The nexus between coronavirus and protests: The virus ‘was the kindling, and the police brutality lit the fire.’

job as a special-education teacher in Louisville to become a disabilities consultant, had plenty of cause to fear the virus. Recently recovered from Lyme disease, she takes 26 pills a day to boost her immune system. She had spent the past two months at home with her boyfriend, a former teacher. But then, after Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old black emergency medical technician, was shot and killed by Louisville police in her own home, Burg heard a call to action through her network of teachers. “I was livid,” she said. “Just livid. I was furious, I was devastated. I felt like, this is the end. This is the end. It can’t go on.” Burg, 34, felt compelled to act. “The virus didn’t concern me at all,” she said. “My immune system, I’ve built it up, and I have faith, I have faith in God, I have faith in my immune system.” She did worry that some people carrying the virus might be among the protesters, that some people may have gotten cabin fever and were “using these protests to get out of the house,” she said. “But I don’t dwell on that.” She feels in the dark about the virus. She mistrusts the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, basically all of the often-conflicting guidance she hears on the news. “We don’t know what to believe or who to trust, so we need to take care of ourselves,” Burg said. In contrast, she’s confident that protesting is the right choice: “It’s important to me to be able to speak out and not live in fear, and it’s important for me to exercise my right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I’m not doing that when I’m sitting at home. Today, I feel empowered, I feel strong. I feel that we’re making progress, and we are going to win.” In the sea of young faces massed in front of the White House during the past week, Louis and Merianne de Merode stood out. He is 71 and she is 64. The Georgetown couple both have compromised immune systems from battles with cancer; they had strictly quarantined themselves, living on delivered groceries, venturing out only for bike rides on lonely stretches of the C&O Canal towpath. Fearful of joining the protests because of the risk of infection, they changed their minds when they read their neighbors’ comments on


Some covid-19 patients taken off ventilators are taking days or even weeks to wake up

a thumbs up, or a few words,” said Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York who specializes in treating disorders of consciousness. “But there are others who are still not following commands and still not expressing themselves weeks later.” The incidence of these cases of prolonged recovery is still unknown, Schiff said. But, he added, “Everybody I know in this field, around the country and around the world, are seeing these patients. I personally have observed, and have had cases referred to me, of people with eyes-closed coma for two to three weeks. It’s a big deal.” The severity of their neurological effects can range from “mental fog,” fatigue or mild memory lapses, to severe dysfunction requiring lengthy rehabilitation, according to an April 28 paper in the journal Neurocritical Care. “The magnitude of the covid-19 pandemic will result in substantial neurological disease,” the paper stated. “The sheer volume of those suffering critical illness is likely to result in an increased burden of long-term cognitive impairment.” Another recent paper, from Wuhan, China, described how 13 of 88 patients hospitalized with severe acute respiratory syndrome, or 14.8 percent, experienced “impaired consciousness” after being removed from ventilators. Schiff pointed to the case of Broadway actor Nick Cordero, 41, who was placed on a ventilator April 1 while hospitalized with covid-19, but who did not awaken when sedation was withdrawn two weeks later. As days turned into weeks, and a clot required amputation of his left leg, supporters of Cordero and his wife, Amanda Kloots, began using the social media hashtag #WakeUpNick. Kloots finally reported on Instagram on May 12, “He is awake. It’s just that Nick is so weak right now, that even opening his eyes, closing his eyes, takes like all of his energy.” Even since then, she has reported that he has continued to suffer setbacks. Physicians offer different theories for the prolonged recoveries. “Just the fact that they get into acute respiratory distress syndrome, you know there’s going to be a significant number of people who are going to have some cognitive impairment,” said Walter Koroshetz, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. “The big question is what’s unique about covid-19. We don’t know the answer yet. We really need to have more precise information.” Some of the neurological effects may be due to strokes caused by the tendency of covid-19 to promote


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The longtime connection between race, country music and military recruitment

As protesters against police killings take to the streets across the nation, different branches of the U.S. armed forces have begun to reckon with the issue of race and military service. The Marines announced a ban on public displays of the Confederate flag. Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., an African American and Pacific Air Forces Commander, posted a video to Twitter detailing the racism he has faced while serving the country. Given the current momentum behind the Black Lives Matter movement and the fact that more than 40 percent of the nation’s active duty military are members of a racial minority, it makes sense that the armed forces are grappling with their racial politics. But if the military truly wants to change race relations in the ranks, it may have to rethink an old strategy that has made a recent comeback in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic — the use of country music as a tool for military recruitment. The Army and Air Force Recruiting Service began using country music radio and television performances in the 1950s to boost voluntary enlistment among the young white Southerners who were the presumed audience for the genre. The Army stumbled into this tactic in 1953 when it drafted a rising star named Faron Young. While Young completed basic training, his first hit, “Goin’ Steady,” climbed the charts. Recruiters then made Young a voice of recruitment and entertainment for the remainder of his enlistment period — including an appearance on an ABC talent show, “Talent Patrol,” that showcased the entertainment skills of service members. By employing Young in this way, the Army used the singer’s growing popularity as a way to plug enlistment from the stage of the Grand Ole Opry and brand military service with the down-home appeal of country music. The recruiting service soon partnered with Owen Bradley, one of Nashville’s top producers, to create more Pentagon-sponsored country music content. In 1957, the Army launched “Country Style, U.S.A.," a 15-minute television program recorded at Bradley’s studio. Each episode featured current stars, including future legend Johnny Cash, performing a few songs with a recruiting service message to join the Army stuck between the tunes. Other service branches copied the Army’s strategy. The Air Force created a radio recruitment show called “Country Music Time,” and the Navy followed with the humorously named “Hootenavy.” The entertainment value lured audiences to these shows, exposing them


No, the lockdowns weren’t an overreaction

From the beginning of the pandemic, many conservatives have argued that the lockdowns were an overreaction to the novel coronavirus and that they are causing unnecessary economic pain. Recent studies, however, show that this argument is wrong. Lockdowns and other measures to inhibit the spread of covid-19 likely saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the United States alone. We know this because of the way the virus spreads exponentially. Without lockdowns and other measures, every infected person would come into contact with a large number of uninfected people every day. A certain percentage of those people would contract the disease and would then further spread the disease to other uninfected people. Left unchecked, diseases such as covid-19 become like a raging wildfire, burning everything in their path. That’s what the initial mantra of coronavirus control — “flatten the curve” — was meant to convey. When the spread of the disease is displayed as a graph, one observes a rapid climb with a slight curve. The slower the climb, the flatter the curve. Flattening the curve meant the disease spread more slowly, ensuring that hospitals and other health-care facilities could treat the patients who arrived. Graphs of the actual spread of the disease before and after the lockdowns show this happened. The most relevant study, from researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, estimates that lockdowns and other measures prevented 4.8 million confirmed infections and nearly 60 million total infections in the United States. The authors don’t calculate how many lives this saved, but given the known fatality rates for covid-19, we can be sure it’s a lot. The United States has a confirmed case fatality rate of 5.58 percent. Applying that percentage to the estimated 4.8 million additional cases means that about 268,000 lives were saved by the U.S. interventions. That result is likely an underestimate of the true number of lives saved. The United States implemented its measures early enough that its health systems were never overwhelmed like those in Italy and Spain. Spain’s confirmed case fatality rate is 9.4 percent, and Italy’s is 14.4 percent. Had the U.S. fatality rate risen to Italy’s level because of hospital overcrowding, more than 691,000 more people would have died. Even this measure might understate the number of averted deaths. Reports show that many countries experiencing a covid-19 outbreak also experienced a significant rise in total deaths over the average


of the disease before and after the lockdowns show this happened. The most relevant study, from researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, estimates that lockdowns and other measures prevented 4.8 million confirmed infections and nearly 60 million total infections in the United States. The authors don’t calculate how many lives this saved, but given the known fatality rates for covid-19, we can be sure it’s a lot. The United States has a confirmed case fatality rate of 5.58 percent. Applying that percentage to the estimated 4.8 million additional cases means that about 268,000 lives were saved by the U.S. interventions. That result is likely an underestimate of the true number of lives saved. The United States implemented its measures early enough that its health systems were never overwhelmed like those in Italy and Spain. Spain’s confirmed case fatality rate is 9.4 percent, and Italy’s is 14.4 percent. Had the U.S. fatality rate risen to Italy’s level because of hospital overcrowding, more than 691,000 more people would have died. Even this measure might understate the number of averted deaths. Reports show that many countries experiencing a covid-19 outbreak also experienced a significant rise in total deaths over the average number reported in prior years for the same time period. These “excess deaths” are almost always more than the total number of reported deaths due to covid-19, suggesting that more people died from the disease than we can confirm. U.S. data through early May suggest that covid-19-related deaths account for only about 75 percent of the total number of excess deaths, while data from the hard-hit Italian region of Lombardy show that reported covid-19 deaths were only about one-third of the total number of excess deaths. Either figure means lockdowns saved hundreds of thousands more lives. The anti-lockdown arguments ignore these data entirely. They instead rely on the published number of covid-19-related deaths to date, saying that this relatively paltry number is more akin to a bad flu year and hardly justifies the massive unemployment and economic pain the lockdowns have caused. But this overlooks the fact that this number is much lower because of the lockdowns. That’s the epitome of comparing apples to oranges. Americans are no different from people all around the globe: They prefer safety over liberty when their lives are at stake. Had the anti-lockdown ideologues gotten their way in mid-March, when battles reportedly were raging


