A funeral is thought to have sparked a covid-19 outbreak in Albany, Ga. — and led to many more funerals

ALBANY, Ga. — People have largely abandoned the streets of this midsize city in southwest Georgia, which has garnered unwanted attention for leading the state in covid-19 deaths and having one of the highest infection rates in the country. But this past week, a few locals ventured out anyway to pay tribute to a community icon. Last weekend, the coronavirus took the life of Femi Anderson, a popular restaurateur and artist, one of 30 people in Dougherty County who have died of the disease since early March. Outside the Renaissance Art Cafe, which Anderson opened in 2007 near the banks of the Flint River and Ray Charles Plaza in downtown Albany, three sets of flowers and a stuffed teddy bear sat at the entrance Tuesday. Friends weren’t able to visit Anderson in the hospital as her case suddenly turned serious. When she was buried Saturday morning, only 10 family members and close friends were allowed at her gravesite at Floral Memory Gardens, in accordance with a local order prohibiting large gatherings. But about 50 people showed up to pay their respects and say farewell. They sat in their cars outside the cemetery and along the streets encircling it, said Amna Farooqi, a local activist and friend of Anderson. Dozens more watched on Facebook. The outbreak in Dougherty County has largely been attributed to a funeral in late February that drew more than 100 mourners, including a man from Atlanta who died a few days after the services. Soon, relatives and friends who went to the wake fell ill, as did employees of the funeral home and worshipers at the church where the service was held. The novel coronavirus quickly overwhelmed Albany, and, as of Friday, the county of 90,000 had seven more deaths than Fulton County, which includes the city of Atlanta and more than a million residents. So far, 521 people in Dougherty have tested positive for the virus, second in the state behind Fulton’s 747 confirmed cases. But long before covid-19 invaded Dougherty County, where African Americans make up more than 70 percent of the population, residents were already battle-worn from decades of struggle against social and economic inequities, including high unemployment, poverty and chronic disease, the lingering effects of slavery and racial discrimination that continue besieging communities of color across the country. Black people account for “90 percent or better” of the Dougherty County deaths, said county


93,000 could become infected in D.C., mayor says, as DMV cases rise to 6,442, deaths to 126

The number of known coronavirus cases in the District, Maryland and Virginia stood at 6,442 Saturday, with 3,126 cases in Maryland, 2,,410 in Virginia and 906 in the District. The total of virus-related deaths was 52 in Virginia, 53 in Maryland and 21 in the District, for a total of 126 fatalities. Here are some of the most significant and recent developments as the region responds to the pandemic of the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease covid-19: • Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said Friday that officials estimate about 93,000 people could be become infected with covid-19 in the city, based on the District’s projections. See more about the models the city uses to project infections. • Earl Stoddard, the head of Montgomery County’s emergency management office said that the county’s hospitals are starting to feel the strain of the novel coronavirus outbreak. • George Washington University Hospital will begin drive-through testing for the novel coronavirus beginning Monday in Foggy Bottom. What a stay-at-home order means for you


How to make money fast in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

want to make the most of your time, catching bugs in the evening hours (6 p.m. onward) can be immensely profitable. At least during the current season in the northern hemisphere (this is the only season I’ve played so far), you can catch a number of expensive critters. Tarantulas in particular aren’t all that rare; they roam your town and its outskirts at night fairly regularly, and they can be sold for 8,000 bells each. Pro tip: Tarantulas may seem difficult to catch at first, but if you spot one in the distance, you can approach it slowly by holding down A with your net in hand. From there, the tarantula will lift its front legs to charge. That’s the sign to stop. Then just move closer, inch by inch. When it’s legs go down and you’re finally close enough, trap it with your net. As for other insects, emperor butterflies (4,000 bells) can be found during early mornings and all through the night, particularly near cliffs and flowers. Man-faced stink bugs are also worthwhile, which go for 1,000, but they’re so common that you can find a number at a time. On certain days during the week, special visitors will come visit your town for an allotted time. This includes C.J. the live-streaming fisherman (he uh, looks at fishing like it was an esport) and Flick, the bug aficionado. You can sell some items that are specific to their interests at a premium rate. In the early hours of the game, Tom Nook will request 5,000 Nook Miles from you to receive a tent and then 98,000 bells to convert it into a house. Once that’s done, it’s best to hold off on expanding your home so you can save money to help finish off quests (like beautifying your town) and subsequently unlock other features more quickly. Of course, this decision is entirely yours, but for those that want the entire palette of game mechanics and features, saving up early on can help make that easier. Animal Crossing fans will know that Joan arrives now and again to sell her batch of turnips to you. In New Horizons, you will want to continue to keep an eye out Sunday mornings — but instead of Joan, her granddaughter Daisy Mae takes her place. By Monday, you can sell turnips that you’ve bought, but be warned: there is a risk of


With their business evaporating, restaurants use their kitchens to feed those in need

to arrive. “A 3-year-old definitely doesn’t help working from home or hosting meetings.” Restaurants around the country are living up to their hospitality tag — providing free food for kids, seniors and hospital staffers, offering a place to stir-crazy parents to chill or just staying and providing paychecks to employees — despite suffering the effects of the pandemic themselves. Since the coronavirus outbreak, restaurants across the country have closed, been forced to shut down or watched their sales plummet. Micheline Mendelsohn, deputy chief executive for Sunnyside, said sales have dropped by 50 percent in the past two weeks. Still, when she got the idea last week to offer free lunches to children who needed them, it didn’t take long to get her parents and brother, with whom she owns three of the group’s restaurants, and their franchisees on board. At first she had hoped to limit the offer to kids who got free and reduced-price lunches at school, but she soon realized it wouldn’t be possible to determine who was eligible. In their haste to make the offer, she says, they circulated some materials saying the lunches were limited to kids with a paying adult and that there was a two-kid limit per family. But she says the meals don’t come with any such conditions. “The bottom line is that if you come in and you’re hungry, we’re going to feed you,” she says. We the Pizza, along with sister operations Good Stuff Eatery and Santa Rosa Taqueria, are among many restaurants around the country stepping up to feed children, who often rely on the public school system for their daily nutrition and meals. Several establishments in the Asheville, N.C., community are offering tacos, bag lunches and biscuits to school-age kids. Restaurants in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and Arkansas are reportedly doing much the same. Little Sesame, a small chain of hummus shops in Washington, is going one step further: In partnership with the nonprofit organization Dreaming Out Loud, the Little Sesame team will deliver meals to residents of the most vulnerable D.C. communities. Its Meals for the City launched Monday at Kelly Miller Middle School in Ward 7. “We’re adapting to this new reality every day. Two things have become really clear: We want to take care of our team and serve the community most in need,” said Little Sesame co-founder Nick Wiseman in a statement to The Washington


More than money, gaming needs its ‘Snow White’ moment, says indie star Jenova Chen

acceptance. Once the medium achieves that, publishers and investors can finally fund more diverse and passionate storytellers and developers. "That’s what the industry needs to grow,” Chen said. Snow White started a snowball effect in animation. And in the 90s, computer animations faced, and overcame, a similar hurdle with the release of Pixar’s “Toy Story.” “I remember how everyone, including Disney, was like CGI is just a fad, like flying golden text for commercials, that’s not art," Chen said. “Until ‘Toy Story,’ and then the whole family can enjoy it and have something to talk about. That grew that industry.” In Launcher’s beginner’s guide to gaming, Sky and Journey were selected as accessible titles for anyone new to gaming. Both games provide pressure-free 3D environments to acclimate new players to movement. More than eight million people already play Sky: Children of the Light on their iPhones. For Chen, he finds the most hope in letters he gets about the game’s multi-generational appeal, and its troll-free social system. He designed the game so anyone can adopt and form their own identities, like a grandmother who recently wrote to him about reconnecting with her grandchildren through the game. “In the world of Sky, no one is judging you based on your status, the fact that you are a 67-year-old single woman or anyone,” Chen said. " You can still form trust and connections through play. You treat each other as individual human beings. Chen talked about learning to “take off his artist’s hat.” His games have always focused on singular human emotions, performed through character design, music and player expression. Journey was created to evoke a feeling of smallness in an unforgiving universe, and finding hope and light in the routines and paths we create for ourselves in life. With Sky, he knew he needed to do more to let players in. “Among artists, we say commercial art is like art with sugar on top, so it’s easy for the mass audience to digest,” Chen said. “This is a project I want the family to embrace.” Chen says that’s why Sky’s musical compositions are child-like lullabies, a step away from Journey’s sweeping, orchestral compositions of Austin Wintory. Not everything needs to be scored like an epic. And not every game needs to be a 100-hour-long Homerian tale. While massive, open-world games are rewarding, you have to play and grind through dozens of


