Japan, world’s third largest economy, vows to become carbon neutral by 2050

percent by 2030, and nuclear power to between 20 and 22 percent, although it is expected to unveil new targets next year. “If Japan and the rest of the world are to avoid the catastrophic effects of the climate crisis, it is precisely this kind of action that the world needs,” said Sam Annesley, executive director of Greenpeace Japan. But Annesley said Japan needs to back up the announcement with a major shift toward renewable energy in its upcoming energy plan “if this rhetoric is to be made reality.” Arguing that the Fukushima disaster shows that nuclear energy “has no place in a green, sustainable future,” Annesley said Japan should aim to produce 50 percent of its electricity via renewable sources by 2030. “Anything less than 50 percent and Japan risks falling short of net zero, and, more importantly, risks driving the world above 1.5 degrees as per the Paris agreement,” he said, referring to the 2016 global pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions and tackle climate change. Economy Minister Hiroshi Kajiyama said the target would not be easy to meet. He vowed to bring together all the country’s resources, including industry, government and academia, to achieve the goal while creating growth and business opportunities. “We will work with the business world so a virtuous cycle with the economy can be created,” he said at a news conference after Suga’s speech. The government sees hydrogen as a new source of energy, Kajiyama said, while also having high expectations for offshore wind power. Coal would be a feasible source of power only to the extent it could be offset by carbon capture, utilization and storage technology. In the past, his ministry has been a strong backer of coal and nuclear power, but observers say it may hold less influence in the Suga administration than it did under his immediate predecessor, Shinzo Abe. Still, a shift was already underway toward the end of the Abe administration in response to international pressure and gradually changing public opinion. Japan’s banks were scaling back financing for coal power abroad, and the government said it would “in principle” no longer subsidize the construction of coal-power thermal plants overseas. Fitch Solutions, a financial market-risk analysis company, said the announcement will significantly boost Japan’s electric and hydrogen-powered vehicle sector, which has been lagging behind those of Asian peers such as China, Hong Kong and South Korea. “For that


How to fix our covid-19 testing debacle? Create a Biomedical National Guard.

around 1 million extra tests per day. That’s more tests lost than the total administered in the United States since the start of the pandemic. Let’s put this into perspective: There are hundreds of labs at MSU and Cornell that run the sort of molecular tests needed for covid-19 diagnosis on a daily basis. We have each deployed just one lab and are able to test at a capacity of 4,000 people per day at MSU and 7,000 at Cornell. But this is only a fraction of what could have been achieved from the beginning. Our country has the largest and most sophisticated concentration of biomedical labs in the world. The capacity of this network to rapidly develop testing tests and deliver highly accurate results is enormous. If a crisis-response regulating body — federally appointed and with representatives from all major government agencies — had had the ability to activate these scientists into emergency service early in the pandemic, we believe that we could have stopped the uncontrolled spread of the virus. A Biomedical National Guard, as we envision it, would create a corps of federally directed academic research institutions and scientists that volunteer to supply biomedical expertise and laboratory infrastructure, drastically decreasing our nation’s response time and exponentially supplementing our knowledge and resources during a disaster — not just the one we’re in, but the myriad biomedical crises we will undoubtedly face in our future. This capability will be needed again. Epidemics, bioterrorism, natural disasters, resource pollution, and biological, chemical, radiation, and nuclear emergencies account for nearly all of the roughly 45,000 federally declared disasters since 1953. The federal government also reports that 2010 to 2019 was a “landmark decade for billion-dollar weather and climate disasters,” all of which result in substantial biomedical needs. Beyond the headlines we most remember, the United States has consistent biomedical needs that frequently dwarf the nation’s available resources. Let’s play to our strengths. Let’s engage the highly skilled scientists, the cutting-edge equipment and the intellectual assets within our federally funded university research community to give our nation better tools in a crisis. Let’s start now. Read more Leana S. Wen: We finally know the Trump administration’s pandemic strategy: Surrender The Post’s View: Our leadership is hapless. But individuals can outsmart the virus. Eugene Robinson: Trump isn’t even trying to slow the virus’s spread David Moscrop: Canada is trying to secure millions of covid-19


Kansas nursing home faces severe federal penalties after deadly coronavirus outbreak

The first hint that the novel coronavirus was tearing through the nursing home in rural Kansas arrived in a Facebook post this month. The Andbe Home was in the grips of “a full COVID outbreak,” administrator Megan Mapes wrote, “despite the precautions we have been taking since March.” But behind the walls of the facility, nursing home officials had failed to take the most basic measures to prevent the spread of the highly contagious virus after learning two residents were infected, according to a blistering report released Tuesday by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which resulted in severe penalties. By the time the viral firestorm had finished sweeping through the nursing home, all 63 residents were infected and at least 10 had died. Medicare moved Monday to terminate the Andbe Home from its program, cutting it off from federal dollars and imposing thousands of dollars in fines. Government inspectors found that infected residents were separated from their healthy roommates by little more than a privacy sheet. Communal dining continued for two days. Multiple staff members failed to wear masks — even after the outbreak took hold. In an email Tuesday to The Washington Post, the nursing home administrator disputed some of the findings outlined in the report and stood by the response to the outbreak, saying the facility had immediately quarantined infected residents and that staff wore full personal protective equipment, including goggles, masks and gloves. “This is a terrible virus, but I am proud of how our staff has battled COVID-19 over the course of the pandemic, coming to work every day under extenuating circumstances, and caring for all of our residents,” Mapes wrote. “I am also proud of and thankful for the mutual support between Andbe Home and our community during trying times for everyone.” The Medicare report, however, said the facility’s failures had “placed all residents in immediate jeopardy by the spread of Covid-19 to all residents.” The virus’s rampage through the nursing home came amid a surge of infections in Kansas’s Norton County, which led the nation in per capita case increases between Oct. 12 and Oct. 19 and ranked second this week, according to a Post analysis. Before Oct. 13, the county near the Nebraska border had been spared virus-related deaths. Now, there are clusters of cases at the nursing home, where 55 of 70 staff members tested positive for the virus, as


Instead of learning from South Korea’s coronavirus example, Trump is lying about it

stereotype-laden misrepresentation of South Korea’s response. “They had an explosion of cases at one megachurch and then they used their military and police powers to lock down that church, arrest everybody who was in contact with individuals in that church,” Azar told CNN on Oct. 23, responding to a Columbia University study that estimated that 215,000 U.S. deaths might have been avoided if the United States had followed South Korea’s approach. South Korea was successful, Azar said, due to “their significant lockdown efforts, things that fit them within their cultural and legal context but would likely not fly here in the United States.” Azar was wrong in two ways. First of all, as South Korea’s largest newspaper pointed out, the country’s military has provided only medical staff support. South Korea’s success has nothing to do with some sort of despotic Asian behavior and everything to do with sensible policies. These include, as the Wall Street Journal noted, aggressive early testing, contact tracing and mask-wearing programs aided by clear government direction and community mobilization. Azar is “simply inventing an alternate reality about how the South Korean government responded to the outbreak,” Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told me. He added that lawmakers repeatedly urged Azar to pursue precisely the same policies during a series of meetings in January and February. “While President Trump was denying the problem and praising what a great job Xi Jinping had done, the South Korean government was prioritizing the health and safety of its people by instituting widespread testing and tracing, something that should be commended.” It’s true that South Korea’s outbreak was exacerbated by the irresponsible actions of one megachurch, but it’s not true that everyone connected to church members was arrested. One leader was arrested in August after flagrant violations of public health restrictions. And while some contact tracing programs in South Korea were more invasive than what Americans are used to, that’s not due to their “cultural” context. “South Koreans don’t comply with invasive contact tracing because they are Asian, they comply with it because they have been through pandemics before and they understand the severity of the danger,” said Jenny Town, a fellow at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan policy research organization. Trump and Azar’s maligning of South Korea is just one aspect of this administration’s overall mistreatment of South Korea and mismanagement of


Hospitals in nearly every region report a flood of covid-19 patients

The goal was to prod the public to follow practices such as mask-wearing to limit viral spread, according to Jake Henry Jr., president and chief executive of Saint Francis. “What we’re seeing is not sustainable,” Henry said Monday. He said exhausted medical workers get discouraged when they see people in public who are not wearing masks. The city of Tulsa has a mask ordinance — signs are posted outside businesses reminding customers — but suburban jurisdictions do not, nor does the state. “We’d just like to get everybody going in the same direction,” Henry said. The pandemic, and President Trump’s handling of it, have emerged as the defining issues of the presidential race, and polling suggests that the crisis is a major drag on the president’s prospects for a second term. Hospitalizations are rising sharply in three electoral battleground states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In Milwaukee, a field hospital has been established at the state fairgrounds to treat overflow covid-19 patients. Ohio, a traditional bellwether state in presidential elections, joins the other three battlegrounds on a list of the 10 states with the greatest increases in covid-19 hospitalizations since Sept. 30, according to The Post’s data. Ohio set a new high Monday for hospitalizations since the start of the pandemic. Seven other states Monday also set records: Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Mexico, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Montana tied its record. In West Virginia, Clay Marsh, an intensive-care physician who serves as the state’s coronavirus czar, said many people who postponed elective surgeries in the spring, during the initial outbreak, are now taking up some of the hospital capacity. Officials are closely watching the high rate of new infections and know that at some point it might be necessary to stop doing elective surgeries and other procedures that are not urgent, Marsh said. A midsummer spike in infections affected mainly younger adults, but much of the recent surge has been in older people, Marsh said. He said he believes there has been a gradual spread from younger people to their elders, including community spread in houses of worship and in nursing homes. “We’re seeing that covid positivity is moving toward an older population, and we have a very vulnerable older population,” Marsh said. “That’s the population we’ve always been very nervous about.” In Michigan, hospitalizations have jumped 80 percent in recent weeks, causing particular concern in the more rural