U.S. Olympic officials take step to support protesting athletes

For decades, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee has struggled to find the best way to handle athletes staging political protests during competitions, usually handing down punishments and kowtowing to international rules. On Monday, in the wake of civic protests and wide-ranging discussions on race and equality across the country, the governing body signaled its intent to challenge long-standing Olympic rules and support American athletes’ ability to make political statements. Sarah Hirshland, the USOPC’s chief executive, sent a letter to U.S. athletes announcing the formation of “an athlete-led group to challenge the rules and systems in our own organization that create barriers to progress, including your right to protest.” “We will also advocate for change globally,” she wrote. The initiative could mark a major challenge to the Olympic Charter and the controversial Rule 50, which bars any “demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda.” It’s the rule the USOPC has cited in punishing protesting athletes, most recently fencer Race Imboden and hammer thrower Gwen Berry at the Pan American Games last summer in Lima, Peru. Berry raised a fist during the national anthem, and Imboden took a knee on the medal podium. Each was put on probation for 12 months. “It’s encouraging,” Berry said Tuesday of the USOPC’s announcement. “I think it demonstrates that athletes’ peaceful protesting is powerful and it can promote change. It’s a step in the right direction. We need to challenge the rule.” Monday’s letter came after Hirshland participated in two town hall discussions with athletes last week, the first featuring track and field athletes and the second with athletes across all sports. Many were passionate and took offense that the USOPC’s initial statement last week didn’t mention George Floyd or the Black Lives Matter movement. Both discussions featured several African American Olympians sharing their experiences and frustrations, with many calling for substantive change, according to participants of the calls. “They listened to the people who spoke up and who shared their stories, especially athletes from the black community,” Imboden said. “They called for change. The USOC is listening. Hopefully this will be widespread and go deep and break some of those roots of systematic racism and systematic problems that are in every organization, including the USOC.” Said Berry: “The USOPC definitely heard a lot of powerful stories. I think they can tell now that, even if you’re a professional, world-class athlete, you’re still subjected to


The Daily 202: ‘Demilitarizing’ the police could be a more fruitful rallying cry for reformers than ‘defunding’

to data tracked by The Washington Post: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Kentucky, New Mexico, North Carolina, Mississippi, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah. “If the pandemic’s first wave burned through dense metro hubs such as New York City, Chicago and Detroit, the highest percentages of new cases are coming from places with much smaller populations: Lincoln County, Ore., an area of less than 50,000, has averaged 20 new daily cases; the Bear River Health District in northern Utah has averaged 78 new cases a day in the past week, most of them tied to an outbreak at a meat processing plant in the small town of Hyrum. The increase of coronavirus cases in counties with fewer than 60,000 people is part of the trend of new infections surging across the rural United States. Health experts worry those areas, already short of resources before the pandemic, will struggle to track new cases with the infrastructure that remains. Adding to the disparity in health-care support, residents in states such as Mississippi, Florida and South Carolina are living under only minor-to-moderate restrictions — even as their average daily infection rate is rising.” At least 109,507 people in the United States have died of covid-19, with more than 1.95 million coronavirus cases reported. “Monday marked the first, limited phase of a four-part reopening plan. Wholesale sellers and manufacturers were allowed to resume business, and the construction industry made its noisy return. Workers in hard hats swarmed a site in south Queens, installing walls and machinery within the skeleton of a tower that had been mostly hollow since March,” Ben Guarino and Shayna Jacobs report. “Florists, clothing shops and other retail establishments that have been shuttered for weeks welcomed customers to pick up goods at the curb — with masks and social distancing required. … Many businesses remained closed. In Lower Manhattan, where City Hall and most city agencies are based, lunch spots were still closed or boarded up. Vehicle traffic was light and there was a fraction of the foot traffic that would normally clog sidewalks.” The “For weeks, health-care associations nationwide have pressed governors for immunity from lawsuits, in some cases offering specific language for emergency orders, according to letters, public statements and media accounts,” Debbie Cenziper, Peter Whoriskey, Shawn Mulcahy and Joel Jacobs report. “But what plaintiffs’ lawyers and patient advocacy groups contest most is not whether immunity should be


Hugo Sosa survived the ICU. But for coronavirus patients like him, that’s just the start of recovery.

oxygen from tanks into patients’ lungs via nasal tubes. Patients who did not respond were sent to the ICU, sedated and placed on mechanical ventilators, which, in effect, breathe for them. A drastic shortage of the devices Then, physicians began to notice that the lungs of some covid-19 patients responded differently than the lungs of typical patients suffering from “acute respiratory distress syndrome.” Speculating that ventilation was being overused in the pandemic, they began to use the machines more sparingly. They also adopted other, less invasive methods, such as turning patients on their stomachs to help them breathe more easily. The debate over ventilation persists in the medical community. There is also research evidence that pure oxygen can be corrosive to lungs and other tissue. The air we breathe is only about 20 percent oxygen. And lying in an ICU, unconscious and paralyzed by powerful drugs, is harmful by itself. Nevertheless, there is widespread agreement that many more people would die of covid-19 without intensive care, ventilation and clinicians familiar with both. There is no good data on how many people have been placed on ventilators during the pandemic. Studies on the number who survive vary widely. Early reports out of China and elsewhere suggested a mortality rate of about 90 percent, and some U.S. studies put it at about 80 percent. But more recently, doctors who work extensively with covid-19 patients on ventilators have said 50 percent to 80 percent recover. Jacqueline Stewart, a 56-year-old psychiatric nurse, spent four weeks on a ventilator before she was discharged to Burke for rehab. She arrived “deconditioned,” essentially unable to move on her own, with nerve damage in her right arm, probably from her position in the ICU bed. She has a raspy voice from a paralyzed vocal cord and what she calls her “battle scars” — marks on her neck from an intravenous line and a tracheotomy. She vowed never to cover them with makeup. After weeks of physical therapy, Stewart went home May 29. There are 20 steps up to her front door in Yonkers. Burke would not allow her to leave until she proved she could climb 20 steps in the hospital. “I’m alive, so everything else is gravy,” Stewart said. “Everything else is a bonus. I’m alive. I can’t believe it.” Some patients will never recover their full strength, so Burke teaches them ways to manage their exertion.


The Health 202: WHO says asymptomatic people usually don’t spread coronavirus. Experts doubt that.

didn’t entirely dismiss the idea that people without symptoms can spread the virus. But she did say contact tracing research from around the world suggests that it’s much rarer than previously thought. “We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing,” Kerkhove said. “They’re following asymptomatic cases. They’re following contacts. And they’re not finding secondary transmission onward. It’s very rare.” Kerkhove pointed to a paper published last week by the WHO, which updated previous guidance on mask-wearing based on the latest research about the virus. The report warns that studies on asymptomatic transmission are limited and small, but says available evidence suggests people without symptoms “are much less likely to transmit the virus than those who develop symptoms.” The report noted several relevant studies. In one, just nine of 63 infected but asymptomatic individuals in China infected another person. Another study found no secondary transmission among 91 contacts of nine asymptomatic cases. “If you actually go back and say how many of them are truly asymptomatic, we find out that many have really mild disease, very mild disease — they’re not ‘covid symptoms,’ meaning they may not have developed fever yet,” Kerkhove said. It’s not that asymptomatic people don’t spread the virus — but that contact tracing is simply bad at detecting it, they argue. The studies cited by WHO relied on only a small number of people in China who claimed to have gotten sick from someone who had symptoms – which is not exactly a rigorous scientific experiment. They also worry that their findings will lead to confusion. Andy Slavitt, former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said that in an email exchange with the WHO, the organization admitted to him it can’t distinguish between asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic people. Jeremy Faust, an emergency room doctor at Harvard Medical School: The critics also noted that coronavirus infections have continued spreading even as people with symptoms were largely isolating at home – indicating that asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic people were spreading it. Spreading was also traced to schools around the world, even though kids typically don’t get symptoms or only mild ones. Slavitt and others pointed to multiple studies showing asymptomatic spread of the virus. For example, one study published on June 3 in the Annals of Internal Medicine suggested asymptomatic people seem to account for 40 to 45 percent of SARS-CoV-2