The Daily 202: Trump weighs intervening on behalf of ousted captain, as acting Navy secretary apologizes for rant

been reported. Of the dead, 4,758 people were from New York. “The coronavirus body count in New York state held steady Monday for the second consecutive day at about 600 deaths — a once-unthinkable statistic that now gives officials some cautious reason to hope that the pandemic may be cresting there,” Ben Guarino, Tim Craig and Devlin Barrett report. “Two days of data is not nearly enough to identify a trend, but officials said there were other glimmers of hope, including significant declines in the past two days in the number of new people hospitalized, admitted to intensive care units and intubated. New York remains the most severe area for the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, with more than 130,000 residents testing positive for the virus, far more than any other state. Officials cautioned that it is impossible to know whether New York has indeed reached the apex or whether the recent numbers are only a lull before worse ones.” The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, which is used by the White House to chart the pandemic’s progression, projects that the United States may need fewer hospital beds, ventilators and other equipment than previously estimated, and that some states may reach their peak sooner than expected. However, experts and leaders continued to steel themselves for grim weeks ahead, noting that the IHME model conflicts with many other models that show higher equipment shortages, deaths and projected peaks. “Some state leaders have also grown increasingly concerned about how the federal government is using IHME’s lower estimates to deny states’ increasingly desperate requests for equipment and help in preparations,” William Wan and Carolyn Johnson report. ”The danger of relying so heavily on one model is that model could be wrong or overly optimistic. … In the two weeks since IHME’s model was originally released — the researchers announced revisions Monday — it has been criticized by some experts as overly optimistic. “But even critics are quick to note that in the absence of any tool offered by the federal government and with no other model offering nationwide state-by-state estimates, IHME could be a lifesaver. … While the [IHME] original model relied only on Wuhan’s curve, the updated model now incorporates curves from seven regions from Italy and Spain where epidemics have also peaked. The newer version also found that deaths in some states — such


The Health 202: At least half of covid-19 patients on ventilators don’t make it

U.S. “will likely go down as the country that was supposedly best prepared to fight a pandemic but ended up catastrophically overmatched by the novel coronavirus, sustaining heavier casualties than any other nation.” “The most consequential failure involved a breakdown in efforts to develop a diagnostic test that could be mass produced and distributed across the United States, enabling agencies to map early outbreaks of the disease, and impose quarantine measures to contain them," they write. “At one point, a Food and Drug Administration official tore into lab officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, telling them their lapses in protocol, including concerns that the lab did not meet the criteria for sterile conditions, were so serious that the FDA would ‘shut you down’ if the CDC were a commercial, rather than government, entity.” OOF: A new report from the Department of Health and Human Services’s inspector general supports the troubling warnings from governors and health-care workers who say hospitals are dealing with dire shortages. For some hospitals, that means making their own hand sanitizer, or searching for face masks from nail salons and auto-body shops, our colleague Amy Goldstein reports. The report is based on a survey conducted at the end of last month of 343 hospitals in 46 states. The report details serious shortages in testing kits and personal protective equipment, and noted the difficulty in maintaining an adequate amount of on-duty staff, as well as the “emotional toll” on doctors and other medical workers. “The report is the first public federal critique of the capacity of the nation’s hospitals to cope with the flood of infected patients in coronavirus hot spots — an inundation likely to arrive elsewhere soon,” Amy writes. “In substantiating complaints about inadequate equipment, it essentially counters assertions by President Trump that hospitals and state officials advocating for them are being greedy.” — At Monday’s coronavirus briefing, Trump dismissed the report’s findings as “just wrong.” Asked about details from the report, he called for the inspector general’s name. “So, give me the name of the inspector general. Could politics be entered into that?” he said. PBS NewsHour’s Yamiche Alcindor: Our colleague JM Rieger: OUCH: Confusion continues over Wisconsin's Democratic primary and local elections scheduled to be held today. The Wisconsin Supreme Court yesterday blocked an executive order by Gov. Tony Evers (D) to stop today’s in-person voting. The court’s decision launched a


Kennedy Center and NSO musicians reach agreement to avert furloughs

about 10 weeks of the musicians’ payroll, which is roughly $400,000 weekly, according to the Kennedy Center. The now-canceled furloughs would have lasted at least six weeks. Ed Malaga, president of American Federation of Musicians Local 161-710, said the musicians were pleased to resolve the grievance and avoid furloughs. “I don’t know why it couldn’t have happened before [the furloughs were announced],” Malaga said. “The musicians had communicated with management their desire to have exactly this kind of conversation, to work collaboratively to address the issues. “I think the musicians of the orchestra are feeling much better about the terms going forward,” he said. Rutter also expressed gratitude that an agreement was reached. “This is an unprecedented time for all of us here in D.C. and around the world,” she said in a statement. “The severe economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have unfolded at an incredibly rapid pace, requiring all of us to work together and demanding the highest levels of strategic and creative thinking to solve our problems in the long-term. We are grateful to the musicians of the NSO for partnering with us and that, together, we have found a way forward.” The Kennedy Center declined interview requests from The Washington Post following Tuesday’s announcement. The deal is a big win for the musicians, said Mark Gaston Pearce, executive director of the Workers Rights Institute at Georgetown University Law Center and former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board. In his view, the furloughs violated both the collective bargaining agreement and national labor law. “The union had them over a barrel. If they lost, the musicians would be entitled to back pay plus interest. That allowed them to engage in some bargaining,” he said. “The musicians were able to negotiate some concessions which will help out the Kennedy Center and gain the added stability and security of another year [on the current contract].” Pearce said the arts center’s decision to furlough before negotiating could have been an intentional gambit by Rutter. “It certainly had a lot of shock value. Her technique might have been to punch the union in the face to see if they would fold and give up more than they would have otherwise,” he said. Instead, he said it created an opportunity for the union. Kennedy Center spokeswoman Eileen Andrews said every negotiation has a natural back and forth. “While the process isn’t always


Navy leader faces political heat and calls for his resignation over handling of virus-stricken aircraft carrier

year amid a scandal over President Trump’s intervention in a Navy SEAL war crimes case. The situation comes as the latest challenge for a Navy that has struggled in recent years with leadership turmoil in its ranks. A scandal over a Malaysian defense contractor nicknamed “Fat Leonard” who bribed Navy officials with cash, prostitutes and other incentives tarnished many would-be officers who had been seen as leading candidates for top service posts. The 2017 collisions of the guided missile destroyers the USS Fitzgerald and the USS John S. McCain led to 17 deaths among the sailors on board and raised further questions about Navy leadership. The turmoil over the president’s intervention in the Navy SEAL case has left the service without a permanent political appointee at its helm for months. The result has left Modly — a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and the Harvard Business School — in the hot seat atop the service. The son of Eastern European immigrants who moved to the United States after World War II, Modly was raised in Cleveland, according to his official Navy biography. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1983 and served as a Navy helicopter pilot before leaving active duty service in 1990 to attend business school. He worked as an executive at a number of companies, including most recently at the consulting firm PwC, where he handled the NATO account, before being tapped in 2017 as undersecretary of the Navy for the Trump administration. Now Modly has gone from being a little-known behind-the-scenes official atop the Navy bureaucracy, who served as the service’s chief management and chief information officer, to the public face of one of its most explosive national scandals in recent years, one that has pitted a captain praised for sacrificing his career in service to his crew against a Trump administration already facing criticism for a sluggish and haphazard response to the covid-19 pandemic. The incident has raised serious questions about how much transparency the military should display when faced with a public health crisis and how top leaders should balance the need to safeguard the well-being of service members with the imperative to continue military missions. Upon becoming public, Crozier’s letter fed into the very narrative that the White House was looking to dispel about leadership in Washington failing to take serious enough steps in early days to contain the outbreak. His firing


active duty service in 1990 to attend business school. He worked as an executive at a number of companies, including most recently at the consulting firm PwC, where he handled the NATO account, before being tapped in 2017 as undersecretary of the Navy for the Trump administration. Now Modly has gone from being a little-known behind-the-scenes official atop the Navy bureaucracy, who served as the service’s chief management and chief information officer, to the public face of one of its most explosive national scandals in recent years, one that has pitted a captain praised for sacrificing his career in service to his crew against a Trump administration already facing criticism for a sluggish and haphazard response to the covid-19 pandemic. The incident has raised serious questions about how much transparency the military should display when faced with a public health crisis and how top leaders should balance the need to safeguard the well-being of service members with the imperative to continue military missions. Upon becoming public, Crozier’s letter fed into the very narrative that the White House was looking to dispel about leadership in Washington failing to take serious enough steps in early days to contain the outbreak. His firing has been seen among the aircraft carrier’s crew as an attempt to muzzle any leaks of information about the situation on the vessel that could become politically inconvenient for top officers and civilian appointees back in Washington. Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who has significant influence over the Navy’s budget, called for Modly’s resignation in a statement. “I disagree strongly with the manner in which acting Secretary of the Navy Modly has handled the covid-19 outbreak on the USS Theodore Roosevelt. His decision to relieve Captain Crozier was at best an overreaction to the extraordinary steps the Captain took to protect his crew,” Smith said. “Acting Secretary Modly’s decision to address the sailors on the Roosevelt and personally attack Captain Crozier shows a tone-deaf approach more focused on personal ego than one of the calm, steady leadership we so desperately need in this crisis,” Smith added. A spokesman for Modly did not respond to a request for an interview. Trump has said he was not involved in the decision to fire Crozier. The president initially supported Modly and attacked Crozier’s letter as terrible. But Trump moderated his stance after news of the acting


Michael Wardian set out for a virtual ultra marathon. He kept running for 2½ days.

