We don’t know whether the coronavirus should affect the Olympics. We do know the IOC.

The Summer Olympics are such a crowded, sweat-dampened, close-packed and germ-ridden affair that attending them can be like hanging out inside someone’s mouth. And that’s in the best of circumstances, when the world isn’t on the brink of a pandemic. Knowing what we know now about the novel coronavirus — the very little we know, which is not nearly enough to fully understand its dangers and spread — it’s fair to ask, should the Games go on? It’s premature to call for the cancellation or postponement of Tokyo 2020. But with the torch relay about to begin and just 150 days remaining to the Opening Ceremonies, it’s certainly not too early to ask how the organizers and the International Olympic Committee realistically propose to keep the Summer Games healthy and secure as opposed to a disease epicenter. How can they prevent an outbreak with athletes from 200 countries and 7.5 million ticket holders preparing to jam into villages and venues? They better have a Plan B. So far, they don’t. Olympic authorities insist no alterations are even being contemplated. Dick Pound of the IOC said Tuesday that it was “business as usual,” while the organization’s Tokyo event coordinator, John Coates, said last week that “there is no case for any contingency plans or canceling the Games or moving the Games.” Why not? Why are officials so sure, so much surer than everyone else, that holding a mega-sports event in the midst of a viral epidemic is a harmless idea? The IOC’s very sureness is untrustworthy. More than 40 other international sports events have been postponed or altered. There are fast-moving new outbreaks from Europe to the Middle East, with no vaccine yet or a definitive incubation period. It hardly seems wise to wad up delegations from all the countries of the world and throw them into the same rooms for two weeks. What is this special immunity, this antidote enjoyed by the Olympics that makes them so sure it’s safe? Money, that’s what. There are so many billions at stake that no one dares to sound unsure. The estimated cost of building, hosting and organizing the Tokyo Games is around $25 billion. The IOC is counting on $5.7 billion in broadcast rights, and Japanese companies have paid out $3 billion in sponsorship deals they could never recoup. You think the lords of Lausanne want to contemplate giving any of that


Could Olympics be impacted by coronavirus? IOC has three months to decide, one official says.

Olympics officials are warily watching the spread of coronavirus as they begin to consider the potential implications for the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo. Moving the Games to another city is unlikely, as is postponing them for a year and then holding them in Tokyo, an official told the Associated Press. A decision on whether to hold the Games or take action, up to a complete cancellation, could be delayed until late May, two months ahead of the July 24 Opening Ceremonies. “You could certainly go to two months out if you had to,” Dick Pound, an International Olympic Committee official since 1978, told the AP. “A lot of things have to start happening. You’ve got to start ramping up your security, your food, the Olympic Village, the hotels. The media folks will be in there building their studios.” If coronavirus makes it difficult to hold the Games as originally scheduled, Pound said, “you’re probably looking at a cancellation.” He added: “This is the new war, and you have to face it. In and around that time, I’d say folks are going to have to ask, ‘Is this under sufficient control that we can be confident about going to Tokyo or not?’” The IOC will continue to confer with the World Health Organization and keep watch, although Pound said “all indications” point to the Games coming off without a hitch and on schedule. Still, much remains unknown and the WHO has warned countries to be “in a phase of preparedness,” although it has declined to categorize the outbreaks as a pandemic, in which epidemics become rampant in multiple countries and continents simultaneously. On Tuesday, global disruptions worsened with the United Arab Emirates, a critical aviation hub, announcing that it has suspended travel to and from Iran, where authorities confirmed that the death toll has reached at least 15 and both the deputy health minister and a member of parliament have tested positive for the disease. Both China and South Korea announced new cases of the coronavirus, with South Korea now up to 977 confirmed cases. The coronavirus was first detected in Wuhan in China in December and there have since been more than 77,000 infections in that country, with 2,663 deaths. South Korea has the second-most cases and the illness has now appeared in Japan as well as Europe and the Middle East. A number of organizations have taken precautionary


Fatal Tesla crash tied to technology and driver failures, NTSB says

as a party to the investigation. The NTSB, an independent federal body that investigates airplane, boat and highway crashes, generally brings manufacturers, government officials and others together to determine the probable causes of major crashes. That process can take a year or two, an eternity in the tech world, but the results are widely trusted. Tesla’s party status was revoked after the automaker released information about the crash. Tesla says it chose to withdraw and accused the NTSB of being “more concerned with press headlines than actually promoting safety.” At a November hearing on the federal investigation into the fatal crash of a self-driving Uber SUV, Sumwalt pointed to what he called Uber’s openness with investigators, and contrasted it with the approach of Tesla chief executive Elon Musk. “I did notice when I talked to their CEO he did not hang up on me,” Sumwalt said, referring to Uber. “We chose to withdraw from the agreement and issued a statement to correct misleading claims that had been made about Autopilot — claims which made it seem as though Autopilot creates safety problems when the opposite is true,” Tesla said in a 2018 statement. The company also noted that NHTSA, which is part of the Transportation Department, regulates automobiles, adding that the company has “a strong and positive relationship” with NHTSA. “Lot of respect for NTSB, but NHTSA regulates cars, not NTSB, which is an advisory body. Tesla releases critical crash data affecting public safety immediately & always will. To do otherwise would be unsafe,” Musk tweeted in April 2018. Huang’s crash was not the first time a Tesla driver was killed while using Autopilot, nor would it be the last, and NTSB officials voiced frustration because they said sufficient changes had not been made by the company and others. In 2016, a speeding Tesla driver in Williston, Fla., crashed into a truck that turned in front of him. At the time, Tesla said “neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor-trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied.” Musk later said that it was “very likely” a new radar-based braking system would have prevented the crash. In 2017, NHTSA said it found no defects in the Autopilot system in use at the time of that crash. The regulator’s broader federal review of dozens of Autopilot crashes did point to industry-wide challenges. “Many


How Bolsonaro’s risky bet on China in the Amazon could backfire

cut the budget of the government’s environmental protection agency, hamstringing its ability to police the jungle, and sent the army in to finish paving the more than 800 miles of a highway bisecting the region, meant to facilitate the transport of grain to China through the Amazon basin. Deforestation rates in the Amazon reached a 10-year high in 2019 and jumped a staggering 183 percent between December 2018 and December 2019. Meanwhile, China — a signatory to the Paris agreement on climate change — has kept quiet over its contribution to the crisis. When it comes to Brazil, Beijing has put its food security priorities ahead of its environmental commitments and chosen to do business with no questions asked. Yet Bolsonaro’s bet on China may backfire. Meat prices in Brazil have skyrocketed domestically, fueling inflation. That’s a worrisome trend in a country where churrasco (barbecue) is almost a religion and where inflation sparked massive demonstrations in 2013 that threatened to derail then-President Dilma Rousseff’s bid for a second term. Experts and officials agree that the rising cost of beef at home is a direct consequence of record beef sales to China, where a devastating swine flu that has halved its pig population has led many Chinese to buy more beef as a replacement protein. This hasn’t just come at the expense of Brazilian consumers. In some cases, it has even come at the cost of Brazilian sellers. Powerful Chinese state-owned enterprises recently bullied Brazilian exporters, renegotiating contracts at the last minute and pushing them to sell meat at a loss. Now, Bolsonaro’s ambitious trade plans with China might face further jeopardy. Brazil had benefited from the trade war between the United States and China, stepping in to sell more soy and beef to the Asian superpower as U.S. farmers got cut out. But the boom times may be over, with the new trade deal essentially a purchase agreement with a pledge from Beijing to buy $36 billion worth of agricultural products from the United States this year, much of it soy, and $43 billion the next. In order to honor its commitment, China has no choice but to pivot back to the United States. As a result, Bolsonaro’s staunchest supporters — farmers — may face a soy surplus this season, just when the harvest is forecast to reach an all-time high. In January, Brazil’s soy exports dropped more than 26


Hosni Mubarak dies at 91. His autocratic rule of Egypt ended with a citizens’ revolt.

1950, during an era when the Egyptian military depended on Soviet equipment and assistance. In 1959, he moved to the Soviet Union for further training. Mr. Mubarak excelled in an environment in which Soviet instructors drilled into their students an aggressiveness and attention to detail. “He enjoyed flying; he was born for the sky,” Boris Pogozhev, a retired Soviet officer who gave flying lessons to Mr. Mubarak, once said in an interview with a Russian news website. “Mubarak learned pretty good Russian, including slang. He understood Russians very well. . . . After his first independent flight, we had a party — that was a tradition. And Mubarak was at his best — drinking vodka without wincing.” Mr. Mubarak rose quickly in the military and was named commander of the air force in 1972, when he was 44. He was regarded as a hero for his role directing an air campaign against Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war over disputed border territories on the Sinai Peninsula. Two years later, he was named vice president under Sadat. Mr. Mubarak largely handled the day-to-day running of the country and was often sent by Sadat to handle regional issues with Egypt’s Arab neighbors. He became known for his shrewd diplomacy. Mr. Mubarak played a key role in negotiating the Camp David Accords in 1978, under which Egypt became the first Arab country to recognize Israel’s right to exist. The 1978 signing of the accords was a historic moment, and Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin shared the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. But Egypt was ostracized by the rest of the Arab world for what was considered an act of betrayal. Sadat was gunned down during a military parade outside Cairo by Islamic fundamentalist militants, who reportedly opposed Sadat’s policies toward Israel. As president, Mr. Mubarak never wavered in his commitment to the course that Sadat had charted with Israel. He was by no means a friend of the Israelis, who often expressed annoyance with him, but he maintained a “cold peace” with his eastern neighbors and kept Egypt mostly out of war. He largely cooperated with Israel on its blockade of the Gaza Strip, even while members of his intelligence service worked closely with Hamas, the Palestinian militant organization that controls the strip and that the United States and other Western countries consider a terrorist group. Despite the blockade, which