high Monday for hospitalizations since the start of the pandemic. Seven other states Monday also set records: Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Mexico, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Montana tied its record. In West Virginia, Clay Marsh, an intensive-care physician who serves as the state’s coronavirus czar, said many people who postponed elective surgeries in the spring, during the initial outbreak, are now taking up some of the hospital capacity. Officials are closely watching the high rate of new infections and know that at some point it might be necessary to stop doing elective surgeries and other procedures that are not urgent, Marsh said. A midsummer spike in infections affected mainly younger adults, but much of the recent surge has been in older people, Marsh said. He said he believes there has been a gradual spread from younger people to their elders, including community spread in houses of worship and in nursing homes. “We’re seeing that covid positivity is moving toward an older population, and we have a very vulnerable older population,” Marsh said. “That’s the population we’ve always been very nervous about.” In Michigan, hospitalizations have jumped 80 percent in recent weeks, causing particular concern in the more rural parts of the state, where some hospitals “are being inundated with patients,” said Gary Roth, chief medical officer for the Michigan Health and Hospital Association. “Are we getting concerned regarding the increasing numbers, the surging of patients coming into the hospitals? Absolutely,” he said. At hospitals across the state, the greatest worry is about health-care workers who have only just begun to recover from the stress of the first coronavirus surge. “One thing that we’ve noticed, particularly in the areas that got hit hard by covid, is it caused a lot of scar tissue for our health-care workers,” said David Wood, chief medical officer at Beaumont Health in southeast Michigan, where hospitals neared capacity during the spring. “Seeing the amount of death in such a short period of time, by what seemed like an entity that we had no defenses against, has made it more difficult to get the health-care workers necessary to want to come back and be back in that same position.” At University of Utah Health in Salt Lake City, the hospital had about 20 covid-19 patients at the end of August. The numbers started rising three to four weeks ago, with 52 covid-19 patients Monday, said


President Trump falsely declares coronavirus is ‘ending’ as virus rates spike and financial markets dip

line is, Donald Trump is the worst possible president, the worst possible person, to try to lead us through this pandemic,” Biden said. “Either he just doesn’t have any idea what to do or just doesn’t care.” Biden condemned Trump’s recent claim that medical professionals are inflating the number of covid-19 cases to “get more money.” “What in the hell is the matter with this man?” Biden exclaimed, noting what he said were the deaths of more than 1,000 health-care workers due to covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. “Mr. President, you have to have a little bit of shame. Just a little bit of shame. Because people are dying.” Biden said he plans travel in the coming week to Iowa, Florida, Wisconsin, Georgia and possibly other states. “I am not overconfident about anything,” he said, when asked about his campaign schedule. “But the big difference about us, the reason it doesn’t look like we are traveling, is we are not putting on superspreaders. We are doing what we are doing here — everybody is wearing a mask and trying as best we can to be socially distanced.” Biden’s latest attacks on Trump’s handling of the virus stemmed from a television interview Sunday in which White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said, “We’re not going to control the pandemic.” Meadows expanded on his remarks Monday by mocking Biden’s purposeful efforts to wear a mask in public, a measure public health experts say could save more than 100,000 American lives in coming months. “The only person waving the white flag along with his white mask is Joe Biden,” Meadows told reporters traveling with the president. “We’re going to defeat the virus. We’re not going to control it. We will try to contain it as best we can.” That argument was rejected Monday by Assistant Secretary for Health Adm. Brett Giroir, a political appointee, who contradicted Meadows in a call with reporters. “I think we can control the pandemic,” he said. “I want to be clear that what we have done, what the American people have done, has been able to put out very significant outbreaks.” He encouraged Americans to keep their distance from each other, wear masks when they can’t stay more than six feet apart and frequently wash their hands. Trump has been inconsistent in his embrace of that advice. At an event in the Oval Office on


Americans’ debts are mounting, putting new focus on Biden’s role opposing bankruptcy protections

27 percent fewer filings in the first 10 years after the law took effect than the decade before it, even despite a wave of bankruptcies triggered by the Great Recession. Researchers attribute the decline to a drop in filings from low-income households and worry they will not seek protections now because of the difficulty of filing. “Too few people file for bankruptcy compared with the number of people who are in debt or [facing] collection or struggling with debt,” said Jialan Wang, assistant professor of finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who co-authored a recent paper looking at the decrease in bankruptcy filings so far during the pandemic. The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 mandated a mountain of new paperwork, including a means test and a credit counseling course. As a result, attorney fees shot up. The cost of an average Chapter 7 bankruptcy rose from about $600 in 2004 to about $1,000 in 2008, researchers at the University of Maine found. Now, bankruptcy experts say, the cost approaches $2,000. Without the ability to rid themselves of debt that bankruptcy affords, low-income debtors suffer larger drops in credit and become more vulnerable to litigation. A 2015 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that people who file for bankruptcy achieve credit scores 40 to 80 points higher than those in a similar financial position who don’t seek bankruptcy. Todd J. Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason University who advocated for the 2005 bill, said the decline in filings after the legislation suggests it succeeded in stopping people from taking advantage of the system. “Prior to the reform, bankruptcy filings went up and up regardless of the business cycle,” Zywicki said. “After bankruptcy reform, bankruptcy filings followed the business cycle.” However, University of Pittsburgh economics professor Stefania Albanesi estimates that a large number of indebted Americans who should have filed for bankruptcy during the Great Recession didn’t because the law created new barriers to doing so, exacerbating the financial distress facing some of the country’s poorest households. Albanesi, who co-authored the New York Fed study, expects another wave of “missing bankruptcies” over the coming months and years. Beginning in the 1990s, business sectors including banks, credit card issuers, department stores and mortgage lenders had been pushing for changes to bankruptcy laws, arguing that the rules allowed individuals to recklessly run up


Paralympian Blake Leeper, ruled ineligible for Olympics, says he’s ‘baffled’ by the decision

runners.” “The problem is, the population that created this formula, when you input my numbers, if you throw that into a formula that was only Caucasians and Asians, I’m going to come out on the back end,” Leeper said. “There are too many variables they didn’t consider.” In theory, after the ruling Leeper could still compete against able-bodied runners with shorter prosthetics. Athletically, Leeper said, it is not a feasible possibility. “If you switched a couple inches — a couple centimeters — it would throw you off,” Leeper said. “I’ve had hours and hours of muscle memory and configurations of running at this height. I’ve been running at this height for 10 years.” Leeper’s height, Kessler said, would have fit World Athletics’ MASH standard before a 2018 rule change. “To suddenly ask him to learn how to re-run at an elite level, it’s not a realistic ask,” Kessler said. “And they know that.” Even in losing the right to compete with his current prosthetics, Leeper landed a legal triumph for other double-amputee runners. At the time Pistorius competed at the Olympics, World Athletics (then known as IAAF) had to prove a disabled runner’s prosthetics gave him an unfair advantage against able-bodied runners. In 2015, it made a small but crucial rule change that shifted the burden: A disabled runner had to prove his prosthetics did not grant an advantage. Leeper’s lawyers argued before CAS that the burden should be on World Athletics. CAS upheld that portion of Leeper’s appeal, which will make it easier for double-amputee runners who want to compete against able-bodied runners in the future. In a statement, Leeper’s lawyers called it “a very important victory for all disabled athletes.” But it did not help Leeper win his appeal. Kessler hopes to take Leeper’s case to the Supreme Court of Switzerland, which can override a CAS arbitration ruling because CAS is based in the country. He believes a decision could come in time for Leeper to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics, rescheduled for July 2021. Leeper has not given up. If his final challenge loses in court, he will still compete in the Tokyo Paralympics. He is clinging to hope that it will not come to that. When he speaks to coaches and other acquaintances about his situation, he finds inspiration. “Hearing the irritation in their voices and how crazy they think the situation is, it gives me


The Health 202: President Trump's predecessors have a mixed record of prepping for a pandemic

amid an outbreak of covid-19 among his staff. While Pence declined to come to the confirmation vote, he has rejected calls to quarantine, visiting Minneapolis on Monday to campaign for Trump. “Months after it raced in successive waves along the nation’s coasts and through the Sun Belt, it is reaching deep into its final frontier — the most sparsely populated states and counties, where distance from others has long been part of the appeal and this year had appeared to be a buffer against a deadly communicable disease,” The Post’s Karin Brulliard writes. Hospitalization rates are straining rural health care in Montana, where active cases have doubled since the beginning of the month. Meanwhile, the National Guard has been deployed to Wyoming to help with contact tracing. Even rural villages in Alaska are seeing unprecedented increases. Some of these areas dodged the early waves of infection, giving them time to stock up on protective equipment and testing supplies. “But with that delay came another risk, others say. As the virus rolls through regions that for months felt relatively sheltered from the disease but not the broader effects of shutdowns and shortages, there is concern that weariness will stymie efforts to stunt the spread,” Brulliard reports. Coronavirus cases are surging across the United States, with new infections nationwide surpassing 80,000 for the first time ever on Friday. Around 40,000 Americans are hospitalized, straining local health systems and renewing talks about rationing care. “At least 27 political appointees have exited the embattled Health and Human Services department since the start of the Covid-19 crisis in February, according to a POLITICO review, and senior leaders are bracing for dozens more officials to depart swiftly if President Donald Trump loses re-election,” Politico’s Dan Diamond reports. An uptick in departures among political staff is common in the lead up to an election, but the people who have left the agency in recent months have been unusually prominent, including the Centers for Disease Control’s chief of staff and the Food and Drug Administration’s top policy official. Staffers are vying for jobs across Washington, and more may leave if Trump loses. “Such a wave of departures would leave only a shell staff shepherding the department through a uniquely challenging winter of coronavirus outbreaks and drug and vaccine authorizations until Inauguration Day on Jan. 20,” Dan writes. Many officials report low morale at HHS and its agencies, the