The Energy 202: Susan Collins distances herself from Trump on lifting fishing restrictions off of New England

natural disasters in the coming months… This information is vital to prepare for high-intensity natural disasters that may include tornadoes, flooding, hurricanes, and wildfires.” More than 200 major zoos and aquariums in the United States have seen major losses as they locked down during the pandemic. Zoos say they “have been hit harder than many other shuttered institutions because their occupants — more than a million animals nationwide, some owned by the U.S. government — still need food, water, heating, cooling and veterinary care,” Karin Brulliard and Jennifer Oldham report. But they’ve had to lay off or furlough workers who care for the animals as they deplete funds without being able to bring in ticket revenue. Zoos play a critical role in supporting endangered species, but many have had to put the breeding of endangered animals on pause. Now, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and a coalition of cultural institutions are calling on lawmakers to provide relief for zoos and aquariums, including for those that participate in endangered species recovery. In a new complaint filed Friday, the state’s Attorney General Maura Healey argued Exxon’s business model “will not survive other major crises like climate change, despite its claim otherwise,” E&E News reports. The complaint adds that the “calamitous consequences of the coronavirus pandemic are a harbinger of the types of systemic risks posed by climate change, demonstrating the sweeping and interconnected nature of climate-driven dangers and disruptions.” The tropical storm hit Louisiana on Sunday and then its impacts shifted inland, Matthew Cappucci reports, “where Cristobal could cause serious flooding as its tropical remnants swirl up the Mississippi River Valley.” “Flash flood watches stretch more than 1,000 miles, from the Florida Panhandle to central Wisconsin,” he adds. “The unusual system has the potential to become the nation’s farthest north and west tropical depression in more than two centuries of record-keeping. Cristobal could even merge with another, nontropical weather system and intensify over the Upper Midwest and into Canada, achieving subtropical storm strength late in the week as it clips the Hudson Bay.” The Climate Change and Hurricane Correlation and Strategy Act introduced by Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) “explicitly prohibits the president, along with any other federal agency or official, from employing a nuclear bomb or other ‘strategic weapon’ with the goal of ‘altering weather patterns or addressing climate change,’” Maddie Stone reports. “In a phone interview, Garcia told The Washington


goal of ‘altering weather patterns or addressing climate change,’” Maddie Stone reports. “In a phone interview, Garcia told The Washington Post that the bill was drafted as a direct response to last year’s report that Trump has floated the idea of nuking hurricanes to his senior homeland security and national security advisers.” The president denied making such a suggestion. The bill appears unlikely to make it out of committee, and even more unlikely to appear on Trump’s desk. “But after hearing Trump’s alleged comments on nukes and hurricanes and researching the issue further, Garcia felt she had to at least get the idea of a ban on using nuclear weapons to disrupt the weather on the table,” Stone adds. Teams of scientists are looking to Rincón de la Vieja, one of Costa Rica’s active volcanoes, and the carbon dioxide that seeps from its cracks. “The stability of the world’s climate depends in part on these areas,” Daniel Grossman reports. “Every year, tropical forests soak up more than 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide, a substantial share of what’s emitted by power plants, industrial smokestacks and vehicle exhaust pipes. Yet how increasing temperatures and decreasing rainfall will affect them long term remains unclear.” Some climate scientists believe tropical forests will start to absorb less carbon dioxide, while others say higher concentrations of CO2 will protect them. The British energy giant will cut about 14 percent of its workforce, nearly 10,000 jobs, and freeze pay for senior-level managers, the Wall Street Journal reports. “The job cuts come as newly appointed Chief Executive Bernard Looney responds to the pandemic’s devastating effect on oil demand and coincides with his attempts to reshape the U.K.-based oil giant for a low-carbon future,” per the report. The move is a money-saving one and a “major step for the company and subsidiary Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which has been based in San Francisco since its creation 115 years ago,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports. “The company’s roots in the city stretch back even further, to the founding of San Francisco Gas Co. in 1852.” The announcement that it will move in the coming years “comes as PG&E seeks to wrap up its costly bankruptcy case this year. The utility and its parent company filed for bankruptcy in January 2019, facing billions of dollars in liabilities from devastating wildfires that the company’s power lines caused,” per the report.


Are asymptomatic people spreading the coronavirus? A WHO official’s words spark confusion, debate

The World Health Organization moved Tuesday to clarify its position on whether people without symptoms are widely spreading the new coronavirus, saying much remains unknown about asymptomatic transmission. A comment by a WHO official on Monday — calling such asymptomatic transmissions “very rare” — touched off a furious scientific debate over the unresolved question and attracted widespread criticism of the organization. Less than 24 hours later, the WHO convened a special news conference to walk back its comments, stressing that much remains unknown. But the comment from Monday had already spread widely and been seized upon by conservatives and others to bolster arguments that people do not need to wear masks or maintain social distancing precautions. The episode sparked criticism of WHO’s public health messaging and highlighted just how fraught and easily politicized such work remains months into the pandemic. Calling the controversy “a misunderstanding,” Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the WHO’s emerging disease and zoonosis unit, said that during the news conference Monday, she was trying to respond to a journalist’s question when she said asymptomatic transmission was “very rare.” “I wasn’t stating a policy of WHO or anything like that,” she said. “We do know that some people who are asymptomatic, or some people who do not have symptoms, can transmit the virus on.” It was not the “intent of WHO to say there is a new or different policy,” added Mike Ryan, head of emergency programs for WHO. “There is still too much unknown about this virus and still too much unknown about its transmission dynamics.” While asymptomatic transmission does occur, no one knows for sure how frequently it happens. Studies and models have suggested many of those infected never show symptoms. And it remains an open question whether they are a large force driving transmission. Some countries using contact tracing to work backward from confirmed cases have not found many instances of asymptomatic spread, WHO officials noted. At the same time, WHO officials acknowledged on Tuesday some modeling studies have suggested as much as 41 percent of transmission may be due to asymptomatic people. Adding to the confusion are differing definitions of what it means to be asymptomatic. Some people who are infected never show symptoms — experts would consider those truly asymptomatic cases. But some show symptoms only later on and could be spreading the virus before those symptoms manifest — they would be considered


Transcript: The Path Forward: The Restaurant Industry

working on a conservation bill, which, while important, a positive step forward, it is not more important than millions of hungry Americans. This should get floor time. Getting the FEED Act passed should be a priority for the Senate. And I am frustrated and upset that Republican leaders in the majority are not giving it the priority and the floor time that it needs and that hungry Americans deserve. MS. JORDAN: There's more unemployment now than at any time since the Great Depression. And in times like this, in crisis, we have mobilized citizens. Talk a little bit about the AmeriCorps expansion. There's enormous amount of people, young people, with no jobs, and how would you use them--when you expand AmeriCorps, exactly how would they be employed to help young Americans? SEN. COONS: Thank you for the question, Mary. Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi and I will be introducing a bill with a wide range of Democratic and Republican cosponsors in the Senate. Today, there's about 75,000 Americans serving through a national service program known as AmeriCorps, and many more serving through Senior Corps. Our bill would double the number of AmeriCorps program slots to 150,000 for the rest of this year, and then increase it to 200,000 and 250,000 for the next two years after, and it would increase how much they get paid, their living stipend, and how much they earn for college as a result. It is a roughly $15 billion bill over three years, a robust expansion that would allow mayors and governors, nonprofit leaders and community leaders all over the country to decide in locally driven and locally initiated programs, to partner with initiatives like the FEED Act, like food banks, like Meals on Wheels. There are already existing AmeriCorps programs around the country that do things to address hunger. I had a chance to talk to James Winfield , for example, in Baltimore just a few weeks ago from Civic Works, a program that has hundreds of AmeriCorps members that is connecting senior citizens who are shut in at home and hungry and typically the beneficiary of programs like Meals on Wheels, with a program that Civic Works already had underway to address food deserts, to help create community gardens, and to connect low-income, majority minority communities in Baltimore with farmers who are committed to bringing in healthy produce. So, that's one very local


in the news and they're going to be a little more reticent to going out and into the public. And so that's working against us as well. MS. JORDAN: We see that a lot of people are baking bread at home. They're planting herbs in their garden. They're thinking more about food. They're, you know, stocking up. You know, in the long term, you know, is there something interesting that you're seeing about trends in American food because of COVID, especially because of the--I mean, when people are eating at home? MR. COLICCHIO: Sure, sure. There is a big move to baking sourdough. I started baking--it's funny, I started baking in the fall, and I'm not much of a baker. I started working on sourdough. I bake now pretty much every other day. But it's amazing that people are actually--you realize that what's getting people through this is food. People, they want something that's comfortable. They're starting to bake bread because there is nothing more comforting than a hot loaf of bread slathered with butter, and the idea that you made this for your family. Victory gardens are popping up. I started gardening--I'm a dedicated gardener; in fact, I'm looking at my garden right now--about eight years ago. And people are doing it because they want to take that back. They want to feel some sort of control. And when you can grow your own vegetables and you can bake your own bread, you have some sort of control over this crazy world that we're living in right now. And so that's not surprising to me. I think, though, hopefully--because I know I am getting tired of cooking, and I cook for a living--I'm getting tired of my own food and I think my family is starting to, too, and so I want to get out there as much as anybody else. But I think it's great that people are actually, you know, taking control back, but also realizing, you know, the importance of someone who's cooking your food or someone who's bagging your groceries or someone who is doing those jobs that people don't think of so much. They're kind of those--you know, well, that person is doing that, that's great. And now they've become so important. So, I think that's a trend that I think we're going to continue seeing. You know, there was a big trend--even though