Rush Limbaugh on coronavirus: ‘The common cold’ that’s being ‘weaponized’ against Trump

toll of 2,663, according to the most recent official figures Tuesday. “Stunningly reckless,” tweeted Charlie Sykes, founder of the Bulwark, a conservative news site. On Monday, Limbaugh kicked off his coronavirus monologue by attacking media coverage of the outbreak. “It’s really being hyped as a deadly Andromeda strain or Ebola pandemic that, ‘Oh, my God, is going to wipe out the nation. It’s going to wipe out the population of the world,’ ” the host said. “The survival rate of this is 98 percent,” he continued. “You have to read very deeply to find that number, that 2 percent of the people get the coronavirus die. That’s less than the flu, folks.” The estimated death rate of the new virus that causes the disease covid-19 is about 2 in 100 confirmed infections, The Washington Post recently reported. But researchers have expressed concern about containing the rapidly spreading disease, which does not yet have a vaccine. While Limbaugh stressed to listeners that he wasn’t “trying to get you to let your guard down,” the host argued that panicking about coronavirus is unwarranted. “There’s nothing unusual about the coronavirus. In fact, coronavirus is not something new,” he said, later adding, “We’re not talking about something here that’s gonna wipe out your town or your city if it finds its way there.” Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that cause illnesses ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which infected more than 8,000 people in 2003, according to the WHO. The coronavirus at the center of the ongoing outbreak is a strain that had not been identified in humans until cases started cropping up in Wuhan last year, the WHO reported. Limbaugh went on to reference the fringe theory that the virus originated from a Chinese laboratory in the city where the outbreak began — an idea that has been widely dismissed by experts. “Based on the virus genome and properties there is no indication whatsoever that it was an engineered virus,” Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, told The Post’s Adam Taylor. In another interview with The Post, Vipin Narang, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the suggestion that a lab accident caused the outbreak was “highly unlikely,” citing a lack of evidence. “It’s a skip in logic to say it’s a bioweapon


Coronavirus cases surge again in China; more than 1,700 medical workers infected

than 66,400 cases have been confirmed in China during the outbreak. Roughly 1,500 people have died. By: Marisa Iati 6:30 PM: Hubei province reports 2,420 new cases and 139 new deaths Hubei province on Saturday morning reported 2,420 new cases of the virus, most of which were in the city of Wuhan. There were also 139 new deaths. About half of the new cases were clinically diagnosed by a doctor, as opposed to confirmed by laboratory testing. Hubei’s recent expansion of diagnosis criteria has caused case numbers in the province to skyrocket this week. Since the outbreak began last month, Hubei has accumulated more than 54,400 cases of the coronavirus and 1,457 deaths, according to the province’s health officials. By: Marisa Iati 5:45 PM: What’s behind the ‘infodemic’ of false coronavirus news? The World Health Organization has a term for the onslaught of inaccuracy that has sprung up around the coronavirus: “infodemic,” or an epidemic of false information. Rumors have included wildly inflated death tolls, a connection between the coronavirus and bioweapons, and the notion that people eating bats caused the outbreak On Thursday, representatives from the WHO visited Silicon Valley to discuss with tech companies how to better combat the spread of false information about the coronavirus online. Facebook and other major social media companies have partnered with the WHO to direct users searching for news about the virus to the WHO and other health organizations. It’s not clear whether governments are behind some of the false information, but patterns have emerged that echo those found in government-backed disinformation campaigns, experts told The Washington Post’s Kim Bellware on the Post Reports podcast Thursday. “It’s not that they necessarily want to misinform us about the coronavirus in particular, but its rather that the coronavirus offers a ready vehicle for spreading disinformation and reducing the quality of information that we see on the internet,” said Carl T. Bergstrom, a researcher at the University of Washington. “When you sow that kind of chaos, it really undermines people’s faith in institutions … and that can be really effective for certain hostile governments who want to undermine the stability of a rival country.” People are susceptible to false information about the virus because much remains unknown. “When that certainty isn’t there, we latch on to people who offer us promises of certainty,” Bergstrom said. Some of the false news has had racist and xenophobic


The social media giant is not alone. Earlier in the week, the Mobile World Congress, the world’s largest mobile phone summit, was canceled because of travel disruptions. The event had been scheduled to start on Feb. 24. The cancellations come amid fears that such events could play a major role in proliferating the virus around the world. Attendees at a sales meeting at a hotel in Singapore earlier this month spread the virus to five countries. By: Miriam Berger 1:29 PM: Egypt confirms first coronavirus case in Africa CAIRO — Egypt’s Ministry of Health confirmed Friday that it had detected a case of coronavirus in the country, marking the first known example of the outbreak in Africa. A spokesperson for the ministry, Khaled Megahed, said in a statement that a foreign national had tested positive for the coronavirus and that the World Health Organization had been notified. Although the person had not shown symptoms, they were tested due to their travel history. The person was subsequently transported to a hospital and they are now under quarantine. The person’s health is stable, Megahed said. Health officials are taking measures to prevent the spread of the virus. A number of people who came into contact with the patient have also been tested for the novel coronavirus, Megahad said. Though they tested negative, they will be placed under a 14-day quarantine as a precautionary measure. The residence where the person was staying was also being sterilized, Megahad said. The statement did not say where the person was detected or whether they were a resident of Egypt. By: Heba Farouk Mahfouz and Adam Taylor 1:15 PM: A look inside Macao’s risky coronavirus casino shutdown MACAO — Visitors arriving in this gaudy Chinese gambling hub are hit with text messages promoting its draw cards: celebrity-chef-branded restaurants and dazzling entertainment shows in one of the dozens of lavish casino resorts. “Grand Lisboa is looking forward to your visits to our Michelin 3 Stars restaurants!” reads a grammatically imperfect message from the casino complex, whose gold-hued tower was designed to resemble a Brazilian dancer’s feathered headdress. “Exclusive accommodation and transportation offers for your choice!” But no Michelin-starred restaurants were open on a recent visit. Nor were the pastry shops known for Portuguese egg tarts. Luxury stores at several casino resorts The Washington Post visited were shut, too. At the few open shops, bored staff members watched movies


Emily Rauhala 12:35 p.m.: Legal scholars argue coronavirus-related travel bans violate international law A group of 16 scholars argued that travel bans are an inappropriate response to the coronavirus outbreak, as they violate Article 43 of the International Health Regulations, a binding agreement reached by WHO member states in 2005. “In imposing travel restrictions against China during the current outbreak of 2019 novel coronavirus disease (covid-19), many countries are violating the IHR,” the scholars write in an article in the Lancet journal that published Thursday. While countries “would rather be safe than sorry,” evidence “belies the claim that illegal travel restrictions make countries safer,” they add. “In the short term, travel restrictions prevent supplies from getting into affected areas, slow down the international public health response, stigmatise entire populations, and disproportionately harm the most vulnerable among us,” the authors write. “In the longer term, countries selecting which international laws to follow encourages other countries to do the same, which in turn undermines the broader rules-based world order.” A variety of nations, including the United States, have imposed restrictions on travel to China, especially Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus, despite guidance from the WHO to avoid such measures. The legal scholars were led by Steven J. Hoffman, director of the Global Strategy Lab and a professor at York University in Toronto, and Roojin Habibi, a research fellow with the Global Strategy Lab. Prominent scholars such as Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, were among the authors. By: Adam Taylor 11:44 AM: WHO says more research needed to know whether patients who recover from novel coronavirus become immune Mike Ryan of the World Health Organization said Friday that “it’s still impossible to know” whether patients who recover from the newly named covid-19 are then immune to becoming sick with it again. “It’s too early to tell what the immunity test would be,” Ryan, executive director of WHO’s health emergencies program, said at a news conference in Geneva. “It’s impossible to know.” Ryan said he expected “that recovered patients would be protected from a further infection,” but that it remained unclear how long the immunity would last and whether it would apply to other coronaviruses as well. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, has now infected and killed more people than severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, another coronavirus that killed around 800 people during an outbreak


scholars were led by Steven J. Hoffman, director of the Global Strategy Lab and a professor at York University in Toronto, and Roojin Habibi, a research fellow with the Global Strategy Lab. Prominent scholars such as Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, were among the authors. By: Adam Taylor 11:44 AM: WHO says more research needed to know whether patients who recover from novel coronavirus become immune Mike Ryan of the World Health Organization said Friday that “it’s still impossible to know” whether patients who recover from the newly named covid-19 are then immune to becoming sick with it again. “It’s too early to tell what the immunity test would be,” Ryan, executive director of WHO’s health emergencies program, said at a news conference in Geneva. “It’s impossible to know.” Ryan said he expected “that recovered patients would be protected from a further infection,” but that it remained unclear how long the immunity would last and whether it would apply to other coronaviruses as well. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, has now infected and killed more people than severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, another coronavirus that killed around 800 people during an outbreak in 2002-2003. Overall, however, a higher rate of people who contracted SARS died of it compared with those sick with covid-19, whose severity varies more widely. Covid-19 affects the respiratory system and can put people at risk of bacterial infections there, further raising the risk of deadly complications. Scientists are scrambling to develop a vaccine and anti-viral treatment for covid-19, which can be a costly and time-consuming process. By: Miriam Berger 11:27 AM: African students stuck in Wuhan call on their governments to arrange evacuations Students from several African countries are stranded in Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, after their governments declined to arrange chartered flights for them to leave China. The BBC reported Friday that the Ugandan government determined it was unable to cover the costs of a flight for the more than 100 students now in the city. In addition, Jane Ruth Aceng, the country’s health minister, told lawmakers Thursday that the country was not prepared to treat coronavirus cases. Instead of an evacuation, the government will send about $61,800 to Wuhan to be split among affected Ugandan students, the BBC reported. “The government has reduced our lives to $61,800,” one person wrote on Twitter, using