to be able to test their fitness, join a community, and do something together when many people cannot leave their homes,” a Calgary-based distance-running outfit called Personal Peak wrote in a March post announcing the race. The rules were simple enough. The runners had to honor social distancing recommendations and either compete on a treadmill or in some sequestered environment. Some, such as Wardian, circled their neighborhood, while others circled their backyard. One entrant did laps around his living room in Dubai, and another ran circles in a Canadian coffee shop that had been closed because of the virus. Runners were connected via Zoom and required to run 4.167 miles each hour. After hitting their hourly mark, the runners flashed their watch to the camera and then waited for the next lap to begin at the top of the hour. For each 4.167-mile lap in the race, Wardian made 10 loops around the block in his Arlington neighborhood. That means that once the race began Saturday morning, he passed the same neighbors, same trees, same parked cars — same everything — more than 620 times. The race began with more than 2,400 entrants, but they slowly dropped, and Monday was mostly a duel between Wardian and a runner halfway around the world named Radek Brunner, who was pounding out miles on a treadmill in the Czech Republic. Wardian officially won shortly before midnight Monday after more than 62½ hours of running when Brunner was disqualified because of a technicality. Brunner failed to start running his 63rd lap precisely at the top of the hour, apparently because of some technical difficulty or confusion, and organizers reluctantly said they had no choice but to disqualify him for a rules violation. In winning the event, Wardian ran the equivalent of 10 marathons in a little more than 2½ days. That’s a bit farther than running straight from Washington to Pittsburgh. Perhaps equally impressive: A sleep-deprived Wardian consistently turned in sub-10-minute miles, but his fastest lap was his final one, when he averaged 7:23 over the event’s final four miles. Wardian, who turns 46 on Sunday, is well-known on the ultra circuit, his running exploits growing longer each year. He has raced against horses, run around the Capital Beltway, completed marathons on seven continents (twice) and competed in the U.S. Olympic marathon trials and most every other premier distance event. Until this virtual competition,


Coronavirus proves a country is only as powerful as its people are healthy

from over, early winners are possibly beginning to emerge: China, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and even Germany, are faring much better, at least relatively, than developed countries like the United States. The difference was strategic stockpiles of protective face masks (or the industrial capacity to produce them quickly and cheaply), myriad testing kits, experienced staffs and well-funded labs, ventilators and critical care hospital beds. All of these resources seem to have allowed these countries to successfully contain the virus, timely diagnose, quarantine and treat those infected and minimize death tolls, which mitigated the disastrous impacts on their national economies by facilitating an earlier return to full economic productivity. While other factors like laws, political institutions, culture and geography contributed to their ostensible success (not to mention the danger from a second wave of the virus that still threatens them), the strength of their public health systems appears to have given them a strategic edge over America that may place them at an advantageous position to recover, and prosper, once the virus recedes. State power has always been fluid and is relative to shifting geopolitical conditions and changing technological circumstances. In the 20th century, new industrial capacities enabled European nation-states, and eventually the United States, to mobilize unprecedented resources, develop unimaginably destructive weaponry and, quite literally, conquer the world, then nearly destroy it in two world wars. The post-1945 nuclear era and, more recently, the advent of cyberwarfare, have once again redefined the nature of power. Now, we might very well have reached a new stage in this evolution. Thanks to the discovery of antibiotics, the development of vaccines for polio, measles and mumps (among other diseases) and breakthroughs in genetic and medical research since the mid-20th century, along with vastly improved sanitary conditions and widely available affordable nutritious foods, the U.S., like most developed countries, has almost uninterruptedly enjoyed rising life expectancy and declining child mortality. But the coronavirus reveals just how tenuous and fleeting are such securities. With globalization having reached a dangerous new stage of interconnectivity that facilitates the rapid permeation of germs and viruses into every corner of the globe, sustaining geopolitical power requires of even the most powerful and wealthiest states to cease taking the health of their populations for granted. If the U.S. wishes to remain the strongest country in the world, it will have to make sure it is also one of the healthiest.


Trump’s claim that he imposed the first ‘China ban’

in Wuhan, the first to suggest partial withdrawal of its embassy staff, and the first to impose a travel ban on Chinese travelers,” said Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying on Feb. 3. “What it has done could only create and spread fear, which is a very bad example.” Here’s the complete list of when countries imposed significant restrictions, along with the covid-19 deaths per million people recorded as of April 6. Some countries may not be reporting their numbers accurately. Jan. 24 Marshall Islands Jan. 25 North Korea Jan. 27 Hong Kong Philippines Jan. 29 Singapore Papua New Guinea Jan. 30 Bahamas Maldives Trinidad and Tobago Afghanistan Tajikistan Rwanda Jan. 31 — date of U.S. announcement (which was effective Feb. 2) El Salvador Guyana Iran Italy Jamaica Antigua and Barbuda Turkmenistan Morocco Solomon Islands Micronesia Kiribati Feb. 1 Australia Egypt Kyrgyzstan Palau Uzbekistan St. Kitts and Nevis Vietnam Feb. 2 Fiji New Zealand Grenada India Indonesia Iraq Israel Mauritius United States “Several countries that denied entry of travelers or who have suspended the flights to and from China or other affected countries, are now reporting cases of covid-19,” the WHO notes on its website. For reference, here are the deaths per million for the G-20 countries that did not impose travel restrictions. There is no clear pattern evident. Italy imposed a ban Jan. 31 but has the highest death rate in the G-20. The United States has the fourth-highest death rate among the countries in the G-20. With more than 10,000 covid-19 deaths recorded in the United States, the third highest in the world, it’s unclear whether Trump’s travel restrictions were especially effective in the long run. The WHO says such bans, at the start of an outbreak, can briefly help buy some time — but that was lost when the United States failed to quickly set up an effective testing program. Tens of thousands of U.S. citizens, permanent residents and exempted foreigners — some carrying the virus — continued to travel from China. In any case, it’s wrong for Trump to consistently claim that the United States was first. Many other countries imposed similar bans ahead of the United States, some even tougher. The president would have a stronger case to make if he specified that he was talking about world economic powers. Nearly half of the G-20 heeded the WHO advice and did not impose such travel bans.


Marshall Islands Jan. 25 North Korea Jan. 27 Hong Kong Philippines Jan. 29 Singapore Papua New Guinea Jan. 30 Bahamas Maldives Trinidad and Tobago Afghanistan Tajikistan Rwanda Jan. 31 — date of U.S. announcement (which was effective Feb. 2) El Salvador Guyana Iran Italy Jamaica Antigua and Barbuda Turkmenistan Morocco Solomon Islands Micronesia Kiribati Feb. 1 Australia Egypt Kyrgyzstan Palau Uzbekistan St. Kitts and Nevis Vietnam Feb. 2 Fiji New Zealand Grenada India Indonesia Iraq Israel Mauritius United States “Several countries that denied entry of travelers or who have suspended the flights to and from China or other affected countries, are now reporting cases of covid-19,” the WHO notes on its website. For reference, here are the deaths per million for the G-20 countries that did not impose travel restrictions. There is no clear pattern evident. Italy imposed a ban Jan. 31 but has the highest death rate in the G-20. The United States has the fourth-highest death rate among the countries in the G-20. With more than 10,000 covid-19 deaths recorded in the United States, the third highest in the world, it’s unclear whether Trump’s travel restrictions were especially effective in the long run. The WHO says such bans, at the start of an outbreak, can briefly help buy some time — but that was lost when the United States failed to quickly set up an effective testing program. Tens of thousands of U.S. citizens, permanent residents and exempted foreigners — some carrying the virus — continued to travel from China. In any case, it’s wrong for Trump to consistently claim that the United States was first. Many other countries imposed similar bans ahead of the United States, some even tougher. The president would have a stronger case to make if he specified that he was talking about world economic powers. Nearly half of the G-20 heeded the WHO advice and did not impose such travel bans. But Italy and Australia are hardly minor economic powers and announced their restrictions at roughly the same time as the United States. Trump earns Three Pinocchios. (About our rating scale) Send us facts to check by filling out Sign up for The Fact Checker The Fact Checker is a verified The Washington Post Fact Checker is working with the CoronaVirusFacts/DatosCoronaVirus Alliance, a coalition of more than 100 fact-checkers who are fighting misinformation related to the covid-19 pandemic. Learn more about the alliance


Covid-19 is ravaging black communities. A Milwaukee neighborhood is figuring out how to fight back.

MILWAUKEE — In this segregated section of America, the novel coronavirus's first casualty was Lawrence Riley, a 66-year-old Navy veteran and retired firefighter. Riley had lived through two strokes, a heart attack and a broken back, according to his daughter. But he could not survive covid-19. "I don't even know how my dad could have caught this because we are homebodies," said Whitley Riley, 20, whose family lives in the city's overwhelmingly black north side. "It's so weird that people here keep getting infected. It makes you wonder." In African American communities ravaged by covid-19, residents like Riley are wondering what they might do to soften the virus's deadly blow. The pandemic wasn't simply exposing the disparities within their city. It was making them worse. As of Monday, 33 of the 45 residents who died of covid-19 in Milwaukee County were black, according to the medical examiner. That's 73 percent, though black residents made up fewer than half of the county's coronavirus infections and about 28 percent of the total county population. The disparity is even more glaring when looking statewide: Black residents here represent nearly half of the coronavirus-related deaths in Wisconsin, a state that is 6 percent black. No part of the black community here has been left untouched by the virus: It passed through blocks with stately middle-class homes where wild turkeys grazed on front lawns and in poorer sections where swales are strewn with empty vodka bottles and used surgical gloves. The virus touched the lives of students at a neighborhood high school, where a basketball coach died after contracting it. It touched the local police department, which lost a retired lieutenant. It touched families who lived on 44th Street and 32nd Street and 57th Street, where relatives wondered if their loved ones got all the medical attention they needed to keep them alive. Black communities were seeing similar patterns in Detroit, Chicago and New Orleans. The deadly path was a detour from early anecdotes that the disease would spread in social circles of wealthy travelers. “At first, we thought this disease wasn’t about us,” said Yaya Shareef, a mother of four who operates a small business with her husband fixing garage doors. “Then, we thought it was elders who should be concerned. Then, it was those whose immune systems were compromised. But now, it’s my neighbors.” The city’s mayor, Tom Barrett, said officials are trying