10 ways to have other people do your grocery shopping, and what it will cost you

for you. “Our members can expect to pay about $5 more using Shipt than they would on a $35 order purchased in the store themselves,” according to the Shipt website. That’s a 14 percent markup on top of the Shipt membership fee. “We didn’t know that,” Davis said. “We hadn’t used grocery delivery in years until the pandemic.” Since the novel coronavirus has prompted a wave of new customers to try grocery delivery, I decided to pore over various methods of obtaining fresh foods — both conventional and creative — and get the facts. I looked at availability, fees, minimums, memberships and markups. And I tried to book a window with each to see how soon I could score a spot. Perhaps the biggest benefit of using an independent delivery service is that you can get groceries from multiple stores, sometimes even in the same order. ●Instacart Where: Stores: Membership: Minimum order: Delivery Fee: Markups: Windows: Tricks: ●Shipt Where: Stores: Membership: Minimum order: Delivery Fee: Markups: Windows: Tricks: For customers new to online grocery shopping, delivery from your familiar store can be the easiest, because if you enter your loyalty card number, past purchases should populate your online queue for easy shopping. ●Albertsons Brands Where: Stores: Membership: Minimum order: Delivery Fee: One-hour window: $9.95. Two-hour window: $6.95. Four-hour window: $3.95. Markups: Windows: Tricks: ●Amazon Fresh/Amazon Prime Now/Whole Foods Market Where: Stores: Membership: Minimum order: Delivery Fees: Two-hour delivery: $5 for orders under $35. One-hour delivery: $10 for orders under $35. Rush one-hour delivery: $12 for orders under $35; $8 for orders over $35. Markups: Windows: Tricks: ●Peapod Where: Stores: Membership: Minimum order: Delivery Fee: Markups: Windows: Tricks: ●Walmart Grocery Where: Membership: Minimum order: Delivery Fee: Markups: Windows: Tricks: The coronavirus pandemic has turned all sorts of businesses into grocery delivery companies, including dog walkers from the East Coast (woofies.com/woofies-concierge) to the West Coast (belovedpetsit.com). For a more formal arrangement, there’s TaskRabbit, a platform to connect with independent contractors. ●TaskRabbit Where: Stores: Membership: Minimum: Delivery Fee: Markups: Windows: Tricks: Distributors who used to supply only restaurants have begun selling directly to consumers, and they’re unlikely to stop now that they’ve tapped this new market. For example, in the Washington area, many customers are arranging deliveries from Baldor Foods (baldorfood.com) and Keany Produce (keanyproduce.com). Here’s an example from a supplier that serves more of the United States. ●The Chefs’ Warehouse Where: Membership:


tried to book a window with each to see how soon I could score a spot. Perhaps the biggest benefit of using an independent delivery service is that you can get groceries from multiple stores, sometimes even in the same order. ●Instacart Where: Stores: Membership: Minimum order: Delivery Fee: Markups: Windows: Tricks: ●Shipt Where: Stores: Membership: Minimum order: Delivery Fee: Markups: Windows: Tricks: For customers new to online grocery shopping, delivery from your familiar store can be the easiest, because if you enter your loyalty card number, past purchases should populate your online queue for easy shopping. ●Albertsons Brands Where: Stores: Membership: Minimum order: Delivery Fee: One-hour window: $9.95. Two-hour window: $6.95. Four-hour window: $3.95. Markups: Windows: Tricks: ●Amazon Fresh/Amazon Prime Now/Whole Foods Market Where: Stores: Membership: Minimum order: Delivery Fees: Two-hour delivery: $5 for orders under $35. One-hour delivery: $10 for orders under $35. Rush one-hour delivery: $12 for orders under $35; $8 for orders over $35. Markups: Windows: Tricks: ●Peapod Where: Stores: Membership: Minimum order: Delivery Fee: Markups: Windows: Tricks: ●Walmart Grocery Where: Membership: Minimum order: Delivery Fee: Markups: Windows: Tricks: The coronavirus pandemic has turned all sorts of businesses into grocery delivery companies, including dog walkers from the East Coast (woofies.com/woofies-concierge) to the West Coast (belovedpetsit.com). For a more formal arrangement, there’s TaskRabbit, a platform to connect with independent contractors. ●TaskRabbit Where: Stores: Membership: Minimum: Delivery Fee: Markups: Windows: Tricks: Distributors who used to supply only restaurants have begun selling directly to consumers, and they’re unlikely to stop now that they’ve tapped this new market. For example, in the Washington area, many customers are arranging deliveries from Baldor Foods (baldorfood.com) and Keany Produce (keanyproduce.com). Here’s an example from a supplier that serves more of the United States. ●The Chefs’ Warehouse Where: Membership: Minimum order: Delivery Fee: Windows: Tricks: A clever way to get anything — whether it’s produce, dairy or proteins — delivered to your home is to sign up for a local farm share. You can find a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) near you at Local Harvest or Modern Farmer. Here’s a sample of one that operates in the Washington area. ●Washington’s Green Grocer Where: Membership: Minimum order: Windows: Tricks: So there you have it, nine different ways to get fresh food delivered to your home. Now here’s No. 10: Jennifer Davis ended up hiring a furloughed friend to shop for her, which benefits them both.


Japanese American who worked 27 years at U-Md. library dies of covid-19 at 92

Connie Galmeijer, 92, survived a brain aneurysm in the early 1970s that left her with health challenges throughout part of her life. But that didn’t stop the Japanese immigrant who had married her family’s English tutor — a U.S. Air Force sergeant — from raising three children and having a 27-year career as a library technical assistant in the East Asia Collection at the University of Maryland’s McKeldin Library in College Park. Galmeijer tested positive at the end of April for the novel coronavirus, her family said. She died May 5 because of complications from the virus at a Rockville nursing home, where her family thinks she contracted it. Galmeijer suffered from high blood pressure and dementia, said her daughter, Eileen Chow, 64, of Wheaton. After her brain aneurysm and an operation in her 40s, she suffered from years of seizures but was able to “fully recover,” Chow said. In her later years, Chow said, her mother would “always be cheerful and happy.” She said Galmeijer especially looked forward to Chow’s visits every Saturday morning — when she would bring her mother a latte from McDonald’s. “She would always say, ‘It tastes so good,’ ” Chow recalled. Chow said even though her mom “lived a long time,” her death was still “such a shock” for her family. “She did test positive for covid-19, but she was doing all right,” Chow said. She said the nursing staff said her mother “needed some oxygen once in a while,” but she didn’t have a fever. Chow said she called to check in on her mother one day and was told she had died. “We thought she was going to beat it and recover,” Chow said. Born in Nagoya, Japan, Galmeijer was the second of six children in her family. Galmeijer’s mom was a homemaker, and her father owned a plywood exporting business. As a child, she enjoyed playing the piano, as well as Japanese painting and calligraphy, her daughter said. Galmeijer graduated in 1948 from Nagoya University with a degree in home economics and fashion design. At 5 feet 6 inches, her daughter said, she was considered tall for a Japanese woman, and her mother would often make her own clothes because she couldn’t find store-bought clothing that fit her properly. In 1950, she married Sgt. Frank Galmeijer, who was serving in the U.S. Air Force. He was also working as an English


As nursing home residents died, new covid-19 protections shielded companies from lawsuits. Families say that hides the truth.

more. So far, 120 residents at Kimberly Hall North have been infected, according to the home. So have 43 of 157 employees. The extent of the outbreak at Kimberly Hall North, Feifer said, reflects the frailty of the patients there, as well as the fact that many had dementia, a condition that can make social distancing difficult to enforce. He added that the outbreak came early, striking before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that infected people without symptoms could spread the virus. Feifer said the home set up video conferences to keep families informed and adopted stringent infection-control measures, such as the universal use of masks. He also pointed out that the home had a series of inspections since the start of the outbreak and that no deficiencies related to patient care or infection control were found. The staff, Feifer said, “did everything they could do and more.” On April 20, however, government inspectors cited the home for not documenting whether a covid-19 patient at risk of weight loss and dehydration was consistently consuming food and fluids. Although a care plan in February had instructed the staff to report any signs of malnourishment to the doctor and dietitian, the resident’s fluid consumption in April had decreased by half, according to the inspection report. Feifer described the inspectors’ findings as “tags … for incomplete documentation” rather than breakdowns in patient care. The findings provide only a limited glimpse inside the home, but the citation is one of the few records available to families of the dead. Although nursing homes have ranked among the deadliest of all group settings during the pandemic, the disparity in coronavirus cases is still a medical mystery: Why have some homes, such as Kimberly Hall North, had dozens of deaths while others have been able to contain the outbreaks? By helping to stave off scrutiny, legal immunity makes it less likely that the public will ever fully know, lawyers and patient advocacy groups say. The push to protect the industry has played out in state capitols across the country. Industry associations have appealed to the governors of Florida, Maine, Pennsylvania and Tennessee, among others. In California, the groups in an April 9 letter offered Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) language for a proposed order: “All state statutes and regulations are hereby waived to the extent necessary to achieve this immunity.” In New York, a massive


14 states and Puerto Rico hit highest seven-day average of new coronavirus infections

As rates of coronavirus infections ease in places such as New York and Illinois and onetime hot spots move into new phases of reopening, parts of the country that had previously avoided being hit hard by the outbreak are now tallying record-high new infections. Since the start of June, 14 states and Puerto Rico have recorded their highest-ever seven-day average of new coronavirus cases since the pandemic began, according to data tracked by The Washington Post: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Kentucky, New Mexico, North Carolina, Mississippi, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah. If the pandemic’s first wave burned through dense metro hubs such as New York City, Chicago and Detroit, the highest percentages of new cases are coming from places with much smaller populations: Lincoln County, Ore., an area of less than 50,000, has averaged 20 new daily cases; the Bear River Health District in northern Utah has averaged 78 new cases a day in the past week, most of them tied to an outbreak at a meat processing plant in the small town of Hyrum. The increase of coronavirus cases in counties with fewer than 60,000 people is part of the trend of new infections surging across the rural United States. Health experts worry those areas, already short of resources before the pandemic, will struggle to track new cases with the infrastructure that remains. Adding to the disparity in health-care support, residents in states such as Mississippi, Florida and South Carolina are living under only minor-to-moderate restrictions — even as their average daily infection rate is rising. The past two weeks of protests against police brutality will be yet another variable in how the virus spreads in the country. Protesters flooded the streets of major cities but gathered in small towns across the country, too. Though the widespread protests are a boon for the movement, health officials have warned about the impact so many people closely packed with one another could have on transmission rates. As of Monday, at least 109,000 people in the United States have died of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, with more than 1.95 million cases of the virus reported.