down to its last chain of transmission. Despite ongoing violence that has hampered the response from its outset, and that has spiked again recently, new cases have dwindled. At the virus’s height in May, hundreds were contracting the disease every week. The waning of the Ebola outbreak comes as a new one captures global attention — and, potentially, funding as well. Global health officials have warned that while the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, now known as covid-19, racks up thousands of new cases a day, the hard work of ending the Ebola outbreak and preventing another is far from over. “Funding needs [for the Ebola response] have not as yet been fully met, and currently there is a risk there will not be funding for WHO activities beyond February,” said Margaret Harris, a World Health Organization spokeswoman. Ebola and covid-19 are vastly different viruses; Ebola can be transmitted only through exchange of bodily fluids, but it killed nearly 70 percent of those who contracted it in eastern Congo. The WHO’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said Thursday that covid-19 “might have adverse consequences for the [Ebola] response efforts through diminishing focus” on it. While the WHO, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a constellation of nonprofits and the Congolese Health Ministry have mounted a relentless campaign to contain Ebola, little has been done to shore up the region’s health system, which is sorely lacking in even the most basic infrastructure. Ebola is endemic to Congo’s rainforest, and the likelihood of future outbreaks is high. Read more here: By: Max Bearak 7:05 AM: Nine new coronavirus cases in Singapore, 6 linked to the same church Singapore confirmed nine new coronavirus cases Friday, linking six of the patients to a church at the center of the country’s biggest cluster of infections. Thirteen people total with ties to the Grace Assembly of God church have tested positive for the virus since Tuesday. In total, 67 people in Singapore have contracted the illness, known as covid-19, according to Singapore’s Ministry of Health. The Health Ministry’s director of medical services, Kenneth Mak, told Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper that investigations were still unfolding around the spread of infections connected to the church. “We have not identified a single individual to be a super spreader,” he said. In Britain, one man who traveled from Singapore to France to Switzerland and then back home


she said. Meanwhile, three new coronavirus cases have been confirmed, bringing the total in Hong Kong to 56. The city’s economic minister said Friday that the government has also requested consent from the Hong Kong Disneyland Park to create more quarantine camps on land originally zoned for the park’s expansion, if cases spike. By: Shibani Mahtani 5:40 AM: International Olympic Committee says no reason to cancel or relocate Tokyo Games YOKOHAMA, Japan — The International Olympic Committee said Friday it has been advised by the World Health Organization that there was “no case” to cancel or relocate the Tokyo 2020 Olympics over the coronavirus outbreak. A day after Japan reported its first death from the new coronavirus, John Coates, the head of the IOC’s Coordination Commission, said he continued to expect the Games to go ahead as planned. Advice from the WHO was that “there is no case for any contingency plans of canceling the Games or moving the Games,” Coates said, according to Reuters. The coronavirus epidemic has already caused several international sporting events to be canceled or postponed, including the Shanghai Grand Prix, while Olympic qualifying events in soccer, badminton and basketball had to be moved out of China. Coates said coordination between the Japan organizing committee’s virus task force and other national authorities reinforced the IOC’s confidence that the situation was being properly addressed, Reuters reported. That raised expectations that “we’ll be able to ensure that the Games go ahead in a way that’s safe for the athletes and spectators,” Coates told a news conference in Tokyo. Toshiro Muto, the chief executive of the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee, said last week he was “seriously worried” that the virus might affect momentum toward the Games, but he pledged the following day the event would go ahead as planned By: Simon Denyer 5:10 AM: Thailand weighs visa-free policy for Chinese travelers — but only after coronavirus eases Thailand’s tourism officials are pushing for visa-free entry for Chinese citizens, the Bangkok Post reported, hoping to kick-start a tourism sector that is suffering heavy losses over the coronavirus outbreak. Tourism and Sports Minister Phiphat Ratchakitprakarn, quoted in the report, said the number of Chinese tourists arriving in Thailand fell about 87 percent in the first nine days of February compared with a year earlier and is likely to drop about 90 percent overall this month. International tourist arrivals overall have dropped


The coronavirus and the long history of using diseases to justify xenophobia

long cascading string of events, quarantining Chinatown, and a characterization of a people and community as unclean, filthy and a constant menace to public health,” Chan said. It was not until 1943 that Congress repealed all exclusion acts. Asian immigration did not really open up again until 1965 with the Immigration and Naturalization Act, designed to reunite families and attract skilled labor. “A lot of the same things have played out, a conflation of events that occur overseas with the American community. … So Chinatowns around the country are experiencing an economic downturn precisely because of fears that American Chinese restaurants and businesses have something to do with the outbreak in Wuhan,” said Chan, a fourth-generation Chinese American. “We just happen to look like the nation-state that the epidemic is occurring in.” On top of that, many are unable to distinguish between the different ethnicities of Asian Americans. When Korean American Sam Lee coughed on the Metro in Washington, other passengers looked alarmed, mouthing, “Coronavirus, Wuhan?” “That’s absolutely something a lot of Asian Americans deal with,” said Lee, 40, referring to the question of origin. “We can laugh about it internally … like when Asian Americans went to the Oscar cast party and were assumed to be in the cast of ‘Parasite’ and randomly took photos with a bunch of celebrities. … It feels like it shouldn’t be happening in 2020. It’s not as much that education is the answer but exposure and empathy.” Some Asians bring over the practice of wearing masks to America as a precautionary measure, which draws even more attention to them during a time of heightened public concern about the disease. When Joanne Leung wore a face mask to the post office in Los Angeles to mail masks to her family in Hong Kong, where supplies are running low, a man started calling out to her, “Hey, corona. Hey, corona.” “It just made me more aware that I have an Asian face, and I may not be the most welcome in this country right now,” said Leung, a 30-year-old photographer. All of this stigmatization can affect mental health, too. When news of an unknown virus from China first broke, Meredith Li-Vollmer started bracing for the impact, worrying about what it would mean for the community here in the United States, of all the “kinds of stress and fear that comes out of those situations.” “We


Hunting is ‘slowly dying off,’ and that has created a crisis for the nation’s many endangered species

people are engaging in outdoor activities, hunting license sales have fallen from a peak of about 17 million in the early ’80s to 15 million last year, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service data. The agency’s 2016 survey suggested a steeper decline to 11.5 million Americans who say they hunt, down more than 2 million from five years earlier. “The downward trends are clear,” said Samantha Pedder of the Council to Advance Hunting and the Shooting Sports, which works to increase the diversity of hunters. The resulting financial shortfall is hitting many state wildlife agencies. In Wisconsin, a $4 million to $6 million annual deficit forced the state’s Department of Natural Resources to reduce warden patrols and invasive species control. Michigan’s legislature had to dig into general-tax coffers to save some of the state’s wildlife projects, while other key programs, such as protecting bees and other pollinating creatures, remain “woefully underfunded,” according to Edward Golder, a spokesman for the state’s natural resources department. Some states, including Missouri, are directing sales tax revenue to conservation. Here in Pennsylvania — where the game commission gets more than 50 percent of its revenue from licenses, permits and taxes — the agency had to cancel construction projects, delay vehicle purchases and leave dozens of positions vacant, according to a 2016 report, even as it tackled West Nile virus and tried to protect rare creatures such as the wood rat. “That’s what keeps me up at night,” Robert Miller, director of the Governor’s Advisory Council for Hunting, Fishing and Conservation, said of the inadequacies of the user-pay, user-play model that has funded conservation for decades. A national panel has called for a new funding model to keep at-risk species from needing far costlier emergency measures. The crisis stands to worsen with as many as one-third of America's wildlife species “at increased risk of extinction,” according to a 2018 report published by the National Wildlife Federation. In December, environmentalists and hunters united in Washington behind two bipartisan bills aimed at establishing new funding sources and facilitating the recruitment of hunters. The needs are becoming more urgent as development eats into habitats and new challenges crop up, such as climate change and chronic wasting disease, a neurological condition infecting deer. The Trump administration’s recent rollback of pollution controls on waterways will put a greater burden on states to protect wetland habitats. The financial troubles are growing


Why is China afraid of Gui Minhai?

law in China today. I think of Gui sometimes when I hear Chinese President Xi Jinping boasting about a country that “has stood up, grown rich and is becoming strong.” Would a truly strong and self-confident nation behave this way? Why would it feel the need to kidnap — for the second time, no less — a peaceable 54-year-old gentleman such as Gui and keep him, in poor health, locked up for, now, more than a thousand days? Gui left China as a young man to study in Sweden and got marooned there when the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre rendered his home country inhospitable to anyone inclined toward democracy. He earned a Phd, married, had a daughter, Angela, who is now, at 24, beginning her own PhD studies at the University of Cambridge in England. Eventually, as the political climate in China eased, Gui moved back. He established a book business in Hong Kong, where he published insider accounts from China’s Communist Party — books that were banned in China itself. In October 2015, he disappeared from his small vacation home in Thailand. That was the first abduction, followed by the first bizarre confession: Gui showed up on television in January 2016 claiming he had voluntarily returned to China to take responsibility for a long-ago hit-and-run car accident. Angela could never find out where he was being held, but last fall he was released into a kind of house arrest in Ningbo, a coastal city south of Shanghai, where he was allowed to resume a careful communication with his daughter. He told her that, while in prison, he had been composing poems. His captors had not permitted him pen and paper, but he had committed them to memory — and last fall he began writing them down and sending them to his daughter. In one, he compares himself to a Père David’s deer — a species that, by the time a French missionary became in the 19th century the first Westerner to see it, existed only in captivity, in the Chinese emperor’s hunting preserve. “When I was caught I started to evolve/When I started to evolve, I was tamed,” Gui wrote. “But while I am shamed in the swamp/I still yearn to run through the Swedish woods.” Also last fall, Gui began to notice alarming signs of neurological deterioration — perhaps a result of maltreatment in captivity; perhaps, as a