World champion sprinter Christian Coleman is banned from Tokyo Olympics for missed drug tests

competition pending a hearing. Coleman did not contest that he missed a test in January 2019. He argued that a filing failure in April 2019 and a missed test in December were unfair and owed to mistakes by the AIU. An arbiter heard the case Oct. 9. When AIU announced its suspension in June, Coleman posted a lengthy note on Twitter claiming he had been wronged by the system. He said he was five minutes away from his apartment while Christmas shopping when a tester showed up to his house Dec. 9. Coleman claimed the tester made no attempt to reach him, and he was unaware the tester had come to his house until the next day. But an AIU spokesman at the time said athletes must be prepared for a drug tester to arrive randomly and that testers are instructed not to call athletes. In the arbiter’s report, two testers said they arrived at Coleman’s home in Lexington, Ky., at 7:15 p.m. Dec. 9. Coleman had indicated he would be home that evening, and by rule he had a one-hour window to be tested. The testers said they knocked loudly every 10 minutes for an hour. Coleman insisted that could not be true, because he could remember watching the 8:15 kickoff of a “Monday Night Football” game between the New York Giants and Philadelphia Eagles. The report, though, cited receipts that disputed Coleman having been at his house during the one-hour window. Coleman made a purchase at Chipotle at 7:53 p.m. and bought 16 items at Walmart at 8:22, according to the AIU report. “It would have been simply impossible for him to purchase a chipotle [sic] at 7:53 (the store being 5-9 minutes from his residence), drive home, park the car, go into his residence, eat the chipotle [sic], then watch the kick-off of the football game which only started at 8:15, and thereafter go out again in his car, drive to the store, and pick up 16 items at the Walmart Supercenter so as to be able to pay for them by 8:22 p.m.,” the report reads. While Coleman complained that the testers never called him, AIU rules do not stipulate athletes must be called if not home. Raphaël Roux, an AIU manager for out-of-competition testing, told the arbiter that the AIU instructed testers not to call Coleman because he had missed four tests previously and that


Baltimore museum halts sales of three paintings, including Warhol’s ‘Last Supper,’ just hours before auction

Future was developed to take action — right now, in this moment. Our vision and our goals have not changed. It will take us longer to achieve them, but we will do so through all means at our disposal. That is our mission and we stand behind it.” The museum’s board of trustees approved the action Wednesday after emergency meetings requested by six trustees who worried that the “long-standing community of the BMA support is being irreparably harmed” as opposition to the plan mounted. Since the sales were announced Oct. 2, the BMA has faced growing criticism and community activism, including the call for a state investigation, the resignation of high-profile trustees and the rescinding of $50 million in planned gifts. The museum stood by its decision until hours before the Sotheby’s auction was to begin. The move came after a statement from the Association of Art Museum Directors, a national oversight organization, that clarified the intent of an April move that loosened deaccessioning rules. That temporary measure was “intended to assist museums facing a financial crisis due to the impacts of the pandemic, between April 2020 and April 2022,” the AAMD said Tuesday. The statement did not mention the BMA. “The resolutions were not put in place to incentivize deaccessioning, nor to permit museums to achieve other, non-collection-specific, goals,” wrote Brent Benjamin, president of the AAMD board of trustees and director of the St. Louis Art Museum. “I recognize that many of our institutions have long-term needs — or ambitious goals — that could be supported, in part, by taking advantage of these resolutions to sell art. But however serious those long-term needs or meritorious those goals, the current position of AAMD is that the funds for those must not come from the sale of deaccessioned art.” Fifteen past presidents of the AAMD sent a letter Wednesday to the BMA board in support of Benjamin’s statement, and urged the museum to reconsider the sale. BMA Director Christopher Bedford has repeatedly stated that his museum is not in financial difficulty but faces a moral imperative to address systemic racism and injustice. The museum planned to spend $10 million to acquire art by women and artists of color and $500,000 for immediate equity measures. The remaining $54.4 million would go into an endowment, and the $2 million to $2.5 million in annual interest would support programs to improve equity, diversity and


Man fatally shot in Northwest Washington

A man was fatally shot Tuesday night in Northwest Washington, police said. The incident unfolded around 8:51 p.m. in the 2800 block of Georgia Avenue NW near Columbia Road in the Columbia Heights area, according to D.C. police. Authorities said officers responded to a report of an aggravated assault, and when they arrived they found a man inside a home, suffering from a gunshot wound. He was pronounced dead on the scene. The victim was later identified as Glenn Wright, 25, of Northeast Washington. Police said they are looking for a suspect or suspects and are trying to figure out a motive. The shooting comes as homicides in the District are up more than 15 percent compared with the same time last year. There have been more than 280 homicides this year in the District, Maryland and Virginia, according to a tracking done by The Washington Post. Of those, more than 160 have been in the District, mostly in the Southeast and Northeast parts.


What’s missing from pandemic-era travel? Plenty.

temporarily. The all-you-can-eat hotel breakfast bar — often a showcase of low-quality, unhealthy food — is largely gone. But some travel companies have taken advantage of reduced customer expectations to cut amenities and services unnecessarily, customers say. Ben Julius is unhappy with the service cutbacks. He understands why a hotel might close its buffet, but he believes that companies are using the pandemic as an excuse to reduce service and save money. “I hope that travel brands don’t take too much advantage of this situation,” says Julius, who lives in Tel Aviv and founded a website about travel to Israel. “We need to keep the standards high and provide an even higher level of service to make people comfortable traveling again.” Of course, some of the elements missing from the travel equation are less tangible than all-you-can-eat waffles. “The freedom to go anywhere,” says Shaun Taylor, owner of Moriti Safaris, a specialty safari company based in South Africa. He is not talking about the obvious — the country-by-country restrictions that are keeping many of his visitors home. Even if you could get to Africa, you can’t just wing it once you are on the ground. “People have to carefully choose which attractions to visit,” he says. “The more popular ones are crowded and will have strict attendance limits in place.” Another thing that’s gone: spontaneity. “It’s nonexistent,” says Chloe Gosiewski, a marketing executive from Camberley, England. “Everything has to be planned in advance.” She loves staying in hostels, where she can share a room and get to know the other guests. But the pandemic has removed opportunities to meet random travelers. What was once free-form is now structured and compartmentalized. Perhaps the most important thing we have lost is the ability to connect. “I miss people,” says Thomas Swick, the Fort Lauderdale-based author of “The Joys of Travel: And Stories That Illuminate Them.” “Now, after traveling thousands of miles, we’re still supposed to keep our distance. Gone is the handshake, the touch on the arm — the small gestures that make a traveler feel welcome. Not to mention the smiles lost behind face masks.” Michael Brein, a Bainbridge Island, Wash., psychologist who specializes in travel issues, agrees. Brein says travelers are missing the nonverbal cues that allow them to connect. It is these small interactions, he says, that make travel memorable. “Our biggest loss,” Brein says, “is the human connection.”


Local Digest: Man fatally shot in Northwest Washington

THE DISTRICT A man was fatally shot Tuesday night in Northwest Washington, police said. The incident unfolded around 8:51 p.m. in the 2800 block of Georgia Avenue NW near Columbia Road in the Columbia Heights area, D.C. police said. Authorities said officers responded to a report of an aggravated assault, and when they arrived they found a man inside a home, suffering from a gunshot wound. He was pronounced dead on the scene. The victim was later identified as Glenn Wright, 25, of Northeast Washington. Police said they are looking for a suspect or suspects and are trying to figure out a motive. The shooting comes as homicides in the District are up more than 15 percent compared with the same time last year. There have been more than 280 homicides this year in the District, Maryland and Virginia, according to tracking done by The Washington Post. Of those, more than 160 have been in the District, mostly in the Southeast and Northeast parts. — Dana Hedgpath MARYLAND With the combination of a Dec. 30 deadline and a pandemic likely to extend into 2021, county leaders in the state are asking for additional time to spend federal coronavirus relief money. Executives said they are thinking about a covid-19 resurgence and the regular flu season as well as the continuing health and economic problems that constituents and businesses could face in 2021, the Baltimore Sun reported Wednesday. But with additional relief stalled in Congress, counties acknowledge time is running out to spend the roughly $240 million left from the federal Cares Act passed in March. After announcing a $250 million disbursement from the state’s Rainy Day account to fund relief programs meant to bolster the economy during the pandemic, Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said last week that counties should consider using some of their federal money to match state efforts. Hogan said about two-thirds of the money distributed to 19 of Maryland’s 24 counties remains unspent. He said that unspent money must be returned to the U.S. Treasury. Federal legislation has been introduced that would push the spending deadline back one year to Dec. 31, 2021. — Associated Press VIRGINIA A judge ruled Wednesday that Virginia elections officials cannot count absentee ballots with missing or illegible postmarks unless they can confirm the date of mailing through a bar code, granting an injunction requested by a conservative legal group. The Public Interest