Washington region reports 1,058 new coronavirus cases as positivity rates continue to fall

virus has not yet slowed enough in the District and its close-in suburbs to lift Phase 1 restrictions that, among other things, limit restaurants to outdoor dining and gyms and fitness centers to outdoor exercise classes. The District reported two new covid-19 deaths Monday — both of them elderly residents — for a total of 491 fatalities. According to D.C. health officials, the city has had seven days of a “sustained decrease in community spread.” As of Saturday, the District had a 12 percent positivity rate. That marked four days of the District being at a less than 15 percent positivity rate. Maryland reported 27 new deaths Monday, bringing the number of people who have died of covid-19 in the state to 659. Montgomery County had three new deaths, and Prince George’s County added four. The positivity rate in the two counties — which have been hit harder by the virus than anywhere else in Maryland — has dropped to 11.83 percent in Prince George’s and 10.26 percent in Montgomery. Maryland also reported the coronavirus-related death of a correctional officer who worked at a Baltimore City facility. The employee, whom authorities did not identify, was in their 60s and had been a correctional officer for 20 years, according to the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. AFSCME, the union that represents workers in Maryland’s prisons, said the officer was the first union member in the state to die as a result of being exposed to the virus on the job and called for more protections for employees. Virginia reported five additional deaths, for a total of 1,477. Its statewide positivity rate was 10 percent as of Thursday, down from a high of about 22 percent in mid-April. In Northern Virginia, the positivity rate was 14.3 percent, compared with 35.9 percent in mid-April. With unemployment rates having spiked amid the prolonged coronavirus shutdown, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) announced a moratorium on all evictions through June 28, ordered by Virginia Supreme Court Chief Justice Donald Lemons. Northam said he will spend the next three weeks implementing “a comprehensive rent relief program for the thousands of Virginians facing housing insecurity in the midst of this public health crisis.” “Access to safe and stable housing is critically important, and this action will keep thousands of families in their homes as we work to get them the support they need,” he said.


New bill would prohibit the president from nuking a hurricane

investigated the issue. “It’s just like dealing with covid-19 — we don’t know much about it.” “It was a bad idea when [the NOAA] wrote this FAQ,” said Phil Klotzbach, a meteorologist and tropical cyclone expert at Colorado State University, “and it’s still a bad idea.” In addition to prohibiting the president from attempting to alter the weather with nukes, Garcia’s bill calls for the White House, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the NOAA to issue five annual reports to Congress on “ways to combat increasing hurricane activity due to warming oceans from climate change,” as well as a “a one-time scientific explanation and analysis on the use of nuclear bombs to alter severe weather, such as hurricanes.” This explanation would explore the health and environmental risks of deploying nuclear weapons on hurricanes, the radioactive fallout, and “how such use would or would not address the systemic issues and challenges of hurricanes.” Climate studies show that warming seas and air temperatures are making hurricanes more damaging by increasing their rainfall output and favoring higher-end, “major” storms of Category 3 intensity or greater. Scientists have also been seeing an uptick in storms that rapidly intensify from weak to major hurricane status, which is enabled by warm sea surface temperatures, among other factors. Garcia’s district on the eastern side of Houston was heavily impacted by flooding during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, a storm that featured extreme rainfall totals that scientists eventually tied in part to climate change. Klotzbach said the bill’s call for annual reports on hurricanes and climate change seemed redundant, given that many reports on the topic already exist. But he felt that a modeling study investigating the effects of dropping a nuclear bomb on a hurricane could be useful, if only to help scientists debunk the idea in the future. Fleming, of Colby College, said that the new bill seemed like “an overreaction to an off-the-cuff comment, a nonexistent threat.” Axios’s reporting noted that Trump raised the idea not once, but at multiple points in time, including with top national security and intelligence aides. Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane expert at MIT, sees things a bit differently. “If we have a leader who would contemplate using a nuclear weapon on a hurricane,” he said, “we have a much more extensive and serious problem than could be covered by a specific bill like this one.” Andrew Freedman contributed to this report.


The military isn’t at war with the public. Trump seems to want to change that.

President Trump has made little effort to mask his contempt for the norms guiding the relationship between military and society in the United States, leaving a long trail of events that have risked politicizing the military’s ranks and damaging the relationship between the military and society. As protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd and racial injustice continue, the Trump administration’s alarming choices concerning the military pose the biggest threat to the institution’s standing among the public since the Vietnam War. A war does not exist between our military and American citizens, and the Trump administration should stop attempting to manufacture one. Consider several previous attempts by Trump to exploit the military for blatantly political purposes. Trump — who has incorrectly boasted of “my generals and my military” — started his term on the wrong foot, using a Pentagon setting dedicated to Medal of Honor recipients to sign a highly controversial immigration-related executive order. He has brazenly pushed domestic messages unrelated to the military while speaking to service members. In a striking political stunt leading up to the 2018 midterm election, Trump deployed thousands of active-duty service members to the U.S.-Mexico border to address a group of migrants who posed no national security threat. But the Trump administration’s choices in response to the protests have politicized the military in a way that dangerously pits it against American communities, inflaming the current racial injustice crisis and severely jeopardizing the military’s relationship with society. Even though active-duty military units have left the Washington, D.C., area (and National Guard troops from other states are withdrawing), Trump may have already done significant damage. He suggested shooting U.S. citizens and threatened that if state and city officials didn’t put down protests to his satisfaction, he would “deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.” Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper echoed Trump’s call for governors to use military elements to “dominate” American communities, which Esper referred to as a “battle space.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, whom Trump claimed to put “in charge” of the response to protests, became the visible face of the protest response effort last week, appearing in his camouflage uniform in the Rose Garden and then parading with Trump and Esper through Lafayette Square, which police had just aggressively cleared of peaceful protesters, on the way to their photo op


How airport screenings have changed since the pandemic

the airport doesn’t have a dedicated check-in point,” says Gabe Turner, a director for Security.org, a safety website. There’s another recent change that could affect you this summer: The TSA has started to screen food more closely, according to many travelers. “Solid food and snacks are still allowed, and agents aren’t making the request 100 percent of the time,” says Molly Fergus, the general manager of the travel site TripSavvy. “Just be prepared to open up your bag for inspection if you’ve packed a nice plane picnic, and make sure to check the list of what you can bring on board.” The TSA publishes a list of allowed foods on its site. The TSA confirmed that, in mid-June, it will begin asking passengers to remove carry-on food items from their bags and place them in a bin for separate screening. The agency will recommend packaging food in a clear plastic bag. Why is this happening? “Food items often trigger an alarm during the screening process,” Farbstein says. “Separating the food from the carry-on bag lessens the likelihood that a TSA officer will need to open the carry-on bag and remove the food items for a closer inspection.” In what may be the biggest change since the introduction of full-body scanners, the TSA will begin enforcing the Real ID requirement starting Oct. 1, 2021. Late last summer, TSA agents began warning travelers who presented regular driver’s licenses about the change. In March, the government moved the enforcement date from this October to next year because of the pandemic. The Real ID Act, passed by Congress in 2005, requires that state-issued identification, such as a driver’s license, meet federal standards if used for commercial air travel, among other purposes. But you’ll be able to fly without the new type of license. The TSA only requires that you verify your identity. There are 15 alternatives to a Real ID-compliant license, the most common being a U.S. passport. As for health screenings, they are still evolving. “As travel begins to pick up, airport screenings will be of the utmost importance to avoid further spread of covid-19,” says Robert Quigley, the regional medical director for the Americas at International SOS, a travel security firm. “Travelers can expect to be responsible for additional requirements to navigate through the airport. That includes mandatory personal protective equipment, temperature checks, social distancing and even more security checkpoints.” Frontier Airlines


The meat industry is trying to get back to normal. But workers are still getting sick — and shortages may get worse.

Correction: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized what the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has said about whether it will sanction companies during the coronavirus pandemic. The agency Tyson Foods, the largest meat processor in the United States, has transformed its facilities across the country since legions of its workers started getting sick from the novel coronavirus. It has set up on-site medical clinics, screened employees for fevers at the beginning of their shifts, required the use of face coverings, installed plastic dividers between stations and taken a host of other steps to slow the spread. Despite those efforts, the number of Tyson employees with the coronavirus has exploded from less than 1,600 a month ago to more than 7,000 today, according to a Washington Post analysis of news reports and public records. What has happened at Tyson — and in the meat industry overall — shows how difficult it is to get the nation back to normal, even in essential fields such as food processing. Meat companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on measures such as protective gear, paid leave and ventilation systems since they were forced to shut dozens of plants that were among the top coronavirus hot spots outside urban areas. But the industry has still experienced a surge in cases, and some companies say they are limited in just how much they can keep workers separated from one another. Only a portion of the labor force has gone back to work — some workers kept away on purpose — and the nation’s meat supply remains deeply strained as barbecue season gets underway. A May report from CoBank, which specializes in serving rural America, warns that meat supplies in grocery stores could shrink as much as 35 percent, prices could spike 20 percent and the impact could become even “more acute later this year” as the knock-on effects on the U.S. agriculture supply chain are felt. Grocery stores have been able to partially meet consumer demand thanks to meat already in the supply chain in March, when the pandemic broke out, but the report said those supplies were quickly being used up. The prospect of long-term shortages is giving rise to an intensifying debate about whether the industry should reopen faster or whether safety should be prioritized, even at the cost of the nation’s food supply. With an April 28 executive order encouraging meat


