars. “There is no question it is the apocalypse,” said Charles N. “Chip” Kahn III, president of the Federation of American Hospitals, the trade group that represents for-profit hospitals and health systems. Now medical centers must figure out how to provide these services in a safe environment and reassure patients who have been watching nonstop media coverage of hospitals overrun by the virus. Some people have become so fearful of contracting covid-19 at emergency rooms that they have stayed home even with chest pain, stroke symptoms and serious infections, according to doctors


Egypt sends military plane filled with medical aid to help U.S. with coronavirus

of the U.S. Embassy in Egypt, as of Sunday there were 3,144 confirmed cases of the virus in the country. Early in April, Sissi sent two military jets to Italy carrying medical equipment, protective suits, detergents and sanitizers to combat the spread of the coronavirus. On the packages, in Arabic and Italian, were the words, “From the Egyptian people to the Italian people.” Egypt’s minister of health and population, Hala Zayed, also came with the shipment and personally delivered it to Italian officials in front of the media. The whole ceremony was shown live on Facebook. A week earlier, Egypt sent 1 million medical masks to Italy, and in February, Zayed flew to Beijing, delivering 10 tons of medical equipment and other items to China. And last week, the Sissi government sent a large number of medical gowns to another key ally, Britain, according to a tweet by the British minister of state for international trade, Greg Hands. The Italian energy giant Eni is working with Egypt on developing a massive natural gas field in the Mediterranean, said Michael Wahid Hanna at the Century Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank. Egyptian officials have portrayed the medical shipments as friendly gestures between Egypt and these nations in light of their historical alliances. After the Italian shipments were delivered, Egyptian presidential spokesman Bassam Rady said that the aid “comes in line with the historical ties between the two friendly countries” and that it was designed to ease “the burden on Italy in its current plight,” according to Egypt’s state-run Al-Ahram newspaper. But many Egyptians took to social media questioning their government’s shipments when prices of masks and hand sanitizers have soared, making them unaffordable for the majority of Egyptians. A doctor and a pharmaceutical worker were arrested by Egyptian security forces after complaining about the lack of masks in a Facebook video, according to U.N. human rights officials. The medical shipments are seen by some as a way of scoring points with the United States and Europe at a time when Sissi is building what critics say is the most repressive regime in Egypt’s modern history. The Trump administration has largely been publicly silent about the regime’s vast human rights abuses. But in Congress, lawmakers are seeking to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Egypt over the death in January of an American citizen held in an Egyptian prison.


John Houghton, renowned climate scientist who led IPCC reports, dies of coronavirus at 88

John Houghton, a Welsh atmospheric physicist who bridged the science, policy and religious communities and served as lead editor of groundbreaking studies for the United Nations’ climate science advisory group when it won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, died April 15 in Wales. He was 88. The cause was suspected complications from covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, his granddaughter Hannah Malcolm said via Twitter. Dr. Houghton was among the most influential early leaders of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was set up in 1988 to advise policymakers on the science of global climate change. He was the chief editor of the IPCC’s first three reports and chaired or co-chaired the panel’s scientific assessment committee as well. The first IPCC report, released in 1990, helped spur world leaders to convene the Rio Earth Summit two years later. At that landmark gathering, virtually all nations committed to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an ambitious treaty requiring countries to prevent “dangerous interference” with the global climate. Each round of annual U.N. climate negotiations since then has taken place under the auspices of the UNFCCC. The second IPCC report in 1995 informed negotiators of the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement that forced developed nations to commit to binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions, while developing countries took other steps. The third IPCC report, published in 2001, for the first time attributed “most of the observed warming over the last 50 years” to the human-caused buildup of greenhouse gases in the air. It also documented rising seas, melting glaciers and other signs of a rapidly warming planet. In 2007, Dr. Houghton was among the IPCC scientists who collected the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on behalf of the organization, which shared the award that year with former vice president Al Gore “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” Dr. Houghton was also the director general and chief executive of the U.K. Meteorological Office from 1983 to 1991 and established the organization’s Hadley Center for Climate Science and Services, which is now one of the world’s foremost research organizations on climate science. His work on climate research began in the 1960s when the focus, amid the Cold War, was on studying potential changes in


We need more covid-19 tests. We propose a ‘shark tank’ to get us there.