How investors are coming up with the green to save the ocean blue

is an effort to trace the reproductive routes of coral to better inform future rehabilitation efforts. Researcher Jazzy Taberer led a $30,000 study tracking the habits of sicklefin lemon sharks, a vulnerable species in the Indo-Pacific that lives near coral reefs and within mangrove forests. The latter is crucial since mangroves have more resilience against a changing climate than corals do. Identifying the sharks’ preferred habitat during their life cycle boosts the odds of saving the species. “They have a chance,” explained Taberer, a science coordinator with conservation group GVI. “They have a fighting chance.” On the small, rock-strewn island of Curieuse, the grant helped her team catch 20 shark pups, affix acoustic trackers and collect mountains of data on this little-studied species. Securing such funding from other sources “would be exceptionally hard,” she noted. Other investors have gotten involved since the initial deal. In 2018, the World Bank helped the Seychelles issue the world’s first “sovereign blue bond” — a slightly different instrument that serves as a new loan — for $15 million. Prudential Financial, Nuveen and Calvert Impact Capital, which each manage billions of dollars globally, provided $5 million apiece. “The belief is that having a healthier ocean is going to make the government of Seychelles a healthier economy,” said Jenn Pryce, Calvert’s chief executive. “If it succeeds, the impact is huge. The Seychelles has a sustainable economy forever, in theory.” The Nature Conservancy’s effort is only expanding, ambitiously so. Though Weary departed in October — after 22 years, he says he wanted to explore new opportunities for his expertise — he left behind blueprints for a massive scale-up. This winter, the organization hopes to ink the first deals toward its target of generating $1.6 billion for ocean protection around the world. It aspires to negotiate debt-restructuring arrangements, funded by blue bonds, in 20 coastal and island nations within the next five years. It has hired Credit Suisse as its conduit to Wall Street. And to try to reassure those who haven’t previously viewed reefs or sharks as investable assets, the Conservancy plans to combine each bond with an insurance policy provided by the U.S. International Development Finance Corp., a new federal agency created to help U.S. investors compete with Chinese banks abroad. The combination will transform the bonds into a “super safe” opportunity with real impact, Weary said. “There shouldn’t be any difficulty finding investors.” Read more:


The Daily 202: Amid coronavirus, Democrats look for new ways to juice turnout among irregular voters

that says an election should be delayed if a major-party candidate dies, a designation the Pot Party earned by getting more than 5 percent in a state auditor's race. Republicans have sued to postpone the election until next year. Democrats have said it's unconstitutional to do that in a federal election. Three federal judges last week sided with Democrats, allowing the election to go on as scheduled. The Supreme Court opted last night not to take up an appeal by the GOP. “As the Dodgers celebrated their championship on the field, many of them wearing masks, one key figure was missing: Third baseman Justin Turner, the longest-tenured Dodgers position player, had been pulled before the seventh inning after his latest coronavirus test came back positive, a result that arrived midgame. He was immediately put in isolation but was later spotted on the field celebrating with his teammates,” Dave Sheinin and Scott Allen report.“It was the first positive test for a player in more than six weeks, and coming in the middle of the final game of the World Series — it was perhaps a fitting conclusion to a season that at times seemed endangered by the spread of the virus. It also appears baseball barely avoided a messy outcome had the series been extended to a seventh game. And for a while Tuesday night, Game 7 seemed to be a strong possibility. The fact the series never got there was due in large part to the stunning and highly questionable pitching move the Rays made in the bottom of the sixth inning, when they pulled ace Blake Snell from a magnificent performance — a move that backfired immediately when the next two Dodgers hitters, Mookie Betts and Corey Seager, gave Los Angeles the lead." “Peter Berkowitz, the director of policy planning at the State Department, met with senior officials at 10 Downing Street and the Foreign Office in London, and with officials in Budapest and Paris earlier this month. One official said that Berkowitz’s mask-wearing and social distancing practices were lax during the trip and that U.S. embassy staff in Europe expressed some concerns before the trip about him traveling during the pandemic,” John Hudson reports. “Following Berkowitz’s visit to London, British officials have started being more selective about approval of American delegations, officials said. They have postponed an upcoming trip by Elliott Abrams, the U.S. special envoy for Iran


Study abroad programs are letting U.S. students travel again. But it’s not without challenges.

good [coronavirus] guidance, whether they have good testing capability.” Liability issues and logistical concerns may outweigh the positive elements of studying abroad. University of Montana professor Stephen Yoshimura says there is no way he could promise students a fruitful educational experience if he took them overseas at this time. However, when students ask him for advice on studying abroad or request letters of recommendations for study abroad programs, he doesn’t discourage them. “I think everybody should be able to make their own decisions,” he says. “I don’t think that the pandemic situation alone is a reason to not travel, but it is a reason to be exceptionally cautious and mindful of the probable complications of it.” On a recent webinar Yoshimura tuned in to for teachers hosted by EF Tours, a company that runs study abroad programs, the audience was told that travel insurance can be a way to account for coronavirus worries. Students may feel more comfortable having travel insurance to cover things like getting sick abroad, having travel plans canceled or needing to be flown home for care. Jeremy Murchland, the president of the travel insurance and benefit management company Seven Corners, says that while business has been down during the pandemic, study-abroad-related business is doing better than that of general leisure travel. His company created an insurance plan called Liaison Student Plus that covers coronavirus concerns for students and faculty who are traveling abroad to study or work. Before buying any travel insurance, Murchland says travel abroad customers should call a company to discuss what plan they need and exactly what is covered, as policies can be lengthy and intricate. One thing that will not be covered: travel guilt. Ferrari says that even though the experience has been a dream realized, having such incredible happiness during a dark time in history can be conflicting. “2020 has been so challenging and so awful in so many ways for so many people that it almost feels not right to be having that kind of joyful moment,” Ferrari says. “I’m trying to share it with people back home and contribute back to this community in some way.” Read more: A travel group report says flying is safe. The doctor whose research it cited says not so fast. Southwest will start filling middle seats on flights beginning Dec. 1 Owed a refund on an international flight? Here’s how to get it.


Afghan man arrested in 2008 kidnapping of American journalist David Rohde

defender in the case, Najibullah reported that he works as an importer and has homes in Afghanistan and Dubai. He also said he is married with seven children. At one point, Najibullah spoke out of turn asking the judge through a Pashto interpreter if he could be released “by bond,” prompting the judge to call a recess so he could present the question to Mark Gombiner, his Federal Defenders attorney. Gombiner declined to make a bid for bail but said he may consider doing so later. Rohde, now an editor with the New Yorker magazine, made a daring escape from the compound along with another of the hostages, Afghan journalist Tahir Ludin. The third captive, Asadullah Mangal, stayed behind. Rohde wrote a detailed account of their time in captivity months after he returned home. The two other suspects, Zada and Timor Shah, are named in the indictment, but the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan did not say whether their whereabouts are known. Authorities say the suspects forced Rohde and the other captives to make videos in which they begged for help. In one video, Rohde pleaded for his life while Najibullah aimed a machine gun at his face, officials said. The abductors asked Rohde’s family for money in exchange for their release, and pushed the U.S. government to release Taliban prisoners, according to the indictment. Rohde, who in the 1990s was briefly held captive while on a reporting assignment in the Balkans, did not respond to a request for comment. In a 2010 interview, he said the videos were intended to make his family feel responsible for his abduction. “I was never beaten or physically abused,” he said. “. . . But my captors terrorized my family. . . . I told my captors about my reporting in Bosnia, which helped expose the mass executions of thousands of Muslims. I hoped they would see me as an independent journalist and release me. Instead, they thought, ‘You must be worth a lot of money.’ ” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers said in a statement that the Justice Department was committed to seeking justice for Rohde and other journalists facing the dangers of covering conflict internationally. “Journalists risk their lives bringing us news from conflict zones, and no matter how much time may pass, our resolve to find and hold accountable those who target and harm them and


SpaceX swapping out a pair of rocket engines weeks ahead of next astronaut launch

SpaceX said Wednesday that it is swapping out two engines on the rocket scheduled to fly a cadre of astronauts to the International Space Station next month after clogged valves caused a last-second abort on a different Falcon 9 rocket earlier in October. The abort of the mission for the U.S. Space Force prompted SpaceX to inspect its fleet of rockets and led to the discovery of a similar problem in two of the engines of the rocket now scheduled to take three NASA astronauts and one from Japan to the space station Nov. 14. SpaceX had delayed the launch to find the problem. NASA said it is confident that the problem has been fixed, but that there are still several data reviews to come before the launch. The agency said it would authorize SpaceX to fly the mission only if officials were confident the rocket is safe. “I think we see a pretty good path to get to flight, and we’ll fly when we’re ready,” Steve Stich, the manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, told reporters in a news conference Wednesday. “We’re certainly taking the time, and the SpaceX team is committed to flying when we’re ready as well.” The mission for the Space Force was aborted just two seconds before launch after sensors detected an over pressurization inside a couple of engine nozzles. SpaceX crews could find nothing wrong with the engines on the pad, so they took them to a testing facility in Texas, where they discovered that two tiny valve lines were clogged with a lacquer-like substance used to prevent corrosion, said Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX’s vice president of build and flight reliability. The problem forced the engines to start prematurely, but the rocket’s computers detected the problem and forced the shutdown autonomously. SpaceX had to delay a couple of other launches recently because of mechanical issues, and Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and chief executive, said on Twitter he was going to Cape Canaveral to conduct a “broad review” of operations there. “No question, rocketry is tough and requires a lot of attention to detail,” Koenigsmann said. “Rockets are humbling. Every day I work with them, it’s always a challenge and it’s always difficult. And you have to be super diligent and on your toes to get this right.” If the rocket had fired, he said, it would have been what’s called a “hard start,” which he


A Maryland family battled covid-19 at the same time as Trump. It devastated them.

