U.S. reports first person-to-person transmission of new coronavirus

Health officials reported the first U.S. case of person-to-person transmission of the new coronavirus Thursday as the World Health Organization set in motion a global effort to fight the outbreak by declaring it a public health emergency. Late Thursday, the State Department also issued a “do not travel” advisory for China. That warning level — the department’s highest — had previously been in force only for the province where the outbreak began. State and federal officials said the sixth infected person in the United States is married to the Chicago-area woman who contracted the virus when she traveled to Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the outbreak. The unidentified man, who is in his 60s, has been isolated in the same suburban hospital as his wife since Tuesday, when he began exhibiting symptoms consistent with the early stages of the virus, including fever, coughing and shortness of breath, officials said. Officials suspect he picked up the virus in the couple’s home while his wife was symptomatic, according to Jennifer Layden, state epidemiologist for the Illinois Department of Public Health. The woman, who was identified last week as the second U.S. case, has been hospitalized since and is doing well, Layden said. Her husband has not attended mass gatherings, Ngozi Ezike, director of the state health department, said in a news briefing. “The virus is not spreading widely across the community,” she added. Officials are tracing the people who came in contact with the new patient but are not recommending any new precautions by others, Ezike said. Around the globe, however, and particularly in China, the respiratory illness caused by the newly identified virus continued on a widening, destructive path that increased public anxiety. The virus had killed 213 people — all of them in China — and infected more than 9,700 as of Friday. About 90 cases have been recorded outside China — including the first two in Italy, both Chinese tourists, according to news reports. Airlines are cutting or completely canceling flights to China, a nation of 1.4 billion people, and some businesses have begun preparing for a possibly extended slowdown in operations and sales there. The union representing 15,000 American Airlines pilots sued the company to halt the carrier’s U.S.-China service, citing “serious, and in many ways still unknown, health threats posed by the coronavirus.” The WHO criticized such actions, urging countries against imposition of trade or travel barriers.


Her husband has not attended mass gatherings, Ngozi Ezike, director of the state health department, said in a news briefing. “The virus is not spreading widely across the community,” she added. Officials are tracing the people who came in contact with the new patient but are not recommending any new precautions by others, Ezike said. Around the globe, however, and particularly in China, the respiratory illness caused by the newly identified virus continued on a widening, destructive path that increased public anxiety. The virus had killed 213 people — all of them in China — and infected more than 9,700 as of Friday. About 90 cases have been recorded outside China — including the first two in Italy, both Chinese tourists, according to news reports. Airlines are cutting or completely canceling flights to China, a nation of 1.4 billion people, and some businesses have begun preparing for a possibly extended slowdown in operations and sales there. The union representing 15,000 American Airlines pilots sued the company to halt the carrier’s U.S.-China service, citing “serious, and in many ways still unknown, health threats posed by the coronavirus.” The WHO criticized such actions, urging countries against imposition of trade or travel barriers. It also called for the world community to combat misinformation about the outbreak and accelerate vaccine development. The global health agency urged Chinese health authorities to take a range of measures, in addition to the travel restrictions already imposed on 50 million people in central China’s Hubei province. It asked China to collaborate with the WHO and others to conduct investigations; share full data on all of its cases; keep people informed about the evolution of the outbreak and protection measures the government has taken; boost efforts to identify the animal source of the outbreak; and conduct exit screening at international airports and ports so travelers with symptoms can be identified and treated. The WHO cannot enforce its recommendations, but countries are under political pressure to follow them. Public health officials and experts have criticized China for not sharing crucial data about patients, including when they became ill. That information is needed to learn more about the evolution of the outbreak, which would help officials control its spread. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus nevertheless praised China’s efforts to contain the outbreak. “Let me be clear: This declaration is not a vote of no confidence in China,” he said. “On the


Fresh, local and unpretentious: A Swedish city with a stirring culinary scene

chain. I was stunned to spot an IPA from Alewife Brewing Company, a brewpub just a few miles from my apartment in Queens. But more intriguing were the hyperlocal beers. Sure, brewpubs serving beers made in-house proliferate in most cities. But this particular Bishops Arms locale has exclusive rights to the beers produced at Minus-1, a brewing cooperative located downstairs from the bar. Eight brands brew at the facility on a revolving schedule, much like a commissary for food start-ups. And the beers are excellent. Four of the eight producers, including the women-run Secret Sisters, make beer that landed them one of the 30 coveted spots on a “best of” list from Untappd, a popular beer app. But long before Minus-1, there was Malmo Brewing Co. and Taproom. The colorful, high-ceilinged space was a brewery when it opened in the late 1800s and after housing other operations, it’s a brewery again. The owner is Anders Hansson, a warm host with an epic beard and a burly stature that suggests he can trace his lineage back to the Vikings. Anders, a creative type whose Technicolor Pop Art-style prints adorn the walls on the second floor, started brewing in 1983. He was 12. The beers he makes today occupy at least 15 of the 42 taps at the bar on any given night, but he’s more excited to talk about his latest undertaking: mead, a honey-based wine. Try the black currant, he urged me. Its earthy sweetness was animated by carbonation, a buoyant vivacity that matched the room’s lively vibe. Scandinavia has become known for its molecular gastronomy, but before spherification or foams there were just the unique, fragrant fruits themselves. Sweden’s native berries and lush orchard fruits are being made the most of these days by drink-producers like Anders. At MJ’s, an airy bistro with a vibe that blends Victorian grandma and Fort Lauderdale patio-chic, there are several Fruktstereo cider options on the menu, all listed along with the sparkling wines, not with the beer, as is typical for ciders. A long-standing barrier, broken. Each of the two I tried takes the base fruit — pears or apples or berries or some combination thereof — and amplifies the flavor. It’s delivered with an understated carbonation that evokes twinkles of light in the night sky. If traditional Normandy ciders — dry and only subtly sweet — are acoustic, these are surround sound.


State Department tells citizens ‘do not travel’ to China; World Health Organization declares coronavirus outbreak a global health emergency

Berger 4:10 PM: WHO urges China to share data, collaborate with partners WASHINGTON — In declaring the coronavirus outbreak in China a global health emergency on Thursday, the World Health Organization urged China’s health authorities to implement a range of measures in addition to widespread quarantines and travel restrictions already in place to control the disease spread. Although the recommendations are not enforceable, countries are often under great pressure to follow them as member states that have agreed to follow the WHO’s international health regulations. Some of the recommendations for Chinese authorities address concerns of public health officials and experts who say China has not shared crucial demographic data about patients and when they became ill. That data is needed to learn more about the evolution of the outbreak, which officials can then use to better control its spread. Among the recommendations, the WHO urged China to: ● Collaborate with the WHO and its partners to conduct investigations; ● Share full data on all of its cases; ● “Regularly inform the population” about the evolution of the outbreak, protection measures and actions to contain transmission; ● Strengthen efforts to identify the animal source of the outbreak, especially the potential for ongoing circulation and inform the WHO as soon as possible; ● Conduct exit screening at international airports and ports so travelers with symptoms can be identified early and treated. By: Lena H. Sun 4:05 PM: New infectious disease outbreaks will probably only increase with climate change, scientists say WASHINGTON — The worldwide panic over the outbreak of the novel coronavirus underscores the challenges that the international community faces in stemming infectious diseases. New viral outbreaks are only expected to become more frequent as the world continues to warm and environments shift due to climate change, according to scientists. “In a broad sense, climate change can increase the likelihood of certain kinds of viruses,” said Bryan Walsh, the author of “End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World.” “The clearest connection we see when it comes to climate change boosting the threat of infection is in insect-borne diseases that thrive in hotter climates … because climate change expands the range of species that carry them,” he explained. Beyond warming climates, man-made changes to environments, like deforestation, also raise the risk of new infectious diseases spreading to humans. That’s because these changes put animals and humans in closer proximity,


to drop in flight bookings to China, data firm says BERLIN — The spread of the coronavirus has resulted in a significant drop in flight bookings to and from China, travel data company ForwardKeys said Thursday. Chinese authorities began imposing travel restrictions to prevent the virus from spreading just as millions of people were preparing to travel for the Lunar New Year. Many left before the restrictions took effect. Up until Jan. 19, outbound bookings from mainland China were up 7 percent year-to-year, setting the stage for a potential record travel season, according to ForwardKeys. On Jan. 23, Chinese authorities put the epicenter of the virus outbreak under lockdown, and by Jan. 26, outbound bookings were down 7 percent year-to-year and Chinese bookings for travel in the Asia-Pacific region were 15.1 percent lower than last year. “China is now the world’s biggest and highest-spending outbound travel market, so the presence of Chinese visitors is eagerly anticipated by the tourism industry globally,” ForwardKeys representative Olivier Ponti said in a news release. China has also suffered as a tourist destination, despite an increase in popularity through Jan. 19 year-to-year. By Jan. 26, bookings were down more than 7 percent compared with last year. Some of China’s most-visited tourist attractions — including Shanghai’s Disneyland and Beijing’s Palace Museum — were closed. Chinese authorities have imposed a nationwide ban on tour groups traveling abroad. Numerous international airlines have suspended flights to and from mainland China, while other countries and territories have imposed entry restrictions on recent visitors to Hubei province. By: Rick Noack 1:53 PM: Scientists remain uncertain whether dead can transfer disease WASHINGTON — Scientists are working to learn more about the transmissibility of the novel coronavirus and fill in some crucial unknowns, such as whether those not showing signs of the infection can spread it. Among the lingering questions is one with sociocultural consequences: How long does the virus remain viable after someone dies of it, and what might that mean for practices surrounding preparing and burying the dead? “I suspect that the virus may still be viable for a certain amount of time after an individual dies,” said Davidson Hamer, a professor of global health and medicine at the Boston University School of Public Health and School of Medicine. He urged healthcare workers to take “contact precautions in addition to respiratory precautions.” As with any infectious disease, Hamer said, proper handling