World Health Organization: China not sharing data on coronavirus infections among health-care workers

virus as it spikes in places such as South Korea, Italy and Iran. Details about front-line worker infections are “critical for developing preparedness plans in countries around the world,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Giving that information to the World Health Organization is also important from a credibility standpoint,” she said. The WHO’s credibility is also on the line. After China’s attempts to cover up the 2002 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic, the rules governing international outbreaks were updated with an eye to accountability. But in recent weeks, as evidence mounted that China had silenced whistleblowers and undercounted cases, the WHO has continued to heap praise on Beijing. Getting information from member countries in crisis always requires coaxing. But public health experts worry that the laudatory tone has gone too far. “China should be transparent and WHO should be transparent with the broader community,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University who also provides technical assistance to the WHO. “This is Health Communication 101,” he continued. “Tell us everything you know, tell us what you don’t know and tell us what you are doing to find out what you don’t know.” It is not clear whether political sensitivities have shaped China’s reporting on sick doctors and other health-care professionals. It is possible that data gaps simply reflect the challenge of gathering information in the middle of a crisis, experts said. What is clear is that China is not sending details that WHO officials and other experts expect and need. “China has learned at least one lesson from SARS. They're cooperating with WHO just enough to stave off accusations that they are not cooperating,” said Mara Pillinger, an associate in global health policy and governance at Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. “This partial collaboration makes it politically tricky for WHO to publicly contradict or go around the Chinese government,” Pillinger said, “because WHO needs to do everything it can to encourage stronger cooperation from China.” This breakdown of trust was not supposed to happen again. Post-SARS measures require countries to quickly report emerging infectious diseases and give the WHO broader power to investigate threats. The response to the coronavirus suggests that some of those measures have been successful and others have not. China has been praised by the WHO for


If you want to save a cow, eat an Impossible Burger. Or stop eating cheese.

away from veal. Another 7 percent came from older dairy cows that hadn’t been sent to feedlots. Only 7 percent were beef cattle that had not been finished on a feedlot (this would include grass-fed beef) and a final 2 percent were older bulls that had been used for breeding or sperm operations. “We call them baloney bulls,” Good said. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service (ERS) reports that 3,224,200 dairy cows were slaughtered under federal inspection in 2019. “Dairy cows slaughtered produced an estimated 2.0603 billion pounds out of a total 26.8 billion pounds produced under federal inspection,” says Russell Knight, an ERS beef analyst. “That suggests that dairy cows contributed 7.7 percent of the beef produced in 2019.” Even some of the biggest meat producers have been quick to jump into the plant-based arena. Tyson, Perdue, Hormel, Smithfield and others have joined the rush to launch products. Cargill, one of the world’s largest privately held companies, announced this week that it would challenge Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods with its own plant-based burger patties and ground-meat alternative. The investment firm UBS predicts that the worldwide, plant-based meat-alternatives industry will rise to $85 billion in value by 2030 from $4.5 billion today. And yet, according to the USDA, per capita beef consumption went from 54 pounds in 2015 to 57.7 pounds in 2019, with a projected 57.9 pounds in 2020. Reports have indicated that dairy is in trouble, with fluid milk consumption down 26 percent since 2000, according to the Dairy Farmers of America. But despite recent high-profile bankruptcies by major milk producers Dean Foods and Borden Dairy, Americans are consuming more total dairy products. Yes, we are not chug-a-lugging a tall frothy glass as frequently, but dairy product consumption other than milk has more than offset the loss in direct milk consumption. There has been a huge increase in cheese consumption, and think of all the ready-to-drink bottled coffees, smoothies and protein drinks that contain milk. “Since the USDA began tracking per capita dairy consumption in the 1970s, the trend has continued upward for five straight decades, increasing 22 percent since 1975,” says Andrew Jerome, director of communications for the International Dairy Foods Association. Whole milk, which had previously seen a steep decline through 2013, has had renewed growth over the past five years, and milk with “added benefits,” such as pre- and probiotics or lactose


We can’t stop the coronavirus now. But we can be ready for it.

measures that do not involve drugs or vaccines — can be helpful in reducing the effect of a large outbreak, effective and long-term control of this virus will probably also require mass vaccination. It took approximately two years to develop a vaccine for SARS, and by the time the vaccine was available for initial human trials, the outbreak was over. For the current outbreak, at least 39 vaccine development programs are already underway. This early progress is due to advances in technology since previous large outbreaks. For example, the technology for identifying vaccine targets on the virus is more advanced than it was even when SARS broke out. Because of genetic similarities between covid-19 and SARS, as well as advances in technologies for decoding viral genetic information, scientists were able to quickly create a genetic sequence useful for developing vaccines. Similarly, technological innovations such as using “messenger” RNA as a vaccine has sped up initial development of vaccines. (Production is still at least a year away.) But the biggest barrier to vaccine availability is not biological. It is what happens after a biological product is developed and tested in animals. Conducting human trials is an essential step in determining the efficacy and safety of vaccines before deploying them in the general population. The market for a vaccine against something like covid-19 is hard to predict, because it’s inherently difficult to forecast how the virus will spread and where. That means there is very little incentive for large vaccine manufacturers to invest in such vaccines; they don’t have a good sense of how or when their investment will pay off. Therefore, a few years ago, scientists and public health professionals created a global public-private partnership called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). This organization aims to speed up the development of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases and make them quickly accessible to people during outbreaks. CEPI has already given out four contracts for development and human testing of covid-19 vaccines. However, the resources available to CEPI are substantially lower than the challenge it faces — and far lower than what private pharmaceutical companies could spend. In 2009, the overall budget for CEPI was $187 million; in the same year, the vaccine R&D budget for just one company, Sanofi Pasteur, was approximately $600 million. CEPI’s funders include the governments of Norway, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Canada, Ethiopia, Australia and Belgium;


Baltimore Symphony Orchestra music director Marin Alsop to step down next year

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Music Director Marin Alsop will step down next year, ending her historic tenure as the first female artistic leader of a major North American orchestra. Alsop, 63, will become music director laureate and continue as OrchKids founder when her contract ends Aug. 31, 2021, the orchestra announced Wednesday. She will lead three concert weeks each year through the 2025-2026 season and will stay involved in the educational program she founded. Alsop, who arrived in Baltimore in 2007, remains the only woman to lead a major American orchestra. She is the first conductor to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, known as a “genius” grant, and last year she was honored with the Crystal Award at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which celebrates leading artists. The announcement of her departure after 14 seasons comes at a pivotal moment for one of Maryland’s most significant cultural organizations, which continues to wrestle with long-standing financial problems. The orchestra’s administration abruptly canceled last summer’s programming as it tried to shorten the 52-week season to 40 weeks, part of an effort to address $16 million in losses over the past decade. After the musicians were locked out in June, management and the musicians agreed to a one-year contract that allowed the current season to start in September. The orchestra performs at the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore and the Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda, drawing about 350,000 people annually. Alsop is in London and was not available for comment Wednesday. But in a statement, she emphasized her pride in leading the Baltimore ensemble. “The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is one of the world’s great orchestras and I have been proud to have served as its artistic leader. I am looking forward to leading these outstanding musicians as Music Director in the upcoming season and continuing our involvement in my new position as Music Director Laureate,” she said. Orchestra officials praised Alsop for her accomplishments as the second-longest-tenured conductor in the orchestra’s history, saying her creativity and leadership expanded its reach in the city and internationally. Alsop’s time with the orchestra has been marked by a dedication to new music, including the commission of 35 world premieres and performances of many rarely heard works. The BSO recorded 14 albums, including the critically acclaimed Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet,” and in 2018 undertook its first international tour in 13 years. “That tour included


Coronavirus will test whether the planet can unite in the face of a global crisis

2006, the United States issued its first “National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Implementation Plan,” updated regularly since. That first version contained this stark admonition: “Uncertainty during a pandemic will drive many of the outcomes we fear, including panic among the public, unpredictable, and unilateral actions by governments, instability in markets, and potentially devastating impacts on the economy. The need for timely, accurate, credible, and consistent information that is tailored to specific audiences cannot be overstated.” Google, Facebook and Twitter, the private guardians of the information space, have been working to keep it sanitary. Twitter has been trying to ensure that #coronaovirus delivers “credible, authoritative information.” Facebook is removing inaccurate information about the disease. Google is making verified, fact-checked information prominent in search results. The WHO, meanwhile, is publishing simple “myth busters.” Examples: Do garlic or sesame oil prevent infection? No. Is it safe to receive mail from China? Yes. Health authorities so far have mostly been taking the right steps. The virus was quickly sequenced genetically, vaccines are already being developed and epidemiologists are closely monitoring the spread. Doctors in Wuhan, China, where the virus began, have carefully mapped the early cases and mortality rates. The number of new cases in China has dropped sharply, which is encouraging. Doctors caution that people should focus on the basics of good health: Washing your hands regularly is a better preventive measure than wearing a face mask; getting a flu shot is essential; if someone gets sick, they need supportive care while their own immune system fights the virus. Health officials have tried to check the epidemic with screenings, lockdowns and quarantines. But these have had limited effect. Some travelers who arrived in Germany from Wuhan and tested negative for the virus were later found to be infected. Some clusters, in Iran and Italy, have mysterious origins. As much as doctors are learning about the novel disease, there’s much that still puzzles them. The politics of this crisis matter. China was initially slow to react because officials there wanted to suppress bad news; Iranian authorities, similarly, may have undercounted cases initially in a cluster there. President Trump’s pronouncement two weeks ago that the virus was likely to “go away” in April missed the mark. The intersection of a public-health crisis and a U.S. presidential election campaign is also worrisome. The U.S. and global economy will inevitably contract; as that happens, Trump will look