“I’ve been teaching for 16 years,” said her co-teacher, Alan Konlande. “She had different tricks that I had never seen before.” Carol was careful to wear a mask and sanitize her hands, Wilson said. But one day in mid-September she called him to say she wasn’t feeling well and was going to get tested for the coronavirus. She was shocked when it came back positive, he said. Carol told Konlande she had the virus but kept teaching, even as she coughed and sniffled through class. “Our last day working together on Zoom, I just noticed when she turned her head, she didn’t look well,” Konlande recalled. After he repeatedly urged her to take time off, she reluctantly agreed. On Sept. 24, her students emailed her get-well cards. “Dear Ms. Coates, I hope you feel better!” one girl wrote next to a cartoon drawing of a teacher in front of a chalkboard. “We miss you and hope to see you next monday.” “I am so glad i took your advice and took off,” she wrote Konlande that night. “I slept for like 3 days straight. Fever, aches and chills no appetite.” “Keep resting,” he replied. “This is no joke.” “I realize now how serious it is,” she answered, adding that she felt “a little better” and was hoping to return the next week. Friends and family members left food at the top of the basement stairs, including bottles of her favorite orange juice, Florida’s Natural. Two floors up, Dale was also struggling. She had long suffered from arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome, her son said. But now she was so exhausted she could hardly get out of bed. She, too, had tested positive and stayed home from work. Her fiance, Ernest Davis, brought her food and slept on the floor next to her bed. On Sunday, Sept. 27, Dale was so weak that Davis called 911. Her family watched from a distance as she was loaded into an ambulance and taken to Anne Arundel Medical Center. Stuck in the basement, Carol couldn’t even say goodbye. “Is mom back yet?” she texted her brother a few hours later. Doctors were going to keep her at the hospital on fluids and oxygen before releasing her, he replied. “Wow,” she wrote. When Wilson chatted with Carol on FaceTime that evening, she looked as healthy as she had in a couple of days. She was


What school looks like now — in striking pictures from around the world

The hope last spring was that the massive disruption to schooling around the world caused by the coronavirus pandemic would not last long — and by fall 2020 classrooms would be packed with children again, like they have been in the past. That didn’t happen. Virtually nowhere are things back to normal, meaning before covid-19. The pandemic has persisted, and, so in the United States and around the globe, students are going to school in ways they never did before until this year — in their homes; outside; in classrooms wearing masks or not wearing masks, and sitting apart from each other or very close; and sometimes behind plexiglass barriers. Some kids are in school a few hours or a few days a week and spend the rest of the time home, while others never go in, or go in five days a week. Teachers sometimes work from otherwise empty classrooms, giving remote lessons to students not allowed back in school buildings because of covid-19 rates. The statistics are grim: There have been more than 43 million cases of covid-19 worldwide with more than 1.1 million deaths, according to the World Health Organization. In the United States, there have been more than 8.5 million cases of covid-19 — more than half a million in the last week — and more than 225,000 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fears of learning loss are high. Millions of children in the world’s poorest countries have not been back to school since the pandemic started and aren’t expected to ever return, especially girls. In the United States, concerns are highest for the neediest students, those who live in poverty, have special needs and are English Language Learners — but month after month of disrupted education will affect every child. As coronavirus cases are rising in most U.S. states and many countries, educators are still trying to find ways to teach kids. Here are some pictures from around the world that show what school looks like in October 2020 in the grip of the worst pandemic in more than 100 years.


Can Google searches predict where coronavirus cases will soon emerge?

or “loss of taste” right before the first surge in confirmed cases. The peak in searches came about 12 days before the peak in case totals. An important note: Loss of taste and smell weren’t added to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s list of likely symptoms until the end of April. In New Jersey, which was also among the hardest-hit early states, the pattern is the same. You can also see that the recent uptick in the state was matched by a slight increase in searches. The first state in which community spread of the virus was confirmed was California. That state has seen two surges, a small one in the spring and another as part of the summer’s surge focused on Sun Belt states. Again, there’s an increase in searches for loss of taste and smell shortly before the increase in cases. The Google data even seems to reflect the double-peak the state went through, though that may be an artifact of the data. One of the states hit hardest over the summer was Arizona. The state hit its peak in searches for loss of taste and smell shortly before the state hit its peak in new cases. More recently, an increase in new cases was preceded by an increase in searches for those terms. Notice that Arizona had a spike in searches for sensory loss in the spring, mirroring the national data. (States that were harder hit at the outset of the pandemic were also ones where more testing was deployed, helping to explain why there’s less difference between Google searches and cases in New York and New Jersey.) So did Florida, where the summer’s surge was also preceded by a spike in Google searches. In Texas, both the summer surge and its more recent increase in new cases trails increases in searches for losses of taste and smell. This pattern doesn’t hold universally, it’s important to note. In Wisconsin, the recent surge in cases actually preceded an uptick in searches about sensory loss. In other states, the Google search data are too spotty to pick out any trends. In larger states and nationally, though, the correlation is striking. We’ve repeatedly seen increases in searches for information about losing one’s sense of taste or smell shortly before states saw surges in new coronavirus cases. It’s not necessarily causation, but it’s hard to believe that it isn’t.


Why booze matters: Fixing alcohol laws during covid-19

C. Jarrett Dieterle is a senior fellow at the R Street Institute and the author of “Give Me Liberty and Give Me a Drink!” In the age of quarantines and social distancing, most Americans can order a car, a weekly allotment of groceries and a Michelin-star meal to their door. But while all these modern conveniences can be expected to continue well beyond the current pandemic, Maryland and Virginia have so far refused to allow alcohol to join the party. In fact, both are so unwilling to loosen their antiquated booze laws that they risk hamstringing recovering bars and restaurants and keeping employment down in their respective states. Other states and local governments around the country are permanently changing their alcohol laws to help businesses grow and reap more tax revenue during the pandemic — and yes, giving their residents a little liquid relief in these stressful times — but Maryland and Virginia are falling behind. Although both states are allowing to-go cocktails during the pandemic, they have not made these reforms permanent as have numerous other states. Doing so would help badly struggling restaurants and bars stay afloat and allow them to rehire furloughed staff at a higher rate. It’s also a freedom that feels distinctly American in a pandemic occurring simultaneously with the 100th anniversary of Prohibition. But these issues run deeper than just to-go booze. Modernizing alcohol laws can have economy-wide effects. The drinks sector has shown promising job growth in recent years, including producing some of the most manufacturing job gains of any industry. These jobs will be at a particular premium in the months ahead as increasing numbers of Americans find themselves displaced from work. Allowing craft producers additional opportunities to sell their products will grow their businesses and enable them to hire new employees. The craft alcohol boom has also generated record amounts of tax revenue for state and local government coffers over the past decade, and the more the drinks sector grows, the more tax revenue it is able to produce. Updating burdensome alcohol laws could help states plug impending budget gaps caused by the recent economic downturn. Something even simpler is at play for consumers here, too: Maryland is one of only a handful of states that effectively forbids grocery stores from selling beer and wine. Under state law, alcohol retailing licenses are limited to Maryland residents and are not obtainable by


Maryland residents and are not obtainable by chain grocery stores. The result is that things that are an everyday occurrence in D.C. — such as purchasing a six-pack or even sipping a beer while shopping — are unheard of in Maryland. Prohibiting grocery stores from selling alcohol mostly hurts customers, who are forced to add an extra stop to their weekly shopping routines. And unsurprisingly, more than two-thirds of Marylanders would prefer that their state allow grocery stores alcohol sales. Permitting these alcohol sales is also good public policy during the pandemic. When we should be encouraging residents to stay at home, grocery stores are often the entities best equipped to deliver alcohol to our doors — if legally permitted to do so — given that they already have procedures in place for delivering food. Maryland’s alcohol system is also convoluted because it devolves substantial regulatory power to counties. This has allowed locales such as Montgomery County to permit liquor sales only at county-operated stores. Not only are government-run stores a Prohibition-era relic totally at odds with the 21st century, but also the Montgomery County network of liquor stores has become notorious for mishandling orders and losing money. For its part, Virginia maintains its own system of government-run ABC stores that operate in a similar fashion to Montgomery County’s network but on a statewide level. Also similar to Montgomery County’s operation, Virginia ABC stores have remained stubbornly insulated from reform. At a time when consumers can order virtually anything online, it makes little sense that private retailers are not allowed to sell distilled spirits alongside these government stores. Again, private retailers are more likely to be adept at delivering alcohol during a pandemic than government-operated agencies, which usually take much longer to develop new protocols and procedures. Virginia ABC could also pursue other helpful reforms in the short term. During the pandemic, the state has granted craft distilleries the temporary ability to ship to consumers’ homes, but it has refused to make this reform permanent — despite the fact that liquor delivery has long been allowed in nearby D.C. To be sure, Virginia and Maryland lawmakers will have a lot on their plates when they return to session in 2021, but they would be wise to add alcohol reform to the agenda. If they don’t, both states risk missing a rare opportunity to help small businesses and make people happy.