School’s online, but high-tech bells and whistles can’t replace good teaching

As schools close their doors to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, educators are scrambling to move teaching online. Many of us have been told that the transition to remote instruction will be smooth, thanks to technology. Students and teachers will not only be able to connect to the Internet from wherever they are, the thinking goes, but also proficiently manage a suite of digital tools, such as webcam- and microphone-enabled computers, Learning Management Systems and videoconferencing apps such as Zoom. The reality, of course, is more complicated. While online instruction has been growing for years, it has also been hampered by inequalities of technological access and literacy. Not all students own a personal computer, and nearly 40 percent of K-12 students live in homes that lack an Internet connection. Students and teachers alike may also struggle to adapt to technology, especially given the effects of social distancing policies that have left families jostling for time, space, equipment and bandwidth to continue their work and education online. In addition, the mass deployment of digital technology for remote instruction has exposed serious security flaws. While Zoom has been adopted widely by educational institutions across the country, the New York City Department of Education recently banned it, citing security and data privacy concerns. The nationwide leap toward remote instruction has revived discussions that this is the “future” of education. But in reality, these classes are part of a long history of distance learning that spans more than a century. Before computers and the Internet, or even television and radio, millions of Americans received an education through distance-learning programs. As we scale up remote instruction during the global pandemic, we should remember a lesson that the for-profit “EdTech” sector would rather we forget: Distance learning doesn’t have to be high tech to be effective. The longest-running and farthest-reaching form of distance education in the United States is the print-based correspondence course. These courses exploded in popularity in the late 19th century, enabled by the increasing efficiency of commercial printing and the U.S. postal system. An early popularizer of distance education was the International Correspondence Schools (ICS). Founded in Scranton, Pa., in 1891 by Thomas J. Foster, the company’s original aim was to educate working miners on mine safety. Yet, its “teaching-by-mail” program took off, and soon the ICS was mailing illustrated textbooks, exams and other coursework to thousands of workers in a


The Afghanistan Papers wins IRE FOI Award

Announcement from Investigative Editor Jeff Leen and Deputy Investigative Editor David Fallis: We are proud to announce that Craig Whitlock’s project “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War” has won the Investigative Reporters & Editors’ FOI Award, which recognizes The Post’s nearly three-year fight to pry loose records from the federal government. The project, which published in December, began with a tip to Whitlock and eventually uncovered more than 2,000 pages of confidential interviews with people directly involved in the 18-year conflict. Those interviews, conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, revealed that presidents, generals and diplomats had misled the American public about the war for nearly two decades. To obtain the documents, The Post filed administrative appeals, pressured the government’s lawyers and filed two federal lawsuits. Those efforts would not have been possible without the work and expert legal guidance of Post Deputy General Counsel Jim McLaughlin and attorneys Chuck Tobin, Matthew Kelley and Max Mishkin of Ballard Spahr. In recognizing the project, IRE contest judges singled out The Post’s fight for records: “Nothing is more important than making sure our leaders tell the public the truth about war, when they’re sending soldiers to fight and die. The Post proved the public didn’t know and that top leaders misled the American people for years. Whitlock did so by obtaining and releasing thousands of previously hidden documents. The reaction was swift: a call for Congressional hearings,” the announcement said. The Afghanistan Papers also involved the collaboration and talent of dozens of other people from across newsroom staffs, including the photo, audio, video, design, graphics, audience, copy-editing and hub teams. The project published with an interactive, state-of-the-art database that laid bare the interviews the government sought to conceal. Please join us in congratulating Craig, the legal team and everyone involved on this important recognition.


Why do we keep treating China as a source of reliable information?

Top World.*” A note at the bottom of the article could provide the context: The Party often manipulates statistics, and with the worsening media environment in China, the publication cannot in good faith claim that U.S. virus cases surpass China’s. How do we know China’s coronavirus statistics are inaccurate? Consider one egregious example. In northwest China’s region of Xinjiang, authorities claim that by April 5, a total of only 76 people have contracted the disease, and only three have died, in a population of roughly 24.5 million. On the same day, the United States reported a total of 304,826 cases and 7,616 deaths among 331 million people. In other words, Beijing claims that, on a per capita basis, roughly 300 times as many people have contracted the disease, and more than 180 times as many have died, in the United States than in Xinjiang. Everything is possible. But claiming that the region where an estimated 1 million Muslims are imprisoned in concentration camps is far safer from the coronavirus than the United States strains credulity. Chinese statistics are growing more and more untrustworthy. Over the past two months, Beijing has moved against the two foreign groups that provide the most accurate auditing of the Party’s numbers. After moving against the Wall Street Journal in February, Beijing decided to expel nearly all of the American journalists from the Wall Street Journal, The Post and the New York Times. (Disclosure: Some of the expelled journalists are my friends.) In early April, the Foreign Ministry also urged foreign diplomats to stay away from Beijing. While diplomats rarely publicly disclose the information they receive, they act as important sources for foreign journalists in China and as crucial transmitters of information about China to their home country. The expulsions have a ripple effect. They remind people in the Party bureaucracy, and in Chinese companies and media outlets, of the dangers of divulging sensitive information to foreigners. And they serve as a warning to the remaining diplomats and journalists that probing too deeply could get one chastised or expelled. The asterisk could be a permanent change. Or it could be a temporary measure, as it also serves as a reminder of the Party’s treatment of American journalists. The Post, the Times and the Journal can maintain this style convention until Beijing reinstates their journalists. Other news outlets can join in solidarity as well, until Beijing reinstates


‘Those numbers take your breath away’: Covid-19 is hitting Chicago’s black neighborhoods much harder than others, officials say

is not negotiable,” she said. “We must understand the magnitude and impact of this virus on all of our communities.” Public health experts have attributed the stark disparity to higher rates of chronic disease among black people compared to white, which puts them at higher risk of dying from covid-19, said Allison Arwady, commissioner of the Chicago Public Health Department. Across the board, data have shown people with underlying health conditions are more likely to die of the virus. But Arwady said that, in turn, the higher rate of chronic disease among African Americans is also undeniably linked to decades of inequitable access to health care and economic opportunity compared to white people. “The community conditions, the holes in our social safety net, the differing economic, educational opportunities, and fundamentally, the systemic and institutional racism that have driven these inequities over the years — we are now seeing it play out in our covid data,” she said. In Chicago, a white person on average lives 8.8 years longer than a black person, Arwady said. Diabetes rates among black Chicagoans is double that of white Chicagoans. Deaths related to lung disease are more than 20 percent higher among black people compared to white, and almost two in five black adults have high blood pressure — a rate 25 percent higher than among whites. “These underlying conditions are part of what are driving some of the racial inequities, but these inequities also reflect the conditions in which people live,” she said. Some lower-income minority neighborhoods don’t have adequate access to grocery stores or healthy food, she said. Some don’t have safe, walkable streets, living exposed to violence. Some families are working multiple low-paying jobs to make ends meet. Because of all of this, Arwady said, even if the health care system were “perfect,” the racial disparities evident in the coronavirus data would probably still exist. By the same token, social distancing can be difficult in low-income households, in which blue-collar jobs don’t allow for working from home, or where using public transportation is unavoidable. “Social distancing, for a lot of people, is a privilege,” Oluwatoyin M. Adeyemi, an infectious disease specialist who has worked in Chicago for two decades, said at Monday’s news conference. She noted how even some of the instructions from public health experts did not consider how poverty might make the instructions impossible to follow. People were urged to


El coronavirus: ¿se equivocó Trump? La lucha en Italia, España, Nueva York y el Cono Sur

Marty Baron, director del Post, habla de una investigación del periódico. Participan también el director de El País de Montevideo y periodistas y científicos desde Madrid, Roma y Berna.


The Finance 202: Small businesses struggle to secure coronavirus relief amid glitchy loan rollout

Adam Milne doesn’t have time to wait. The owner of Old Town Pizza & Brewing, in Portland, Ore., laid off two-thirds of his staff in late March after the state imposed social distancing measures in response to the coronavirus. He shifted the two-restaurant operation to pickup and deliveries in a bid to keep it afloat. But the small business owner has piled up $25,000 in credit card debt and counting covering rent, utilities and insurance. To avert closing his doors — and to bring his full staff back to work — Milne is scrambling to secure a $189,363 government lifeline. The process of attempting to get an emergency loan through the administration's Paycheck Protection Program, which launched Friday, has been a stressful mess. Despite a long-standing relationship with Wells Fargo, Milne never received the notification he’d signed up for to notify him when the bank’s online application portal went live. Instead, he learned Monday – over Twitter – that the bank had reached a $10 billion limit for lending under the program and wouldn’t be accepting any more applications. He also submitted a request to U.S. Bank, which said it would reach out with follow-up questions before processing his application. He’s still awaiting that inquiry, with no clarity on whether funds will come. “It’s been a free-for-all,” Milne says. “We desperately need these funds to keep us alive … and our employees want to come back to work.” Small business owners are not only struggling to navigate an unprecedented economic shutdown forced by the coronavirus; they are also knee-deep in the bureaucratic morass of what is meant to be Washington’s rescue effort. The $349 billion program to provide forgivable loans to smaller businesses has been beset by a technically buggy rollout and mounting concerns that its funds will run dry long before reaching many that are counting on its help. The nation's biggest banks have already committed 10 percent of the total, Major glitches with the processing system for the program are adding another layer of headaches. Per Reuters, “Since the program opened on Friday, banks have struggled to access the clunky system and the paperwork involved has changed more than once, industry sources said… Many lenders have had problems signing up for new user accounts with the SBA’s platform, while bankers who already had accounts have had issues unlocking them or resetting passwords.” Borrowers are encountering problems online, too.