to photograph your test swab result and send it to a doctor. Several may incorporate wearable technology. The second place is the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. BARDA has been working across government and industry to invest in multiple innovative ideas to achieve accurate, fast and easy testing capabilities and build new capacity. BARDA will also play a critical role in partnering with private companies to manufacture and produce tests as necessary and as breakthroughs are discovered. We must invite breakthrough ideas to our so-called shark tank. We must innovate. And we must use our best scientists at these two agencies and across government to do this faster than ever before. By incorporating a shark tank environment in government research, we can more quickly develop the necessary technologies to get more tests into circulation. While there is a risk of failure with any research — in science, success is not guaranteed — we also could produce the one mighty great white shark that will help us combat this disease. Last month, Congress gave BARDA, NIH and other agencies up to $38 billion for testing, treatments and vaccines to fight this virus. We recommend spending even more to advance other research, giving money to states to buy testing equipment, improve data reporting, conduct tests and operate testing centers, and implement contact tracing to identify those who’ve come in contact with sick people so they, too, can quarantine themselves — instead of the rest of us quarantining ourselves. Specifically, we propose $1 billion to launch this shark tank for testing. Funding would be provided to the NIH to work with BARDA to underwrite any innovative idea with a chance to succeed. Importantly, industry experts and partners would be brought in to evaluate the potential technology, its effectiveness and its scalability. This is the time for both government and its industry partners to step up and pull out all the stops. American ingenuity will succeed, but like any enterprise, it needs start-up financing to help it thrive. Read more: Danielle Allen: The three key ideas at stake for a post-coronavirus future Mark Zuckerberg: How data can aid the fight against covid-19 Michele Flournoy and Michael Morell: The 6 factors that determine coronavirus containment or devastation Megan McArdle: Leana S. Wen: Three key issues missing from Trump’s guidance on reopening the country


Singapore lost control of its coronavirus outbreak, and migrant workers are the victims

to hospital; the normal ones like me, no one takes care of us.” The situation highlights the vulnerability of migrant workers, who in Singapore make up one-third of the labor force. Their risks of infection are exacerbated by overcrowded living quarters, poor nutrition, limited access to health care and personal protective equipment, low wages and, in some cases, discrimination. In the Persian Gulf, laborers’ quarters also have become infection hotspots. As in Singapore, many migrant laborers are from South Asia. Elsewhere, African migrants in China are facing discrimination and xenophobia, refused entry into restaurants or evicted from their homes. Singapore’s largest Chinese-language broadsheet, Lianhe Zaobao, recently published a letter from a reader who blamed the migrants for the outbreaks, labeling their countries “backward” and their practices dirty. In Singapore, critics say these events have revealed a hubris among the authorities and the wider community, who took for granted their initial success in keeping infection numbers low while failing to prepare for the possibility of an outbreak among the most downtrodden. “For the first two months, we engaged in a lot of self-congratulation,” said Alex Au, vice president of rights group Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2). “If anyone had cared to look, the dangers were already there.” Authorities had planned for the epidemic with a focus only on citizens, he said, distributing surgical masks, hand sanitizer and reusable masks only to Singaporean households. Singaporean residents returning from the United States and Britain, meanwhile, were put up in four- and five-star hotels paid for by the government. “This reflects the deliberate invisibilization of the foreign worker; the whole machinery of state operates as though they don’t exist,” Au said. HealthServe, a nonprofit providing subsidized health care to migrant workers, said migrants had been anxious as early as February about the virus and their level of risk in overcrowded living conditions. But a change in regulations meant volunteer doctors and nurses staffing the organization’s nonprofit clinics could no longer serve part-time, forcing it to cut services by 90 percent. “This was a situation we felt was going to come, even if we were hoping for the best,” said Suwen Low, spokeswoman for HealthServe. A spokesman for the Ministry of Manpower responded to a request for comment from The Washington Post with a news release, issued April 14, saying that authorities are working to “reduce the number of workers in the dormitories and also


Fighting coronavirus feels like fighting a war. That might bring us together.

of equipment with a quote from the Roman philosopher Seneca: “We are waves of the same sea.” Scientists around the world have banded together, launching hundreds of international clinical trials, including a megaproject named SOLIDARITY. The United Nations General Assembly unanimously approved a resolution for “intensified international cooperation to contain, mitigate and defeat” covid-19. There are limits to these effects, of course: The pandemic has brought humanity together in some ways, but has also deepened divisions between smaller versions of “us.” Anti-Asian bias has intensified. Many Americans are so committed to their partisan sense of belonging that they can’t agree on the scope of the pandemic, let alone how to address it — a rift that was on display in last weekend’s anti-quarantine protests. The pandemic has also highlighted and worsened inequality, as low income and minority communities bear the brunt of its sickness, death, and economic hardship. And we are failing to protect our protectors, in ways that rhyme with the past. Veterans have long been valorized for their service while left woefully alone to deal with its toll. Now, health-care workers are given standing ovations while forced to wear garbage bags instead of adequate protective gear, and grocery store workers have been “drafted” into taking immense risk, but not compensated accordingly. Wartime language can paper over these injustices — encouraging people to talk about togetherness without doing much to assure it. But wartime compassion can go deeper — shining a light on how we’d like to face shared struggles, and how far from those ideals we are. This has spurred powerful change in the past. During World War II, Britain laid the ground for its welfare state, including the National Health Service, in part to recognize the sacrifice many had made. To one of its architects, Sir William Beveridge, war clarified the country’s responsibility to care for all its people. “A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching,” he wrote. If today’s wartime compassion is to be meaningful, it must be planted into the structures that rise from covid-19’s rubble. Spain has moved in that direction, planning to institute universal basic income, “not just for this extraordinary situation, [but] that it remains forever.” Governments should also consider broadening mental health infrastructures to treat the trauma that health-care workers and countless others are experiencing, and which will affect them for years. Individuals