Nebraska football is airing its grievances against the Big Ten, over and over and over

With no room for maneuvering and novel coronavirus cases spiking throughout the country (especially in its Midwest stronghold), it was inevitable that the Big Ten’s compressed 2020 football schedule would encounter some bumps. The conference got in all of one weekend of games before that inevitability became reality: On Wednesday, Wisconsin canceled Saturday’s game at Nebraska amid a spike in positive coronavirus tests among team personnel, including Coach Paul Chryst and, reportedly, quarterbacks Graham Mertz and Chase Wolf. Also inevitable: Nebraska officials and fans would gripe about it. The most prominent airing of recent grievances took the form of a Twitter poll posted Wednesday night by the account of Nebraska’s official radio network. The poll, which was deleted after hours of online existence, asked “if the roles were reversed and the #Huskers had 6 players and 6 staff members sitting out with positive tests, would the game be played Saturday?” The question suggested the Big Ten has it out for Nebraska and was allowing Wisconsin, a member of the conference’s old guard, to duck out of Saturday’s matchup even though Wisconsin Athletic Director Barry Alvarez admitted Wednesday that the Badgers’ positive-test rate did not meet Big Ten metrics for cancellation. (The conference requires teams to pause football activities for seven days if 5 percent of its player tests come back positive and more than 7.5 percent of essential personnel test positive, based on seven-day averages.) Instead, Alvarez and Wisconsin Chancellor Rebecca Blank decided themselves to cancel the game, without consulting anyone in the Big Ten. Alvarez said Wednesday that he “had the prerogative to make the decision.” The Nebraska radio network’s poll was extremely on brand for the Cornhuskers and their supporters, who have been nurturing a persecution complex for months now. They griped in August, when the Big Ten initially announced it was postponing its football season. Coach Scott Frost said the program was “prepared to look for other options” if the Big Ten wasn’t going to be playing, and eight Cornhuskers players filed a lawsuit against the conference over its decision to postpone. They griped one month later, when the Big Ten reversed course and decided to play and Nebraska had to open the season against conference powerhouses Ohio State and Wisconsin. Athletic Director Bill Moos told the Omaha World-Herald that he didn’t “want to come across as the champion complainer” while also saying: “Nebraska is playing five


Thanksgiving vs. ‘pandemic fatigue.’ Experts warn against letting your guard down against covid-19 during the holiday.

probably more than any other holiday, typically produces large multigenerational gatherings — parents, grandparents, children grandchildren, college kids on break — many traveling by air — and with everyone kissing and hugging everyone else. “It’s the most Norman Rockwell of all the holidays,” says William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University. “It is the one holiday that is totally family oriented.” And it’s enough to make public health experts shudder. “It’s a perfect storm,” Schooley says. “You have multiple generations of families, young people who have been out and about and exposed, and older people who have been sequestered. You have little kids. You have people traveling extensively to be together for a prolonged period of time in a packed dining room having a meal. It’s a feast for the virus.” This year, the Faucis will not be hosting their three grown daughters, who live in different parts of the country, and who decided to stay away to safeguard their father. Fauci’s age — he will be 80 in December — puts him in danger of severe covid-19 disease. Instead, the family will get together for an hour on Zoom, Fauci says. “They are very careful, but they would have to fly to get here,” says Fauci, who has become the nation’s most recognized authority on the pandemic. “How would they know if they got infected on the plane? They thought it best this way. This was a decision driven by my children. They are very protective of me.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a public warning Think carefully about family members — their ages and any underlying medical conditions — and the potential risk of mixing them with young adults or children who haven’t been sequestering, experts say. And be cautious when it comes to little children. “They can hug their grandparents only around the waist, but no kissing,” Schaffner says. “And don’t stay close.” Keep the group as small as possible. “I don’t think people should have as large a gathering as they might otherwise have had,” says Andrew Badley, an immunovirologist and head of the Mayo Clinic’s covid-19 task force. “It should not be a broad invite list. It should only be people you know and trust, and who you believe are taking responsible measures to reduce risk.” And forget about Black Friday. “This isn’t the right time to stampede through


As the novelty of Zoom wears off, classical music reluctantly embraces its new virtual reality

to hear this music was a way of completing it — and ensuring that the only observers weren’t ones mounted to tripods. Hi-def cameras and high-speed connections are crucial elements of keeping audiences and performers engaged as the pandemic drags on (and picks up), but Kendall, like many other artists, fears that distance-listening may become the norm. “I’m very interested in alternative forms, and the kinds of creative work that a lot of young musicians are doing with new forms,” he says. “On the other hand, I have a real sense of foreboding about the erosion of stable arts institutions in our culture. It feels like there’s a sort of a parallel transformation happening in these different domains.” If the response to first seven months of the pandemic was a wave of Zoom choruses and stopgap measures, the next stage seems to be about a reluctant acceptance of the virtual, and a reexamination of what that means for the actual. Look around at other local institutions and you’ll see this transformation underway, as orchestras and ensembles undergo a mass pivot to video, with a wide variety of approaches. The National Philharmonic recently announced an entirely virtual 2020-2021 season of Sunday afternoon concerts broadcast from Strathmore Music Center and AMP by Strathmore. The Washington Chorus first surfaced after the lockdown with a Zoom-based talk show on YouTube, and on Nov. 14 it will premiere “Cantata for a More Hopeful Tomorrow,” a short music film from composer Damien Geter and Emmy-winning filmmaker Bob Berg. And this week, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra announced 27 more episodes of its BSO Sessions docuseries, which mixes high-def performance footage with an intriguing backstage view of how the orchestra is navigating, well, everything. This is a tricky time to be a listener: Are you hearing the music or the media that brought it to you? It’s also a tricky time to be a critic: What am I experiencing by watching what I’m missing? And it’s well beyond a tricky time to be an artist: What are you making when what you make must be made into something else? Composer David T. Little is addressing the problem of how people see his work by changing how he sees it himself. Since the pandemic hit, he has been revisiting operas he composed years ago and adapting them into short films. Little recently retrofitted his 2010 comic opera, “Vinkensport, or


Galileo’s famous gravity experiment holds up, even with individual atoms

tube under vacuum. As the atoms rose and fell, both varieties accelerated at essentially the same rate, the researchers found. In confirming Galileo’s gravity experiment yet again, the result upholds the equivalence principle, a foundation of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity. That principle states that an object’s inertial mass, which determines how much it accelerates when force is applied, is equivalent to its gravitational mass, which determines how strong a gravitational force it feels. The upshot: An object’s acceleration under gravity doesn’t depend on its mass or composition. So far, the equivalence principle has withstood all tests. But atoms, which are subject to the strange laws of quantum mechanics, could reveal its weak points. “When you do the test with atoms . . . you’re testing the equivalence principle and stressing it in new ways,” physicist Mark Kasevich of Stanford University says. Kasevich and colleagues studied the tiny particles using atom interferometry, which takes advantage of quantum mechanics to make extremely precise measurements. During the atoms’ flight, the scientists put the atoms in a state called a quantum superposition, in which particles don’t have one definite location. Instead, each atom existed in a superposition of two locations, separated by up to seven centimeters. When the atoms’ two locations were brought back together, the atoms interfered with themselves in a way that precisely revealed their relative acceleration. Many scientists think that the equivalence principle will eventually falter. “We have reasonable expectations that our current theories . . . are not the end of the story,” says physicist Magdalena Zych of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, who was not involved with the research. That’s because quantum mechanics — the branch of physics that describes the counterintuitive physics of the very small — doesn’t mesh well with general relativity, leading scientists on a hunt for a theory of quantum gravity that could unite these ideas. Many scientists suspect that the new theory will violate the equivalence principle by an amount too small to have been detected with tests performed thus far. But physicists hope to improve such atom-based tests in the future, for example by performing them in space, where objects can free-fall for extended periods of time. An equivalence principle test in space has already been performed with metal cylinders, but not yet with atoms. So there’s still a chance to prove Galileo wrong. — Science News magazine


A youth-led climate group is campaigning for Biden. If he wins, the honeymoon will be short.

a ban on the controversial oil and gas extraction technique, as many left-leaning climate activists do. “That kind of rhetoric is really disappointing,” Sedall said. "It’s frustrating. It’s infuriating. All those feelings.” Yet Biden has moved to the left. In July, he bolstered his plan to fight climate change by setting a new goal of completely cutting emissions from power plants by 2035. The timeline matched one proposed by a climate task force that was convened by the campaign and included Sunrise’s executive director, Varshini Prakash. “I’ve been really happy to see the ways that he and his campaign have, at least on paper, listened to activists," said Robby Phillips, a 19-year-old sophomore at Duke University who is working for Sunrise, before adding: "It’s still not fully enough.” Biden, at times, has also adopted Green New Deal backers’ rhetoric about solving climate change being a buoy, not an anchor, on the economy. “When I think about climate change,” he said when unveiling this climate plan, “the word I think of is ‘jobs.’ ” In an acknowledgement that it needs to do more to reach young people, the Biden campaign put together a committee specifically to motivate voting-age teens and 20-somethings to go to the polls for a candidate three or four times their age. “This is a turnout election,” said billionaire activist Tom Steyer during an Oct. 8 meeting of the campaign’s Climate Engagement Advisory Council. “When young people vote, when you vote, you change everything for the better.” In the week leading up to Election Day, the campaign is airing a 30-second spot on Comedy Central and Adult Swim, both of which cater to 18-to-34-year-olds. The animated ad mocks some of Trump’s more ridiculous claims about the climate. (“It’ll start getting cooler, you just watch.”) Biden’s favorability has crept up by 22 percentage points among likely young voters since March, when he locked down the nomination, according to the Harvard survey. Sunrise says its goal is bigger than Biden. It is to reorient the entire project of government around climate change — and make solving it an electoral winner, as the New Deal was for Franklin D. Roosevelt. To that end, Sunrise’s ranks have swelled, nearly doubling since July as it recruits new supporters while campaigning for Biden. But working for Sunrise is just not the same as it was at the beginning of the year, when Sanders still


Artificial intelligence and covid-19: Can the machines save us?