The Health 202: Coronavirus keeps spreading — including as a subject in the South Carolina Democratic debate

but when this will happen, and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses,” Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters. “Messonnier said the rapid surge in cases outside mainland China in the past several days prompted the change in official warnings,” our colleagues write. “There is growing evidence that efforts to contain the spread of the virus outside China have failed.” While the virus appears less deadly than the 2003 SARS outbreak, it spreads more easily and some health experts believe people without symptoms can still spread it. Former CDC Director Tom Frieden made this prediction: —The Olympics could even be affected. Officials are warily watching the virus’s spread as they begin to consider implications for the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo, The Post’s Cindy Boren writes. It’s unlikely the International Olympic Committee would move the games to another city or postpone them for a year, but officials could delay making a decision until late May. “You could certainly go to two months out if you had to,” Dick Pound, an International Olympic Committee official since 1978, told the AP. “A lot of things have to start happening. You’ve got to start ramping up your security, your food, the Olympic Village, the hotels. The media folks will be in there building their studios.” — Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar faced a grilling on Capitol Hill yesterday over the administration's new $1.8 billion emergency spending request. The request Yet lawmakers on a Senate Appropriations subcommittee called the request woefully inadequate and questioned whether the administration had stockpiled necessary resources to respond to such an outbreak. “This has been going on for months and last night we get this somewhat vague request for emergency funding. If I was cynical … I would think it was rushed over just in time for your appearance before this committee this morning,” Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said. Even Republicans questioned whether the funding request was enough. Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala) told Azar: “If you lowball something like this you’ll pay for it later. You’re not only dealing with the crisis you’re dealing with the perception of the American people. “ Trump defended his request with a slam directed at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who had also criticized it as “too little, too late.” — In another hearing, Sen.


The rising panic over coronavirus is likely to make containing it harder

to Chinese immigration that persisted until World War II. The same dynamic of racist ideas fueling medical misinformation played out with tuberculosis, the so-called Jewish disease, because of its prevalence in neighborhoods like the Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century. Tuberculosis was endemic to the area because of the housing conditions, not the population. The densely packed tenement buildings were prevalent in the neighborhood. This meant many shared spaces included respiratory irritants, like coal stoves, that would cause people to cough, which ultimately exacerbated the spread of the disease. At the time, however, upper-class reformers blamed the cramped living conditions and people in them for the spread of the disease, helping bolster middle-class fears of the spread of tuberculosis and of downtown immigrant communities at the same time. Governmental officials at the local, state and federal levels noted the higher prevalence of tuberculosis within working-class, minority and immigrant neighborhoods, so medical practitioners and the public linked the living conditions, hygiene, culture and morality of at-risk populations with rates of infection. The rates of active infection were higher in working-class immigrant neighborhoods, but upper-class New Yorkers were also susceptible to contracting the disease. These misconceptions, however, obstructed the medical community from being able to look at the disease scientifically. And anti-Semitism led to the United States turning away and barring from entry desperate Jewish refugees fleeing Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Disease is scary, and worrying about getting sick is natural. But we must understand that marginalizing communities based on xenophobic fear cannot protect anyone from getting sick. In fact, in many cases, historically, it has only made it more difficult for medical communities to study and treat diseases. Currently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states the risk in the United States for coronavirus is low. Yet fear and xenophobia seem to be on the rise. Scientists estimate medications for this coronavirus can get to human testing in three months; it took over 20 months to get to that point during the SARS, another coronavirus, outbreak in 2003. Part of this is because of how quickly experts were able to sequence the genome and the fact the information was widely shared. It takes time for information to be shared within the medical community. History attests to the fact that this process is hindered by the widespread dissemination of misinformation, particularly harmful myths about the


Swedish bookseller Gui Minhai sold critical titles about Xi Jinping. China jailed him for 10 years.

Gui be released. “We are now seeking more information,” she wrote on Twitter, adding that Swedish diplomats did not have access to the trial. “The government continues to demand that Gui Minhai be released and that we have access to our citizens to provide consular support.” In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said that Gui’s “rights and interests have been fully guaranteed.” He said Swedish diplomats have not had consular access to Gui “due to coronavirus containment efforts.” Gui, 55, was part-owner of Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay Books, known for selling politically sensitive publications and gossip about top Communist Party leaders, including General Secretary Xi Jinping. He was kidnapped in Thailand in 2015, around the same time that several other people affiliated with the bookstore also vanished — an operation widely believed to be the work of Chinese agents. Gui reappeared in Chinese custody months later and delivered a scripted confession in which he suggested he had secretly smuggled himself to China to turn himself in for his involvement in a 2003 car crash. He also said he didn’t want help from Swedish authorities. Authorities partially released him in October 2017 and allowed him to travel within China. But in 2018, Gui was detained, snatched by Chinese plainclothes police officers as he rode a train from Shanghai to Beijing while accompanied by Swedish diplomats. In a video released after that second detention, Gui, flanked by two police officers, said he was “ashamed” and had “made mistakes,” adding that Sweden had used him like a “chess piece.” Friends and activists said the video was staged and that Gui spoke those words under duress. Little had been heard of him since, and relations between Sweden and China deteriorated. This was complicated by a bizarre incident in which Sweden’s ambassador to China, Anna Lindstedt, arranged a meeting in Stockholm between Gui’s daughter, Angela Gui, and Chinese representatives. The meeting came to light when Angela Gui wrote a Medium post about it. The Swedish Foreign Ministry said it had no knowledge of the meeting, and Lindstedt was recalled from her post. She faces criminal charges. China’s ambassador to Sweden, meanwhile, has emerged as one of the country’s most aggressive diplomats, giving interviews including one in which he appeared to threaten local journalists who write critically about Beijing. The ambassador, Gui Congyou — no relation to the bookseller — last month slammed Swedish


Spread of coronavirus in U.S. appears inevitable, health officials warn, as Trump defends response

squares with cuts to health programs. By: Siobhán O’Grady 1:40 PM: Health officials consider expanding airport screening to travelers from other countries Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday that they would consider, but have not determined, whether they will expand screening at U.S. airports to include travelers coming from countries such as Italy and South Korea where the number of infections has spiked in recent days. “Certainly we are considering what the spread of illness in other countries looks like” and how it could impact Americans traveling abroad, Nancy Messonnier, a top CDC official, said in a call Tuesday. She said the CDC is working with states and localities “on those considerations.” The agency has updated its alert system, issuing a Level 3 alert advising individuals to avoid all nonessential travel to South Korea. For those traveling to Japan, Italy or Iran, it has issued a Level 2 alert urging high-risk travelers to take special precautions. Messonnier added that the CDC has “more than one layer of surveillance,” and while one definition focuses on travel, others involve community-based surveillance involving the nation’s flu-surveillance network. That has already started in some areas and will be expanded more broadly, she said. Since Feb. 2, commercial air passengers arriving from China are being funneled to 11 U.S. airports — John F. Kennedy International, O’Hare International, San Francisco International, Los Angeles International, Honolulu’s Daniel K. Inouye International, Newark Liberty International, Detroit Metropolitan, Dallas-Fort Worth International, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International and Washington Dulles International — where they are being screened for the virus. U.S. citizens who show signs of the virus must undergo a 14-day quarantine; those who don’t appear to be infected are allowed to return home, but are asked to self-quarantine. Noncitizens are not being allowed to enter the United States. It’s not clear how many people are being screened at the 11 airports since much of the commercial flight traffic between the United States and China has been halted. United, Delta Air Lines and American, have suspended flights between the United States, China and Hong Kong through April. By: Lori Aratani and Laurie McGinley 1:35 PM: Apple reopens some stores in China after extended closures Apple reopened dozens of stores in China this week after prolonged closures due to the coronavirus outbreak. Bloomberg News Although some factories have reopened in China, Apple said in a


KMBC TV outlet in Kansas. “In the past, we’d say go ahead and order it, they’ll manufacture it. It’ll be here in time. I can’t do that today. Today I have to say: ‘You know what sweetheart? We need to find you a different dress.’ ” By: William Wan 12:25 PM: Health officials warn that spread of coronavirus in U.S. appears inevitable, a significant change in tone Health officials in the United States warned that coronavirus spreading in the country appears inevitable, marking a significant change in official statements since the outbreak began in China in December. The comments were made in separate briefings to lawmakers and reporters on Tuesday, marking an escalation in tone and urgency. “Ultimately, we expect we will see community spread in the United States,” Nancy Messonnier, a top official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters. “It’s not a question of if this will happen but when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses.” Read more here. By: Erica Werner, Lenny Bernstein and Lena H. Sun 12:20 PM: A faulty CDC coronavirus test delays U.S. understanding of disease’s spread Problems with a government-created coronavirus test have limited the U.S. capacity to rapidly increase testing, just as the outbreak has entered a worrisome new phase in countries around the world. Experts are increasingly concerned that the small number of U.S. cases thus far may be a reflection of limited testing, not of the virus’s spread. While South Korea has run more than 35,000 coronavirus tests, the United States has tested only 426 people for the virus, not including people who returned on evacuation flights. Only about a dozen state and local laboratories can now run tests outside of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta because the CDC kits sent out nationwide a week and a half ago included a faulty component. U.S. guidelines recommend testing for a very narrow group of people — those who display respiratory symptoms and have recently traveled to China or had close contact with an infected person. But many public health experts believe that in light of evidence the disease has taken root and spread locally in Singapore, South Korea, Iran and Italy, it’s time to broaden testing in the United States. Infectious disease experts fear that aside from the 14 cases picked up by public health surveillance,