Coast on Jan. 27, as well as guests who stayed at the same hotel as the tour group. By: David Crawshaw 5:40 AM: British evacuation flight to China delayed for lack of Chinese permissions BERLIN — A British evacuation flight from Wuhan, scheduled for Thursday, will not take off as planned because it is still lacking the appropriate permissions from Chinese authorities. “We are doing everything we can to get British people in Wuhan safely back to the U.K.,” said a Foreign Office spokeswoman, adding that Britain was not the only country affected. “A number of countries’ flights have been unable to take off as planned. We continue working urgently to organize a flight to the U.K. as soon as possible,” she said. South Korea reported that it was able to get approval for only one of four planned flights to Wuhan. German media outlets also said Thursday that evacuation plans by the German military have been delayed, as well. A spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry said there were “remaining questions” that needed to be addressed before an evacuation flight could take off. By: Rick Noack 5:00 AM: Russia closes border with China; Moscow McDonald’s cancels party MOSCOW — Russia is closing its entire border with China, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin announced Thursday, in the latest measure to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Although no cases of the disease have surfaced in Russia, the country does share a 2,615-mile border with China, one of the world’s longest international borders. Worries are high, and McDonald’s in Moscow canceled plans for its 30th anniversary over fears of big crowds. The fast-food chain had planned to offer burgers for the cost they were in 1990 — the equivalent of a nickel. Relations between Russia and China have been warming, and they did $110 billion in trade with each other last year. China this week shared with Russia the genome of the coronavirus so that they could jointly work on a vaccine. Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova said Wednesday that Russia is considering suspending all air travel to and from China, and rail service has been limited to a direct train between Moscow and Beijing. By: Isabelle Khurshudyan 4:54 AM: U.S. sending additional flights to evacuate Wuhan virus epicenter HONG KONG — The U.S. government is arranging more flights to evacuate Americans trapped in the Chinese city at the epicenter of the deadly


What changes after Brexit Day on Jan. 31?

mere minnow — of Britain’s gross domestic product and employ just 24,000 people. But the issue is highly emotional, stirring up nationalist fervor. Johnson has vowed that Britain will — no matter what else — reclaim its “spectacular maritime wealth.” Meanwhile, Ireland’s prime minister, Leo Varadkar, warned on the BBC on Monday: “You may have to make concessions in areas like fishing in order to get concessions from us in areas like financial services” in a post-Brexit trade deal. The Cod War of 2020 is just beginning. During the transition period, Britain will remain in the E.U.’s custom union and single market, but after that, everything is up for grabs. Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay has declared that the U.K. wants a “zero tariff, zero quota” trade pact with the E.U. by the end of the year. But the new president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has warned — in a very friendly, very warm, very public way — that it is almost certainly “impossible” for the two sides to complete a comprehensive agreement within this “very tight” schedule. She suggested that Johnson will have to ask for a delay. Or accept a partial deal — and keep talking. The prime minister insists he will walk away if his deadlines are blown and head (again) for the dreaded cliff edge of a no-deal departure. Not everyone believes this. Once the U.K. is officially out of the E.U., it can start to negotiate with countries that don’t already have trade deals with the E.U. At the top of that list is the United States. President Trump, a fan of Brexit, has promised a “massive” deal. Both sides have said they want to hammer something out quickly. But there could be stumbling blocks, including over drug prices and taxes on big tech companies. There’s also the debate about “chlorinated chicken.” Believe it or not, this is a big thing. Bigger than cod. To have easy, free trade of agricultural goods, Europe is pressing Britain to remain aligned with E.U. rules on food safety and animal welfare. But that puts Britain on a collision course with the United States and its relatively lax regulations on industrial farming. American food processors rinse their poultry in a chlorine bath and shoot up their beef with antibiotics — both no-nos in Europe. Whether Johnson will bow to the Americans on chlorinated chicken and on


As the D.C. area awaits results in possible coronavirus cases, doctors say they are prepared

said Xiaoyan Song, director of infection control and epidemiology at Children’s. “We really were expecting this.” Many medical facilities continue to run drills for treating other highly infectious diseases more commonly found overseas, including Ebola. “We’re an international city and an international hospital with patients that come from so many places that our eyes are always on the global level,” Song said. “We’re always tracking these diseases that anywhere else, I think, physicians would not worry about. Not because we want them to be in our hospital, but so that we’re prepared for them to come.” Though much is unknown about the Wuhan coronavirus, health officials have advised that symptoms of the disease — fever, coughing, trouble breathing — can appear within two to 14 days of exposure. On Thursday, the first person-to-person transmission of the virus in the United States was confirmed in Chicago, where the patient had been in contact with a woman who upon her return from Wuhan, China, became the second confirmed case of coronavirus in the United States. Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that cause disease in people and animals, ranging from the common cold to more serious illnesses like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). D.C. Department of Health Director LaQuandra Nesbitt gave a presentation Tuesday to the D.C. Council about how the District is working with federal agencies to monitor the outbreak. The next day, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) told reporters the state is “taking every precaution to prepare and mobilize whatever resources are necessary to address the coronavirus,” including notifying travelers coming through Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport about the virus and coordinating with universities to monitor students who have traveled to China. Several universities in the region have suspended student and faculty trips to China for the spring semester. Other students already studying in China have been told to return home en masse. Health experts recommend those who believe they might have contracted the coronavirus to contact their primary care physicians, who will evaluate their symptoms and take samples, if necessary. “I think anytime there’s an unknown disease out there, it causes a lot of anxiety, and we need to be respectful and cautious of this virus until more is known about it,” Wortmann said. “But, big picture, in the United States, it’s probably just a good time to go get your flu vaccine.” marissa.lang@washpost.com


More than 11,800 people in China have been diagnosed with coronavirus, the country’s health experts confirm; U.S. to deny entry to foreign nationals who recently visited China and quarantine returning Americans

at home with his wife, who is also suffering from the virus. Barbara Yaffe, Ontario’s associate chief medical officer of health, said a patient must test negative for the virus on two tests at least 24 hours apart to be discharged from the hospital. By: Amanda Coletta 2:55 PM: Diarrhea could be less common, potentially infectious, feature of the novel coronavirus WASHINGTON — Scientists know that the novel coronavirus infects the respiratory system. But a subset of infected patients have also reported diarrhea, leaving scientists unclear as to the cause and consequence of this gastrointestinal discomfort. Diarrhea similarly presented in some patients infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a closely related coronavirus that caused a global public health crisis in 2003. Scientists even determined that the SARS virus could be shed in stools, making sewage a potential infection vector, said Davidson Hamer, a professor of global health and medicine at the Boston University School of Public Health and School of Medicine. “SARS could infect the intestinal lining,” he said. But “it’s too early to tell” whether that’s also the case with this novel coronavirus, he cautioned. “Diarrhea may be a symptom, and based on what we know from SARS, there could be shedding of the virus in the GI [gastrointestinal] tract, but we don’t know that for sure,” Hamer said. Scientists know much more about other viruses that infect the gastrointestinal tract, such as the highly contagious norovirus and others like it, colloquially grouped as the stomach flu. Nausea and vomiting are the most common norovirus symptoms, followed by others such as diarrhea, abdominal pain and loose stool. There aren’t any vaccines against SARS or this novel coronavirus, but there are for the viruses that cause the flu. Public health officials highly recommend the flu vaccine each year to protect against it. Antibiotics target bacteria, so they don’t work against viruses. However, bacteria can develop in a respiratory tract damaged by viruses. For infections such as pneumonia doctors may recommend antibiotics along with antiviral medicines. By: Miriam Berger 2:15 PM: Market drops further, with Dow sliding more than 2 percent The Dow Jones industrial average on Friday plunged more than 575 points, or about 2 percent, as investors fear the spreading coronavirus that has brought China to a near-standstill will stall global growth. The Dow erased its 2020 gains and was off to its worst start of a year


be moving operations away from affected areas. By: Adam Taylor 10:12 AM: China to repatriate Wuhan residents, citing ‘practical difficulties’ that they've encountered abroad WASHINGTON — Chinese authorities are preparing to repatriate citizens from Wuhan who recently traveled out of China due to the “practical difficulties recently encountered” abroad, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Friday. The ministry said officials are planning to charter flights and bring back residents from Hubei province who left before travel restrictions were put in place “as soon as possible.” Chinese authorities have placed some 50 million people in Hubei province and its capital Wuhan under quarantine in an effort to contain the coronavirus outbreak. Nonetheless, authorities said some 5 million people traveled out of the area before the restrictions but after the disease had already started spreading. As the virus has reached other countries, international air carriers have canceled or cut down on flights to China, while some neighboring countries, like Russia and North Korea, have sealed off borders or limited entry from China. That in turn has made it harder for Chinese people abroad to return. The virus has also unleashed a global wave of fear and uncertainty — and incidents of racism and xenophobia toward Chinese people. Chinese students and tourists abroad have reported incidents of being denied entry to establishments and scapegoated as carriers of the disease just because of their nationality. By: Miriam Berger 10:03 AM: Global markets sink on coronavirus fears WASHINGTON — Global stocks sank Friday as investors confronted slowing economic growth in the United States and Europe, which could be compounded by the coronavirus outbreak that has forced China and its powerful economy into lockdown. The deadly virus presents a huge threat to the global economy, as it paralyzes China's workforce and dampens its powerful manufacturing industry, while forcing global firms with roots in the country to freeze operations and seek out ways to reorient supply chains. From an economic perspective, the outbreak's timing is especially punishing, dragging down growth prospects and taking a bite out of corporate earnings just when investors had hoped for a boost after the truce in the U.S.-China trade war. “Companies are taking decisive action over their exposure to China, such as canceling flights, closing stores and shutting factories,” Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, wrote Thursday in a note to investors. “It is already clear that