Genetic testing. Interventions attempted. Outcomes. Now, nearly 10 months into the outbreak, scientists are starting to make connections in this jumble of letters and numbers with the help of artificial intelligence, leading to new theories about the virus and how to stop it. While the human brain can process only so much information at a time, machines are whizzes at finding subtle patterns in huge amounts of data, and they are being deployed against covid-19 — the disease caused by the coronavirus — in ways only imagined in the past. Data scientists are aiming AI at some of the coronavirus’s biggest mysteries — why the disease looks so different in children vs. adults, what makes some people “superspreaders” while others don’t transmit the virus at all — and other, lesser questions we have made little headway in understanding. At Northwestern University, a modeling lab is running large-scale simulations on the effects of travel restrictions and social distancing on infection rates. The U.S. Energy Department’s Argonne National Laboratory is using AI to home in on the most promising molecules to test in the lab as possible treatments. In Egypt, AI is helping counter coronavirus misinformation in Arabic. Jason Moore, director of the Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania, who is helping put together an international covid-19 data consortium, said that if the virus had hit 20 years ago, the world might have been doomed. “But I think we have a fighting chance today because of AI and machine learning,” he said. In April, a computer sorting through medical records confirmed that a lack of smell and taste, which had been reported mostly anecdotally, was one of the earliest symptoms of infection — a discovery that influenced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to add anosmia to its list of symptoms. In June, a deep dive into the records of nearly 8,000 patients found that while only a small fraction had obvious and catastrophic blood clots, nearly all had worrisome changes in their blood coagulation. Other researchers piggybacked on Venkatakrishnan’s finding of the aberrant genetic sequence to understand how the virus binds to cells, and to use that knowledge to develop drugs that aim to reduce transmission. In a follow-up paper published in September, Venkatakrishnan and his colleagues reported that a computer analysis showed this “evolutionary tinkering” by coronavirus, which appears to have made it appear like


live.” Celi said that an AI analysis of covid-19 mortality data, under review at a journal, shows that ventilator and bed allocation plans in many states do not accurately predict who might benefit most from treatment. He is urging states and hospitals to rework those plans for a second wave of the pandemic, with an eye toward minimizing biases. Moore, the Penn bioinformatics expert, has similar concerns about analyses on the efficacy of therapies. “If you’re only studying primarily Caucasian populations and want to apply that nationally, that may not work as well on a more diverse population,” he said. “AI algorithms themselves can be biased, and can pick and inflate biases in the data. Those are the things I worry about.” Cambridge, Mass.-based Nference is made up of 250 computer programmers, PhDs in medical or biological sciences, and other specialists. Before the pandemic, the company, which raised nearly $145 million from venture capital funds and other investors, had secured partnerships with several prestigious institutions — most prominently the Mayo Clinic and Janssen Pharmaceuticals — to help them manage and analyze their medical data. The company’s previous focus was cancer. But since April, it has made headlines for its work on covid-19. In peer-reviewed publications, the team has confirmed reports out of Britain that steroid use could be effective in treating severely impacted covid-19 patients experiencing respiratory distress. It found that a small percentage of people might be long-term “shedders” of the virus — for up to 22 days. And it identified existing childhood vaccines that may provide some protection against covid-19 infection. It has also partnered with Minnesota state to develop a way to predict covid-19 hot spots so that public health resources such as test sites could be better deployed. In addition to clinical data, the company is analyzing 50,000 public documents from academic journals, filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other public sources of data on covid-19 — many multiples of what the average researcher can follow and digest. Venky Soundararajan, co-founder of Nference and a biological engineer, said that seeing the scope of the information gathered on covid-19 makes him hopeful and appreciative that so many minds around the world — both human and artificial — are working on the problem. “It makes you very humble very quickly,” he said. “What you know is only an atom in the universe of what’s out there.”


So, while we’re waiting . . . will Mike Pence ever be president?

Olivia Troye remembers a time when she wished Mike Pence were president. Troye, a Department of Homeland Security official, had been working with the vice president on the coronavirus task force. He had impressed her: working hard, staying late, speaking to Democratic governors about the need to keep politics out of the government’s response to the deadly pandemic. “Once I said to him, ‘I wish it was you in the Oval Office. It would be a lot different,’ ” she says. It was more a commentary on President Trump’s poor leadership than an endorsement of Pence, but still — “It was pretty blunt,” she says. “He stayed quiet and did the Mike Pence smile, a smile he has when he is just genuinely being himself.” Pence’s ability to just be himself, however, has been greatly hampered by being Trump’s wingman. The president has undermined his government’s public-health message by contradicting its scientists, sowing doubt about mask-wearing and social distancing and claiming that the virus was mostly harmless and forever on the brink of disappearing. For his part, Pence wrote an infamous newspaper op-ed declaring there would be “no second wave” of the novel coronavirus. That was four months and 100,000 deaths ago. Cases were spiking at that time and now are spiking again. The White House has been the site of several outbreaks — including, most recently, a rash of infections among Pence’s own staff. “I watched him try to do the right thing,” says Troye. “But also constantly have to pivot to stay in the good graces of the president. He was still trying to remain on the ticket, that’s reality.” Troye left in August and has since become a vocal critic of the administration; Pence has responded by dismissing her a “disgruntled” former employee. “I wouldn’t trust anything Olivia Troye tells you,” said Pence spokeswoman Katie Miller. Watching the 2020 campaign from afar, Troye sees a different kind of smile on Pence’s face. He flashed that smile recently during a standoff with Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes”; the vice president, in an act of hostile politesse, refused to answer her questions and instead issued a weak but unrelenting stream of campaign-trail pablum in the manner of a garden hose attached to a tap someone left open by accident. He has worn the smile on rally stages across the country when he “brings greetings” from the president. That he’s


From Prince George’s County to a Nobel Peace Prize

calls an “office in a box," perished in March 2019 in the Boeing 737 crash in Ethiopia that killed more than 20 people affiliated with the United Nations, including seven from WFP. Colin tells me that in addition to the exhilaration that he and his colleagues feel at having won this prestigious award, there is also a sense of disbelief and unworthiness. There are so many people working so hard around the world to help vulnerable people. Why choose the WFP? Perhaps because, as the Nobel Committee noted in making the award, it does the challenging work of trying to end the use of “hunger as a weapon of war.” So many ordinary things are weaponized that those of us who live securely do not know or see what others around the world endure — or die trying to endure. And so in winning the Nobel, WFP has a chance to educate, inspire and, yes, humble us. I certainly feel humbled knowing that the little boy I so adored has become a man I can only try to emulate. In 2019, WFP provided food assistance to nearly 100 million people in the more than 80 countries where it works. Eighty percent of WFP resources were focused on people living in conflict environments. By 2030, it is estimated that nearly half of the global poor will be living in fragile and conflict-affected situations. Prince George’s County, where I grew up, has produced its share of basketball phenoms and politicians and geniuses (witness the founders of Google, one of whom went to Roosevelt, too). But peacemakers? We surely can count many of those in the ranks of former and current Peace Corps workers and other humanitarians. And a Nobel Peace Prize winner? I will have to do some research on that. Lesson learned: When I feel overwhelmed reading about the day’s news, I remember that millions of people around the world have no say in living through it. Watch Opinions videos: Read more: José Andrés: Our people are hungry. We need a leader who will feed them. David M. Beasley: Covid-19 could detonate a ‘hunger pandemic.’ With millions at risk, the world must act. Mark Leon Goldberg: Why the WHO deserves the Nobel Peace Prize José Andrés: How we’ve served 1 million meals to Hurricane Dorian survivors in the Bahamas Christine Emba: Foreign aid as a cash-only transaction? It’s worth a try.


Saudi crown prince girds for legal battle in a changing Washington over human rights allegations

litigants and lawyers have to address egregious conduct by authoritarian regimes.” The firm’s new human rights practice will assist corporations with independent investigations, crisis response, international negotiations and global business reviews, as well as litigate for individuals. Earlier this year, the firm also added another former U.S. diplomat, Lee S. Wolosky, and attorney Douglass Mitchell, who together previously succeeded in freezing more than $2 billion in Iranian assets to enforce court judgments for the benefit of terrorism victims. “Doug is the nation’s foremost lawyer in enforcing U.S. terrorism judgments abroad and is experienced litigating cases against banks under the Anti-Terrorism Act,” Wolosky said. “More generally, he is an exceedingly experienced and talented trial lawyer.” “You have to be willing to treat gross human rights abuses with the attention they deserve and use instruments in this country that have been established to protect our rights and our democracy and defend our values,” Pressman said. “That’s not only a responsibility of human rights activists, but also of companies doing business in the world, where they have exposures to abuses.” Aljabri asserted in a complaint filed Aug. 6 that the Saudi leader orchestrated a conspiracy to kill him in Canada that parallels one that resulted in the death of Khashoggi, the dissident Saudi columnist and Washington Post contributor. The CIA has assessed that Mohammed probably ordered Khashoggi’s killing himself, The Post previously reported. Since March, Saudi authorities have arrested and held one of Aljabri’s sons, Omar, 22, and a daughter, Sarah, 20, the lawsuit alleges. Aljabri’s brother has also been arrested, and other relatives detained and tortured in and out of Saudi Arabia, the lawsuit asserts, “all in an effort to bait [Aljabri] back to Saudi Arabia to be killed.” Cengiz and Democracy for the Arab World Now claimed in their lawsuit that Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi Consulate in Turkey to obtain documents that would allow him to marry pursuant to a directive by Mohammed to “permanently silence” his advocacy for democratic reform in the Arab world. Saudi officials have asserted that Khashoggi’s death was a tragic accident, carried out by rogue agents who disobeyed orders to persuade Khashoggi to return to the kingdom. The kingdom prosecuted people it said were Khashoggi’s killers in a trial broadly criticized by human rights groups, which noted that court sessions were closed to the public and that no senior officials were held to account.