The CDC must end its silence on the racial impact of covid-19

The CDC customarily reports such data, but it has not done so with covid-19. Many states and counties are also not publishing the information. As of Tuesday, the CDC had not responded to inquiries about whether it has the demographic data and isn’t releasing it, or simply isn’t tracking the information. In this critical moment, the federal government must collect and disclose racial data on covid-19 testing, cases and deaths. States and local governments should do the same. This demographic data could help save lives. Understanding which populations are most vulnerable allows public health officials to partner with messengers who can speak credibly to specific communities, offering up-to-date information about social distancing, sheltering in place and other preventive measures. The data also would allow public health officials to more effectively deploy testing to particular areas, track the virus on social networks, and identify and contain its spread. This containment helps not just communities most vulnerable to covid-19, but all Americans. Such transparency also advances fairness in health care. Covid-19 demographic data can reveal the degree of access that the most susceptible populations have to coronavirus testing and medical services. Disclosure also allows federal agencies, Congress, states and local governments, as well as journalists, scholars and civil rights groups, to assess the quality of care received by African Americans, Latinos and other racial and ethnic groups. Health-care systems can use the information to guide treatment. The possibility exists that data about race and covid-19 could be misused. Publicity about disproportionate death rates among African Americans could increase racial discrimination in an echo of recent attacks against Asian Americans amid reports on the coronavirus’s origins in China. Another potential drawback: With lifesaving equipment in short supply in some hospitals, health-care professionals could steer ventilators and respirators away from African American patients and toward those assumed to have better prospects of recovery. And policymakers, seeing the higher death rates in health systems serving black communities, might deem them ineffective and reduce their funding — when increasing it would be the obviously appropriate response. These concerns are legitimate, but making the truth available is essential — especially now, when disinformation, political polarization and distrust abound. The covid-19 pandemic has arrived at a time when distrust about racial bias in the allocation of limited medical resources is already high. Research has shown that in treatment of other maladies, including osteoarthritis, cardiovascular disease and cancer, white


in health care. Covid-19 demographic data can reveal the degree of access that the most susceptible populations have to coronavirus testing and medical services. Disclosure also allows federal agencies, Congress, states and local governments, as well as journalists, scholars and civil rights groups, to assess the quality of care received by African Americans, Latinos and other racial and ethnic groups. Health-care systems can use the information to guide treatment. The possibility exists that data about race and covid-19 could be misused. Publicity about disproportionate death rates among African Americans could increase racial discrimination in an echo of recent attacks against Asian Americans amid reports on the coronavirus’s origins in China. Another potential drawback: With lifesaving equipment in short supply in some hospitals, health-care professionals could steer ventilators and respirators away from African American patients and toward those assumed to have better prospects of recovery. And policymakers, seeing the higher death rates in health systems serving black communities, might deem them ineffective and reduce their funding — when increasing it would be the obviously appropriate response. These concerns are legitimate, but making the truth available is essential — especially now, when disinformation, political polarization and distrust abound. The covid-19 pandemic has arrived at a time when distrust about racial bias in the allocation of limited medical resources is already high. Research has shown that in treatment of other maladies, including osteoarthritis, cardiovascular disease and cancer, white physicians harbor implicit preferences for white patients over black ones. In this moment of deep uncertainty, covid-19 demographic data could act as effectively as a police dash-cam video in providing clear evidence of what is really transpiring during the pandemic. That’s why several civil rights groups and other organizations, as well as members of Congress — including Sens. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — are pushing the federal government to collect and publish demographic data about covid-19’s impact. Some states and local governments are already doing that job and could serve as models for a nationwide effort. Milwaukee County is especially notable for its online tracker, updated in real time with data about covid-19 deaths broken down by race, age and gender, with data-visualization mapping that shows outbreak hot spots. Collecting and publishing such demographic data about the entire country are essential. This would allow communities affected the most to receive the support they need, slowing the virus’s spread and saving lives.


On Twitter, almost 60 percent of false claims about coronavirus remain online — without a warning label

university’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the Oxford Martin School. Researchers also found that the most common subject of coronavirus misinformation concerned false claims about the actions of government or other international authorities, such as the United Nations or World Health Organization. The most powerful spreaders of misinformation were politicians, celebrities or other public figures, who were the source of about 20 percent of false claims but generated 69 percent of the total “engagement,” a term that measures the reach of misinformation on social media. The report cited President Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro as politicians who have made documented false statements about the pandemic, and all three platforms studied in the Oxford report in March removed some misinformation from Bolsonaro that violated their policies against harmful content. Independent fact checkers have increased their focus on false claims about the coronavirus as the pandemic has grown in recent months, with checks on the subject rising more than 900 percent between January and March. The largest category among those items studied — drawn from a list of fact checks maintained by First Draft, a nonprofit group that combats misinformation and disinformation — were partially true information that had been twisted or manipulated to make it misleading. Only 38 percent of the items studied were completely fabricated, the Oxford researchers found. Twitter said it created a policy against misinformation related to the coronavirus pandemic on March 18, which could explain the uneven results from a study whose data set began in January. “We’re prioritizing the removal of content when it has a call to action that could potentially cause harm," said Twitter spokeswoman Katie Rosborough. "We will not take enforcement action on every Tweet that contains incomplete or disputed information about COVID-19. Since introducing these new policies on March 18, we’ve removed more than 1,100 Tweets and challenged 1.5 million potentially spammy accounts targeting COVID-19 discussions.” YouTube spokesman Farshad Shadloo said in a statement, “We have clear policies against COVID misinformation and we quickly remove videos violating these policies when flagged to us.” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said, "Since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global public health emergency, we’ve been taking aggressive steps to stop misinformation and harmful content from spreading, including by making additional investments to our program of over 60 fact-checking partners around the world who are debunking false claims in over 50 languages.”


How to put millions of Americans back to work safely

or “Mobilization of the Recovered.” The idea is to get those who’ve already had the disease, and developed some immunity, into roles needed for society to function. To varying degrees, it can work in all countries affected by covid-19 today. In the United States, the potential is great. Here’s why: The case fatality rate of a disease is the fraction of infected people who die of it — the number of deaths divided by the total number of cases. A simple idea, but also a moving target: Because of incomplete testing, we may not detect all cases; the figure will differ by age group, region and other factors. Based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures as of Monday, we estimate a case fatality rate of about 2.5 percent for the country as a whole, meaning that approximately 97.5 percent of Americans who contract the virus would survive the disease. Based on our understanding of other coronaviruses, such as those behind SARS and MERS — and the results of a not-yet-peer-reviewed March study in monkeys of this coronavirus specifically — covid-19 survivors will be immune to reinfection, for several months at least, and possibly far longer. As the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, Anthony S. Fauci puts it, “It’s never 100 percent, but I’d be willing to bet anything that people who recover are really protected against reinfection.” They likely also won’t be able to transmit the virus through coughing, sneezing or other respiratory channels. While they would still be able to transmit by touching contaminated surfaces, this risk can be minimized through improved workplace sanitation and personal hygiene. Most important, when a blood test to detect antibodies — not the same as the test to detect the virus itself — becomes available, we will be able to identify this immune group. Once we have the antibody test, able-bodied adults in this cadre could reenter the workforce without risk to themselves, and with minimal risk to others, in some cases, returning to their former jobs or filling in for absentees until these people can return to their previous employment, if possible. This same immune cadre could be deployed as a supplemental health-care workforce to perform various nonspecialized functions, including hospital facilities maintenance, laundry, disposal, transport of patients, distribution of supplies, supervision of elderly patients and other jobs needed to meet demand. And while there’s nothing beneficial about the spread of


Think you’re out of baker’s yeast? Think again.

decided to exploit the power of these alcohol-producing, carbon-dioxide-belching microbes to brew and bake. Voila, our mighty bakers’ yeast: Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Wild yeast really is everywhere, and you can harvest and propagate it at home. Scour your cupboards for old dried fruit (raisins, apricots, prunes) and add them to a few tablespoons of water. As you mix everything around, you’ll notice the water getting slightly cloudy — that’s your yeast. But it needs something to eat. Add an equal amount of flour to form a loose paste, and store it in a warm corner of your kitchen until you see bubbles: That’s your yeast waking up and starting to grow. Within 24 hours, there should be a healthy, vigorous soupy mix — your very own wild yeast and bacterial culture, ready to be transformed into your favorite bread! Nurturing this culture is a hobby in itself: I find taking small portions of the living dough and diluting it into equal parts flour and water oddly relaxing; fretting over the health or vigor of my starter is a useful way to pass the long hours spent sheltered at home. My starter rewards me generously by bringing all my baking projects to life. Yours will, too; tending to the puddle of flour and water in a jar on your kitchen counter, folding dough and baking bread — it somehow works comfortably into a new pattern of daily life, a comfort at a time when our usual patterns have been disrupted by a pandemic. Of course, the experiment you are doing with the dried fruit in your cupboards is the same one humans have been doing from time immemorial. Our earliest evidence of beer-brewing with yeast comes from the Near East almost 10,000 years ago. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, written in the second millennium B.C., the wildman Enkidu becomes civilized only after he eats bread and becomes drunk on beer. And yeast is still at the heart of our civilization in the 21st century. In biomedical research, we have used yeast as a model to understand what happens when our bodies manifest cancer, or what changes in a cell when we develop myriad diseases. In my current role as a biological engineer, I view yeast as a canvas for creativity. I think about the future of food as we know it: How can we develop yeast to produce components in our food


Wisconsin is scheduled to vote today. How will the pandemic affect turnout?