Brexit Day: After 1,317 days and three prime ministers, the U.K. has left the E.U.

longer helping shape them. British members of the European Parliament have lost their jobs. The British prime minister will no longer sit on the European Council. Through the end of 2020, negotiators in Brussels and London will seek to hammer out a new trade deal and come to terms with pacts for data-sharing, security, fisheries, aviation, banking and much, much more. Or at least that is the plan. A joint letter published on Friday by E.U. leaders — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, European Council President Charles Michel and European Parliament President David Sassoli — signaled that they will fight for their interests in upcoming talks. “Without the free movement of people, there can be no free movement of capital, goods and services,” they wrote. “Without a level playing field on environment, labour, taxation and state aid, there cannot be the highest quality access to the single market. Without being a member, you cannot retain the benefits of membership.” E.U. citizens will be able to continue to live and work in Britain, and Brits in Europe, through the transition period, but after that they will need to apply for residency rights. The fact that the United Kingdom is still deeply split over the issue of Brexit was reflected not just in the polls but also in Friday’s commemorations. In addition to the celebrations, there were anti-Brexit events throughout the country: A candlelight vigil outside the European Commission building in London, a “European Solidarity March” in the historic town of Canterbury, protests in villages along the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. In a sign of trouble brewing north of Hadrian’s Wall, Scotland First Minister Nicola Sturgeon used a speech in Edinburgh to renew the press for a second referendum on Scottish independence. Irish leader Leo Varadkar wished, “goodbye to an old friend embarking on an adventure.” “We hope it works out for them,” he said. “But if it does not, there will always be a seat for them at the table.” Though the chance for that may not be for a decade or more, some pro-E.U. Brits believe it could happen. Led by Donkeys, an anti-Brexit activist group, on Friday projected onto the White Cliffs of Dover a video featuring two World War II veterans. It ended with an image of the E.U. flag, each of its stars fading away until there was just one,


Asia’s tourist spots brace for leaner times as coronavirus keeps Chinese visitors at home

SIEM REAP, Cambodia — Tourists roaming around the ancient Cambodian temples at Angkor Wat are used to having to protect themselves. Usually, it's against the sun and the indefatigable hawkers. But as coronavirus has spread from China to tourism hot spots across Asia — aided by the mass movement of people during the Lunar New Year holiday — many people are looking for ways to protect themselves against the pneumonia-like respiratory ailment that has claimed more than 200 lives. “We had hand sanitizer from China and our hotel gave us masks,” said Roberto Rubio, an American living in the Chinese coastal city of Qingdao. He and his wife, Jenessa, left China on Jan. 19, before the severity of the outbreak was clear. They were wearing light blue surgical masks as they toured the ruins at Angkor Wat, which is usually packed with Chinese tourists during the Lunar New Year holiday but was notably quiet this past week. Now, their return flight has been canceled and their workplaces are offering to extend their breaks. “We haven’t decided what to do,” Jenessa Rubio said, with a shrug. The outbreak of the coronavirus — which has been detected in all of China’s neighbors, including Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia — has cast a pall over a regional tourism industry that has become increasingly reliant on China’s burgeoning middle class. The Chinese government has canceled all outbound group tours, while a sizable number of those traveling independently have canceled their plans. It’s an outcome that is complicated for China’s neighbors, and its impact is only just beginning to be felt. It’s not unusual to see Asian tourists wearing the kinds of masks more frequently associated with dental hygienists. But this week, everyone from New Zealanders to Russians, Chileans to Sri Lankans has been donning masks as they travel around places that are popular with Chinese tourists. This concern about health is looking a lot like profiling. Some even say they are going out of their way to avoid Chinese tourists, and Mandarin-speaking travelers like Taiwanese and Singaporeans have noticed people putting on masks when they approach. Many tour guides at Angkor Wat are wearing masks given out by their agencies. “The government has told us to wear masks, but I don’t think they can really protect us, and I can’t wear a mask up here every day,” said Bing, a


Can this virus be contained? Probably not.

John M. Barry is the author of “ Of the many questions about the Wuhan coronavirus, the most important one is this: Can it be eradicated from the human population, like the coronavirus which caused SARS, or at least contained, like the coronavirus which causes MERS? Here are what the facts seem to be: Analysis puts the “reproductive number” of this virus at 2.2 or higher, meaning each infected person infects at least two other people. This is an explosive number. By comparison, the median value of studies of seasonal and pandemic influenza viruses put the reproductive number of ordinary influenza, which can sicken 10 to 20 percent of the population any given winter, at 1.28, with the 1918 pandemic virus at 1.8 — which was enough to kill between 50 million and 100 million people in a world population that is about a quarter of today’s population. To contain the Wuhan virus, its reproductive number must be brought below 1. Is this possible? The answer depends on whether this virus transmits more like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), or more like influenza. The virus which caused the SARS outbreak also had a high reproductive number. But SARS required close contact for transmission, the incubation period seemed to have been longer than the Wuhan virus, and, most important, people with SARS were most infectious when they were already too ill to mix with the public. (That’s why in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, upwards of 90 percent of transmission occurred in hospitals.) Those factors allowed medical interventions — rapid case detection, isolation, contact tracing and stringent infection control in hospitals — to eradicate the disease in humans. MERS has a high reproductive number and a case mortality rate of roughly 40 percent, but it has not spread widely in the general population because it does not transmit easily and, like SARS, cases are frequently clustered in hospitals. It can be controlled, if not eliminated, by the same methods that worked against SARS. By contrast, none of those control measures can contain influenza. In influenza, aerosol transmission is most important, though the virus can survive on a hard surface for hours and so also be transmitted by touch. Also, the incubation period can be as short as one day and the disease can be transmitted by people before they have any symptoms at all, making


reproductive number. But SARS required close contact for transmission, the incubation period seemed to have been longer than the Wuhan virus, and, most important, people with SARS were most infectious when they were already too ill to mix with the public. (That’s why in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, upwards of 90 percent of transmission occurred in hospitals.) Those factors allowed medical interventions — rapid case detection, isolation, contact tracing and stringent infection control in hospitals — to eradicate the disease in humans. MERS has a high reproductive number and a case mortality rate of roughly 40 percent, but it has not spread widely in the general population because it does not transmit easily and, like SARS, cases are frequently clustered in hospitals. It can be controlled, if not eliminated, by the same methods that worked against SARS. By contrast, none of those control measures can contain influenza. In influenza, aerosol transmission is most important, though the virus can survive on a hard surface for hours and so also be transmitted by touch. Also, the incubation period can be as short as one day and the disease can be transmitted by people before they have any symptoms at all, making contact tracing and even quarantine ineffective. Perhaps the most relevant data comes from U.S. Army camps during World War I; in some camps, soldiers were inspected twice a day and immediately isolated if they showed any flu symptoms, and if a unit had more than one symptomatic soldier, the entire unit was quarantined. In camps where measures were rigidly enforced, disease transmission was slowed, but quarantine had no impact on rates of infection or death; where the measures were less than rigidly enforced, they had no impact whatsoever. If quarantine could not work in the military during wartime, one can hardly imagine it working in a civilian community during peacetime. What will work for the Wuhan virus? Reports, so far, suggest that close contact is not necessary for transmission and, while the information is not definitive, health authorities in China have said that asymptomatic individuals can infect others — making it much more like influenza than either SARS or MERS. All that makes containment look impossible, but there is encouraging news. The spatter of cases outside China has not led to any spread in general populations. At this writing, there are 142 people infected in 22 locations outside mainland China


American, Delta and United suspend China flights, citing coronavirus risks

be Tuesday. The airline said it expects to resume service March 28 but will continue to monitor the situation. More than 200 people — all in China — have died after contracting the virus, and the number of people infected reached 9,720 as of Friday morning, including nine cases in the self-governing island of Taiwan. The State Department has urged Americans not to travel to China. So far, six people in the United States have been diagnosed with the virus. This week, U.S. health officials expanded the number of airports where travelers will be screened for the virus from five to 20. They say that those most vulnerable are people who have traveled to Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, or who have had close contact with people who have traveled there. But much is still unknown about the virus and how it might mutate. Health officials believe that precautionary measures, such as the decision to impose a federal quarantine on 195 evacuees who returned to the United States on a flight from Wuhan this week, will help prevent the virus from spreading. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is overseeing the U.S. coronavirus response, said officials imposed the quarantine because new cases in China have surged dramatically over the past week. She cited reports that the virus spreads from person to person and sometimes even before the infected person shows symptoms. The virus is spread through respiratory droplets, such as coughing and sneezing. “If we take strong measures now, we may be able to blunt the impact of the virus on the United States,” she said in a briefing with reporters Friday. “We are facing an unprecedented public health threat.” On Thursday, the union representing American Airlines pilots filed suit in a Texas court seeking to stop the airline from flying to China, saying the coronavirus posed a threat to crew members and the public. “Recent events relating to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in China have created a threat to the safety of passengers and flight crew traveling to and from that country,” said the lawsuit filed on behalf of the Allied Pilots Association, which represents the 15,000 pilots at American. In a message to pilots, union president Eric Ferguson said pilots should decline any assignment that would take them to China.