quarantine in a hotel, Orlando said. By: Chico Harlan 5:47 AM: Worries Mount over Tokyo 2020 Olympics TOKYO — Dick Pound, the longest-serving member of the International Olympic Committee, estimates there’s a three-month window to decide whether the Tokyo Games can go ahead due to the spread of coronavirus, the Associated Press reported. Pound told the AP that a decision could be put off until late May, two months before the Games are due to start. “A lot of things have to start happening,” he said. “You’ve got to start ramping up your security, your food, the Olympic Village, the hotels; the media folks will be in there building their studios.” Pound said it would be tough to shift the Olympics to a different city, while a postponement until the fall would not work for American broadcasters. If the Games could not go ahead in July, “you’re probably looking at a cancellation,” he said. “This is the new war, and you have to face it. In and around that time, I’d say folks are going to have to ask: ‘Is this under sufficient control that we can be confident about going to Tokyo, or not?’ ” Pound encouraged athletes to keep training, with “all indications” at this stage that the Games will go ahead in Tokyo. The modern Olympics have been canceled only during wartime, including in 1940 when they were supposed to be held in Tokyo. Pound said the IOC was depending on consultations with the World Health Organization. “It’s a big, big, big decision, and you just can’t take it until you have reliable facts on which to base it,” he said, adding that current advice doesn’t call for cancellation or postponement of the Olympics. “You just don’t postpone something on the size and scale of the Olympics. There’s so many moving parts, so many countries and different seasons, and competitive seasons, and television seasons,” he said. “You can’t just say, we’ll do it in October.” By: Simon Denyer 5:18 AM: UAE suspends all flights to and from Iran BEIRUT — The United Arab Emirates has halted all flights to and from Iran, the General Civil Aviation Authority announced Tuesday. The suspension will take immediate effect and will continue for one week but could be extended further, state news agency WAM reported. “The decision is a precautionary measure undertaken by the UAE to ensure strict monitoring and prevention


Hosni Mubarak’s death evokes the paradox and pain of the Middle East

Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak died Tuesday, nearly a decade after he was toppled in a chaotic coup that broke his iron rule but didn’t provide Egypt with a dynamic, post-Mubarak identity. Mubarak has been a forgotten man in recent years, but his death evokes the paradox and pain of the Middle East. He governed Egypt for nearly 30 years, a modernizing despot who kept peace with Israel and liberalized the economy but balked at dismantling the military dictatorship and police-state tactics that had spawned him. The revolt against Mubarak in early 2011 was the apogee of the “Arab Spring” movement; an idealistic President Barack Obama helped push him out the door, a move that Saudi Arabia and other conservative Arab states never forgave. He was succeeded by a military-led committee, then a Muslim Brotherhood government headed by Mohamed Morsi, then by a backlash counter-coup that installed Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, a former head of military intelligence who governed with even less charisma than Mubarak. Through this tormented saga, the United States seemed to keep making mistakes — encouraging Mubarak’s ouster in the streets after he agreed to leave office voluntarily; then trying to nursemaid a Muslim Brotherhood government that lacked the skills to govern; and finally backing a military takeover. By the end of this dizzying story, Egypt had moved from a country that loved America to one that bitterly resented U.S. tutelage. It was a sign of Mubarak’s power that Egypt never seemed to fully recover its balance after his fall. So thoroughly did Mubarak dominate and suppress political life that, in the months after the 2011 Tahrir Square revolution, Egypt displayed a mix of euphoria and exhaustion, as if the nation were coming out of a trance. Mubarak’s imprint also survived in the military that still holds power, effectively, under Sissi’s presidency. Mubarak was a stubborn man by nature, and an easy departure wasn’t in him. He clung to the job for years after U.S. officials began urging him to consider a transfer of power. The more he was pushed to leave, the more Mubarak dug in his heels. His last term as president began after a supposedly democratic election in 2005, his first such ballot. But those who dared challenge him at the polls, such as opposition candidate Ayman Nour, were bullied and arrested. Still, if Mubarak had listened to critics and announced that he wouldn’t


The only surefire way to stop foreign interference in our elections

and newspapers. These efforts intensified from 1984 to 1986, as Congress debated passing comprehensive sanctions against South Africa. The South Africa Foundation sponsored trips and “fact-finding missions” for Americans to travel to the apartheid state and report back to the American public. The Rev. Jerry Falwell took the most infamous of these trips in April 1985. During the “mission,” Falwell called the beloved anti-apartheid activist Bishop Desmond M. Tutu a phony with no authority to speak for black people on apartheid. These efforts fueled rampant misinformation surrounding the extent of the South African government’s reforms, vile conspiracy theories about Nelson and Winnie Mandela and intense attacks on Americans leading the sanctions effort, including Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.). Critically, this misinformation effort asserted throughout the 1980s that black workers would be the “first victims” of sanctions. The South African government and its surrogates commissioned dozens of economic studies “proving” the “irreparable” damage of sanctions to black South Africans. This push included moderate black leaders like Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi and Bishop Isaac Mokoena traveling to the United States to argue that sanctions were deeply unpopular among black South Africans. These arguments gave President Ronald Reagan the grounds to veto a sanctions bill in 1986. But despite the best efforts of the South African government, Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan’s veto, a rare congressional rebuke of presidential foreign policy. Disinvestment proved popular with Americans, foreign audiences and most importantly, among many South African liberation movements like Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. But while the apartheid government ultimately failed to forestall harsh economic sanctions, its interference efforts took root in the United States because Americans proved all too willing to support its interference in U.S. affairs. Some were motivated by ideology — stalwart in their support of an anti-communist partner — some by racism, horrified at the prospect of losing the last system of legalized white rule, and some by pure profit, willing to support whomever to secure funding and notoriety. The South Africa case offers a cautionary tale to Americans — foreign interference does not always rely on high-tech schemes. Sometimes you just need a few ready partners. As Americans approach November worrying about foreign interference, they should remember that it cannot succeed without willing Americans. Americans can and must safeguard their own elections, and those who refuse — and stand to benefit from interference — must be called out for their actions.


How Elon Musk went from sleeping in the factory to being on the cusp of launching a crew into space

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, a teetotaling conservative Republican and former congressman from Oklahoma, didn’t appreciate the message it sent. He ordered a safety review of the company and publicly chastised Musk, saying that “culture and leadership start at the top. Anything that would result in some questioning the culture of safety, we need to fix immediately.” SpaceX went to great lengths to show that it prioritizes safety over all else. And in March of last year, it successfully flew its Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station and back, a feat that seemed to erase any concerns from Bridenstine, who crowed after the 2:49 a.m. launch that SpaceX had helped put NASA on the “precipice of launching American astronauts in American rockets from American soil." Speaking at the predawn news conference, Musk said he “was emotionally exhausted” and that the flight was “super stressful,” and the culmination of “an incredible amount of hard work and sacrifice.” The high didn't last long. A month later, that same spacecraft blew up during a test of its emergency abort system, sending an ominous cloud of orange smoke wafting into the Florida sky. At Tesla, everything started to stabilize once Musk had a new team he could trust to deliver in 2019. Gone were the days when Musk moved into the manufacturing plant, overseeing mundane elements of production personally, such as the Model X production, the company’s paint shop and later the Model 3’s lagging due to overemphasis on automation. Finally, he began to delegate, more and more, becoming more comfortable after the revolving door of executives finally left him with a team he could trust, former officials and close observers said. The Model 3 line was ramping up and meeting delivery goals. Tesla opened a factory to produce cars in China. The stock started rising. And Musk did a dance — arms pumping, jacket tossed to the side — at an event in Shanghai celebrating the first car deliveries in China that went viral and symbolized the sudden turnaround. Still, there are many perils ahead. Musk faces serious questions about core pieces of Tesla’s business model that could send the company back to its near-constant volatility over the last few years, which saw the company’s stock dip to a low of $177 as recently as June. Even earlier this month, the stock rose nearly 14 percent to $887 before falling 17 percent the


Iran struggles to contain coronavirus outbreak, putting Middle East countries at risk

ISTANBUL — Iran is emerging as the center of an outbreak of the new coronavirus across the Middle East, where cases in at least five countries have been linked to patients who traveled to Iran in recent weeks, authorities said. In Iran, 139 people have contracted the virus, including the deputy health minister and a prominent member of parliament. Nineteen people have died, according to the Health Ministry — the largest death toll from the virus outside China, where it first appeared. The government has struggled to contain the spread of infections after reporting the first confirmed cases in the holy Shiite city of Qom last week. Since then, the virus has appeared in multiple Iranian cities, and infections in Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon and Oman have been traced back to Iran. Several countries have halted flights to Iran. On Wednesday, Bahrain said the number of coronavirus infections in the island nation had risen to 26, after three more cases were detected among people who had recently returned from Iran, state media reported. In Iraq, which borders Iran, authorities closed crossings along the frontier, and medical teams at the country’s airports monitored arriving passengers after five people were confirmed to have been infected. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians visit Iraq’s holy city of Najaf each year, and shrines and schools there were shuttered Wednesday and the streets largely empty, residents said. But even as regional governments moved to control the outbreak, Iranian authorities came under fire for what critics said is an inadequate response to the threat. Officials have rejected calls to quarantine major cities and have allowed communal prayer services to continue in places such as Qom, where the virus first emerged in Iran. Nurses and other medical personnel have complained in interviews and on social media that authorities were preventing health workers from wearing masks and were forcing staff to buy their own gloves. “The equipment we have and the protective measures in place are all very primitive. The situation is critical,” said one nurse at the Shariati teaching hospital in Tehran. She was reached by telephone and spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss her working conditions. The hospital, she said, lacks coronavirus testing kits and was attempting to diagnose patients through their symptoms and chest X-rays. The virus, officially called SARS-CoV-2, causes fever, cough and mild to severe respiratory illness. But some relatives of