In fact, Hispanic voters spend closer to half an hour in line, on average, regardless of whether their incomes are high or low. Why might we see these disparities? It could be that areas with more minorities are allocated fewer, more poorly staffed and funded polling locations. That means longer lines. Wisconsin’s strict voter ID laws may disproportionately affect Hispanic voters, who are more likely to have their citizenship documents scrutinized even if they are wealthy. Our findings are consistent with Pettigrew’s findings from previous elections: On average, black and Hispanic Wisconsin voters have a harder time casting their ballots than the state’s white voters. Some scholars argue To find out whether that’s true in Wisconsin, we asked people whether they voted early and whether they voted with absentee ballots. Older and more educated voters were the ones who took advantage of these voting options. Black and Hispanic Wisconsinites were not significantly more likely to use early and absentee voting mechanisms. Some research suggests In Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city, people in black neighborhoods are dying of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, at higher rates than people in nonblack neighborhoods. Although our data doesn’t comprehensively represent all black and Hispanic Wisconsin voters, it does suggest that the pandemic may make it less likely for these groups to vote compared with other voters, given they face a longer commute to begin with and are not more likely to take advantage of early and absentee voting opportunities. This pandemic is challenging electoral administration around the world. In Wisconsin, more than 100 communities have no poll workers available to administer the elections on Tuesday. With governors and state legislatures implementing myriad policies to make voting more accessible by mail, that puts more pressure on those validating and counting mail-in ballots. The TMC newsletter is changing shape! Sign up here to keep receiving our smart analysis. Jordan M. Foley Michael W. Wagner Lewis A. Friedland Dhavan V. Shah Katherine J. Cramer Ceri Hughes Read more: Asians are stereotyped as ‘competent but cold.’ Here’s how that increases backlash from the coronavirus pandemic. Sanders was losing to Biden anyway. He lost more in areas with covid-19 cases. Americans who are biased against Asians are more likely to fear the coronavirus Republicans were more concerned about Ebola than they’ve been about coronavirus. Here’s why. The coronavirus is expanding the surveillance state. How will this play out?


Deborah Birx says she couldn’t treat her ill grandchild because of social distancing — and a fear of infecting Trump

As many Americans enter yet another week of practicing social distancing in an effort to combat the ongoing pandemic, Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response director, assured the public Monday that she is all too familiar with the challenges of the restrictive guidelines that have begun to rule people’s lives. This past weekend, Birx said, was especially difficult for her. “My grandchild of 10 months got a fever of 105 this weekend,” she said during Monday’s press briefing. “I’m the doctor and I couldn’t get there." Standing alongside President Trump and Vice President Pence, Birx, a physician, described trying to instruct her daughter remotely how to listen to her own lungs and the baby’s lungs. Respiratory issues are among the symptoms of a coronavirus infection. Aside from wanting to adhere to the official guidelines, Birx noted there was another major factor that influenced her decision to stay away from her ailing grandchild: her frequent contact with Trump, 73, and Pence, 60. The president and vice president are both within the age range of the population’s most at-risk segments, as is Birx, who is 64. “You can’t take that kind of risk with the leaders of the country,” she said. Birx told reporters Monday that her granddaughter’s high fever was likely the result of roseola, a common viral illness that affects young children, and not covid-19. But she said her recent experience serves as an example of the lengths people should be willing to go to stay isolated amid the outbreak. “I know you all are making sacrifices, and I guess I want everyone to take this seriously,” she said. Along with Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Birx is a voice of scientific expertise for the White House. The doctor and retired Army colonel, who has a background in immunology, rose to national prominence as the country’s global AIDS coordinator after spending years working toward a cure and vaccine for the disease. Since 2014, Birx has run the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, the largest disease-specific foreign-aid program in U.S. history, as Emily Bass wrote in a profile for The Washington Post Magazine. On Monday, the beginning of what the U.S. Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams predicted will be “the hardest and saddest week of most Americans’ lives,” Birx stressed the importance of social distancing, urging people to heed


Small businesses worry $349 billion emergency lending program isn’t big enough

because she didn’t have a business account there. “No other banks will take it unless you have an account,” she said. Loewinger worries that because Wells Fargo isn’t taking more applications, she could be locked out of the emergency fund altogether. “Just because I happen to use Wells Fargo, I get nothing, and my employees get nothing, and my rent isn’t getting paid,” she said. “Two of largest banks in world, and neither will make a loan.” The program, seen as a key part of Congress’s $2 trillion economic rescue package, is meant to help small-business owners retain their employees during the coronavirus pandemic. Businesses with fewer than 500 employees are eligible for loans of up to $10 million. The loans will be forgiven, meaning business owners won’t have to pay them back, if they meet certain conditions, including using 75 percent of the money to retain or rehire employees. The program got off to a rocky start Friday. The Treasury Department and the Small Business Administration didn’t release the final rules until a few hours before it launched. Many of the country’s largest banks were still reviewing the rules as thousands of small-business owners began applying. By Monday, the problems were persisting. Some big banks, including Citigroup, still haven’t begun accepting applications. JPMorgan Chase, the country’s largest bank, took its site down briefly to make “essential updates” and simplify its application. Many banks have restricted access to their existing customers and say that while they have begun processing the loans, they lack the proper SBA paperwork to finish the process and turn the money over to the businesses. Hundreds of lenders are still trying to get approval to access the SBA system so they can process loans, Rebeca Romero Rainey, president and chief executive of the Independent Community Bankers of America, said in a letter Saturday to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Carranza. Banks are experiencing “massive delay” and remain “frustrated with a myriad of unanswered questions” about how the process is to work, she said. “Without a more robust intake process, American small businesses in many parts of the country will not receive and deploy the funds intended for them,” Rainey said. “Community bankers are frustrated with failed technology links and portals.” Erica Werner and Aaron Gregg contributed to this report. Have a tip or story idea about how the government is handling the Cares Act and its


Deaths in the DMV increase as officials warn it could be next hot spot

are not overwhelmed. In Virginia, 538 patients were hospitalized with covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. An additional 656 people were in state hospitals awaiting coronavirus test results. In Maryland, 1,059 people were hospitalized and 184 had been released from isolation. D.C. officials have not been disclosing how many people are hospitalized with covid-19. But on April 1, the city’s top public health official said that about 14 percent of people who tested positive for coronavirus were hospitalized and that the average age of a hospitalized person was 59. “We have definitely seen a steady increase in the number of patients who are both positive with covid-19 and people who are getting sick with covid-19,” said William B. Borden, chief quality and population health officer with the George Washington University Medical Faculty Associates. “We have not yet seen the inflection point where it’s gone up to exponential growth. But that could happen at any point.” The rising cases across the Washington area are probably a combination of increased infections as well as a greater access to testing, Borden explained. A similar spike in the number of hospitalizations would be a dangerous red flag for heath officials. “We think we’re still in the calm before the storm,” said Leslie Simmons, the executive vice president of LifeBridge Health, whose five Maryland hospitals are beginning to see an influx of patients in need of ventilators. Simmons said the critical-care unit at Carroll Hospital in Westminster was in overflow status last week after seeing a rise in patients from Pleasant View Nursing Home in Mount Airy. That meant that some critical-care patients were being treated on a different floor, in a unit that is normally used for intermediate care, she said. The LifeBridge hospitals have not yet had to open tents or conference rooms to care for patients but have surge plans in place to do so if necessary, she said. As of Monday, the critical-care unit at Carroll was back at normal capacity. The D.C. government on Monday released coronavirus data broken down by race for the first time, showing black residents are disproportionately represented among the dead. Fourteen of the District’s 24 covid-19 fatalities are black, or about 58 percent, the city reported. Black residents compose about 46 percent of the population in the District. Data released by other jurisdictions, including Michigan and Chicago, also shows black residents have been disproportionately


The Daily 202: British, Canadian and U.S. leaders cite World War II to make very different points about coronavirus

in faith and in friends, are closed in many states to stop the spread of the disease. Churches, temples and other places of worship nationwide — where congregants sit close, take Communion, share hugs and handshakes and pecks on the cheek — have served as hothouses for the virus, with religious gatherings exacerbating outbreaks in New Rochelle, N.Y.; Washington, D.C.; Glenville, Ill.; and Sacramento, among others,” Scott Wilson, Michelle Boorstein, Arelis Hernandez and Lori Rozsa report. “Some houses of worship and gatherings of religious leaders have proved particularly dangerous in areas where the virus has been prevalent. Following the outbreak in Sacramento, Mayor Darrell Steinberg (D) made clear that disregard for the prohibition on church gatherings could prompt police intervention. Steinberg’s wife serves as cantor at the city’s largest synagogue, which now streams its services online. … Rural Minnesota has reported at least nine coronavirus cases traced to a church. And 43 fell ill, one fatally, after attending a March 15 service at the Life Church of Glenview, in Glenview, Ill., a Chicago suburb.” “Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) issued an emergency order requiring nursing home staff to wear protective gear and segregate infected patients to halt the spread of the disease following outbreaks in the state’s long-term care facilities,” Ian Shapira, Rachel Chason, Fenit Nirappil and Hannah Natanson report. “Meanwhile, the administration of D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) ordered the Wharf Fish Market in Southwest Washington shut down Sunday after customers crowded its open-air marketplace Saturday, defying social-distancing orders. … As of Sunday morning, the District had 1,002 confirmed cases and 22 deaths; Maryland had 3,610 cases and 67 deaths; and Virginia had 2,640 cases and 52 deaths.” Bowser said D.C. probably would hit its largest number of hospitalizations in early summer. However, a projection from the University of Washington said the District could reach peak “hospital resource use” as soon as April 15, with as many as nine deaths per day starting April 13. Catherine Calderwood acknowledged she visited her second home on two occasions during her country’s lockdown despite calling for people to limit nonessential movement and stay at home to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Photos of and her family at their second home in Earlsferry, more than an hour away from where the family normally resides in Edinburgh, were published in the Scottish Sun. Scottish police confirmed that officers visited her and issued