top coronavirus hot spots outside urban areas. But the industry has still experienced a surge in cases, and some companies say they are limited in just how much they can keep workers separated from one another. Only a portion of the labor force has gone back to work — some workers kept away on purpose — and the nation’s meat supply remains deeply strained as barbecue season gets underway. A May report from CoBank, which specializes in serving rural America, warns that meat supplies in grocery stores could shrink as much as 35 percent, prices could spike 20 percent and the impact could become even “more acute later this year” as the knock-on effects on the U.S. agriculture supply chain are felt. Grocery stores have been able to partially meet consumer demand thanks to meat already in the supply chain in March, when the pandemic broke out, but the report said those supplies were quickly being used up. The prospect of long-term shortages is giving rise to an intensifying debate about whether the industry should reopen faster or whether safety should be prioritized, even at the cost of the nation’s food supply. With an April 28 executive order encouraging meat plants to reopen, the Trump administration has said the food supply must be weighted equally with safety. Over the past month, more than half of the 30 meat processing plants that had shuttered because of the coronavirus have reopened. “Our objective is two equal goals,” Vice President Pence said in a meeting with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) in early May. “Number one is the safety and health of the workforce in our meat processing plants, and, two, there’s strength in our food supply and getting people back to work.” But others say that safety must be the paramount concern — and that the industry still has a long way to go before facilities are safe again. “Absolutely, positively, no worker’s life is worth my getting a cheaper hamburger. No worker’s life is worth that,” former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said at a Yahoo News virtual town hall last week. Officials with the meat processors say they are doing whatever they can to protect workers, while trying to make sure the nation’s food supply remains sound. “The safety of our team members is paramount, and we only reopen our facilities when we believe we can


Hospitalizations in at least nine states are on the rise; U.S. nears 2 million cases

As the number of new coronavirus cases continues to increase worldwide, and more than a dozen states and Puerto Rico are recording their highest seven-day average of new cases since the pandemic began, hospitalizations in at least nine states have been on the rise since Memorial Day. In Texas, North and South Carolina, California, Oregon, Arkansas, Mississippi, Utah and Arizona, there are an increasing number of patients under supervised care since the holiday weekend because of covid-19 infections. The spikes generally began in the past couple weeks and in most states, are trending higher. There have been more than 7.1 million cases of covid-19 officially reported worldwide, including more than 405,000 fatalities, though the totals are likely higher. Nearly 2 million cases have been reported in the United States, with more than 109,000 of those fatal. Here are some significant developments: Sign up for our coronavirus newsletter


Rental market reacts to coronavirus but stays active

than mom-and-pop landlords to have the financial bandwidth needed to offer incoming tenants incentives such as rent-free months, fee waivers, and short-term lodgings while waiting for an apartment to become available. (Think of a situation in which a tenant has to remain in quarantine after being exposed to covid-19 and cannot leave in time.) “If you only have this one property, it’s a condo that you bought three or four years ago and you decide to rent it out, you don’t really have the ability to provide comparable accommodations,” said Steven Krieger, a lawyer in Arlington, Va. That is why Krieger suggests that prospective renters always inquire whether the unit is empty before committing to it. In most states, moving companies have been designated “essential businesses” and have been allowed to operate during the pandemic. But a change of residence has become complicated in ways that can’t be solved by a moving crew. In New York City, for instance, some apartment buildings, early in the pandemic, adopted policies intended to curb the spread of covid-19 by encouraging renters, not always in a friendly way, to stay in place — not moving in or out. Move-ins were canceled or rescheduled. Tenants were allowed to extend their leases month to month to reduce the pressure to move out. In some cases, owners resorted to disincentives such as imposing steep cleaning fees on people moving in or out. “They’re calling them sanitizing fees,” Raskopf said. “I have heard of one building that’s charging a one-time $3,500 fee to move out of the building. That could be cost-prohibitive to many, and those are things you need to just factor in.” While no-move policies remain in force on rented units in many condo and co-op buildings, Raskopf said, they have been lifted for the most part in rental apartment complexes in New York. But she advises renters still affected by such a restriction to seek legal aid on what fees they might be obliged to pay and how their security deposits might be affected if they move. Schlepping belongings to a new address, of course, may also increase the threat of a coronavirus infection, especially if renters interact with movers (or anyone else outside the immediate family, for that matter). In May, Dean and her sons settled into a four-bedroom single-family house in Northern Virginia. She enlisted relatives to help move her family’s belongings. “We


Mexico is a deadly place to be a journalist but sophisticated bot attacks are increasing the danger

an investigation. But the criticism has never been about the veracity of her work. (Her outlet is the most trusted online news site in the country, according to an annual Reuters survey.) It’s about attacking the messenger. Mexico is already the most dangerous country on the continent for journalists. More regional reporters have been killed here than any other place on the Western Hemisphere. To this alarming situation, we add the sophisticated digital campaigns to discredit their work, which also puts their lives in danger. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the New York Times, El País and the Wall Street Journal published investigations showing the Mexican government was vastly undercounting covid-19 victims. Pro-AMLO bots once again launched outlandish attacks against the reporters on Twitter, in particular against the Times, calling the outlet #prensaprostituida, or prostituted press. Again, instead of discussing the merits of the story, the bots attacked the messenger. They made numerous racist slurs against Times correspondent Azam Ahmed with one person telling him to “get down off of his camel.” They told El País journalist Javier Lafuente to go back to Spain. Bots made the hashtag #PrensaProstituida a trending topic Some analysts, reporters and activists engaged with the reporting in good faith, but a host of AMLO supporters — including, inexplicably, some international reporters — attacked the journalists behind the stories. Any healthy discussion about the facts presented in the investigations was lost in the mayhem. And then the president piled on, not to deny the reports, but to join his supporters in attacking the integrity of the news outlets. In a morning news conference, AMLO said the Times was “a famous newspaper but had little ethics, and in this case it’s evident they didn’t do a good job.” His deputy secretary of Health hinted, without evidence, that the outlets coordinated in a conspiracy to attack the government. Still, no government official denied there were systemic failures to account for covid-19 victims. They knew better. In fact, Mexico City’s mayor quickly launched an independent committee to investigate the unreported deaths after the Times story found there were three times the number of deaths than officially reported. Another outlet followed the story with their own reporting confirming the Times’s story. Since the beginning of the current administration, battle lines to criticize and attack journalists have become increasingly blurry. The murkiness has made seeking out the truth that


For 48 hours, the nation’s capital was gripped by chaos. Then everything changed.

work closely with the city’s police force and played a valuable role over the past week. But others that were summoned impromptu by the president, including Federal Bureau of Prisons officers and military police from other states, did little to help the situation, he said. “Those were resources that the mayor did not ask for, and I do not believe that their presence had a meaningful contribution to the positive evolution you saw night after night,” Donahue said. More aggressive actions by city officials also may have deterred escalating violence. On May 31, Bowser declared a curfew at 11 p.m. that was poorly enforced and largely ignored. But the next day, the curfew was moved up to 7 p.m., and police used it to arrest large numbers of demonstrators, focusing on those they believed were out to repeat Sunday night’s looting, Donahue said. The Metropolitan Police Department arrested nearly 300 people last week at the rallies on Monday night into early Tuesday morning. That was followed by 29 arrests on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. After that, only two people connected to the demonstrations were arrested over the next four days. “Curfews are a blunt instrument. That’s why they’re used so rarely,” Donahue said. “But it provides a legal context for taking individuals off the street who MPD believes might have some intent to do harm to people and property.” In the final reckoning, comparisons between last week’s demonstrations and the destruction seen in 1968 may not be apt, according to George Derek Musgrove, associate professor of history at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. The two episodes separated by a half-century had different outcomes, but they also had very different circumstances. The 1968 riots were fueled by an African American underclass who had grown increasingly desperate with police brutality, discriminatory housing policies and predatory slumlords, as well as impatient with the promises of the civil rights movement. Although King’s killing was the catalyst for the riots, they were at their root a revolt against local conditions, Musgrove said. “This time around, you saw a very multicultural group. It appears to be majority middle class. It appears to be split between the city and the suburbs,” Musgrove said. “It almost looks like a cross between a Black Lives Matter protest and an Occupy protest. And that is absolutely not the demographics of the people who were down there in ’68.”