Coronavirus deaths surge as U.S. warns on China travel; Hong Kong shuts schools until March

as the basis for the new travel warning. The advisory added that Americans in China “should consider departing using commercial means,” and that government staff should defer nonessential travel to the country. Already, the fallout has been significant for Chinese travelers globally. Dozens of airlines have suspended flights to the country and many companies have urged their staff to stay away. From Italy to the Philippines, hotels and ports have been turning away Chinese citizens over fears that they may be infected. The response at times has morphed into outright racism. In France, the hashtag #JeNeSuisPasUnVirus — “I am not a virus” — began trending, with those of Asian descent sharing their experiences of racism after a newspaper used the headline “Yellow Alert” to describe the outbreak. Restaurants in South Korea have put up signs turning away Chinese clients. A student in Britain wrote in the Guardian that commuters have avoided sitting next to him because of his ethnicity. And after 7,000 people were held on a cruise ship in an Italian port over unfounded fears that two of its Chinese passengers were infected with the virus, officials have warned of latent and widespread racism against the Chinese community. The outbreak, meanwhile, continues to spread. Britain on Friday confirmed the first two cases of coronavirus in England. “We have been preparing for U.K. cases of novel coronavirus and we have robust infection control measures in place to respond immediately,” chief medical officer Chris Whitty said. In South Korea, health officials reported an 11th case. Earlier Friday, 368 South Korean evacuees from Wuhan arrived home on a government-chartered flight. They were screened for symptoms, with 18 taken to the hospital and the remainder placed in quarantine. Germany and India, which have each confirmed cases of coronavirus, were preparing to evacuate their citizens in Wuhan by plane. Over 350 names featured on a list drawn up by Indian officials, while Germany was planning to retrieve about 100 people. Elsewhere, Mongolia extended the closure of its border crossings with China until March 2 and said it would not allow Chinese citizens to enter the country. Pakistan said it was halting flights to and from China with immediate effect. In Hong Kong, officials said they were shuttering schools until March, while banks announced plans to close branches. Still, the city’s government continued to resist calls to close the border with China. At a briefing


Tokyo Olympics organizers look on anxiously as coronavirus menaces the Games

TOKYO — Japan's Olympic organizers knew that hosting the Games in July would mean hot weather for athletes and spectators. They were not expecting a major epidemic to force them to take everyone's temperature upon entering the venues. The irony is that Japan has been exuberant about the Games, with phenomenal demand for tickets and a real sense of excitement. But the spread of a new coronavirus is already putting something of a damper on that enthusiasm. “With only 177 days to go and our preparations accelerating, we must firmly tackle the new coronavirus to contain it, or we are going to regret it,” Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike said Wednesday. “I will do the utmost to contain this new problem as we cooperate closely with all of you.” The virus already is disrupting Olympic qualifiers, and the concerns caused a mini-meltdown on Japanese social media when the Buzzap website asked whether the Games might be canceled. The story, based on a German news report of contacts between the International Olympic Committee and the World Health Organization, went viral before Koike denied it. But it caused some to ask some previously unthinkable questions. Could the fast-spreading and deadly virus put the Games at risk? Will spectators turn up to sit beside strangers in Tokyo’s Olympic Stadium? How would people feel about venues packed with spectators wearing face masks? Could the Games proceed without spectators from China? It took about six months in 2002 and 2003 to eliminate severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a similar coronavirus that results in pneumonia-like symptoms. But with less than six months until the Olympics, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases — more than 11,000 — already has surpassed the SARS total, even if the official death toll remains lower. One source of hope: Pneumonia-type diseases do not generally survive and spread so well in the summer. “Coronaviruses in general tend to be seasonal,” said Ikuo Tsunoda, a professor of microbiology at Japan’s Kindai University. “There was a fear of the Zika virus spreading during the Rio Olympics [in 2016], but it didn’t happen. In the light of the seasonality, I wonder if we should be worrying about it, being held in the hot summer, at this point.” The potential flaw in that argument: Every virus is different, and little is known about the new strain. “Many times, respiratory viruses die out when ambient temperature is high,”


to be held at the venue of Beijing’s 2022 Winter Games were canceled. Olympic qualifying tournaments in women’s basketball and women’s soccer, scheduled to take place in China in February, were moved to Serbia and Australia, respectively, and a boxing qualifying tournament for the Asia-Oceania region set for Wuhan was shifted to Jordan. China delayed the start of its Super League soccer season, and the international field hockey federation postponed Pro League games in the country. Formula 1’s governing body said it is “monitoring the evolving situation” as it decides whether the Chinese Grand Prix can take place in Shanghai in April. But moving or postponing the Olympics would be a tougher prospect. Government officials said they have incorporated disease planning in their preparations. “Infectious disease is always an important issue,” said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under government ground rules, noting previous concerns about the Zika virus in the run-up the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games and an outbreak of norovirus at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in South Korea in 2018. “So we remain vigilant.” There were no confirmed cases of Zika connected to the Rio Olympics. More than 200 people were diagnosed with norovirus in PyeongChang, mostly security staff and Games personnel, but also two Swiss skiers. The H1N1 swine flu virus overshadowed the run-up to the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010, but it did not disrupt the Games. The IOC said countermeasures against infection would be an important part of Tokyo’s preparations. “Tokyo 2020 will continue to collaborate with all relevant organizations which carefully monitor any incidence of infectious diseases and will review any countermeasures that may be necessary with all relevant organizations. In addition, the IOC is in contact with the World Health Organization, as well as its own medical experts,” the IOC said in response to questions from The Washington Post. Koji Wada, a professor of public health at International University of Health and Welfare in Tokyo, co-authored a paper in 2018 that examined health risks from the influx of visitors to the 2020 Games. He said there probably was not enough time to develop a vaccine for the new coronavirus strain, but other preventive measures could be devised based on analyses of how the virus is spreading. “It may require cooperation from athletes and spectators, but we should be working toward hosting the Olympics safely,” he said. Measures might include


Skywatch: What’s happening in the heavens in February

For February, look to the sky for love: At dusk, find the planet Venus — named for the Roman goddess of love — high in the southwestern heavens, hanging like a bright searchlight. The prominent planet starts the month at -4.1 magnitude (very bright) and becomes brighter (-4.3 magnitude) by month’s end, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. During the last week in February, see the new moon — a waxing, skinny crescent — approach Venus on Feb. 26, pass the planet on the next night, then climb higher by Feb. 28. The fleet Mercury skims the early-evening horizon now in the west-southwestern sky. The nimble planet is bright, at -1 magnitude, according to the observatory. Find Mercury hovering above the horizon for the first third of the month, but by Feb. 11, it becomes dimmer at -0.6 magnitude. Wake up before daybreak to find Mars, Jupiter and Saturn loitering in the southern heavens. Before sunrise on the mornings of Feb. 18-20, find planetary and lunar activity near the constellation Sagittarius. The waning crescent moon on Feb. 18 seems to nudge Mars, a planet with a tepid +1.2 magnitude, in the south before the moon occults (covers) it. For Washington, the occultation starts a half-hour after sunrise, so in effect, the sun washes the event out for casual sidewalk observers. The West Coast lucks out on viewing the occultation: In Los Angeles, for example, it starts at 3:37 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, according to the International Occultation Timing Association. On Feb. 19, the skinnier moon approaches Jupiter (-1.9 magnitude, very bright) in eastern Sagittarius, and the next night, the wisplike lunar crescent sits near the ringed planet Saturn (+0.6 magnitude, bright), below and to the left of Sagittarius. Betelgeuse Brian Murphy, a professor of physics and astronomy at Butler University in Indianapolis, said the variable star may have dimmed a full magnitude — to about +1.6 magnitude — during the past several months. “Dropping brightness and seeing this action, Betelgeuse may be going through its death throes . . . but then again, maybe not,” he said. The dimming may be a sign it could become a supernova that would be visible to skywatchers on Earth. Should that happen, Murphy noted, our blue planet is safely far away. ● Feb. 5 — ● Feb. 8 — ● Feb. 9 — ● Feb. 11 — ● Feb. 20 — ● Feb.


Starting Sunday, all flights from China will go through one of these seven airports

symptoms, making it much harder to contain. More than 11,000 people have been diagnosed with the rapidly spreading virus, and more than 210 people, all of them in China, have died. The State Department told Americans not to travel there and advised those already there to consider leaving. Seven people in the United States have been diagnosed with the virus, including a Northern California man who was diagnosed Friday. He had returned to Santa Clara County from Wuhan on Jan. 26. He remains isolated at home. So far, there has only been one case in the United States of person-to-person transmission of the virus. Health officials had recently expanded screening to 20 U.S. airports, but now say they will do enhanced screening at seven airports. They are: The new measures comes as air traffic from China has dropped considerably. Officials in China have restricted travel from Wuhan, the city where the virus was first detected at the end of December. On Friday, three U.S. carriers — American, Delta and United — announced they were suspending flights to and from China, although American and United will continue to offer service to Hong Kong. The temporary lull in air traffic will allow U.S. officials to work out the logistics of how to funnel all incoming flights from China to the seven airports. American Airlines began suspending flights on Friday. Delta and United said they will halt service in early February to ensure customers and employees who want to return to the United States have that option. The three carriers had previously announced they would reduce the number of flights but would continue to offer service. On Friday, however, they said the State Department’s announcement Thursday evening that it was raising its China travel advisory to Level 4, its highest level of caution, prompted them to reevaluate. Delta said it will operate flights through Wednesday. The airline’s last China-bound flight will leave the United States on Monday. Its last flight from China is set to depart Wednesday. Flights will remain suspended through April 30. American Airlines said that flights would remain grounded through March 28 but that officials would monitor the situation to see whether American would extend the cancellations. United said it will suspend all operations between its hub cities in Beijing, Chengdu and Shanghai beginning Thursday. An earlier version of this story misspelled Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. This version has been corrected.