No, Bill Gates did not engineer the covid-19 pandemic — and other lessons on fake news

Jr., who have seized on the moment as an opportunity to air their long-standing opposition to Gates’s vaccination advocacy efforts. Influential partisans have also amplified aspects of the false theories. Laura Ingraham, host of Fox News’s “The Ingraham Angle,” and Emerald Robinson, a correspondent for the conservative website Newsmax, have both repeated conspiratorial claims on Twitter. And former Trump adviser Roger Stone (who has been ordered to report to federal prison by the end of this month) invoked a number of them in an April 13 radio interview with Joe Piscopo on New York City’s AM970 “The Answer,” part of the conservative Salem Media Group. Stone’s baseless comments were then repeated, unchallenged, by a report in the New York Post that has been shared almost 7,000 times on Facebook. Discuss: Xenophobic incidents, racism and attacks on Asian Americans — based on false narratives that covid-19 came from the “other” — are sadly predictable, says Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a journalism education and advocacy organization in St. Petersburg, Fla. “Here is how the contagion of irrationality works,” he wrote in an April 13 column. “Someone blames it on China. By extension, the blame extends to the Chinese people. In a diverse country like America, blame — by pure ignorance — is extended to Chinese Americans (many who have never been in China); and because the ignorant do not discriminate between the varieties of Asian cultures, blame extends to all Asian Americans.” It’s a view shared by Russell Jeung, chair of the Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State University. In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) published on April 14, he discussed the role of news organizations in reducing such attacks — by, for example, providing broader coverage of Asian Americans and using accurate terms (such as “covid-19” instead of “the Chinese virus”). Having reporters who are culturally sensitive and can communicate in communities where English may not be widely spoken can also help, he said. Jeung and his graduate students have analyzed xenophobia and discrimination in covid-19 news coverage, and he has helped to collect firsthand accounts of anti-Asian violence. Among the patterns they saw in global English-language news reports about the pandemic were these: First came racialized memes about eating Chinese food (including eating bats, which were a possible source of the coronavirus) and wearing masks (a common sight in Asian


Chinese people. In a diverse country like America, blame — by pure ignorance — is extended to Chinese Americans (many who have never been in China); and because the ignorant do not discriminate between the varieties of Asian cultures, blame extends to all Asian Americans.” It’s a view shared by Russell Jeung, chair of the Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State University. In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) published on April 14, he discussed the role of news organizations in reducing such attacks — by, for example, providing broader coverage of Asian Americans and using accurate terms (such as “covid-19” instead of “the Chinese virus”). Having reporters who are culturally sensitive and can communicate in communities where English may not be widely spoken can also help, he said. Jeung and his graduate students have analyzed xenophobia and discrimination in covid-19 news coverage, and he has helped to collect firsthand accounts of anti-Asian violence. Among the patterns they saw in global English-language news reports about the pandemic were these: First came racialized memes about eating Chinese food (including eating bats, which were a possible source of the coronavirus) and wearing masks (a common sight in Asian countries during flu season). Those were followed by reports on cancellations of Lunar New Year events and the decline of Chinese businesses. Next came worldwide reports about racism against Asians. Media outlets “could be contributing to the xenophobia by calling the virus the ‘Chinese virus,’ calling it the ‘Wuhan virus,’ by showing pictures of Chinese people wearing masks when they’re talking about the virus, or running stories about conspiracy theories,” Jeung told CJR. (The Jan. 27 issue of the Sift referred to covid-19 as the “Wuhan coronavirus”; other news organizations used the same language around that time.) But when he and his students looked solely at U.S. domestic news coverage, those anti-Asian patterns were followed by reports on elected officials, health officials and Asian Americans themselves speaking out against racism and condemning harassment and violence. Such reports, he suggested, may have been partially responsible for President Trump’s tweets on March 23 that Asian Americans should be protected and that the spread of the virus was not their fault. Still, Jeung added, Trump has “a clear ‘us’-versus-‘them’ dichotomy.” “We call that Orientalist language, saying that the West is different from the East,” Jeung said. “Therefore Asian Americans are considered perpetual foreigners.