Would-be vacationers approach summer travel cautiously

How bad is the fear of travel right now? So bad that even people in the travel industry are staying home. Annie Gofus, a Washington, D.C., travel agent who founded the site Wunderbird, isn’t going anywhere. She’s worried not just for her own safety, but also for that of her customers. “I’m afraid of a client falling ill while traveling, or spreading coronavirus while on vacation,” she says. “As eager as I am to start planning travel again, I don’t think I’ll be totally confident until we have a safe vaccine for covid-19.” If you’re afraid to travel this summer, you’re in good company. Lum Kamishi is afraid to travel, too. He says the pandemic threatens to create a rift between visitors and suspicious residents. “I’m afraid I’ll be seen as an alien — an outsider by the locals,” says Kamishi, who is based in Kosovo and works for a travel news site that specializes in visa information. Carlos Chilin, the general manager of AirportParkingReservations.com, doesn’t expect consumer confidence to rebound until next year. But there could be some hope for 2020, he says, “if travel operators listen and take action to satisfy travelers about their number-one concern, health and safety.” First, a reality check. The virus continues to spread, and many states still have restrictions in place. “It is reasonable to want to avoid a threat to your safety,” says Robert Quigley, a physician and regional medical director for the Americas at International SOS, a travel security firm. “While many areas are starting to reopen, covid-19 is still a large health threat to the world. But there are still ways to travel and enjoy a summer vacation.” Juan Fernandez, the operating partner at Virtuoso-affiliated Elli Travel in Larchmont, N.Y., says travel has always come with risks. “The difference this time around,” he says, “is the fear of the unknown.” The travel industry hopes that reassuring travelers will push them to return sooner. For example, VisitPortugal in April unveiled an initiative called Clean & Safe. It’s a government certification to distinguish tourist activities that are compliant with hygiene and cleaning requirements for the prevention and control of covid-19 and other possible infections. In May, the vacation rental company Vrbo introduced a new program to both help customers filter for close-to-home properties and allay anxiety about the cleanliness of its rental homes. Its guidelines advise owners to disinfect high-touch surfaces, build


How to make America less productive

entrenched system when many companies are struggling to survive.” The most generous interpretation of what Cass, Friedberg and others are arguing is that a well-crafted industrial policy would inculcate production facilities in the United States that possess powerful network externalities and increasing-returns dynamics. Under those circumstances, adroit policy could, in theory, increase productivity and enhance the welfare of all Americans. Of course this requires that the federal government possess the knowledge, expertise and wherewithal to pick the winning sectors, nourish them accordingly and delicately extricate the United States from existing supply chains. That is a high bar, and the risk of screwing up is considerable. Attempting to use a nationalist form of industrial policy on, say, artificial intelligence would be an unmitigated disaster. According to one just-released study, “The U.S. lead is built on attracting international talent, with more than two-thirds of the top-tier AI researchers working in the United States having received undergraduate degrees in other countries.” So maybe don’t try decoupling in that sector. As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman recently observed in Foreign Affairs, the prerequisites to properly disentangle global supply chains are high and the federal government is not yet up to the task: This would be difficult in normal times; in the Age of Trump it is impossible. This administration overtly disdains government expertise across a wide variety of areas. Congress cannot competently draft economic security laws. The Trump White House is genuinely awful at economic statecraft. The idea that this government would be able to do adroit industrial policy requires the willing suspension of disbelief. In instances in which home-shoring might make national-security sense, as with semiconductors, the media coverage does not suggest productivity gains. Rather, it is chock-full of statements like, “Chip makers also sense an opportunity to bring in funding for an industry increasingly seen as a national-security priority” and “U.S. chip makers have backed off building cutting-edge factories domestically in recent years because of their cost.” The likely result of what Trump, Cass, Friedberg, Josh Hawley et al are proposing is not wise industrial policy but crude rent-seeking in the form of stealth protectionism, and Foxconn-style debacles. If economic nationalists want to argue that a state-directed economy is better for Americans, they are welcome to do so. There’s a case for it — if one values inefficient, domestic production that imposes costs on consumers and would render more U.S. sectors uncompetitive.


Police unions and police misconduct: What the research says about the connection

Correction appended Some of the most shocking images to emerge from the demonstrations that have dominated recent headlines stem from violent interactions between law enforcement officers and peaceful protesters. They’ve also escalated calls for police reform. But police unions tend to be resistant to such efforts, as their mandate is to protect the interests of their members — even in cases when those interests may be counter to democratic norms and values. Though an understudied topic of criminology, what research that does exist is unequivocal: “Virtually all of the published items that express an opinion on the impact of police unions regard them as having a negative effect, particularly on innovation, accountability, and police — community relations,” as a review in the journal Police Practice and Research put it. Researchers say unionized officers draw more excessive-force complaints and are more likely to kill civilians, particularly nonwhite ones. Here are some key findings: A recent University of Chicago working paper found violent misconduct among sheriff’s officers increased about 40 percent after a state supreme court ruling allowed the officers to unionize. The incidents examined in this paper are among the most serious types of violent misconduct, including sexual assault and excessive force. It’s worth noting the baseline numbers of these types of incidents are very low, such that the 40 percent increase translates into roughly one additional violent incident per sheriff’s office every five years. Certain union-negotiated contract provisions — including time limits on misconduct investigations, expungement of misconduct records, and mechanisms allowing officers to challenge disciplinary findings — make it more difficult to detect and punish officers who abuse their position, the researchers say. Additionally, the authors write, unionization “may increase solidarity among officers and thereby strengthen a code of silence that impedes the detection of misconduct.” A 2006 report from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found unionized police agencies garnered 9.9 use-of-force complaints for every 100 officers, compared with 7.3 for non-unionized agencies. During the disciplinary process, about 7 percent of those complaints were sustained, or found to have merit, in unionized agencies. In nonunion agencies, the sustain rate was more than double, at 15 percent. In effect, officers in unionized police forces are more likely to be the subjects of an excessive-force complaint, but more likely to beat the allegations in disciplinary hearings. Writing in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Stephen Rushin analyzed 656 police union


Air travel is up 400 percent from its record-low point in the pandemic, according to the TSA

Despite the coronavirus continuing to reach record case numbers, more people are traveling by plane. On Monday, the Transportation Security Administration reported 430,414 people passed through its airport checkpoints — a nearly 400 percent increase from its record low traffic day during the pandemic of 87,534 in April. “On the same date in 2019 there were 2,644,981 individuals who were screened at checkpoints nationwide, an 84 percent decrease from the previous year," TSA Public Affairs spokesperson Lisa Farbstein said in a tweet Tuesday. At this time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention travel website encourages people to stay home to protect themselves and others from getting sick, as travel increases one’s chances of getting infected and spreading the coronavirus. One issue with embarking on air travel during the pandemic is the likelihood of not being able to follow social distancing recommendations throughout the journey. “Air travel requires spending time in security lines and airport terminals, which can bring you in close contact with other people and frequently touched surfaces,” the CDC website says. “Social distancing is difficult on crowded flights, and you may have to sit near others (within 6 feet), sometimes for hours. This may increase your risk for exposure to the virus that causes COVID-19.” Nonetheless, travel companies are seeing a significant increase in bookings. A representative from Hopper, a hotel and airfare booking app, told The Washington Post in an email that “weekly flight bookings on Hopper are up +195% since low reached 6 weeks ago, and only down -30% year over year.” The app’s hotel bookings are up 86 percent month-over-month. People are feeling more comfortable taking not only domestic flights but international ones as well. Travel analytics company ForwardKeys reported that as certain European countries — namely Greece, Portugal and Spain — announced their reopening to tourism, there were immediate increases in international flight bookings to those countries. “When governments tell people they are again allowed to travel, bookings immediately start to come back,” Olivier Ponti, vice president of insights at ForwardKeys, said in a statement. But while bookings are on the rise, they’re nowhere near pre-pandemic levels. “The relatively low booking levels, compared to 2019, suggest that many people are still reluctant to fly,” Ponti said in the statement. "With bookings for Greece, Portugal and Spain respectively 49.8%, 52% and 53.5% behind where they were at the beginning of June 2019, it will


The Daily 202: Many Americans are moving on, but the coronavirus isn’t

the WHO’s emerging disease and zoonosis unit, said that during a news conference on Monday she was trying to respond to a journalist’s question when she said asymptomatic transmission was “very rare.” During a special presser designed to clean up her comments on Tuesday, she chalked up the donnybrook to “a misunderstanding”: “I wasn’t stating a policy of WHO or anything like that. We do know that some people who are asymptomatic, or some people who do not have symptoms, can transmit the virus on.” “While asymptomatic transmission does occur, no one knows for sure how frequently it happens,” William Wan and Miriam Berger report. “Studies and models have suggested many of those infected never show symptoms. And it remains an open question whether they are a large force driving transmission. Some countries using contact tracing to work backward from confirmed cases have not found many instances of asymptomatic spread, WHO officials noted. At the same time, WHO officials acknowledged on Tuesday some modeling studies have suggested as much as 41 percent of transmission may be due to asymptomatic people. “Adding to the confusion are differing definitions of what it means to be asymptomatic. Some people who are infected never show symptoms — experts would consider those truly asymptomatic cases. But some show symptoms only later on and could be spreading the virus before those symptoms manifest — they would be considered pre-symptomatic cases. Further complicating matters is the fact that for some people, symptoms are so mild — or manifest themselves in less expected ways such as diarrhea or muscle aches, instead of the classic fever and cough — that people aren’t aware of them until later on. … CDC spokesman Scott Pauley said it remains essential that people wear masks.” Other countries are also seeing spikes of new cases. “As a farmer eking out a living in Peru’s central jungle, Rubén Leiva grew one cash crop that seemed immune from global cycles of booms and busts. But the coronavirus pandemic has accomplished what neither other international crises nor a U.S.-backed ‘war’ ever could: a collapse in the price of coca leaf, a natural stimulant that is the building block of cocaine,” Anthony Faiola and Lucien Chauvin report. ”The great coca crash of 2020 — prices for the leaf in some regions of South America have fallen as much as 73 percent — illustrates the extent to which the