U.S. begins screening for the coronavirus at airports in Atlanta and Chicago

single case in the United States. “It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control,” he said. The person who was infected was identified as a man in his 30s, in Washington state, who had been visiting relatives in Wuhan. When he arrived back in Seattle, he reported feeling sick, called his doctor and was later hospitalized. Officials are monitoring him but said he is not considered seriously ill. He was not screened when he returned to the United States because he arrived before enhanced screenings began. In a statement, officials with U.S. Customs and Border Protection said the agency, in coordination with the CDC, has measures in place to identify travelers entering the United States who may show signs of illness and pose a risk to other members of the public. However, the enhanced screening at the five airports will focus specifically on symptoms related to 2019-nCoV, also known as the coronavirus. CDC officials will screen passengers on their arrival, Customs and Border Protection said. Travelers will have their temperatures taken and those with high temperatures could undergo additional testing. While screening for a common virus usually takes only hours, health authorities said that people suspected of having the coronavirus could be delayed for up to a day for if additional testing is needed. The screening is being done in English and Mandarin. As part of the enhanced screenings, travelers arriving from Wuhan on direct or connecting flights to the United States will be rerouted to one of the five designated airports. That means a passenger traveling from Wuhan who caught a connecting flight in Shanghai that would have landed in Boston would be likely to be rerouted to JFK for screening, CDC officials said. If that person is cleared, he or she would continue on to Boston. The CDC, the Department of Homeland Security and transportation agencies are working out details about how travelers arriving in the United States will be redirected to the five airports. The rerouting is likely to create logistical challenges for airlines. U.S. officials want to make sure that every time someone books a flight from Wuhan to the United States, the person’s first point of entry is one of those airports, said the CDC’s Martin Cetron, the director of agency’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine. Only JFK and San Francisco airports have direct flights from Wuhan. The process


suspected of having the coronavirus could be delayed for up to a day for if additional testing is needed. The screening is being done in English and Mandarin. As part of the enhanced screenings, travelers arriving from Wuhan on direct or connecting flights to the United States will be rerouted to one of the five designated airports. That means a passenger traveling from Wuhan who caught a connecting flight in Shanghai that would have landed in Boston would be likely to be rerouted to JFK for screening, CDC officials said. If that person is cleared, he or she would continue on to Boston. The CDC, the Department of Homeland Security and transportation agencies are working out details about how travelers arriving in the United States will be redirected to the five airports. The rerouting is likely to create logistical challenges for airlines. U.S. officials want to make sure that every time someone books a flight from Wuhan to the United States, the person’s first point of entry is one of those airports, said the CDC’s Martin Cetron, the director of agency’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine. Only JFK and San Francisco airports have direct flights from Wuhan. The process is complex and will involve “reissuing tickets and redirecting passengers all over the globe,” Cetron said. U.S. carriers may not offer direct service between the United States and Wuhan, but some have partnerships with carriers that serve Wuhan. For example, United Airlines does not offer service to the affected area, but it has Star Alliance partners that do. “ Officials at American Airlines said they remain in close contact with CBP and CDC and are coordinating with them on any required health or safety-related measures. American does not serve Wuhan directly, but China Southern, one of its OneWorld network partners does. Even so, the airline said it expects the rerouting will impact only a small number of connecting passengers. Coronaviruses are part of a large family of viruses that range from the common cold to more-serious respiratory diseases. The strain identified in China is related to two other coronaviruses that caused major outbreaks in recent years, Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, and severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. Chinese officials first detected this new strain of the virus on Dec. 31 in Wuhan. They initially linked it to an unsanitary food market where seafood and mammals were sold for


The butterfly effect is not what you think it is

much would that improve your forecast? “The answer is it would only improve it by seconds,” Palmer, the atmospheric physicist at the University of Oxford, said in an email. “It may be that you just cannot predict beyond a certain finite time horizon, no matter how accurate your initial conditions are.” This is why, on average, you can’t make detailed weather predictions more than around two weeks out, Palmer said. Lorenz described this idea in a 1969 paper, which was the basis for a talk he gave titled “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set off a Tornado in Texas?” In an interview, Palmer said that when author James Gleick popularized Lorenz’s work in his acclaimed book, “Chaos: Making a New Science,” he used the term “the butterfly effect” to describe the 1963 paper, which found that weather forecasts are sensitive to small changes in the initial conditions, and not the 1969 paper, which found that learning more about the initial conditions yields diminishing returns. Gleick said this distinction wasn’t important for his purposes, adding that chaos scientists have used the term to describe various related phenomena. “The Butterfly Effect isn’t one simple idea; it encompasses a set of mathematical discoveries that have been expressed in different ways at different times,” he said in an email. It’s easy to see how “the butterfly effect” could have come to take on multiple meanings. Lorenz wrote about the term’s “cloudy history” in his book, “The Essence of Chaos,” noting that his 1963 paper featured a graph that was said to resemble a butterfly, which may have created some confusion. Clouding matters further, the term “the butterfly effect” calls to mind a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury about a time traveler who steps on a butterfly in the prehistoric past, changing the outcome of a presidential election in 2055. Bradbury’s description of the butterfly’s death presaged Lorenz’s work on chaos theory more than a decade later. It also gestured at the definition of “the butterfly effect” later employed by countless popularizers of science, from Goldblum to Gleick. “It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time,” Bradbury wrote. “. . . Killing one butterfly couldn’t be that important! Could it?”


Early missteps and state secrecy in China probably allowed the coronavirus to spread farther and faster

of a new contagious disease in Wuhan but did little to inform the public — even with the approach of the Lunar New Year holiday for which hundreds of millions of Chinese travel. An analysis of those early weeks — from official statements, leaked accounts from Chinese medical professionals, newly released scientific data and interviews with public health officials and infectious disease experts — reveals potential missteps by China’s overburdened public health officials. It also underscores how a bureaucratic culture that prioritizes political stability over all else probably allowed the virus to spread farther and faster. “It’s clear that a much stronger public health system could save China lives and money,” said Tom Frieden, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Medical professionals who tried to sound an alarm were seized by police. Key state media omitted mention of the outbreak for weeks. Cadres focused on maintaining stability — and praising party leader Xi Jinping — as the crisis worsened. “China’s public health system has modernized, but China’s political system hasn’t,” said Jude Blanchette, head of China studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “If anything, there’s been a regression.” In mid-December, patients in Wuhan presented with what seemed like a mix of wintry symptoms: fever, trouble breathing, coughs. It looked like viral pneumonia. But doctors in Wuhan, a city of 11 million in central China, could not pinpoint the cause. Rumors of a mysterious virus started to swirl on Chinese social media, particularly among medical professionals. It is clear, now, that Chinese officials soon knew something was amiss. An account published Thursday in multiple Chinese news sites by an anonymous lab technician who claimed to work at a lab contracted by hospitals said that his company had received samples from Wuhan and reached a stunning conclusion as early as the morning of Dec. 26. The samples contained a new coronavirus with an 87 percent similarity to SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. A day later, lab executives held urgent meetings to brief Wuhan health officials and hospital management, the technician wrote. The technician’s account, which included extensive images of test results and contemporaneous messages sent by the technician, could not be independently verified by The Washington Post. Scientists outside China would later confirm the genetic sequence bore a striking resemblance to that of SARS. By the evening of Dec. 30, word


not fabricate rumors, not spread rumors, not believe rumors,” the Wuhan authorities said, adding that they encouraged Web users to “jointly build a harmonious, clear and bright cyberspace.” All eight people detained that day were doctors, including Li, the Wuhan ophthalmologist. Wang Guangbao, a surgeon and popular science writer in eastern China, later said speculation about a SARS-like virus was rampant around Jan. 1 within medical circles, but the detentions dissuaded many, including himself, from speaking openly about it. “The eight posters getting seized made all of us doctors feel we were at risk,” he said. With the world watching, Chinese scientists raced to decode the virus. On Jan. 9, with 59 cases on the books, China announced it had isolated and obtained the genome sequence of the new form of coronavirus, confirming rumors that the mystery ailment was linked to SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). They posted it on a publicly accessible genetic data repository, allowing scientists to quickly develop tests to diagnose and confirm the infection in people. Their work garnered praise from scientists and public health experts around the world — but there was information missing. Epidemiologists need to know the details about when people get sick, what their symptoms are, and other demographic characteristics, such as age, gender and underlying medical conditions that might put them at higher risk for respiratory diseases. That information is the best way for disease detectives to get an assessment in the early stages of the outbreak to determine how readily the virus spreads, and how potentially deadly it is. “We need to know for each case when they first became ill so we can gauge when in the epidemic the case occurred,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Key information about who got sick and when was not released publicly until weeks later, scientists and researchers said. The New England Journal of Medicine study published Wednesday of the first 425 patients in Wuhan who became sick between Dec. 10 and Jan. 4 revealed long delays for patients to get admitted to hospitals. Those delays indicate how hard it was to identify and isolate cases earlier on in their illness, according to the study, which was led by researchers at China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Person-to-person spread occurred as early as mid-December, and cases were doubling every


14 things to do in the D.C. area this week

Monday, Feb. 3 Billy Woods at DC9 Iowa caucuses watch parties at various locations Tuesday, Feb. 4 ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ at Arena Stage [How a play about the Taliban’s oppression of women manages to be both harrowing and hopeful] Sir E.U at Songbyrd Wednesday, Feb. 5 Alewives, Brewsters and Gruits: A History of Women in Beer at Heurich House Museum Rapsody at the Fillmore Silver Spring Thursday, Feb. 6 Joel Ross at Blues Alley ‘A Year of Change: Best Picture Nominees of 1968’ at the Library of Congress Diane Keaton at Sixth & I Synagogue Sierra Nevada 40th Birthday Celebration at ChurchKey: For many veteran craft beer lovers, Sierra Nevada’s signature Pale Ale was the introduction to the world of hoppy ales, and the one to measure hop-forward beers against. The California brewery has released a new beer to mark four decades in business, and — shocker! — it’s a dank, resinous West Coast IPA that recalls Sierra’s roots. ChurchKey celebrates Sierra’s birthday by putting 16 of its beers on tap, ranging from IPAs to barrel-aged stouts. Among the beers to look for: Fantastic Haze, a hazy double IPA version of the wildly popular Hazy Little Thing; a rum barrel-aged quadruple; and three different iterations of the Bigfoot barleywine, originally released in 2011, 2016 and 2020. 4 p.m. Free; beers priced individually. Friday, Feb. 7 Tarot & Cocktails at Slash Run [What will 2020 bring you? Silent retreats, meditation and tarot cards can guide the way.] International Clash Day at Bluejacket Frances Quinlan at the Anthem Tove Lo at the Fillmore Silver Spring — Hau Chu, Fritz Hahn, Adele Chapin, Chris Kelly and Vanessa H. Larson


Why we should be wary of an aggressive government response to coronavirus

As the novel coronavirus has spread, so, too, has fear: Beijing has imposed a travel ban on 16 cities, quarantining more than 50 million people, and several countries, including Australia and Singapore, have also imposed travel restrictions. The World Health Organization declared a public health emergency of international concern. Anti-Chinese sentiment, too, has spread rapidly: In France, a newspaper headline warned of a “Yellow Alert,” and restaurants in South Korea, Hong Kong and Vietnam have reportedly refused to serve Chinese customers. In the United States, customers are avoiding cities’ Chinatown neighborhoods, and students report anti-Chinese sentiment growing on their college campuses. Initially, the U.S. government adopted a relatively measured response, even as political commentators and some members of Congress demanded that the United States ban all travel from China. It resisted travel bans in lieu of warning people to avoid nonessential travel to China and screening passengers from China at 20 international airports. Its decision Friday to deny entry to non-nationals who have recently traveled to China and quarantine Americans who are returning from that country marks a significant, and potentially counterproductive, escalation in the U.S. response to the coronavirus crisis. Although this may assuage critics who insisted that the administration take more aggressive action, history and epidemiology warn us that such measures are unlikely to work. Respiratory diseases are not easily contained by travel bans or quarantines. Rather than contain an epidemic, harsh, coercive policies often scapegoat already-marginalized populations and intensify panic rather than quell it. History offers ample reasons to be wary that authorities may resort to discriminatory measures in the face of a frightening disease. When bubonic plague came to San Francisco in 1900, for example, the city twice enacted racially motivated, scientifically dubious measures. First, health officials required that Asian residents be inoculated with an experimental vaccine before traveling outside the city. After a federal court, in a rare example of judicial intervention during a public health panic, struck down that measure, the city established a quarantine around a neighborhood where many Chinese residents lived, enforcing it only against Chinese residents. That quarantine was also found to be unconstitutionally discriminatory. Decades later, HIV similarly provoked discrimination against groups perceived to be at the highest risk. As children such as Ryan White were kept out of school and well-known commentators demanded widespread quarantine, the Coast Guard picked up asylum-seeking Haitians and quarantined them at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.


Second man with ties to Mexico’s largest monarch butterfly reserve found dead

said they were uncertain of any connection between the two deaths, or between their deaths and their work in environmental conservation. For years, illegal loggers tied to Mexico’s criminal underworld have clashed with conservationists who tried and eventually succeeded to ban logging from the butterfly sanctuaries in the state of Michoacan. Between 2005 and 2006, 461 hectares in the region were lost to illegal logging. The destruction threatened the world’s largest butterfly migration. Gómez González, a former logger himself, spoke out against the threat of illegal timber. Millions of butterflies travel thousands of miles from the United States and Canada each year to winter on a few hillsides in Michoacan, a spectacle that draws thousands of tourists annually. Gómez González, a former commissioner of the small community of Rosario, and other local leaders argued that tourism could produce a more sustainable revenue stream than logging. The Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008. Hernández Romero was one of the men who showed Mexican and foreign tourists around the Rosario sanctuary. He pointed out the massive clusters of monarchs that hung from oyamel trees and scattered in an orange cloud when they were touched by the morning light. Magdalena Guzmán, a spokeswoman for the Michoacan attorney general’s office, said authorities were “looking into several lines of investigation” in the deaths of the two men, including their connections to the butterfly sanctuary. Gómez González’s death sent a shock wave through the community of environmentalists in Mexico and beyond. For many, it underscored the risks involved with activism in Mexico, where organized crime and conservation are often at odds. Gómez González’s body was found at the bottom of a well on Wednesday. Hundreds of farmers and agricultural workers attended his funeral Friday, the Associated Press reported. So far, authorities say, no evidence links his death to his work defending the monarchs. Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador called Gonzalez’s death “very unfortunate and painful.” The cause of Romero’s death is also unclear. Many here doubt the crimes will ever be solved. According to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, 154,557 people were killed in Mexico between 2010 and 2016. There were convictions in fewer than 6 percent of those cases. “All of these losses are horrible,” said Gloria Tavera, the regional director for the commission of national protected areas. “All of these people are important.” kevin.sieff@washpost.com


U.S. factory activity expanded in January after five months of contraction

ECONOMY U.S. factory activity unexpectedly rebounded in January after contracting for five straight months amid a surge in new orders, offering hope that a prolonged slump in business investment has probably bottomed out. A rebound in business investment is critical to keeping the longest economic expansion in history, now in its 11th year, on track amid signs of fatigue in consumer spending. The economy grew 2.3 percent in 2019, the slowest performance in three years, after expanding 2.9 percent in 2018. The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) said Monday its index of national factory activity increased to a reading of 50.9 last month, the highest level since July, from an upwardly revised 47.8 in December. A reading above 50 indicates expansion in the manufacturing sector, which accounts for 11 percent of the U.S. economy. The ISM index had held below the 50 threshold for five straight months. The improvement in the ISM data likely reflects ebbing trade tensions between the United States and China. Washington and Beijing signed a Phase 1 trade deal last month. The deal, however, left in place U.S. tariffs on $360 billion of Chinese imports, about two-thirds of the total, which economists say will remain a constraint on manufacturing. The 18-month U.S.-China trade war has pressured business confidence and undercut capital expenditure. Business investment contracted in the fourth quarter for the third straight quarter, the longest such stretch since 2009. — Reuters RETAIL A consortium of buyers, including mall owners Simon Property Group and Brookfield Property Partners, is bidding $81 million for Forever 21, the ubiquitous mall staple that filed for bankruptcy protection in September. Simon and Brookfield are Forever 21’s biggest landlords. The other bidder is Authentic Brands Group, which has acquired the licensing rights to other troubled retailers such as Barneys New York. In 2016, Simon and mall owner General Growth Properties, which is now owned by Brookfield Property Partners, teamed up to save struggling teen apparel retailer Aeropostale, which was in bankruptcy. Simon’s Chairman and CEO David Simon told investors during an earnings call last year that Simon was looking at other potential bankrupt retailers. Forever 21, based in Los Angeles, is a privately held company founded by the Chang family. It joined a rapidly growing list of retailers that have fallen victim to changing shopping behaviors and preferences among teens who have increasingly turned away from malls in favor of online brands


The Cybersecurity 202: Government may be too slow to tackle cyberthreats, outgoing NSA attorney warns

THE KEY Outgoing National Security Agency General Counsel Glenn Gerstell says hacking threats from China and other U.S. adversaries pose as great a challenge to the country as climate change. And the government and private sector risk moving too slowly to respond. “You look at all the manifestations of technology and it has been a tsunami hitting us within a 20-year period,” said Gerstell, who retired after four years as NSA’s top legal official on Friday. “The rate of change is so significant and its impact … is so exceptional that I fear we run the risk of thinking too conventionally about it.” Gerstell’s alarm bell comes after years during which the U.S. has failed to stem the tide of significant hacks from Russia, China, Iran and North Korea -- and as a wave of new innovations such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing and 5G telecommunications networks could radically expand the damage adversaries can do in cyberspace. Gerstell noted this digital transformation is happening far quicker than the 40 or 50 years it took for automobiles, airplanes and other technology to become ubiquitous. It took even longer before government began seriously addressing the safety challenges they posed. The U.S. must get ahead of the challenges posed by the warp-speed evolution of internet technology, he said. “The challenges presented by the digital revolution… are of such a magnitude and coming at us with such a rapidity that there’s a danger we will treat it conventionally and underestimate its significance,” he said. Gerstell said the U.S. probably will have to update the slate of laws that govern cyberspace, many of which date to the 1980s, and ramp up regulations on technology firms. But he stopped short of recommending specific updates. The government will also probably have to consolidate responsibility for cybersecurity, which is spread across the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and numerous smaller agencies, he said. And it must figure out a way that it can better assist companies when they’re targeted by hackers backed by other national adversaries. The increased hacking danger is also going to require the NSA to be far more public about its work protecting the U.S. government in cyberspace and digitally spying on adversaries, he said. Gerstell took the reins of NSA’s main legal office just two years after leaks from former contractor Edward Snowden thrust the secretive agency — whose initials officials


The Technology 202: YouTube explains how it will moderate political falsehoods just in time for Iowa

NIBBLES: Social media app TikTok hired the chief of a top Big Tech trade groups as its first vice president of U.S. public policy, Beckerman, who served as president of the Internet Association for the past eight years, has dealt with Washington’s growing scrutiny of American tech giants including IA members Google, Facebook and Amazon. IA quadrupled in size over the course of his tenure. As Tony points out, the organization is at a critical juncture as its larger members face antitrust scrutiny for potentially hobbling the competitiveness of smaller members: Members of both parties have raised concerns about the social media app, but Republicans have proven some of the company’s harshest critics. A federal interagency committee opened an investigation into TikTok after lawmakers, including Sen Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), raised concerns about a Chinese company’s acquisition of the app formerly known as Musical.ly in 2017. TikTok repeatedly denied influence from any foreign government, including the Chinese government. BYTES: Uber suspended the accounts of 240 users in Mexico who rode with two drivers possibly exposed to the coronavirus, Uber confirmed the widespread deactivations after a user tweeted that the company sent her a message saying she had possibly come in contact with the disease and then suspended her account. Mexico City’s Health Ministry confirmed that an Uber driver in the city had carried a passenger visiting from Los Angeles infected with the coronavirus. Uber said the suspended individuals should contact health officials if they develop symptoms. So far none of the none of the individuals known to have come in contact with the passenger have developed symptoms in the 10 days since. There are no confirmed cases of coronavirus in Mexico. — President Trump on Friday signed an executive order cracking down on counterfeit products sold by e-commerce sites including Amazon and Walmart.com, Diane Bartz and Andrea Shalal at Reuters report. (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The order requests that the Department of Homeland Security design rules to identify and track companies that have contraband in their shipments to the United States. Companies increasingly depend on third-party sellers to bulk up site inventory, and that has made it difficult for them to weed out fraudulent items, as my colleague Jay Greene reported. But top companies say they’re trying to crack down on such fraud. A Walmart spokesman told Reuters that the company takes reports of counterfeit goods very


Coronavirus infections predicted to grow exponentially; first death outside China; outbreak becomes political

BEIJING — One nation after another is closing its doors to most Chinese travelers, as the death toll from the novel coronavirus continues to rise with no sign that the virus can be contained before it becomes a full-blown planetary health crisis. China's increasing isolation threatens to turn this new epidemic into a geopolitical conflict, intensifying preexisting tensions between China and the United States and having potentially significant impacts on the global economy. At 5 p.m. Sunday, the United States put into effect stringent travel restrictions on people coming from China. But the official edict of the Trump administration, announced Friday, led to confusion late Sunday about where, exactly, travelers from China deemed in need of quarantining would be screened and housed at or near the airports where they would be arriving. The U.S. travel restrictions came in the wake of a report released late last week showing that the virus can be transmitted by someone who has not yet shown symptoms of an infection. At least a dozen countries have put travel restrictions on people coming from China. That list includes some neighboring countries that have closed their borders with China. Such travel restrictions are contrary to public health recommendations and have riled Chinese government officials. The Foreign Ministry’s combative spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, singled out the United States, saying that the World Health Organization has said such restrictions are not necessary. A “certain country has turned a blind eye to WHO recommendations and imposed sweeping travel restrictions against China,” Hua tweeted Saturday. “This kind of overreaction could only make things even worse. It’s not the right way to deal with the pandemic.” Hua said many countries have offered China support, but in contrast, “certain U.S. officials’ words and actions are neither factual nor appropriate.” That appeared to be a reference to U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who last week said the coronavirus could “help” to bring jobs to the United States as companies moved operations away from China. Hua said these “unfriendly U.S. comments” were “certainly not a gesture of goodwill.” The coronavirus, which causes pneumonia-like symptoms, and for which there is no vaccine, was first identified in late December in the Hubei provincial capital of Wuhan. An early cluster of cases was found among people who had visited a seafood market where live animals were sold for consumption. Bats and the catlike civets have been linked to previous


mutations in viruses that have jumped from animals to humans, including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which began in southern China in 2002. China’s National Health Commission reported Monday that there are now 17,205 confirmed cases of coronavirus infection on the mainland, plus 15 in Hong Kong and eight in Macao. The WHO reported 146 confirmed cases in 23 countries outside China. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Sunday confirmed an additional case in California, involving a patient who had recently returned to the United States from Wuhan. That brings the U.S. case number to nine, with no deaths. Scientists suspect the true number of infections may be many times higher than the official count. So far, 361 people have died, all but one in China. The most serious illnesses appear to be in the elderly and people with preexisting medical problems, and it is highly contagious. Unless contained soon, it could become a pandemic — a disease that travels almost everywhere on the planet in the same manner as influenza. The WHO on Sunday warned that the coronavirus is spreading not only disease, but also rumors, myths and misinformation. “The 2019-nCoV outbreak and response has been accompanied by a massive ‘infodemic’ — an over-abundance of information — some accurate and some not — that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it,” the WHO wrote. A report published Friday in the New England Journal of Medicine documented a cluster of cases in Germany linked to a Chinese business traveler who showed no symptoms of disease when she was in Germany and became sick only when she returned home. The WHO, however, said this weekend that such transmission by an asymptomatic person is rare with coronaviruses. “Persons who are symptomatic will spread the virus more readily through coughing and sneezing,” the WHO wrote. The Trump administration announced Friday that non-U.S. citizens who had been in China recently — and not just in Wuhan or in surrounding Hubei province — will be temporarily barred from entering the United States, with a few exemptions. American citizens who had been in Hubei province in the previous 14 days would be allowed to return but would be quarantined. U.S. citizens who had been elsewhere in China would be required to self-quarantine at home and report any symptoms to health officials. Meanwhile, the Philippines


Philippines reports first death of coronavirus patient outside China; border restrictions intensify as outbreak takes root around China and across globe

the Trump administration to halt all flights to China. Nearly 10,000 flights have been canceled since the start of the outbreak, travel data analytics firm Cirium said. But as governments battened down the hatches, the virus continued to spread around the globe, with more than a dozen cases each in Thailand, Singapore, Japan and South Korea, as well as everywhere from Finland to Australia. The United Kingdom confirmed two cases Saturday. India reported a second case Sunday, local time. The spread around China is also a major concern, experts said, with more than 170 cases in Shanghai and more than 160 in Beijing. And recent analyses suggest that Chinese officials potentially could have controlled the virus sooner if they had been more transparent about the potential severity of the outbreak. In a study published by the Lancet medical journal Friday, three experts from the University of Hong Kong warned that the epidemic may already be “growing exponentially” in multiple cities around China with a time lag behind the Wuhan outbreak of one to two weeks. “Large cities overseas with close transport links to China could also become outbreak epicenters, unless substantial public health interventions at both the population and personal levels are implemented immediately,” the study warned. “Independent self-sustaining outbreaks in major cities globally could become inevitable because of substantial exportation of presymptomatic cases and in the absence of large-scale public health interventions.” The Chinese government effectively closed down the entire province of Hubei on Jan. 23, but not before an estimated 5 million people had already left Wuhan, the provincial capital. Evidence that people who have caught the virus may be infectious before symptoms are obvious has added to concerns. Chinese health officials directed that people who die from the virus should be cremated immediately, without funerals, to stymie the transmission of the disease. Meanwhile, the pain for the Chinese economy is mounting, with Beijing, Shanghai and many other provinces telling nonessential businesses to remain closed until Feb. 9 and major international hotels empty. The streets of Beijing, typically quiet during the Lunar New Year holiday, would normally have returned to life by now. Instead, they remain largely deserted, with few people taking public transport, restaurants and stores closed, and reminders for returning workers to register and quarantine themselves at the entrance to every residential compound. The start of the spring semester at universities and schools has been postponed


What does ‘dangerous’ climate change really mean?

What are climate or warming targets? How are these goals determined? — McKenzie, Georgia The Post has reported that the world must halve emissions by 2030 if humanity is to avoid the worst effects of warming. What exactly are these ‘worst effects?’ What global temperature increase do scientists predict will lead to them? — William, Maryland The conversation around climate change can sometimes seem riddled with magic numbers and dark thresholds. Researchers talk about the dangers of surpassing 2 degrees of warming. Headlines blare about the importance of reducing emissions by 2030. Even your friendly neighborhood climate reporter (hi!) gets tripped up by the complex calculations involved. But all this math didn’t get pulled out of a hat; it’s the product of years of careful research by scientists and painstaking negotiations among diplomats. So it’s worth understanding how the world comes up with these targets — and what might happen if we fail to meet them. Way back in 1992, world leaders signed a treaty promising to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere “at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic” — human-caused — “interference with the climate system.” This set up the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and member countries have been trying to figure out how to achieve its goals ever since. As Texas Tech University climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe has pointed out, “dangerous” is a pretty subjective standard. If humans are going to hold ourselves accountable to the terms of the UNFCCC, we need to understand the consequences of warming and decide what we’re willing to live with. Scientists have done a great deal of work to help answer the first half of that question. As early as the 1970s, Yale economist William Nordhaus suggested that humans would want to avoid a global average temperature increase that went beyond the natural variations seen in the last few hundred thousand years (as long as our species has been around). This would mean limiting warming to roughly 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. (Side note: Even though most Americans — and The Washington Post’s copy editors — prefer to talk about temperature in Fahrenheit, metric is the chosen system of scientists and pretty much everyone else in the world. That’s why you’ll almost always see climate targets discussed in degrees Celsius.) Nordhaus was an economist, not a climate scientist, and he referred


The audacious effort to reforest the planet: How trees can fight climate change

grassland “back to forest.” Now five years old, Kawayanon’s 45-acre forest is a model for the National Greening Program. Nationwide, the program planted more than a billion seedlings between 2011 and 2018. The tree cover in the Philippines has begun to return — increasing to about 23 percent, according to a U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization report in 2015. Still, the Philippine forests and the greening program are threatened by politics and illegal logging. Danilo S. Lendio, who oversees the Department of Environment and Natural Resources station in Cebu province, said his office has broken up the same tree harvesting ring three times. The first time, the man in charge of the ring was a lieutenant in the army, Lendio said. The second time, he had been promoted to captain. By the third round, the ringleader was a general, and the DENR was warned it would be too risky to continue to bust him. Lendio said he will persist. “As long as he’s doing what he is, we will continue,” he said. Meanwhile, president Rodrigo Duterte’s administration cut the greening program’s budget in half last year, citing poor performance. Administration officials declined to comment on the decision. Though the Philippines produces less than 1 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, it is a nation on the edge of climate change, which underscores its need to restore its rainforests. Global warming has probably strengthened the storms that pummel its shores. In November 2013, Typhoon Haiyan battered the country’s low-lying eastern islands with a wall of water. The hurricane’s winds, which reached up to 180 miles per hour, were some of the fastest ever recorded. More than 6,300 people died. Had the mangrove forests been healthier, they may have absorbed some of Haiyan’s winds and surges. A lush mangrove forest was credited with saving the seaside town named General MacArthur. If such problems could be overcome, how much carbon could trees capture? Jean-Francois Bastin, an ecologist and geographer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, has spent the past decade trying to answer that question. Several years ago, Finkbeiner wanted to know how many trees currently exist, a question that inspired Bastin, Crowther and others to map global tree density. In a study published in Science in 2015, they estimated that there are about 3 trillion trees on the planet. A follow-up in 2019 found room, theoretically, for about a trillion


Forget the log cabin. Wood buildings are climbing skyward — with pluses for the planet.

AMHERST, Mass. — Research assistant Conrado Araujo punches a key, mighty electromechanical motors surge, and a giant steel arm begins to bear down on a long wooden beam with thousands of pounds of pressure. In this airy lab on the ground floor of a four-story building made of similar beams, the crucial question is when the wood will break. Araujo’s computer traces the load with a line that climbs along with the suspense. Sixteen thousand pounds. . . . Eighteen thousand pounds. . . . Twenty-one thousand pounds. . . . Finally, under the weight of nearly six cars, the wood surrenders with a sharp crack. “Impressive,” Araujo says. This is no ordinary block being tested at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. It is “engineered wood,” composed of about 20 boards of eastern hemlock glued together in perpendicular layers to make a thick, extraordinarily strong slab 12 inches wide and 6 1/2 inches high. The potential of such cross-laminated timber — also called “mass timber,” for massive — is exciting builders, city planners, architects and environmentalists around the world. Builders see it as a way to construct midrise structures faster and cheaper. City planners see a fast track that could help reduce housing shortages. Architects love its light weight and look. And some environmentalists tout its ability to lock up carbon to combat climate change. “We call it a win, win, win, win,” explains Robert Perschel of the New England Forestry Foundation. Advocates envision a radical shift in construction, with wood buildings of seven to 18 stories sprouting wholesale in cities, drastically reducing the cement and steel that generate tons of greenhouse gases. The perceived environmental benefit is key to their enthusiasm, moving discussion of mass timber out of builders’ trade shows and into academic and governmental offices. By utilizing wood, proponents argue, the carbon stored in it during tree growth is retained within floors and walls. “It’s kind of amazing,” said Nicole St. Clair Knobloch, a climate policy expert who has a U.S. Forest Service grant to promote mass timber in Massachusetts. “That carbon, you put it in a building, it’s going to stay in the building. It’s not going to be released to the atmosphere.” Not all environmentalists are on board, though. The Sierra Club contends that nearly two-thirds of trees’ carbon is lost to the atmosphere when forests are cut and milled, and replanting young trees


Have you seen or experienced any racism, xenophobia or other forms of discrimination connected to the coronavirus epidemic?

In Rome, a top conservatory suspended East Asian students. A newspaper in France issued a “Yellow Alert.” Around the world, reporters have chronicled an uptick in anti-Chinese sentiment. As the coronavirus continues to spread, so do fears over rising prejudice. If you’ve seen or experienced discrimination, racism or xenophobia connected to the ongoing coronavirus epidemic, The Washington Post wants to hear your story. Please fill out the form below and a reporter may follow up with you.


A D.C. nonprofit is bringing healthier options to neighborhood corner stores

shoppers want more than snacks and sodas, and that customers want better interactions. Cooking demonstrations have been held inside and outside stores. Fruit cups were packaged in the same colorful, attractive wrappings used by candymakers. Healthy recipes were printed on cards and passed out to customers. Neighborhood elders were chosen to find out from residents what items should be added to the store inventory. Because some owners did not speak English fluently, interpreters were called in to navigate this new world. Gregory Cooper, who oversees delivery of the produce, noted that much of the efforts now involve helping customers learn more about healthy meals. “We had a battle trying to convince customers to buy more vegetables than fruit to create a balanced diet,” he said. “But we’re making progress. Our most popular veggies are potatoes, onions, collard greens and spinach.” D.C. Central Kitchen is certainly not alone in trying to make healthy foods more accessible. DC Greens works closely with the agency. And there are a cadre of food policy experts in the city, as well as churches with food ministries and numerous charitable organizations in the fight for food justice. The injustice is all too obvious. The District may be one of the wealthiest cities in the nation, but it has neighborhoods that are segregated by race, and the wealth gap is among the widest in the nation. According to the District’s 2018 Health Equity Report, six neighborhoods have neither a grocery store nor a corner store. They are called “food deserts,” located in predominantly black areas. An additional 17 neighborhoods have only corner stores, liquor stores and fast-food joints. These are the “food swamps,” with notoriously unhealthy food offerings, also in black neighborhoods. About 11 percent of District residents are considered “food insecure,” meaning they are often faced with tough economic choices, such as whether to buy food or pay the rent. They are overwhelmingly black and Latino residents. These patterns are deeply rooted in a systemic racism, historical and ongoing. Only four neighborhoods have retail food options in which at least 50 percent of the stores are considered high-quality, according to the Health Equity Report. And all of them are in predominantly white areas. As D.C. Central Kitchen's Moore sees it, such systemic problems require systemic solutions. He believes that the networks and delivery systems developed for Healthy Corners can be expanded and incorporated into the city’s


The 2003 SARS outbreak fueled anti-Asian racism. Coronavirus doesn’t have to.

Pacific Mall — North America’s largest indoor Asian mall — always hums with life, as a constant wave of shoppers converses loudly over the gentle roar of shopkeepers hawking their wares. A fixture of one of the several Chinese ethnic enclaves in Toronto, Pacific Mall attracts throngs of both Chinese Canadian and non-Chinese shoppers who flock there to buy groceries, sample food from different Chinese cuisines at the mall’s food courts or wander the aisles of stores selling imported clothes, jewelry, skin care products, electronics and more. As a high school student, I volunteered as a tutor for an after-school program at the mall. Several days a week, I would ride the bus north from my high school to push my way through the bustling crowds. After class, I would slip among the swarm of window-shoppers, and peruse the storefronts as I waited to be picked up to go home. That’s why the images of Pacific Mall from 2003 are so eerie. For months, Pacific Mall (like many Chinatowns across North America) was uncharacteristically silent and deserted, a multistoried, fiberglass ghost town. In 2003, news of a local SARS outbreak led to a racial panic, and over the course of that spring, Torontonians enacted an informal boycott of the Chinese community that stigmatized Asian Canadians and devastated Asian-owned small businesses. By some estimates, Asian-owned small-businesses lost up to 80 percent of their income that year from the SARS scare. Nearly two decades later, we are poised to repeat that history as fears of a new coronavirus — a cousin of the SARS virus — mount throughout the United States. After initial reports last month, the number of confirmed infections continues to climb. Most cases of coronavirus infection are in regions of central China, where the outbreak originated, but patients with the virus have also been reported in nearly 20 countries, including the United States. At least two of those American coronavirus patients are in Southern California, mere minutes from where I now live. Just as in 2003 with SARS, we again face a possible global outbreak of a new and relatively unknown virus. Like many, I’m concerned about steps we can take to prevent and limit coronavirus spread. But after experiencing firsthand the hostile racial climate of the SARS outbreak in 2003 in Toronto and across the United States, I’m equally nervous about how rising anti-Asian racism fueled by fear