The Belarus government is largely ignoring the pandemic. Here’s why.

no-quarantine position. But the country’s unique economic and geopolitical situation also helps explain why autocrats around the world have a wide range of pandemic responses. Here’s what you need to know: The Belarusian government has been benefiting from other countries’ response to the virus, as well as the response of its own people. Thus far, the government has made only limited efforts and financial contributions to contain the pandemic. Belarus is a landlocked nation, and its neighbors — Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Russia — closed their land borders within the first two weeks of March, with limited exceptions for cargo transport and diplomatic travelers. These moves effectively isolated Belarus, without any effort by the government. This allows the Belarusian government to “free ride” — it now does not need to support individuals and companies that would have lost work from an official lockdown or stringent measures to limit exposure to coronavirus in Belarus. Despite the limited official response, Belarusian doctors joined the global flash mob #StayAtHome and have been urging the people to stay at home to minimize the number of contacts. The Belarusian opposition and civil society leaders called for a “People’s Quarantine” from March 23 through April 30, asking people to stay home, keep their kids home from school and minimize all social contact. While the official media have been downplaying the severity of the crisis, many Belarusians have been taking precautions and finding ways to self-isolate — without waiting for decisions from above. The volume of daily weekday traffic in Minsk, for instance, has declined 37.5 percent since the beginning of March. In summer 2020, Alexander Lukashenko will run for his sixth term in office. By not labeling the virus as a threat, the Belarusian government diverts attention from its limited capabilities to assist people in need. The country’s gross domestic product grew just 1.5 percent in 2019, slowing from a 3.05 percent expansion in 2018. The coronavirus remains the root cause for the growing economic hardships, limiting the government’s vulnerabilities to shared and emotionally charged opportunities for protest mobilization triggered by economic factors. Moreover, the global pandemic has exacerbated Belarus’s economic problems in a variety of ways, including the appreciation of the dollar and suspension of work by foreign companies. For example, the largest Belarusian passenger car manufacturer — BelGee — has experienced delays in supplies of components for Geely cars from China. The largest


The Daily 202: Republicans divide over reopening U.S. based on how worried they are about getting coronavirus

was unable to wake him from his bed,” Ariana Eunjung Cha reports from North Bergen, N.J. “When Dave Prina and the other EMTs arrived, there was nothing to do but express condolences and ask for the father’s identification for the paperwork. What’s the boy going to do? he wondered. How will he live? How will he pay next month’s rent? ‘When we left, he was hysterical on the stairs,’ Prina recalled. The ambulance call that haunts him is one of thousands during a relentless three weeks in which this region has become the world’s coronavirus epicenter. North Bergen is located at the other end of the Lincoln Tunnel from New York City. … At least 13 EMTs and 50 police officers and firefighters nationwide have died of covid-19-related complications in recent weeks. … Two of the dead are this area’s own: Kevin Leiva was a 24-year-old EMT in North Bergen. Israel ‘Izzy’ Tolentino Jr., a 33-year-old father of two, was a firefighter and EMT from neighboring Passaic.” Nearly 1 in 10 nursing homes nationwide have identified patients with the virus. The Post “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,” Debbie Cenziper, Joel Jacobs and Shawn Mulcahy report. “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 [CDC] will collect the information. … 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.” “Was there any way to prevent the Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in South Dakota from becoming one of the country’s largest known coronavirus clusters, with more than 700 workers infected? It’s hard to know ‘what could have been done differently,’ a Smithfield spokesperson said, given what she referred to as the plant’s ‘large immigrant population,’” BuzzFeed News reports. “‘Living circumstances in certain cultures are different than they are with your traditional American family,’ she explained. … But internal company communications and interviews with


¿Más eficaces contra el coronavirus las mujeres que gobiernan, como Angela Merkel y Jacinda Ardern?

Hablan Thomas Sparrow de la Deutsche Welle, Steve Braunias del New Zealand Herald y Jyrki Palo del Kauppalehti. También la analista mexicana María Amparo Casar y la argentina Silvia Pisani.


Maryland extends closure of schools through May 15; D.C. schools to end academic year early, canceling instruction May 29

The number of known coronavirus cases in the District, Maryland and Virginia was 21,579 on Friday, with 11,578 cases in Maryland, 7,521 in Virginia and 2,480 in the District. The number of virus-related deaths was 499 in Maryland, 233 in Virginia and 86 in the District, for a total of 818 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: • D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) announced Friday that school buildings will remain closed through the academic year and instruction will end late next month, rather than June 19. In Maryland, officials announced that schools will remain closed through May 15. • The total number of covid-related deaths surpassed 800 in the District, Maryland and Virginia on Friday as case numbers reached 21,579. • Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said Friday he expects the surging caseload of coronavirus patients to peak and start to decline soon, a key turning point in plans to reopen the state economy. What a stay-at-home order means for you