show symptoms — experts would consider those truly asymptomatic cases. But some show symptoms only later on and could be spreading the virus before those symptoms manifest — they would be considered pre-symptomatic cases. Further complicating matters is the fact that for some people, symptoms are so mild — or manifest themselves in less expected ways such as diarrhea or muscle aches, instead of the classic fever and cough — that people aren’t aware of them until later on. … CDC spokesman Scott Pauley said it remains essential that people wear masks.” Other countries are also seeing spikes of new cases. “As a farmer eking out a living in Peru’s central jungle, Rubén Leiva grew one cash crop that seemed immune from global cycles of booms and busts. But the coronavirus pandemic has accomplished what neither other international crises nor a U.S.-backed ‘war’ ever could: a collapse in the price of coca leaf, a natural stimulant that is the building block of cocaine,” Anthony Faiola and Lucien Chauvin report. ”The great coca crash of 2020 — prices for the leaf in some regions of South America have fallen as much as 73 percent — illustrates the extent to which the pandemic is disrupting every aspect of global trade, including the traffic in illegal drugs. Lockdowns have sealed regional borders and sharply curbed domestic and international transit, challenging the ability of cartels to move product by land, air or sea. At the same time, the cartels are dealing with global disruptions in the production and importation of precursor chemicals, such as potassium permanganate, that are used in clandestine labs to refine the recreational drug. … “In Afghanistan, virus lockdowns have created acute shortages of lancers — the specialized workers, many from neighboring Pakistan, who cut the seedpods of mature poppies to produce heroin. The current challenge of sourcing precursor chemicals from Asia has disrupted the manufacturing of illicit drugs including methamphetamine and fentanyl in Mexico and amphetamine-type stimulants in Lebanon and Syria. Border restrictions have made it difficult for Colombians to obtain from Venezuela the cheap gasoline needed to refine cocaine … U.S. officials say they are aware of stockpiles of drugs and cash sitting at the Mexican border as cartels experience problems moving product into the United States. DEA field divisions across the country report that supplies of some illicit drugs appear to be running low in U.S. cities. The


Crime reports for Anne Arundel and Howard counties and for Annapolis

Due to coronavirus and social distancing concerns, •Destruction to a vehicle •Destruction of property/vandalism •Theft from a vehicle •Thefts of vehicle parts and accessories •Tampering with a vehicle •Attempted vehicle theft •Credit or debit card theft •Identify theft •Lost property •Telephone misuse •Trespassing The following were among incidents reported by the Anne Arundel County police. For information, call 410-222-8050. BALTIMORE AREA Bel Air Rd., GLEN BURNIE AREA Ritchie Hwy., Hospital Dr., Somerset Bay and Foxtree drives, and Foxwell Bend and Trumpeter courts, LAUREL AREA Ridgemere Crossing and Lindenwood Dr. area, PASADENA AREA Fort Smallwood Rd., Sillery Bay Community Beach, SEVERN AREA Jacobs Rd., SEVERNA PARK AREA Ritchie Hwy. and McKinsey Rd., Due to coronavirus and social distancing concerns, These were among incidents reported by the Annapolis Police Department. For information, call 410-268-9000. Main St., Clay St., Tyler Ave., King George St., Forest Dr. at Thom Dr., Severn Ave. at Burnside St., Market Space, Americana Dr., Boucher Ave., Coybay Dr., Forest Dr., Parole St., Due to coronavirus and social distancing concerns, COLUMBIA AREA Knighthood Lane, Little Boots, Tamar Dr., Cloudleap Ct., Gerwig Lane, Little Patuxent Pkwy., Tinted Hill, Windbell Way, Hayshed Lane, ELKRIDGE AREA Troy Hill Dr., Washington Blvd., ELLICOTT CITY AREA Lombardi Dr., ESSUP AREA Race Rd., LAUREL AREA Blues Alley, Kenbrooke Ct., Kings Post Ct., Washington Blvd., MARRIOTTSVILLE AREA Warwick Way, — Compiled by Lisa M. Bolton


Accessing home equity in a tight economy has become problematic

Whether they have been furloughed temporarily, laid off or are dealing with a pay cut due to the coronavirus pandemic, many Americans are looking for cash to pay their bills. Homeowners may be looking to their home equity as a source of funds. Home equity, which refers to the difference between your mortgage balance and the value of your home, is a major source of wealth for many Americans. Approximately one in four (14 1/2 million) American homeowners were considered “equity-rich” during the first quarter of 2020, meaning their mortgage balance was less than 50 percent of their estimated home value, according to ATTOM Data Solutions, an Irvine, Calif.-based property data provider. “As a country, we’re equity rich, but the tightened credit box has locked many people out of the ability to access that equity,” says Nicole Rueth, producing branch manager for Fairway Independent Mortgage Corp. in Denver. Collectively, Americans had $6.2 trillion in “tappable equity” during the fourth quarter of 2019, which refers to the amount available to borrow before hitting a maximum of 80 percent of the home’s value, according to Black Knight, a mortgage data provider. The average amount of available equity was $119,000 during that quarter. Many lenders cap the amount homeowners can borrow with a first mortgage and any additional loan at 80 percent of the home’s value. But having home equity isn’t the same as being able to convert that value into cash, especially if you have been furloughed or are unemployed. Several large banks, including JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo, stopped accepting applications for home equity loans and home equity lines of credit earlier this spring. “Banks are thrilled to lend you money when you don’t need it, but not when you do,” says Brian Sacks, branch manager with Homebridge Financial Services in Pikesville, Md. Still, many financial institutions offer refinancing options and some continue to offer home equity loans to consumers who are currently employed. But borrowers should anticipate tighter standards for qualifying for a new loan such as higher FICO credit score requirements, particularly if they plan to tap into their equity. “Lenders are nervous right now and rightly so because of these high levels of unemployment,” says Shawn Low, co-founder and head of operations for Better.com mortgage in New York City. “Also, an inadvertent impact of the mandate to offer forbearance to borrowers for up to 12 months is


The Health 202: WHO has stumbled repeatedly in communicating about the coronavirus

Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, released a white paper detailing five recommendations for preparing for a public health crisis that comes after the coronavirus pandemic. Those recommendations including hastening research and development for testing, treatment and vaccination; broadening the ability to identify and track emerging infectious diseases; maintaining and improving medical supply stockpiles; improving state and local abilities to respond to public health issues; and bolstering federal agency coordination. “Looking at lessons learned from the COVID-19 crisis, many of the challenges Congress has worked to address during the last 20 years still remain,” Alexander said in a statement. “Additionally, COVID-19 has exposed some gaps that had not been previously identified. These include unanticipated shortages of testing supplies and sedative drugs, which are necessary to use ventilators for COVID-19 patients.” Before the program began, bank lobbyists warned the Treasury Department of a flaw. “When the PPP began accepting applications on April 3, the bank lobbyists’ prediction proved true,” Jonathan O'Connell, Jeanne Whalen, Jeff Stein and Erica Werner report. “Rather than covering all businesses that qualified, much of the funding went first to the customers the banks already knew and trusted ― including large corporations ― igniting a public firestorm that outraged tens of thousands of business owners still desperately awaiting funding.” After making changes, and asking lawmakers for more money as they addressed numerous problems, the PPP after two months has “directed more than $530 billion to 4.5 million companies, and economists, business leaders, White House officials and lawmakers from both parties think it helped stabilize the economy,” they write. But because the federal government has yet to release information about how many jobs the program saved, “it’s still unclear whether it achieved its primary goal of apportioning the lion’s share of the money to workers.” Wages were modestly rising, and unemployment rates were at record lows. “The black unemployment rate, which at 5.8% in February was near the lowest since records began in 1972, tripled to 16.8% in May, according to the Labor Department,” the Wall Street Journal’s Eric Morath and Amara Omeokwe report. “Even when unemployment was low, African-Americans’ overall economic situation was fragile. As a group, they had less job security and wealth than whites, leaving them especially vulnerable when the economy shut down.” That vulnerability “now weighs on their prospects as the steepest economic contraction since the 1930s shows signs of turning. Historically, African-Americans’ recovery from


We need more data about how the coronavirus spreads to know what’s risky and what’s not

The 19th-century physician turned epidemiologist John Snow discovered that water, not air, was the cause of the 1854 London cholera outbreak simply by asking victims about where they got their water. We are more technologically advanced now, but we could still apply old-school epidemiological tools to the data that public health departments routinely collect and get better answers about where infections from the novel coronavirus happen. My public health professor defined “epidemiology” simply: It’s the study of the causes of disease. Diseases like covid-19 have immediate causes, like the coronavirus that emerged late last year. But they also have an array of causes behind the causes. Understanding underlying causes, like where and how an infection spreads, is a key for stopping any disease. Because the virus spreads easily and through people without symptoms, we can’t completely isolate the risk of getting covid-19 to just some places or activities. But the risks of getting and spreading the disease are not the same everywhere, at every time, for everyone. And as the epidemic evolves, we might expect increasingly localized outbreaks. We’ve also heard about many high-profile outbreaks. They’ve occurred at nursing homes, meatpacking plants, choir practices and prisons. That tells us that particular places are riskier. So far, we’ve just been speculating about where. But answering these kinds of questions is what epidemiology can do well. Uncertainty about risks will get in the way of America reopening. A recent Associated Press/University of Chicago poll tells us that over half of Americans fear getting a haircut, going shopping or visiting a friend. Better facts about the location of the bigger risks might help people feel more confident about lower-risk activities. This information also tells public health officials where to target prevention efforts. States and counties collect detailed data on every covid-19 case, but so far, they haven’t been using that information to say where risks are higher. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is now reporting covid-19 cases and deaths from licensed nursing homes. Otherwise, neither states nor counties nor the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been telling us how much different living and working conditions contribute to the spread of the disease. One study We have the same opportunities in the United States now. The case report forms completed by doctors contain a wealth of information, like the type of place a person lives, their work, whether they had