Grocery workers are beginning to die of coronavirus

at cash registers and requiring customers to stand six feet apart in line. The country’s two largest grocers, Walmart and Kroger, are beginning to check employees’ temperatures at the beginning of each shift and will provide workers with gloves and masks. The added precautions come amid a wave of strikes and petitions aimed at getting employers like Amazon, Trader Joe’s and the grocery delivery service Instacart, to take additional steps to protect workers. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Those efforts are likely to take on new urgency, analysts said, as supermarket workers across the country begin to see colleagues fall ill from covid-19. More than 356,000 Americans have tested positive for the coronavirus as of Monday afternoon, and nearly 10,500 have died. A Trader Joe’s employee with underlying health conditions died of covid-19 early Monday morning, spokeswoman Kenya Friend-Daniel said. The Scarsdale, N.Y., store where the employee worked is closed until Thursday to give workers “time to process and grieve,” Friend-Daniel said in an email. Employees will continue to be paid during the closure and will receive an additional two days of paid leave, she said. Trader Joe’s stores in Brooklyn and Philadelphia also were temporarily closed Monday, for additional cleaning and sanitizing. In Illinois, Walmart employees Phillip Thomas, 48, and Wando Evans, 51, both of whom worked at a store in Evergreen Park near Chicago, died in late March, according to labor advocacy group United for Respect. A Walmart spokesman said the company is “heartbroken.” The grocery giant has hired an outside company to sanitize “high-touch” areas, such as the front entrance, carts, registers and bathrooms. It has also started installing sneeze guards at cash registers and begun limiting the number of customers who can shop at one time. In Maryland, Leilani Jordan, 27, a greeter at Giant’s Campus Way South store in Largo, died last week. “She said, ‘Mommy, I’m going to work because no one else is going to help the senior citizens get their groceries,’ ” her mother, Zenobia Shepherd, told The Post. “She only stopped going to work when she could no longer breathe.” Her last day at work was March 16, according to Giant spokesman Daniel Wolk. Jordan tested positive for the coronavirus in late March and died Wednesday. Wolk said the company cleaned and disinfected the store when it found out about Jordan’s diagnosis and is providing counseling for employees.


After botched test flight, Boeing will refly its Starliner spacecraft for NASA

in 2014 to Boeing and SpaceX, Boeing was viewed as the industry stalwart that would likely earn the honor of restoring human spaceflight to American soil for NASA. But since then, SpaceX, which also flies cargo to the space station and was recently awarded a contract to resupply the outpost NASA wants to put in orbit around the moon, has become a force in the space industry long dominated by traditional contractors. SpaceX is proceeding swiftly with its program. And after flying a successful mission without astronauts on board to the station last year, it is currently planning a flight with crews as early as May. Boeing had hoped to fly crews this year, but in addition to the timing issue, the company has said it encountered a software problem that would have caused the wrong thrusters to fire during the craft’s return to Earth, when what’s known as the service module separates from the crew module. Controllers on the ground discovered the problem while the spacecraft was in orbit, and were able to correct it. Had they not, however, it could have led to an array of significant problems, from damaging the spacecraft’s heat shield to sending it tumbling off course. NASA and Boeing initially played down the significance of the spacecraft’s woes, and held out hope that Boeing would be able to proceed with a flight with astronauts this year. But as the company and space agency uncovered more problems, NASA grew more pointed in its criticism of one of its most trusted contractors. Earlier this year, NASA said in a blog post that “there were numerous instances where the Boeing software quality processes either should have or could have uncovered the defects. It added that those problems would have had serious consequences and “led to risk of spacecraft loss.” As a result, Boeing is now reviewing all 1 million lines of code on the spacecraft — a lengthy and expensive process. Last month, SpaceX announced a problem leading up to the test of its spacecraft’s parachute system. A capsule-shaped device designed to simulate the weight and mass of the spacecraft became unstable as it was being hoisted aloft by a helicopter. Out of an abundance of caution, the pilot released the test device, destroying it. But officials said they didn’t think the setback would delay the company’s progress. And a crewed launch remains scheduled for next month.


The dark side of ventilators: Those hooked up for long periods face difficult recoveries

is a wave, about six weeks after the initial illness,” said Samuel Brown, director of the Center for Humanizing Critical Care at Intermountain Healthcare in Utah. “One to three weeks to get off the ventilator, and a couple of weeks to get their sea legs back to get home — and then to finally realize: What happened? What did I just survive? And how desperately frightening that experience was for a wave of survivors who are going to have really difficult psychological symptoms.” Although the vast majority of people with covid-19 experience mild cases of infection, about one in six known cases develop severe shortness of breath. About half of those become critically ill, as people’s damaged lungs fill with fluid, staying alive only with the help of a mechanical ventilator, according to evolving data. By the end of the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of Americans who have survived severe cases of covid-19 are likely to seed the next health-care crisis as many struggle with the physical and psychological effects of long hospital stays, say epidemiologists. Patients with covid-19 typically stay on ventilators for prolonged periods which increases the likelihood of long-term complications. The risk of infection also means they are cut off from human contact, which also increases the risk of psychological issues. “We normally kneel at their bedside and hold their hand and ask them, ‘How are you’ and tell them, ‘It is my privilege to help you.’ Instead what they are getting is someone in spacesuit garb with very little time to spend with them,” said E. Wesley Ely, a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He recounted how a medical resident recently came to him in tears. “I don’t feel like I’m a doctor,” the resident told Ely. “The first time I really sat with that patient was to pronounce him dead.” The ranks of covid-19 survivors are just beginning to expand in the United States, but acute respiratory distress syndrome — the lung failure that kills patients — is also caused by other infections, giving doctors a deep reservoir of knowledge about what happens to such people after they leave the hospital. Each year, there are about 200,000 people with acute respiratory distress in the United States, and about 60 percent of them live. Many of these survivors have been watching the unfolding pandemic in the United States with an unsettling sense of foresight and


The pandemic canceled their wedding. So they held it in Animal Crossing.

Sharmin Asha was disappointed. With the covid-19 outbreak sweeping across the globe, she and her fiance, Nazmul Ahmed, had to face a hard truth — it wasn’t safe to bring her family and friends together under one roof. They’d have to cancel their wedding. The 28-year-old couple from New Jersey scrapped plans for their 150-person, April 12th reception in Brooklyn until next year, and pressed pause on a first dance set to Louis Armstrong’s “A Kiss to Build a Dream On.” “We were basically 99-percent ready to get married, which unfortunately did not happen,” Asha said. In the days that followed their decision, Asha and Ahmed tried to move past their disappointment, taking up the new Nintendo game, Animal Crossing: New Horizons on the recommendation of a friend. The couple enjoyed their time with the life simulator, harvesting resources and using them to upgrade their personalized islands with new buildings and items. Then Asha experienced a thrilling surprise. “Nazmul invited me over to collect resources [on his island] since he had been playing longer than me,” Asha said. “As soon as I got there, he was at the airport and there were arrows on the ground. He told me there was some special in-game event, so we followed them.” The arrows led Asha through the town, where she picked up flowers Ahmed had left along the path, and up to the beach where their friends were waiting with their own Animal Crossing characters. Ahmed had planned a surprise beach wedding within the game. He got everything ready on the same day and had their friends in a video chat on mute until the big reveal. “It took me around four or five hours to set the whole thing up,” Ahmed said. “Our friends played [the game] already, so they were immediately on board.” Asha and Ahmed’s story is not a rare one these days. There have been instances all over the world of players hosting a wedding within Animal Crossing in the midst of a pandemic that has closed borders, postponed planned events and forced people to stay home. Some have even designed traditional Vietnamese and Korean wedding clothing with the game’s customization options. The in-game nuptials isn’t a full substitute for their wedding, Asha and Ahmed said, and their ceremony carries no legal bearing. But, for now, Asha, Ahmed and a host of other couples are saying “I do”


Jobless claims skyrocket in the D.C. area; mayor tells hospitals city needs 3,600 more beds for surge

The number of known coronavirus cases in the District, Maryland and Virginia stands at 4,697 on Thursday, with 2,332 cases in Maryland, 1,708 in Virginia and 657 in the District. The total of virus-driven deaths was 41 in Virginia, 36 in Maryland and 12 in the District, for a total of 89 fatalities in the region. Here are some of the most significant and recent developments as the region responds to the pandemic of the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease covid-19: • Labor Department numbers released Thursday show Virginians filed 114,104 jobless claims through the week ending March 28. Marylanders filed 83,536 unemployment benefit claims during that time, while D.C. residents filed 14,868 new claims. The regional numbers mirror a record spike nationwide. • Maryland had its biggest single-day increase in new coronavirus cases Thursday, and Virginia and D.C. again recorded big jumps, bringing the total number of positive coronavirus cases in the three jurisdictions to 4,697 cases. • D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) told local hospitals this week that the city would need an additional 3,600 beds to handle a surge in coronavirus cases and offered to create a $25 million fund to defray the costs. What a stay-at-home order means for you