Saved by the whale: Runaway train caught by fateful sculpture

A fatefully placed whale sculpture in the Netherlands saved a careening train from certain devastation Monday, catching the lead runaway metro carriage on the graceful arc of its mammoth tail. The improbable incident unfolded at the De Akkers metro station in Spijkenisse just after midnight. Photos from the scene suggest that the train, part of the Rotterdam Metro network, had been unable to stop as it reached its terminus and overran the track. Rather than fall more than 30 feet to the ground, the train was brought to a stop by one of two whale tail sculptures at the end of the track. The driver of the train was able to escape. He visited a hospital as a precautionary measure, according to local media reports. Dutch emergency services have told reporters there were no other passengers aboard. The artwork’s official name, “Saved by the Whale’s Tail,” now seems apt. Made out of plastic and installed in 2002, its designer seemed surprised it could hold a moving train. “It has been there for almost 20 years,” architect Maarten Struijs told NOS. “You actually expect the plastic to disintegrate a bit, but that apparently is not the case.” Struijs told the Dutch broadcaster that the event was a “miracle” and that he was impressed by how artistic the train looked on his creation. “I’ll make sure that I get a few photos,” Struijs said. The architect is not alone in admiring the unusual sight. Photos from social media suggest that the crash has become a point of interest for curious locals. Experts said it was unclear why the train had not been stopped by automatic buffers at the end of the track. “I don’t understand how this can happen,” Rob Goverde, professor of rail traffic engineering at TU Delft, told Algemeen Dagblad. "Apparently something went wrong technically, possibly combined with human error.” Authorities must now figure out how to remove the train from its perch. It is not clear how long the plastic structure can support the carriage, but lifting the train could prove difficult, as the track lies directly above water. Dutch emergency services said that a group of experts had arrived at the scene on Monday to see if the train needed to be secured before removal. “Given the complexity [of the task], this will take some time,” a website for Rijnmond emergency services warned, adding that people visiting the


Getting to the polls can be hard in Navajo Nation. This woman is leading voters on horseback.

Allie Young saddled up, slid her feet into stirrups and started on a two-hour trail through her homeland of Navajo Nation, with a group of eager early voters in tow. They were heading to the polls on horseback. There are only a few available polling stations for Navajo voters, many of whom have limited access to transportation. Frustrated by the barriers that discourage voting among Indigenous people, Young, 30, hatched a plan. She started “Ride to the Polls” in early October, hoping to empower Native American youth to vote in the 2020 election while connecting with their cultural heritage. She leads groups on horseback along a 10-mile route from Church Rock in Navajo County to the polling stations in Kayenta, Ariz. The Navajo Nation spans 27,000 square miles, and occupies portions of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Horseback riding is common in the community. Young led a group of 15 Navajo voters on horseback on Oct. 20, most of whom range in age from 18 to 30. When they arrived at the polling station, they were met by a crowd of Native American people who were there to cast their ballots, too, after hearing about Ride to the Polls through social media and word of mouth. Before saddling up, Young’s mother carefully tied a traditional Diné sash around her waist and outfitted her in customary beaded jewelry. “I am doing this to honor our ancestors who fought for our right to vote, so I wanted to wear traditional clothes,” Young said. Native American communities historically have faced barriers and inconveniences in the voting process that discourage them from voting. They were not given voting rights in every U.S. state until 1962, and have had problems since, including in the 2018 midterm elections, when many tribal ID cards were deemed invalid. Today, poor access to voter registration offices and polling stations, limited transportation and excessive mail delays, among other logistical hurdles, makes voting in the U.S. election burdensome for many in tribal communities. Complicating matters, some in the community live miles from their closest neighbor and do not have a mailbox or street address. But Native Americans potentially have the political force to shift the outcome of the election, particularly in Arizona. There are 67,000 eligible Navajo voters in the swing state, and their vote could prove pivotal in the polls. OJ Semans, co-executive director of Four Directions, a nonpartisan organization


As Election Day approaches, many Americans abroad are grateful for the distance

The past four years have not always been an easy time to be an American overseas, and the run up to the 2020 presidential election is no exception. International approval of the United States, according to a Pew survey of 13 countries, has spiraled to the lowest levels since the organization began tracking it. The trend has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. response to which has alarmed experts around the world and ground much international travel to a standstill, disrupting the lives of those split between countries. The chaotic election season has stoked perceptions of decline. A half-dozen Americans based outside the United States told The Washington Post that a defining aspect of life abroad in recent times has been watching attitudes toward America shift. Yet they expressed a degree of happiness to be overseas for the election, watching from afar as fraught politics destroy friendships and strain families. Those interviewed expressed relative investment in the election, echoing a broader trend: The U.S. Vote Foundation, a nonprofit voter assistance organization, told The Post that it had received a higher-than-normal influx of queries, as voters fret over making sure their ballots get counted amid consular disruptions and postal slowdowns. According to a report by Vice, nearly every state expects to see a year-over-year spike in turnout among overseas voters, typically a disengaged demographic. Donald and Maria Williams, 77 and 78, who have voted in every U.S. presidential election since they retired and moved from Arkansas to Mexico 14 years ago, said they were especially worried that their vote would get lost or fail to arrive in time. Normally, the couple would submit their ballots by means of a diplomatic pouch organized by the U.S. Consulate, bound for Washington, to be sent on via the U.S. Postal Service to their polling place in Little Rock. Not this year. “We just didn’t trust what was going on with the Postal Service,” Donald Williams told The Post from their home in the town of Tizapan el Alto. Instead, they drove some 50 miles to the nearest FedEx store, in Guadalajara. Many Americans overseas share their worries. The coronavirus pandemic has spurred a heightened demand for absentee ballots, a burden for the U.S. Postal Service, which has seen delays and errors in delivering ballots to polling places. Although President Trump has alienated many Mexicans over the past four years, according to surveys


The Health 202: Obamacare marketplaces survived Trump's term better than expected

and Dupree write. “The truth is that mortality rates have improved, but the accelerating spread of the virus is driving up the absolute numbers of deaths.” There's a spot of good news: Improved techniques for treating patients and new therapeutics have led to better outcomes for hospitalized patients. A recent study of more than 5,000 patients from researchers at NYU Langone Health found the death rate dropped from 25.6 percent in March to 7.6 percent in August. Nationally, the daily death toll remains below that seen in the initial spring wave of the pandemic, when more than 2,200 people were dying each day on average. But the trend is grim. A mashup of models being used by the Centers for Disease Control forecasts 248,796 total deaths by the end of the month, with more than 6,000 deaths a week until then. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, has expressed skepticism about the possibility of accurately predicting the death toll, but he said that he expects to see an increase in deaths over the fall and winter. “You know, our doctors get more money if somebody dies from covid. You know that, right?” Trump told a rally in Waterford Township, Mich., on Friday. “I mean, our doctors are very smart people ... so what they do is they say, 'I'm sorry, but, you know, everybody dies of covid.’ ” “Medical groups, including the American Medical Association, denounced Trump's assertion that doctors inflate the number of deaths. AMA President Susan Bailey called Trump's claim ‘malicious, outrageous and completely misguided’,” USA Today’s John Fritze reports. According to Johns Hopkins University, 230,000 people have died in the United States of covid-19. Data on excess deaths show even more striking numbers: Nearly 300,000 more people have died during the coronavirus pandemic than would be expected in a typical year. “To imply that emergency physicians would inflate the number of deaths from this pandemic to gain financially is offensive, especially as many are actually under unprecedented financial strain as they continue to bear the brunt of covid-19," the American College of Emergency Physicians said on Friday. “Doctors and nurses go to work every day to save lives. They do their jobs. Donald Trump should stop attacking them and do his job," Biden told a drive-in rally in Minnesota on Friday. Ashish K. Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health: Emergency room physician


How to beat the covid blues

Regarding the Oct. 29 news article “Gloom settles over Europe as days darken, virus surges”: European nations are imposing shutdowns in the face of increasing novel coronavirus cases. Here, we are also seeing a rise in cases. No one was prepared for the first lockdown, but now we know what to expect, and there’s a short time to prepare. Get out there and stock up on craft supplies, books, games, exercise equipment. You read every book in your house and played every game till you’re sick of it? Get your local organization to hold a free book swap, then a craft swap, and a board-game and exercise-equipment swap. Gotten out of shape? Make neighborhood exercise buddies: “I’ll knock on your door at 9 a.m., then walk up the steps. You follow 10 steps behind. If I don’t show up, you check on me.” Cooking buddies: “I’ll bake a new recipe and drop off Monday. You do the same on Friday. Again, if you don’t show up, I’ll check on you.” Redeem this time. Jean Taylor Read more letters to the editor.


Coronavirus caseload sets record in Virginia as infections jump across D.C. region

recording 148 new infections for each 100,000 residents. Neil J. Sehgal, assistant professor of health policy and management at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, said the rising caseloads aren’t a surprise to health officials. He said people want a sense of normalcy, which is leading to more behaviors conducive to the virus spreading. “People have relaxed their vigilance,” he said. “The virus doesn’t relax in the same way we do.” Sehgal also voiced concerns about family and social gatherings during the holidays, as well as the increase in travel during that period. He said any travel will bring an additional risk of contracting the virus, and urged residents to follow the same basic health precautions in place for months. “Ten days afterwards, we will know how vigilant people were,” he said. D.C. health officials on Monday added three states to the city’s list of locations considered “high-risk” for travel because of the pandemic, raising the number of states under the designation to 42. The growing number of states on the city’s travel advisory means 9 in 10 residents of the country would be required to isolate before nonessential travel in the nation’s capital. A state is considered high-risk if its seven-day rolling average of new cases is 10 or more per 100,000 people. Under an order from Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), anyone who comes to the city from a high-risk state for nonessential reasons must self-isolate for two weeks. Those who arrive in D.C. from one of the states for essential purposes are asked to monitor for symptoms for two weeks. No states were removed from the list Monday, but California, Oregon and New Jersey were added, while Maryland and Virginia remain exempt from the order. About 296 million Americans — roughly 90 percent of the population — live in states that are included in the city’s travel advisory. New York is by far the most populous state not included in the advisory. The greater Washington region Monday recorded seven additional deaths and 1,945 new coronavirus cases — ending a six-day streak with daily caseloads surpassing the 2,000 mark. Virginia added 1,026 cases and three deaths, Maryland added 850 cases and three deaths, and D.C. added 69 cases and one death. Despite the rise in caseloads, the rate of virus-related deaths has held relatively steady since July. Hospitalizations have ticked upward slightly in recent days. erin.cox@washpost.com