Economic damage spreads as Europe confronts coronavirus

travelers feared getting stuck in a 14-day quarantine after returning home, said Georgia, an Acampora travel agent who would give only her first name. “We’ve had a lot of cancellations, and for us it’s a terrible moment,” she said. “It seems like someone wants to kill all of the tourist industry and economy.” Indeed, an Italian hotel association two days earlier had pleaded via tweet for “urgent intervention” on a national scale, “before the long wave of cancellations turns into a tsunami, forcing many companies to reduce their staff or even to close their doors.” The coronavirus has been a fearful challenge everywhere. In China, the interruption of normal factory operations came just as the country hoped to shake off the effects of a two-year trade war with the United States. In South Korea, site of the largest Asian outbreak outside of China, a cluster of nearly 1,300 cases is slowing an economy that was beginning to accelerate. But the virus poses special challenges for the European Union, which is already preoccupied with Brexit, the United Kingdom’s departure from the E.U., and the threat of a tariff war with Trump. Indeed, after a decade of financial crisis and anemic economic growth, a fatal epidemic is the last thing Europe needs. Even before the coronavirus — and its associated illness, covid-19 — established a foothold in Italy, the continent’s major economies were expected to grow just a bit more than 1 percent this year. Now the outbreak’s inevitable disruption to the tourism, manufacturing and retail industries threatens to tip the European Union into outright recession. “Things are going to get pretty bad in Europe,” said Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. In recent days, the virus that originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan -- before spreading to South Korea, the Philippines, Japan, Iran, Afghanistan and Bahrain -- became a European problem. A swath of northern Italy, responsible for about 30 percent of the country’s economy, is under lockdown after authorities reported more than 280 cases and 11 deaths. France reported the first death of a French citizen. Elsewhere, Spain confirmed at least eight new cases in the past 24 hours and new infections were reported in Germany, Greece, France, Croatia, Austria and Switzerland. Disruption quickly rippled across the borderless European economy. The French national rail line SNCF said some of its Milan-bound trains are stopping at


Maryland open houses Feb. 29-March 1

1019 Double Gate Rd 1003 Howard Grove Ct 1277 Lavall Dr DEALE 20751 713 Oar Lane 711 Oar Lane EDGEWATER 21037 2947 Edgewater Dr 695 Hillmeade Rd 315 Bright Light Ct 311 Bright Light Ct 309 Bright Light Ct 305 Bright Light Ct 206 Bethel Aly 208 Bethel Aly 1503 Fullerton Rd GAMBRILLS 21054 928 Densmore Bay Ct GLEN BURNIE 21060 502 Pebblebrook Lane 314 Marley Neck Rd 21061 7514 Resch Loop 141 Olen Dr 387 Phirne Rd W HANOVER 21076 1907 Simonson Ct 2920 Koens Ct #1 2920 Koens Ct #2 2615 Hardaway Cir 0 Stemhart Lane 6164 Phelps Lane 7970 Patterson Way 7978 Patterson Way 6151 Phelps Lane 7982 Patterson Way 7980 Patterson Way Lot 1 Phelps Lane 7984 Patterson Way 7972 Patterson Way Homesite 6 Loblolly Way 8293 Meadowood Dr #13801 8306 Meadowood Dr #118 8308 Meadowood Dr LAUREL 20707 7209 Piney Woods Pl 1020 Harrison Dr 20724 3642 Sweetbush Trl MILLERSVILLE 21108 557 Lanny Ct 408 Kosmill Dr 486 Kenora Dr ODENTON 21113 1562 Star Stella Dr 1128 White Clover Lane 0 Broad Wing Dr 1713 Red Fox Trl 2006 Ripley Point Ct 2024 Hinshaw Dr 1727 Red Fox Trl 2416 Knapps Way PASADENA 21122 1443 Old Fort Smallwood Road 325 Nature Walk Lane 1222 Castine Ct 770 209th St 8135 Tower Bridge Dr 8063 Newcomb Ct 7728 Lee Dr 830 Swift Rd RIVA 21140 307 Cove Rd SEVERN 21144 7820 Amalfi Lane 7824 Amalfi Lane 7762 Venice Lane 7763 Venice Lane 7765 Venice Lane 7767 Venice Lane 7769 Venice Lane 7771 Venice Lane 7909 Sibley Way 7747 Venice Lane 7749 Venice Lane 7751 Venice Lane 7753 Venice Lane 7755 Venice Lane 7757 Venice Lane 7759 Venice Lane 1118 Chevron Rd 1435 Harvey Ave SEVERNA PARK 21146 830 Dividing Rd TRACYS LANDING 20779 6423 Melbourne Ave CALVERT COUNTY BROOMES ISLAND 20615 9435 River View Rd CHESAPEAKE BEACH 20732 8132 Harrison Blvd 4425 Bristol Dr DUNKIRK 20754 4080 Loving Dr LUSBY 20657 12696 Ranch Lane 12925 Ottawa Dr OWINGS 20736 440 E Mount Harmony Rd SOLOMONS 20688 1106 Back Creek Loop 136 Square Rigger Way ST. LEONARD 20685 1051 Solomon Frazier Ct CHARLES COUNTY ACCOKEEK 20607 500 Dobbin Ct BRYANS ROAD 20616 6781 Pearlbush Pl HUGHESVILLE 20637 5824 Allerdale Ct 14377 Shadow Ridge Ct LA PLATA 20646 9282 Prime Ct 128 E Quail Lane 10340 Andrea Lane WALDORF 20601 11264 Flagstaff Pl 20602 0 Golden Gate Ct


Boris Johnson threatens to walk away if Europe doesn’t meet his demands in trade talks

regulations, cutting environmental safeguards, rewriting labor laws — or deploying outsized state subsidies — that would help its companies outbid European competitors. Johnson said Thursday that Britain could guarantee overall top quality for goods, without following every new regulation issued by Brussels. “We’re not going to engage in some race to the bottom,” the prime minister said. “All we want is mutual recognition of each other’s high standards, and access to each other’s markets.” Johnson said Britain would not demand that the E.U. follow every change in U.K. legislation. “So it doesn’t make any sense for them to make the same requirement of us, and that’s where we are,” he said. Johnson has blinked in talks with Europe before, over what to do about the Irish border, but his government insisted Thursday that maintaining full sovereignty was nonnegotiable. Britain will either sign a free-trade deal with the E.U. by December or it will leave with no deal, and trade with Europe as a third country, such as Australia, relying on World Trade Organization terms. Such a hard exit could see the imposition of all sorts of new trade barriers, including customs duties and inspections for food safety. Government economists in 2018 forecast that a Canada-style deal could reduce Britain’s economic growth over the next 15 years by 5 percent, while a deal similar to Australia’s would cost Britain’s economy 8 percent over the same time period. If it is not clear by June that a deal to Britain’s liking can be quickly concluded, “the government will need to decide whether the U.K.’s attention should move away from negotiations and focus solely on continuing domestic preparations to exit the transition period in an orderly fashion,” the British mandate says. The two sides, too, are likely to clash over access to British fishing waters, as any restrictions will endanger the business model of European fishermen, who catch up to half of their harvest in British territory. The other main worry for Europeans is the lack of preparations by the United Kingdom to manage customs and sanitary checks for goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which, according to the Brexit withdrawal deal, is supposed to remain aligned with E.U. regulations. Johnson maintains that Britain will not be doing any such checks and that no new infrastructure is needed. “We know the situation is fragile and peace is fragile,” Barnier said. “We know


The Daily 202: SEIU will spend $150 million on 2020 elections, focused on mobilizing infrequent voters

to Asia or were close contacts of people who went there. The vast majority, 42, picked up the virus while quarantined on the Diamond Princess cruise ship off Japan. … “The individual is a resident of Solano County, according to the California Department of Public Health. The patient is being treated at UC Davis Medical Center. Two officials from that hospital sent an email to employees Wednesday that said the patient arrived at the medical center Feb. 19 but was not tested until Sunday, despite an immediate request to the CDC. The patient arrived from another hospital in Northern California … “There are indications that other hospitals could be involved in the case. Kris Concepcion, fire chief and acting public information officer in Vacaville, Calif., said county officials had issued a directive not to transport any new patients to two local hospitals — NorthBay VacaValley Hospital in Vacaville and NorthBay Medical Center in nearby Fairfield. … The two hospitals are in Solano County, home to Travis Air Force Base, where hundreds of Americans repatriated from China and others brought home from the Diamond Princess cruise ship have been kept in quarantine. Many of them have been released. The health department said it has already begun tracing people who may have come in contact with the coronavirus-infected individual. … The virus, which originated in Wuhan, China, has killed 2,801 people and sickened more than 82,000 as it has spread around the globe, reaching every continent except Antarctica.” Key quote: If the infection is confirmed to be a case of “community spread,” “it would confirm what we have long suspected — that there is a good chance there already are people infected in this country and that the virus is circulating undetected,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, epidemiologist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Nine possible coronavirus cases have been investigated in Virginia since Jan. 21, health officials said. No positive test results have been returned, per Justin Wm. Moyer. For example, in Virginia, the Fairfax County school system – with 188,000 students, one of the largest – posted website updates with the same instructions it has offered since the virus surfaced – frequent hand-washing and disinfectant everywhere. The school system has canceled international field trips to countries where residents have fallen ill from the coronavirus. Class closures are unlikely in the near future, experts said, because relatively few


Trump’s desk.” “José cared for the bottle-fed babies, 700 of them in all. He knew a calf was healthy if her eyes were bright and her appetite hearty,” the Times reports. “‘His job was to do all things a mom would do to look after her young,’ said Mary Kraft, who employed José and his brother, Juan, both undocumented immigrants from Mexico, for a decade at her Quail Ridge Dairy in Colorado. Then about a year ago, the brothers informed Ms. Kraft that they were returning to Mexico. They had amassed enough savings in the land of opportunity to resume their lives back where they had started. The pair are among a growing number of Mexicans who have been departing the United States in recent years … New data that was released on Wednesday by the Center for Migration Studies shows there were 10.6 million immigrants living unlawfully in the United States in 2018 compared with 11.75 million in 2010, a decline propelled primarily by Mexicans returning south.” Agency officials “have been permitted to run facial-recognition searches on millions of Maryland driver’s license photos without first seeking state or court approval, state officials said — access that goes far beyond what other states allow and that alarms immigration activists in a state that grants special driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants,” Drew Harwell and Erin Cox report. “The technology now under scrutiny could let an ICE official run a photograph of an unknown person through the system and see if any potentially undocumented immigrants are returned as a match.” “The startup Clearview AI disclosed to its customers that an intruder ‘gained unauthorized access’ to its list of customers, to the number of user accounts those customers had set up, and to the number of searches its customers have conducted,” the Daily Beast reports. ”The notification said the company’s servers were not breached and that there was ‘no compromise of Clearview’s systems or network.’” Federal officials “arrested several alleged members of a white-supremacist group called Atomwaffen Division, including its two leaders, accusing them of plotting to intimidate journalists by calling police to their homes and offices and dropping off threatening fliers,” Rachel Weiner and Matt Zapotosky report. “John Cameron Denton, of Montgomery, Tex., is charged in U.S. District Court in Alexandria with conspiring to call in fake threats targeting a ProPublica reporter and his office. … In federal court in Seattle, prosecutors


In South Carolina, Democrats debated when a dictator is really a dictator. So what’s the answer?

sources of anti-regime mobilization. Scholars have found the Chinese leadership is surprisingly responsive — and even solicitous — of public input. As long as citizen participation stays within well-controlled lanes, the Chinese leadership gains important policy feedback and boosts public perceptions of its legitimacy. Diana Fu and Greg Distelhorst, for instance, show in their chapter how institutionalized forms of popular participation such as Freedom-of-Information requests and lawsuits against government agencies have persisted and, in some cases, increased during Xi’s rule. At the same time, his regime has criminalized and repressed more contentious forms of social activism in China, including crackdowns on labor activists, rights lawyers and even Marxist student groups. Like all autocrats, Xi faces difficulty crafting a strategy that provides both political stability and reliable information. For example, local failures to report and efforts to punish doctors for “spreading rumors” about the coronavirus had devastating consequences for China’s initial failure to identify and contain the outbreak. Policies that maximize political stability often mean forfeiting good information, yet placing a premium on getting good information can undermine political control. These trade-offs mean there is no single authoritarian model that countries like China, Russia, Cuba and North Korea have followed. For example, while Russia holds regular, competitive national elections (albeit not on an even playing field), China does not. China is a party-run dictatorship that deals ruthlessly with direct opposition to one-party rule — as the Soviet Union did for 73 years. One might expect that because the Russian regime holds elections, Russian citizens would have more influence on politicians and policies than Chinese citizens do. But we find again and again that while Chinese leaders regularly consult with or solicit views from society, these kinds of contacts are quite uneven and less common in Russia. In the legal arena, as Elizabeth Plantan’s chapter shows, change in China builds on extensive discussion and consultation. In Russia, this process can be both very elitist and quite rushed. While Putin’s regime can certainly be repressive and seeks to sow divisions across society, its efforts to consult and seek information from ordinary Russians are much less consistent than in China. Each of the Democratic candidates asked about dictatorship were quick to denounce it — but they differed in how they tempered their criticisms. Despite the gulf that otherwise divides Sanders and Bloomberg, the two candidates ironically were quite close in arguing that dictatorships like


Trump wanted, and got, a coronavirus lead who would give politics primary consideration

response to the threat of a coronavirus pandemic. Speaking to reporters at a briefing, Pence explained the role he would play. “As a former governor from the state where the first MERS case emerged in 2014,” Pence said, referring to Middle East respiratory syndrome, a form of coronavirus that spread that year, “I know full well the importance of presidential leadership, the importance of administration leadership, and the vital role of partnerships of state and local governments and health authorities in responding to the potential threat of dangerous infectious diseases.” The question that looms over the Pence appointment is a simple one: Has the former governor, whose skepticism of government intervention in health emergencies was manifested in the HIV outbreak, actually come to appreciate the importance of a government response? When he first ran for Congress, he wrote a series of blog posts that presented similar skepticism about having the government address public health crises. The most famous was an article opposing a settlement between tobacco companies and the government — a deal that he warned was actually about “big government.” Pence conceded that cigarettes were harmful, although he argued that “smoking doesn’t kill,” since most smokers don’t die from tobacco-related illnesses. He continued: “The relevant question is, what is more harmful to the nation, second hand smoke or back handed big government disguised in do-gooder healthcare rhetoric.” “Even a conservative like me would support government big enough to protect us from foreign threats and threats to our domestic tranquility,” he said, “but the tobacco deal goes to the next level. Government big enough to protect us from our own stubborn wills. And a government of such plenary power, once conceived will hardly stop at tobacco. Surely the scourge of fatty foods and their attendant cost to the health care economy bears some consideration. How about the role of caffeine in fomenting greater stress in the lives of working Americans? Don't get me started about the dangers of sports utility vehicles!" This is mostly just political rhetoric of the government-is-bad-and-oppressive variety, which was popular at the time of Pence’s immersion into federal politics. But it’s nonetheless a perspective that should raise concerns in the current moment: Does Pence similarly think that recommendations to wash one’s hands are too Big Brother-y? What about mandatory quarantines, should it come to that? Mandates to wear protective masks in public? If for two months


The coronavirus outbreak will hit the cruising industry where it hurts most — new business

Week. “The industry is known for its resiliency, etc., etc. But this one’s just so different.” Four days before the Diamond Princess quarantine was set to end on Feb. 19, U.S. officials said they would evacuate American citizens from the ship, as long as they showed no symptoms, and fly them to the United States — where they would be placed into another 14-day quarantine. The Diamond Princess is the only cruise ship where coronavirus was believed to have been spreading, but it was not the only one affected by the outbreak, which has sickened more than 73,000 people and killed more than 1,870. Another ship, the World Dream, with more than 3,800 people aboard, was stuck in quarantine in Hong Kong for four days after authorities learned that passengers on a previous cruise had tested positive for the virus. Everyone was allowed to disembark after crew members tested negative and passengers passed health screenings. No one on Holland America Line’s Westerdam was known to be ill during a voyage that started in Hong Kong, but that ship and the more than 2,200 people onboard spent days at sea when port after port denied permission to dock. Cambodia came through, and passengers began to disembark on Friday. But that decision was called into question the next day when officials announced that one woman who was on the ship tested positive in Malaysia after flying there from Cambodia. Since then, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore have said they will not allow passengers from the ship to travel through their airports, according to Bloomberg News. Several other ships have been told they cannot stop at ports because of coronavirus fears, and earlier this month, Royal Caribbean International’s Anthem of the Seas delayed departure by two days while passengers who had been in China previously were tested. None had the illness. Similar ordeals have played out across the world, with headlines referring to the “coronavirus cruise ship nightmare,” the “pariah cruise ship” and “floating petri dishes.” The attention comes at an inopportune time, during the busy “wave season,” when many travelers book cruises. And although Asia still makes up a fraction of the market for global cruising — the Caribbean and Mediterranean, for example, attract far more people — it has been a focus for cruise operators looking to expand their global footprint. In 2018, according to the Cruise Lines International Association, 28.5 million


Cruise lines ban anyone who has recently been to China as coronavirus fears spread

members who served them, will be isolated in their cabins, MSC said. Similarly, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings said guests and crew who have been to mainland China within 30 days will not be allowed to board. The company’s cruise lines include Norwegian Cruise Line, Oceania Cruises and Regent Seven Seas Cruises. Anyone getting on a ship in Hong Kong will be screened for a fever, and those with a temperature of 100.4 or higher will not be allowed to board. Those who show signs of respiratory illness while sailing will have to undergo additional screening and may be quarantined or forced to leave the ship. Royal Caribbean Cruises, whose lines include Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises, Azamara Club Cruises and Silversea Cruises, has canceled all China and Hong Kong voyages through mid-February. The company said Thursday that all ships in its fleet would adopt health screening measures “until further notice.” They include denying boarding to anyone who traveled from or through mainland China or Hong Kong over the past 15 days. Special health screening will be mandatory for anyone who has been in contact with people who traveled from or through China or Hong Kong over the previous 15 days; anyone who holds a passport from China or Hong Kong, regardless of when they were last there; or those who say they don’t feel well, or show any flulike symptoms. Anyone with a fever or low blood oxygen will not be allowed on a ship. “These steps are intentionally conservative, and we apologize that they will inconvenience some of our guests,” the cruise company said in a statement. Colleen McDaniel, editor in chief of Cruise Critic, said in an email that cruise lines have always had regular policies in place to check for illness as passengers are boarding and prevent those who are sick from getting on a ship with hundreds, or thousands, of other people. “But that’s on a case-by-case basis,” she said. “This wider-spread policy to deny boarding to those who have been in a particular destination is unusual, but it reflects the concern from passengers and caution from the industry." Read more: State Department tells citizens ‘do not travel’ to China; World Health Organization declares coronavirus outbreak a global health emergency Mapping the spread of the new coronavirus Before the new coronavirus, travel aided the spread of other diseases. Here’s a look back at 5 notable cases.