The Daily 202: A phone call with Trump can open doors for executives, celebrities and others with coronavirus asks

are prescribed to prevent drug-related deaths,” Christopher Rowland reports. “With no established treatments available, the FDA said in an approval letter Saturday that, essentially, trying the anti-malarial drugs was worth a shot. … Larger, more rigorous clinical trials of the treatments are underway around the world and in the United States.” “Aides and advisers say the president was heavily influenced by briefings from scientific and public health officials, as well as by the stark reality of the virus, including projections of greater deaths depending on what measures the government takes. But Trump campaign officials and political allies had also briefed the president in recent days about their fears of reopening the economy too soon, arguing that a spike in deaths could be even more politically damaging in November than the current economic downturn,” Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey and Yasmeen Abutaleb report. ”Public health officials warned Trump that many rural areas — which form the bedrock of the president’s political support — do not have the necessary hospitals and doctors to handle an outbreak, should it come. Some administration officials had also circulated a Yahoo News/YouGov poll showing that 59 percent of Americans believed opening up ‘the country for business’ by Easter, as Trump suggested last week, was ‘too soon’ … And Trump has been pleased by how his approval ratings have ticked up recently.” Federal immigration authorities have begun expelling border-crossers in an average of 96 minutes under emergency coronavirus measures. Under the new rules, U.S. agents are processing migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras “in the field” before they are able to set foot inside a U.S. Border Patrol station. The migrants are then whisked back to the border and sent into Mexico. (Nick Miroff) There are about 27,000 DACA recipients working as doctors, nurses, paramedics and other health-care workers who could be pulled from the workforce if the Supreme Court sides with the Trump administration and ends their protections. (USA Today) A federal judge declined to release dozens of detained immigrant families, for now, demanding instead that immigration authorities come into compliance with federal guidelines for preventing transmission. (Politico) “Oscar Health—a health-insurance company closely connected to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner—developed a government website with the features the president had described,” the Atlantic reports. “Then the website was suddenly and mysteriously scrapped. The site would not have helped many Americans even if it had launched. Today, more


Opposition lawmakers had tried to set a time limit on the legislation but failed. Orban’s commanding two-thirds parliamentary majority made his new powers a fait accompli.” “Several factors have helped create a virus time bomb: crowded conditions and, for many, a lack of basic shelter; aid that has slowed and, in some cases, stopped altogether during the crisis; along with the absence of medical care and basic sanitation … In a report released Monday, the independent organization said that while a failure to protect refugee communities will threaten societies at large, ‘many nations are turning inward as they seek to protect their own citizens,’” Karen DeYoung reports. “Among the most dire situations, more than 3 million Afghans live in Iran, which is one of the main hot spots for the disease … As tens of thousands of Afghans return home, nearly all of the confirmed coronavirus cases in Afghanistan have been among those coming from Iran. Last week, Afghanistan’s health ministry warned that ‘half of the country’s almost 39 million people might be infected,’ the report noted.” “It is relying less on tests, and more on its own disease modeling, to guide its response to the pandemic. As Central American neighbors declared emergencies in mid-March, Mexico kept its airports, shops and government offices open — the government didn’t urge a broad stay-at-home policy until last week,” Mary Beth Sheridan reports. “Mexico’s approach amounts to a bet, its coronavirus czar acknowledges — ‘a bet that’s technically sound,’ Hugo López-Gatell said in an interview.” “China’s leaders say the country has largely won the battle against its outbreak, reporting each day that domestic transmissions are negligible or nonexistent. The gradual reopening of parts of Hubei province, and now of Wuhan, the provincial capital, is testament to that,” Anna Fifield reports. A Yahoo News reporter who is recuperating from the virus encouraged other survivors to also donate plasma: Thousands in Pittsburgh waited in their cars to get provisions from a food bank: The Empire State building paid tribute to all emergency workers, but some complained that the display, which will stay on through the covid-19 battle, heightens anxiety: Five California prosecutors recorded a public service announcement to speak out against the surge of anti-Asian racism that’s been sparked by the coronavirus: Stephen Colbert is back and has a message for America: Seth Meyers castigated Trump for caring about his TV ratings during the crisis:


State Department warns against cruise travel; Ted Cruz shook hands with CPAC patient

The coronavirus epidemic continued to prompt new travel restrictions and emergency declarations around the world, with the U.S. State Department on Sunday warning citizens against cruise travel and Italy resorting to a massive lockdown affecting millions of people. The epidemic ravaging northern Italy can be traced to an outbreak at a car parts manufacturer in Germany, according to a study by Italian virologists — findings that are likely to shatter assumptions that German authorities had successfully contained the first major cluster in Europe. In the United States, the death toll rose to 21 on Sunday to include two more residents of an infection-stricken nursing home. U.S. cases have surpassed 500 and affected more than 30 states, as well as the District of Columbia, where a church rector had the city’s first confirmed infection. Maryland announced two more cases on Sunday, while Virginia reported one more. With positive cases reported among attendees of major gatherings — including a conservative conference attended by the president — some political organizations have reassessed their plans for large-scale events. But Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Sunday that he is moving forward with plans to hold campaign rallies ahead of Tuesday’s primaries in six states. In China, where the outbreak has begun to subside, a hotel in the southeast that served as a quarantine facility for 71 people collapsed late Saturday, killing at least 10 people and trapping scores in the rubble. Here are the latest developments: Sign up for our coronavirus newsletter


Thunderous applause, tears as the ‘greatest show on Earth’ takes a final bow

municipalities around the country to ban elephant bullhooks — a sharp metal tool used by handlers — or to prohibit wild animal performances altogether, as Los Angeles recently moved to do. After Ringling retired its last pachyderms to a company-owned elephant conservation center in Florida, ticket sales declined much more than Feld expected, and the company announced in January that Ringling would close for good. “The legislative landscape . . . made it really difficult to tour with the elephants,” Alana Feld, the company’s executive vice president, said Friday. But the circus was also contending with evolving public tastes and an ever-widening entertainment landscape. In the early to mid-20th century, Ringling, which merged with Barnum & Bailey in 1919, was a much-anticipated event. In many locations it was often a school holiday, said LaVahn Hoh, a retired University of Virginia drama professor who long taught the nation’s only course on circus history. Hoh said he vividly remembers waking at dawn as a boy and seeing the arriving circus train’s headlights break through the fog in his home town of Appleton, Wis. These days, he wonders, “Maybe the word ‘circus’ has to change to something else. Maybe the whole definition has to change.” Though it eventually was the last of about two dozen American circuses to still travel by train, Ringling continued trying to modernize and surprise. Its outer-space-themed shows at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum featured motorcycles, Segways and, for the first year, an ice floor and skaters. But these days, a spokesman said, the show is something on people’s bucket lists — a spectacle to see once but not every year. “We’ve been a part of something so magnificent . . . but if people aren’t coming to the show, you can’t keep having a circus,” said 30-year-old Ashley Vargas, a Ringling ice skater. Disney and other entertainment companies are present in Americans’ daily lives, she noted. “The circus, unfortunately, is not anymore.” Like many of the 300 cast and crew members, Vargas said she plans to take a break before seeking out new opportunities. Animal performers that are owned by their handlers — such as the tiger, leopard and 15 lions owned by big-cat trainer Alexander Lacey — will stay with them. Those owned by Feld, including a kangaroo, a camel and other tigers, have been found new homes that circus officials would not divulge. The circus remained


Power Up: FDA says ‘the food supply in this country is safe’ despite empty grocery shelves

Good morning, friends and c A GOVERNMENT STAND AGAINST PANIC BUYING: The Food and Drug Administration’s Frank Yiannas spoke with Power Up on Tuesday to discuss the spike in demand for food in this country and how the agency is responding. Despite the socially-distanced lines snaking outside grocery stores so long they often wrap around street corners, there is actually no food shortage in the U.S., insists Yiannas, the former vice president of food safety for Walmart. “There are no widespread or nationwide shortages of food despite localized reports that you’re seeing.” A growing role for FDA: And Yiannas said he's frequently hearing a key question: “Should I be worried about food, in general and sometimes imported food?” And those Clorox wipes you might have been obsessively using to disinfect your egg carton or can of lentil soup — you can probably save those. The FDA is closely monitoring reports that at least four people who work in grocery stores have died in recent days. Yiannas says the agency has been working in close coordination with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to protect workers. “We put out guidance this weekend based on the [Centers for Disease Control’s] positions on face coverings and have said it’s perfectly fine for employees that work in food and beverage environments to wear face coverings,” said Yiannas. But the guidance may not be enough to protect workers who interact with customers and other staff members throughout the day. Congress is concerned: Front-line workers: You are reading the Power Up newsletter. THE DEADLIEST DAY SO FAR: THE VIRUS IS INFECTING BLACK AMERICANS DISPROPORTIONATELY: It is a nation-wide problem: MEADOWS TRIES TO MAKE HIS MARK: MEET THE NEW PRESS SEC: Stephanie Grisham is out after just nine months: TRUMP AGAIN TARGETS INDEPENDENT OVERSIGHT: The latest target: Trump framed his decision to remove Fine as merely cleaning house: “We have a lot of IGs in from the Obama era,” Those attacks are in contrast to the largely bipartisan support the IG-system has received for decades: “WE DECIDED TO RISK OUR LIVES TO COME VOTE”: Patricia McKnight The scene on the ground: WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW: Acting Navy secretary resigns: Boris Johnson remains in the ICU: Congressional leaders and administration officials put politics aside in private: Continuing struggles with coronavirus testing: REMEMBERING JOHN PRINE: