India is hitting a record number of new covid-19 cases. That’s not its only problem.

On Sunday, India logged more than 90,000 new covid-19 cases — a daily count global record — and overtook Brazil as the country with the second-highest number of cases worldwide. India has more than 4.2 million confirmed cases. Only the United States, with 6.3 million cases, has a higher covid-19 count. The covid-19 crisis has also led to economic pain, and new pressures on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government. Here are five things to know about what’s happening. More than 72,000 India’s predominantly young population could be one reason for the lower fatality rate. But many scientists believe covid-19 fatalities in India are also vastly underreported. Information on suspected deaths from covid-19 is not publicly available. Official numbers exclude those who never received a test. Deaths are often attributed to comorbidities instead. India’s mortality data was problematic before the pandemic, making it challenging to accurately estimate pandemic-related deaths. Most rural deaths occur at home — only 22 percent of deaths are medically certified with a cause of death. The pandemic has massively strained India’s health-care services, a dire situation for patients with acute or chronic illnesses. During the first three months of the pandemic, an estimated 60 percent of cancer surgeries were postponed in India. India also has the largest population of tuberculosis patients, and their treatment has been considerably disrupted. Medical care for acute heart diseases and communicable diseases has fallen significantly. As is the case in many countries, millions fewer children have been immunized every month. But this is especially concerning for India, which sees one-fifth of the world’s 5.9 million deaths for children under 5 — vaccination campaigns can prevent more than half of these deaths. Fewer women are giving birth in institutional facilities, raising concerns about maternal and infant care. The Modi government imposed nationwide lockdowns, but was unable to stem the rising number of cases in densely populated urban centers. Health policies fall under each Indian state’s purview, so it’s difficult for the national government to impose centralized reporting policies. More than 67 percent of reported cases are concentrated in the six states of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. While cases were initially concentrated in large cities, the Indian Medical Association has pointed to community transmission in rural areas since July. Seven states reported their highest daily cases on Monday. While the government took early preventive measures, the


reopening process since June has been accompanied by a rising number of cases. Even regions initially lauded as successes have seen spikes. Despite challenges of managing the virus in densely populated slums — as Adam Auerbach explained here at TMC in April — the World Health Organization praised Dharavi, a Mumbai slum with 1 million people, for containing the virus. But by August, more than half of the residents had contracted covid-19. States with adequate health-care infrastructure and contact-tracing capacity saw new spikes when India’s nationwide lockdown eased starting June 1. Nearly a half-million workers returned to Kerala from Gulf countries and other parts of India, for instance, resulting in one of India’s fastest growing outbreaks by August. India had the world’s fastest-growing economy until last year. But the Indian economy contracted 23.9 percent during the second quarter of 2020 — the sharpest drop of any major economy this year — triggering the country’s first recession in 40 years. Some 4.1 million to 6.1 million youth jobs are at risk, and an estimated 18.9 million salaried jobs have been lost. Government rural employment programs have also been reduced and make irregular payments. India is potentially facing its worst economic crisis since independence. According to the World Bank, 90 percent of workers in the informal sector are at risk of falling into poverty, without access to any unemployment insurance. The IMF’s chief economist Despite this grim picture, support for the Modi government has not declined. In an August 2020 survey, 78 percent rated the prime minister’s management of the covid-19 crisis as “Outstanding” or “Good.” In addition, 71 percent said the government’s handling of the economy was above average — though 85 percent of respondents had either lost their jobs or experienced declining income. A number of world leaders enjoyed a short-lived ratings bump after the pandemic outbreak. How has the Modi government continued to maintain its popularity? The government was among the earliest to institute lockdowns, even though these policies adversely affected India’s large migrant worker population. The government’s high approval may also lie in how Modi delivered Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) campaign promises related to Hindu nationalism, at the expense of India’s Muslim minority. Last year, the government scrapped Article 370 and Article 35A of the Indian constitution that gave Jammu and Kashmir special status. Last month, Modi inaugurated the Ram mandir. This Hindu temple, to be built on


Amid the pandemic, motels stage a major comeback

destinations — and foreign travelers are much more likely to stay at larger hotels than at small motels and hotels. “Motels are benefiting from a snowball effect that is taking place right now,” said Jeff Rosenblum, a marketing strategist with more than two decades of experience in the travel industry and co-founder of Questus, a digital advertising agency. “There is more interest in road trips, which is creating more content on social and traditional media about road trips, which is ultimately creating more people interested in road trips.” AAA predicts 683 million road trips from July to September this year. While this is a 3 percent decrease from last year (AAA would normally project 857 million trips for summer 2020), it’s a great number compared with other forms of travel. AAA projects that rail, cruises and bus travel will decrease by 86 percent. Motels had decreased in popularity in recent years because hotels became such a destination in and of themselves: People went on vacations simply to enjoy the amenities at the hotels at all budget ranges. The combination of affordable air travel and improved hotels made motels less appealing, but covid-19 changed this, Rosenblum said. “Millions of travelers are flocking to motels and thoroughly enjoying the experience,” he said. Lynsie Zona, a law clerk in Chandler, Ariz., chose to stay at Hotel McCoy (a motel) during the pandemic after driving by it frequently and studying its social media posts about safety precautions. “The motel layout in itself knocks out a lot of the risks,” she said. Once her cabin fever hit its breaking point, she and her husband booked a room, disregarding their nagging worry that what they loved about travel would be too complicated to enjoy at a motel. But this wasn’t the case, she said, explaining that they still appreciated fancy breakfasts delivered to their room, and local craft beer — from a social distance. And they were surprised by how much they enjoyed their stay. “There’s something about staying in a motel that feels familiar, even if motel stays weren’t a part of your childhood vacations,” Zona said. “Right now, amid all this uncertainty, I think there’s a natural instinct to find something familiar that reminds you of a more carefree time, even if you only experienced that time through a book or movie.” Many people visiting motels may have been inspired by “Schitt’s Creek,” the


Video analysis of Beirut explosion reveals its power, even at great distances

at Imperial College London who studies the effects of explosions on the human body. As the explosion grows, the initial shock wave condenses water in the atmosphere to create a large expanding hemispherical cloud that quickly dissipates as it passes. The pressure wave generates a massive cloud of debris that heaves a wall of deadly projectiles commonly referred to as missiles by experts. The shattered masonry and glass fragments inside the cloud cause even more catastrophic destruction and injuries. “The majority of fatalities are likely to have been caused by missiles and or building collapse,” U.K.-based explosive expert and chemical engineer Tony Ennis told The Post in an email. “Those nearest to the blast are likely to have been killed by a combination of blast and thermal radiation,” he wrote. Hotel manager Tony Dagher filmed the devastating effects of the explosion as it tore through the restaurant of the Saint Georges Hotel over a mile away from the blast site. Dagher told The Post he struggled for air and was overwhelmed by shortness of breath after he was knocked to the ground by the explosion — a likely result of the shock wave compressing his lungs, according to experts that study the effects of explosive blasts on the human body. The explosion of the nearly 3,000 metric tons of the highly explosive chemical compound then releases a massive plume of a reddish-hued gas into the atmosphere visible for miles, according to videos and eyewitness accounts. The color of the smoke indicates the presence of nitrogen oxides, a known product of an ammonium nitrate explosion, according to Cheryl Rofer, a retired chemist for the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “That is such a distinctive color for a chemist,” said Rofer, who reviewed several videos of the explosion for The Post. The devastation in the densely populated city was cataclysmic. The shock wave collapsed buildings, tore through apartment blocks and launched debris hundreds of feet away from the blast site. Some people were trapped underneath the rubble while local hospitals, already overwhelmed by coronavirus patients, struggled to take in the thousands injured by blast debris. “The energy from the blast wind that follows the high-pressure wave doesn’t just accelerate fragments ... it produces crush injuries due to buildings collapsing," Bull told The Post. An analysis by Ennis taking into account the amount of ammonium nitrate reportedly housed inside the warehouse facility estimates the


deadly projectiles commonly referred to as missiles by experts. The shattered masonry and glass fragments inside the cloud cause even more catastrophic destruction and injuries. “The majority of fatalities are likely to have been caused by missiles and or building collapse,” U.K.-based explosive expert and chemical engineer Tony Ennis told The Post in an email. “Those nearest to the blast are likely to have been killed by a combination of blast and thermal radiation,” he wrote. Hotel manager Tony Dagher filmed the devastating effects of the explosion as it tore through the restaurant of the Saint Georges Hotel over a mile away from the blast site. Dagher told The Post he struggled for air and was overwhelmed by shortness of breath after he was knocked to the ground by the explosion — a likely result of the shock wave compressing his lungs, according to experts that study the effects of explosive blasts on the human body. The explosion of the nearly 3,000 metric tons of the highly explosive chemical compound then releases a massive plume of a reddish-hued gas into the atmosphere visible for miles, according to videos and eyewitness accounts. The color of the smoke indicates the presence of nitrogen oxides, a known product of an ammonium nitrate explosion, according to Cheryl Rofer, a retired chemist for the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “That is such a distinctive color for a chemist,” said Rofer, who reviewed several videos of the explosion for The Post. The devastation in the densely populated city was cataclysmic. The shock wave collapsed buildings, tore through apartment blocks and launched debris hundreds of feet away from the blast site. Some people were trapped underneath the rubble while local hospitals, already overwhelmed by coronavirus patients, struggled to take in the thousands injured by blast debris. “The energy from the blast wind that follows the high-pressure wave doesn’t just accelerate fragments ... it produces crush injuries due to buildings collapsing," Bull told The Post. An analysis by Ennis taking into account the amount of ammonium nitrate reportedly housed inside the warehouse facility estimates the blast would be equivalent to the explosion of up to 2.4 million pounds of TNT. “This was an entirely avoidable tragedy. The explosive properties of ammonium nitrate have been well known for many years and are well understood as are the proper precautions for safe storage,” he said. Laris Karklis contributed to this report.


Tracking known coronavirus deaths and cases in D.C., Maryland and Virginia

were not informed of the free testing being offered. In recent weeks, some health officials have noted what they call “testing fatigue," contributing to a dip in tests administered. Even with widespread testing, officials rely on effective contact tracing to control the virus. This has been a challenge in many places, including the District, where officials said in September that less than half of newly infected people had been providing contact information for the people they exposed. Leaders in Virginia, Maryland and the District have all pointed to daily numbers of coronavirus-related hospitalizations and intensive care unit patients as crucial measures in determining the severity of the virus and the ability of local hospitals to handle cases. In all three jurisdictions, those measures trended downward from May to June. In D.C., the metrics have held mostly steady, despite a slight uptick in infections in July. But in Maryland and Virginia, hospitalizations rose briefly in July before declining in August through September. Experts note that hospitalization metrics tend to lag behind changes in infections and that young people — who constitute an increasingly large share of new cases in the region — are less likely to get seriously ill. Design and development by Leslie Shapiro, Youjin Shin and Chris Alcantara. Story by Rebecca Tan. Dana Hedgpath, Fenit Nirappil, Kevin Uhrmacher, Gabriel Florit, Danielle Rindler, Armand Emamdjomeh, Dana Hedgpeth, Rachel Chason, Erin Cox, Antonio Olivo, Jenna Portnoy, Patricia Sullivan, Laura Vozzella, Ovetta Wiggins, Perry Stein and Hannah Natanson also contributed to this report. Contact the team at This case tracker relies on data provided by the Maryland, D.C. and Virginia health departments. Earlier in the pandemic, The Washington Post made small adjustments to some of the data to account for unexplained fluctuations in the state reports. On May 1, with the number of cases exceeding 45,000, The Post switched to a more automated process that does not allow for those adjustments. This resulted in a minor fluctuation in the state totals on May 1 and some small discrepancies in the historical data shown for April 25. The seven-day rolling average uses the past seven days of new daily reported cases or deaths to calculate a daily average, starting from the most recent full day of data. Population data are five-year estimates from 2018 American Community Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau. Testing data is from the Covid Tracking Project. Originally published March


The pandemic at sea

retiree from Atlanta, died of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, three days after disembarking the Celebrity Eclipse. “They could have taken more precautions.” Public health experts say that a number of factors contributed to the rapid spread of the virus around the world, predominantly air travel; an estimated 4.54 billion people flew last year, compared with the 30 million passengers who traveled on cruise ships worldwide. But with hundreds of people dining, swimming and dancing together over a sustained period of time, the ships provide unique environments for disease to spread, they say. “People on a large ship, all together, at the same time, all the time — you couldn’t ask for a better incubator for infection,” Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-diseases expert, said in February. For their part, U.S. agencies struggled to manage the escalating crisis, initially deferring to the industry’s own plan to manage the pandemic. Until early this month, federal health officials also allowed passengers who left infected ships but appeared healthy to board commercial airlines home. Even as the virus exploded into a global story, cruise officials failed to immediately recognize flu-like outbreaks as possible signs of the coronavirus, passengers said. In many instances, they did not immediately isolate passengers in their cabins when sickness broke out. In some cases, such as on the Celebrity Eclipse and the Coral Princess, those aboard said they were reassured by company officials there was no coronavirus infection on their ships — even as some travelers were wracked with fevers and coughs. David Nystrom, 75, said he spent the last four days of the Eclipse voyage with his wife, Susan, in the medical clinic, wiping her brow and watching the ship’s crew administer her oxygen. From her bedside, the Boca Raton, Fla., resident said he heard regular announcements from the ship’s captain, assuring passengers that the Eclipse was a “healthy ship” with no coronavirus on board. “If they honestly thought that all these people who were getting sick had colds and bronchitis and pneumonia, I don’t know what to say,” Nystrom said. Officials with the cruise industry said they took extraordinary efforts to limit outbreaks of the new virus on ships and get tens of thousands of passengers and crew home safely as the pandemic spread, going beyond measures adopted by other industries. Bari Golin-Blaugrund, a spokeswoman for Cruise Lines International Association, said in a statement


The pandemic at sea

since tested positive. Among former passengers from the Costa Favolosa, there have been at least 52 covid-19 cases and one death in Trinidad and Tobago, 13 cases in the Dominican Republic and two cases in the French territory of Martinique, according to local health officials. “We knew there was an epidemic with international potential,” said Ted Cohen, an epidemiologist at Yale School of Public Health who examined data gathered by The Post, adding: “It was irresponsible for the industry to not be proactive in how to limit these activities in times of global crisis.” Cruise lines said they followed all international regulations to prevent the spread of disease and took voluntary measures such as temperature checks and intensive sanitation measures. And they disputed the idea that their ships brought the coronavirus into the region, saying that while Caribbean residents who sailed on their ships have tested positive, there is not proof they contracted the virus on board. "We have no evidence of any direct link of contagion between our ships and the territories of our destinations in the Caribbean and there is no scientific or health-related evidence or background to this,” Costa Cruises, which operates the three Costa ships, said in a statement. MSC Cruises said it “has no reason to believe” that the MSC Meraviglia contributed to any local outbreak, saying it screened the health and travel history of its passengers and has had no known cases on any ships while sailing. After a Canadian passenger who had traveled on that ship tested positive nearly six days after disembarking, the ship isolated seven crew members who had contact with him and never showed symptoms, the company said. Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines, which operates the MS Braemar, said that once it learned that two passengers from a previous Caribbean cruise had been diagnosed with covid-19, it arranged to test those currently on board who had flu-like symptoms. When six people tested positive, it barred passengers from disembarking until the ship ended its journey in Cuba. The emergency medical treatment of passengers placed a significant burden on the region’s health-care infrastructure. Much of a hospital in the Cayman Islands was shuttered for two weeks after a 68-year-old Italian man who suffered a stroke was evacuated from the Costa Luminosa ship on Feb. 29 and later tested positive for the coronavirus. More than 40 health-care workers who came into contact with the


The Daily 202: The Supreme Court is one of six topics Chris Wallace plans to cover in the first presidential debate

Pete Buttigieg is playing the role of Vice President Pence in mock debates with Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.). Scott Walker is Biden said last week that he has multiple people, not just one, playing the role of Trump in practice sessions. Biden and Trump will debate again in Nashville on Oct. 15 and in Miami on Oct. 22. “Organizations that track the virus, including The Washington Post, have logged recent increases in case numbers and test positivity rates,” Joel Achenbach and Karin Brulliard report. "Hospitalizations and deaths remain lower nationally than at their midsummer peak, but those numbers always lag several weeks behind trends in new infections. "Workers at Midwestern meatpacking plants and on construction sites in Florida are getting sick and dying of a virus that is exacerbating historic inequalities in communities where residents, many of whom are ‘essential’ workers, struggle to access health care. The undocumented are largely invisible,” Arelis Hernández reports. “The disparities are particularly acute in Texas, where people who identify as Hispanic or Latino comprise 40 percent of the state’s population. They are more likely to be hospitalized, face financial ruin or die of the virus than their White neighbors, experts said. The burden on Hispanics is diverse, affecting recent migrants to Houston, natives of San Antonio, indigenous immigrants in Austin, Dallas business owners or those who called the Borderlands their home before it was Texas. … When Texas reworked its coronavirus data in July, it added 600 additional virus deaths — 47 percent of which were Latinos.” “The agency is issuing the guidance to boost transparency and public trust as it approaches the momentous decision of whether a prospective vaccine is safe and effective,” Laurie McGinley and Carolyn Johnson report. “The guidance, which is far more rigorous than what was used for emergency clearance of hydroxychloroquine or convalescent plasma, is an effort to shore up confidence in an agency that made missteps during the pandemic. While it is being reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget, elements of it are already being shared with vaccine makers. Under it, the FDA would ask manufacturers seeking an emergency authorization — a far quicker process than a formal approval — to follow participants in late-stage clinical trials for a median of at least two months, starting after they receive a second vaccine shot. … “As a sign the vaccine works, the agency also is


Photographers across Mexico have been documenting the challenges of distance learning

MEXICO CITY — It began in January. Schools in China closed for the Lunar New Year holiday. They didn’t reopen. Then, schools went dark in Europe. The Middle East. Latin America. During the first half of 2020, 1.5 billion students around the world lost out on education because of the coronavirus pandemic. In Mexico, about 31 million children were affected. Many had struggled to learn even before the pandemic. Around half of Mexican children and adolescents live in poverty, according to UNICEF. Mexico’s Education Ministry provided a mix of distance-learning options, including classes online or on public television. But only about half of homes have an Internet connection. And many students rely on schools for food. The shutdown meant hunger as well as reduced education. In the spring, six photographers started documenting the lives of children affected by the school closure in a project for Quinto Elemento Lab, an independent journalism organization in Mexico City, and Trasluz Photo, a photography collective based in the southeastern state of Veracruz. The subjects ranged from an 11-year-old who lives in a home without electricity in Veracruz to a 7-year-old in Mexico City’s upscale Polanco neighborhood. Some children had to go into the streets to work with their parents. Others were left home alone. Schools remain closed in Mexico as the pandemic continues to claim lives. More than 73,000 people have died of covid-19, the disease the novel coronavirus causes, according to government statistics. Authorities have launched a massive nationwide program of instruction via TV for the fall semester. No one knows when schools will reopen. Sarah Mac Gillivray Corpi, 7, reporter Stephania Corpi’s daughter, attends the private Liceo Franco-Mexicano in Mexico City’s Polanco neighborhood. The coronavirus arrived as she was adjusting to being back in Mexico after years in Costa Rica and Peru, where her father worked through 2019. “It scares me,” she says. Her great-grandmother died after being infected with the virus. Sarah followed classes on her mother’s old laptop and amused herself by doing yoga classes on Zoom, dressing up as a robot or building castles in her room. Occasionally, she has thrown tantrums, hugging Lima, her dog. She showed her father a green, spiny seed pod that had fallen from a nearby tree. “Is this covid?” she asked, tearfully. (photographer: Luis Antonio Rojas) After classes were suspended, Briana Villafuerte Caltzontzl, 6, accompanied her mother, Diana, to work every day at


Covid eliminated airline change fees. Could hotel resort fees be next?

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, which has grounded flights and led to massive job losses, most travel companies are searching for new ways to entice travelers. In late August, for example, airlines had an unprecedented showdown over change fees that resulted in all of the U.S.’s major players — United, Delta and American — dropping the added cost “permanently.” Could other travel sectors see the value in ditching fees to attract travelers during this period of uncertainty? Experts say not to hold your breath for the controversial resort fee to disappear widely — even though the amenities they typically cover, such as fitness centers and towel service, are closed because of the novel coronavirus. But some hotels say they are forgoing the fee, with one major chain saying that its properties have been pulling back on resort fees since the pandemic began. Over the past several years, resort fees have become more expensive and are increasingly imposed by properties that are not resorts, especially non-resort hotels in cities, according to experts. During that time, these fees have also become increasingly hidden from initial nightly rates, displayed on booking sites only in the final stages of purchasing. Consumer backlash to hidden resort fees prompted separate lawsuits in 2019 by attorneys general in D.C. and Nebraska, who accused hotel giants Marriott and Hilton, respectively, of “price deception” for omitting resort fees from initial room rates. The fees can cover a range of services, and be either a nightly fee or one single add-on charge. For example, Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas charges $45 per room per night for Internet access, “unlimited local and toll free calls, airline boarding pass printing, daily digital newspaper access and fitness center access,” according to its website. Manhattan’s Grand Hyatt New York usually charges guests one $40 “mandatory destination fee” for its bag-check service, Internet access, food and beverage credits, and a free audio tour of Grand Central Terminal. The fee is now being waived until Jan. 1, 2021, according to the hotel. Also, resort fees have gone from optional — meaning customers could request not to pay if they weren’t using the amenities — to mandatory, says John Burns, a professor of hospitality at Farleigh Dickinson University. “Despite the pandemic, this continues to be generally the policy,” he said in an email. “During a pandemic when travel demand is at a historic


Treasury’s special lending program has been a non-factor in our economic rebound. We should learn from that.

Like many others, we were optimistic about a program under which the Federal Reserve would support as much as $600 billion in lending to otherwise-sound midsize businesses that faced short-term cash-flow problems because of the pandemic but did not qualify for other assistance. Authorized by Congress in the bipartisan Cares Act on March 27, what came to be known as the Main Street Lending Program seemed like an innovative adaptation of the central bank’s function as lender of last resort to a novel situation: the devastating shutdown of the U.S. economy due to public health concerns. In practice, however, Main Street has been a non-factor in the economy’s rebound, with a mere $1.4 billion in new lending since its much-delayed opening on July 6. Though the Fed issued revised rules on Sept. 18 that should boost lending, the impact before Main Street expires Dec. 31 is unclear. It’s time to learn from this experience. Admittedly, the private sector’s non-use of Main Street is in part a good-news story. Many companies in the relevant category — 15,000 employees or fewer; $5 billion or less in 2019 sales — managed to draw on conventional bank credit, or found themselves needing less new borrowing when the economy rebounded faster than anticipated in the second quarter. As Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell testified at a House hearing Tuesday, “most creditworthy small and medium-sized businesses can currently get loans from private-sector financial institutions.” Nevertheless, it is also clear that many firms did not access the lending program because of bureaucratic obstacles or because the Fed’s lending terms, as interpreted by the risk-averse commercial banks through which the money flowed, proved too onerous. In the crucial early stages of the program, the Treasury Department, which controlled $75 billion in capital allocated by Congress, and thus had ultimate power over the program, albeit within broad leverage limitations set by the Fed, placed a high priority on avoiding taxpayer losses, as opposed to maximizing lending to companies. The Fed’s newly revised rules attempt to remedy one of the most significant problems by encouraging banks to vet candidates for Main Street loans based not on their current financial condition but on their pre-pandemic books and future prospects. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said at the House hearing that he would be willing to lower Main Street’s minimum loan size from $250,000 to $100,000. Again, though, it’s getting late. Main Street’s


Transcript: Agents of Chaos

the presidential campaign, was simply interested in getting a Moscow Trump Tower deal done, and he thought by saying nice things about Vladimir Putin, that would help in that goal. And I also think that people like Paul Manafort that joined the campaign for free as a campaign manager wasn't pursuing some mysterious political goal; he just wanted to get out of a debt that he owed to a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska. So, there was a kind of corruption and venality embedded in the campaign which sought to exacerbate this whole notion of chaos, and I think is really important to understand. MR. CAPEHART: Camille, you were engaged by the U.S. Senate to study the activities of the infamous Russian troll farms. And in the film, you talk about the three different types of online personas Russia used to do this. Tell us about them, the three. MS. FRANÇOIS: Yeah, so, it's interesting what we looked at in 2017. The Senate Select Intelligence Committee gave us the data of the activity of the troll farms on three different platforms, right, on Twitter, on Facebook, and on Google. And so, we took a step back and tried to understand, okay, what does this entire campaign look like? And we found fake activists, we found fake news organization, and we find fake people, fake influencers. But what's interesting is how all of this worked together as a system for many years to target the divisive and polarizing topics in the American conversation and to create chaos and division using social media. MR. CAPEHART: So, Camille, by the time--by the time the Russians turned their attention on the United States, they had already had some practice--and correct me if I'm wrong; you're the expert, here. They already had some practice when it came to Ukraine and Crimea, no? MS. FRANÇOIS: They also had practice on their own people. They had used social media to control their own domestic sphere of online information. I think we also forget that they turned their attention to the U.S. fairly early on, they start in 2014. The thing that I discovered back in 2017 when we look at this data for the first time is I'm realizing that it's not just about 2016, right? They started targeting the U.S. at least two years prior, and they didn't stop after the election. As a matter of


Local Digest: D.C. police identify man fatally shot in Northeast

THE DISTRICT A man who was fatally shot on Monday in Northeast Washington has been identified by the D.C. police as 29-year-old Cimerron Kennedy of Northeast. He was found about 6 p.m. in the 3500 block of Jay Street NW, the police said, with a gunshot wound and died at a hospital. — Martin Weil MARYLAND State officials in Maryland say fatal drug overdoses and alcohol-related deaths are rising. Their data shows that such deaths increased by 9.1 percent from January to June of this year compared with those months last year. Opioids were responsible for nearly 90 percent of the 1,326 deaths. Officials from the Maryland Department of Health and the state’s Opioid Operational Command Center said the pandemic is exacerbating people’s addictions as they’re quarantined. “Taken together, the associated social isolation, disruptions of support, impeded access to care, and economic distress have helped to create an extremely dangerous environment for those suffering from substance use disorder,” a report said. Gov. Larry Hogan (R) touted the creation of the Maryland COVID-19 Inter-Agency Overdose Action Plan to help address the connection between substance abuse and the pandemic. “In spite of the other challenges that we face, our dedication to reversing the devastation of the opioid crisis has not wavered,” he said in a statement. — Associated Press VIRGINIA Ten inmates at a prison that holds many elderly and otherwise vulnerable inmates have died of covid-19, officials said. Deerfield Correctional Center, which is located in Capron, 69 miles south of Richmond, has an assisted-living unit and infirmary and holds many of the state prison system’s older and medically impaired offenders. Many of the inmates at Deerfield sleep in dormitories, making social distancing difficult if not impossible. Figures posted Tuesday by the Virginia Department of Corrections also showed that 36 staff members at Deerfield also have tested positive for the coronavirus. Lisa Kinney, a department spokeswoman, said temporary nurses have been hired and the department has moved medical staff from other facilities to Deerfield. She said all medical and kitchen staff are wearing N95 masks. With 10 deaths, Deerfield has the most of any facility in Virginia. — Associated Press


An autistic girl eats only one food. Here’s what happened when stores sold out of it.

Crystal MacDonald’s daughter Ashlyn — who is 11 years old and autistic — is very loyal to her favorite meal: canned SpaghettiOs with miniature meatballs. “She would eat a few other things like pizza and grilled cheese, but she has always loved those the most,” said MacDonald, 34, a mother of five who lives in Attleboro, Mass. “For years, it’s been her ‘go-to’ comfort meal.” In March, when the coronavirus pandemic hit, Ashlyn’s routine was disrupted, and one of her reactions was to refuse to eat anything besides her preferred meal. “She wanted nothing except SpaghettiOs, not even generic brands,” said MacDonald, who explained that her daughter has nonverbal autism. Ashlyn was upset she could no longer attend her special needs school because of the pandemic, said her mother, and she found comfort in SpaghettiOs with meatballs. She insisted on eating them for breakfast, lunch and dinner. “Structure is what centers her — it gives her a sense of control when everything else seems chaotic and overwhelming,” MacDonald said. “Ashlyn is most comfortable when she feels like she’s living ‘Groundhog Day’ every day. SpaghettiOs are a sensory experience for her.” MacDonald and her husband, Jeffrey MacDonald, had no trouble finding enough cans of SpaghettiOs to keep Ashlyn happy at mealtime. Then, in mid-April, Crystal MacDonald dropped by her regular market one afternoon and found the shelves had been cleared of SpaghettiOs. “People were going nuts, loading up on all the canned goods they could find, including SpaghettiOs,” she said. “I had to go to every grocery store in the area to find enough for Ashlyn. It became like a treasure hunt to find just a couple of cans.” For the next five months, Crystal MacDonald drove miles out of her way to more than a dozen stores to find the canned pasta. Last month, she was featured in a local newspaper story about area food shortages. A lot of people read the story, and to her surprise, they responded not with judgment that she was repeatedly feeding her daughter the prepackaged meal, but with support. They wanted to help her find SpaghettiOs with meatballs for Ashlyn. Some scoured their own pantries and began offering up the SpaghettiOs from their kitchen shelves. Others called grocery stores to see if they had any cans in stock. “When I read about Crystal’s story, I knew immediately that I wanted to help,” said Janet


A University of Georgia student exposed pandemic violations. One fraternity responded with racist texts.

any place on our campus, and we condemn them in the strongest terms.” Mbunwe is one of many students at UGA who have been speaking out about the university’s response to the novel coronavirus pandemic. Earlier this month, UGA reported almost 2,600 total cases of coronavirus infections since mid-August. The university, which has maintained in-person classes, has not released updated figures since then. The state of Georgia has recorded more than 307,000 cases and more than 6,600 deaths, according to The Washington Post’s coronavirus tracker. UGA also made national headlines last week for announcing that it would not host any on-campus voting sites, saying that the risk of transmitting the coronavirus during in-person voting was too high. Critics, though, noted that the school is allowing thousands of students to attend football games. The university was widely criticized and quickly reversed the decision. Students upset at the school’s coronavirus response have turned to Reddit to express their outrage, posting memes making fun of the university’s president and videos and images of students in sororities and fraternities apparently violating mask and social distancing rules, the New York Times reported. Mbunwe, a 20-year-old junior and political science major, did the same on her Twitter feed. Students began sending her tips, which Mbunwe would post. Last week, Mbunwe tweeted images of an Instagram post from a member of Zeta Tau Alpha with a caption saying she tested positive for the coronavirus but was going to her sorority’s event anyway. Mbunwe tweeted with images: “ummmm I’m speechless.” But Saturday, instead of receiving tips about other students, Mbunwe received images of texts about herself. The images were from a chat room on GroupMe called “Sex Drugs and Darby House,” made up of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity brothers. “What a foul, miserable creature,” someone wrote under an image of Mbunwe. One person with the username “Ghost of Aunt Jemima” commented on Mbunwe’s genitals and said she “just sits in her room saying how white people are racist because she’s mad she didn’t get a bid lmao.” The images went beyond Mbunwe. Many were also homophobic and misogynistic, including talk about a “threesome pledge” and making fun of one of the members for “making out with a Black chick in the basement,” to which one person responded by saying, “jungle fever.” The texts included several other racial slurs. “I was disappointed, but I wasn’t surprised,” Mbunwe said in


No matter what the CDC says, here’s why many scientists think the coronavirus is airborne

now trying frantically to understand how some of the biggest virus superspreading events can be explained by not only the assumption of airborne viral particles, but also the conditions of particular indoor spaces, including their ventilation systems and how much they allow for the circulation of fresh air. In one of the most startling scientific offerings, Bjorn Birnir, a mathematician at the University of California at Santa Barbara, studies three well-documented cases in which the coronavirus spread rapidly and widely in an enclosed or indoor environment — a restaurant in Guangzhou, China; a bus traveling in China’s Zhejiang province; and a call center in Seoul. Constructing a model of how virus particles from our breath flow through indoor air when ventilation is low, Birnir found that the popular six-foot rule for social distancing can utterly fail in these circumstances. People much farther away from an infected individual can breathe in levels of the virus that you might expect only if they were standing or sitting right next to that person. Take the famous case of the restaurant, for instance, where one sick person infected nine others. Birnir’s model, which has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, found that thanks to poor ventilation, the virus’s concentration away from the sick person grew so high that within seven minutes, it was as if many others in the space were sitting directly next to that person. On the bus, a single person infected 24 others over the course of two 50-minute rides, but people sitting near open windows were spared. In the call center, where 97 people were ultimately infected, one individual appears to have infected several others through close contact, and then as the group worked together, the virus spread through the air thanks to the presence of several sick people in a large indoor work area. “The SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus attacks in two steps,” Birnir wrote. “The first step is a linear spread between individuals with a couple of days delay. The second step is an exponential spread effected by the air-conditioning system affecting a much larger number of people. Thus in the second step, the ventilation becomes the super-spreader.” Several experts consulted by The Post offered technical critiques of Birnir’s model, but did not disagree with the main conclusion: Viral particles can build up high concentrations in spaces where the air is not adequately changed. “It makes sense the


A local’s guide to Washington, D.C.

under $20 a dish for some of the most inventive food in the city. The restaurant is housed in an old tomato-packing factory in industrial Ivy City. Vegetarians are in luck because half the menu is for them. Gravitas’s wine menu is impressive, but opt for the cocktails instead. Each glass comes with a fancy garnish, such as the origami butterfly on the “Southern Butterfly.” BTW: Label: Dinner address: Gravitas, 1401 Okie St. NE. Washington, D.C. 20002 latlng: phone: 202-763-7942 website: http://www.gravitasdc.com/ twitter: gravitasdc instagram: gravitasdc Even if you’re not on your way back from the bars, Amsterdam is worth a late-night stop. The original location, in Adams Morgan on 18th Street, is small, but it’s a quick eat. Pick a falafel pita or bowl, then go crazy with the 22 topping options, from pickled cabbage to hummus. If you happen to be on 14th Street NW, you’ll find a location there, too. BTW: Label: Late-night address: Amsterdam Falafelshop, 2425 18th St. NW. Washington, D.C. 20009 latlng: phone: 202-234-1969 website: https://www.falafelshop.com/ twitter: AmsterdamDC instagram: amsterdamfalafelshop This H Street NE spot pulls double duty. The bottom floor is a Chinese street-food shop, with bar and window seating only. The chef makes pot stickers, bao and skewers right in front of you. When you’re ready for a drink, head upstairs to the bar, where the city’s bartenders hang out. Because of that, order the “bartender’s choice” to give them the opportunity to show off their skills. BTW: Label: Late-night address: Copycat, 1110 H St. NE. Washington, D.C. 20002 latlng: phone: 202-241-1952 website: https://www.copycatcompany.com twitter: Copycat_Co instagram: copycatco It’s arguably the most Instagrammed storefront in D.C., but the real shots are inside. As you enter the small rowhouse on Capitol Hill, one packed from floor to ceiling with used books, take note of the list of words “not spoken here” (“awesome,” “OMG” and “problematic” are just a few millennialisms at which the former owner cringes). You’ll then notice snarky commentary written on notecards reacting to the books on display. Novels are upstairs, sociology is in the basement and foreign language is in the bathroom. BTW: address: Capitol Hill Books, 657 C St. SE. Washington, D.C. 20003 latlng: phone: 202-544-1621 website: https://www.capitolhillbooks-dc.com/ twitter: chbooksdc instagram: capitolhillbooks Status: Temporarily closed Congressional Cemetery has been dubbed “the hippest cemetery in America,” and it lives up to the title. Located in Hill East, it was America’s first


Camping or hosteling during the pandemic? Here’s how to scout out your best bathroom options.

Since May, when states reopened and Americans began hitting the road after weeks of being quarantined, people traveling on a shoestring have faced a challenge: finding a safe place to answer the call of nature. Budget lodging options such as campgrounds and hostels may offer private sleeping quarters, but in many cases, the bathrooms are shared, and social distancing inside those facilities is difficult to achieve. In the worst-case scenario, this might endanger your health. But more likely, it will chip away at your peace of mind — the very thing many of us aspire to achieve when traveling. But it doesn’t have to be this way, as I learned after spending two weeks car camping in some of New Hampshire and Maine’s most well-trod mountain and beach towns. Relieving oneself in relative comfort while traveling on a tight budget isn’t easy, but like most aspects of budget travel, it’s achievable with a little research and an intrepid mind-set. So before hitting the road, memorize these four steps for a tension-free trip to the toilet. If you won’t have access to your own commode while traveling, then your shared-use venue will either be a solo bathroom or a multi-toilet bathroom that can accommodate several people at once. If you’re concerned about covid-19 transmission inside bathrooms, this could be the crucial factor to consider. Scientists have established that covid-19 spreads more effectively in indoor settings where people are congregated, especially if the room where they’re clustered has poor air ventilation. You might be able to keep six feet away from your fellow bathroom occupants, but what if they aren’t wearing masks? Then there’s the toilet itself. We’ve seen those stomach-turning studies that show that flushing a toilet may blast aerosolized fecal particles upward, where they linger in the air for up to half an hour — and many shared or public bathrooms have flush toilets without lids. While it hasn’t been conclusively proved that inhaling fecal aerosols can result in a case of covid, this is another reason to wear a mask, and to remember to wash your hands after touching or removing it. “Wearing a mask is the best protection that people have from the aerosolization and transmission that can happen inside,” says Robbie Goldstein, an infectious-disease doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital. “You don’t know who was last in the bathroom, and our old understanding of how viruses were transmitted


that can accommodate several people at once. If you’re concerned about covid-19 transmission inside bathrooms, this could be the crucial factor to consider. Scientists have established that covid-19 spreads more effectively in indoor settings where people are congregated, especially if the room where they’re clustered has poor air ventilation. You might be able to keep six feet away from your fellow bathroom occupants, but what if they aren’t wearing masks? Then there’s the toilet itself. We’ve seen those stomach-turning studies that show that flushing a toilet may blast aerosolized fecal particles upward, where they linger in the air for up to half an hour — and many shared or public bathrooms have flush toilets without lids. While it hasn’t been conclusively proved that inhaling fecal aerosols can result in a case of covid, this is another reason to wear a mask, and to remember to wash your hands after touching or removing it. “Wearing a mask is the best protection that people have from the aerosolization and transmission that can happen inside,” says Robbie Goldstein, an infectious-disease doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital. “You don’t know who was last in the bathroom, and our old understanding of how viruses were transmitted through the air seems to be wrong. We thought the droplets that people were breathing out hung in the air for seconds or minutes before dropping to the ground. But it turns those aerosolized droplets probably stick around for a lot longer and can travel farther.” A solo-occupancy bathroom can offer some protection from people and aerosols, especially if the bathroom is an outdoor facility with a non-flush pit toilet like an outhouse or even a porta-potty. (“There’s no one else who may be in a stall next to you,” Goldstein notes.) It may be a grimier venue, but this was a problem before the coronavirus, and protocol remains the same. Plan to hover, or to wipe down the seat with some kind of disinfectant. When you’re done, wash your hands for at least 20 seconds or use hand sanitizer, which should also take 20 seconds. And if you can, try opening the door before your bathroom visit and consider keeping it partially open while you’re inside. “Letting air flow through the porta-potty is going to be the best ways to flush aerosols out,” Goldstein says. Before booking any lodging, pick up the phone and find out a bit more


How to fix public health weaknesses before the next pandemic hits

Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist, leads the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where Yonatan Grad is an assistant professor of immunology and infectious diseases. Even as the world still struggles against the novel coronavirus pandemic, it isn’t too early to start cataloguing lessons learned and to patch vulnerabilities. In past centuries, cholera and typhoid outbreaks in the United States prompted investments in clean water and sanitation, which helped control these and other infections. Efforts to control the mosquitoes that carry malaria and yellow fever led to the use of screens on windows and doors, which also keep out other insect-borne diseases. Similarly, the extraordinary speed of the race to develop a covid-19 vaccine has been facilitated by initiatives prompted by the SARS and MERS viruses and the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014. And efforts to understand covid-19 transmission and evaluate reinfection benefit from advances in viral genome sequencing and analysis that were developed in response to Ebola, Zika, influenza and other viral diseases. But the covid-19 experience shows that large holes remain in U.S. public health infrastructure, especially the mechanisms to generate, collect, analyze and compare data. This deficiency has hampered every aspect of pandemic control. Early on, communities rushed to set up testing to see when the virus had arrived. They wanted to make consistent measurements of how it was spreading and see how well control measures were working. Testing shortages, overlap with flu season and the mild illness seen in many people made it hard to tell when the virus started spreading until it was too late in many locations. Surveillance systems — counting and tracking infected people, monitoring the course of the epidemic and projecting resource needs as the epidemic unfolds — are inflexible and outdated. The systems have been undermined by the long neglect of local and state public health. Fundamentally, there is no common system for collecting and reporting the key numbers, confounding efforts to control disease spread. Eight months into the pandemic, states and counties around the country are struggling to track the spread of the virus through routine, reliable testing of representative members of their communities. Efforts to help hospitals and public health systems by modeling the covid-19-related demand for intensive care have been stymied by this fact: There is insufficient information available about the duration of stays in intensive care units in


hampered every aspect of pandemic control. Early on, communities rushed to set up testing to see when the virus had arrived. They wanted to make consistent measurements of how it was spreading and see how well control measures were working. Testing shortages, overlap with flu season and the mild illness seen in many people made it hard to tell when the virus started spreading until it was too late in many locations. Surveillance systems — counting and tracking infected people, monitoring the course of the epidemic and projecting resource needs as the epidemic unfolds — are inflexible and outdated. The systems have been undermined by the long neglect of local and state public health. Fundamentally, there is no common system for collecting and reporting the key numbers, confounding efforts to control disease spread. Eight months into the pandemic, states and counties around the country are struggling to track the spread of the virus through routine, reliable testing of representative members of their communities. Efforts to help hospitals and public health systems by modeling the covid-19-related demand for intensive care have been stymied by this fact: There is insufficient information available about the duration of stays in intensive care units in the United States. And few jurisdictions provide specific data on where their epidemiologists determine transmission is occurring, making it difficult to identify areas that can reopen safely or health-care facilities that need to bolster their prevention measures. The list could go on. The common denominator is an antiquated and unstandardized system of linking data from clinical records and public health monitoring in ways that provide evidence on how to control the virus while minimizing the disruption to the economy and society. Electronic medical records — envisioned as a boon for public-health surveillance, providing data that could be readily analyzed — turn out to be much better for billing than for the exchange of data. The next phase of pandemic response that might be placed at risk by these spotty data systems is vaccination. Accurate records of who has been vaccinated, when and with which vaccine will be essential. They will encourage trust in the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, ensure prioritization of the groups that should first receive the vaccine, and aid in monitoring vaccine impact on the pandemic. A patchwork of local systems, already strained, is not well-suited to this task. Solving this problem will require significant investment to


Electronic medical records — envisioned as a boon for public-health surveillance, providing data that could be readily analyzed — turn out to be much better for billing than for the exchange of data. The next phase of pandemic response that might be placed at risk by these spotty data systems is vaccination. Accurate records of who has been vaccinated, when and with which vaccine will be essential. They will encourage trust in the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, ensure prioritization of the groups that should first receive the vaccine, and aid in monitoring vaccine impact on the pandemic. A patchwork of local systems, already strained, is not well-suited to this task. Solving this problem will require significant investment to link public health agencies at the local level to state and national databases, and to ensure that the information coming into these systems is of adequate quality. Nontraditional sources of data — tracking mobility through cellphones to see how people respond to lockdowns, measuring viral RNA in sewage and predicting epidemic trends through analysis of Internet searches — potentially provide information faster and with higher resolution than traditional epidemiologic data. But efforts to make use of them remain bespoke collaborations between companies or academic groups and individual health departments. Large-scale serological surveillance, a potentially game-changing idea pioneered by several of our colleagues, remains just that, an idea. Calls for a national pandemic forecasting center have so far gone unfunded. All this will require new investment in these good ideas, IT infrastructure, highly skilled personnel and equipment to run large numbers of diagnostic tests. The improvements would aid in fighting the current pandemic, and they will be essential weapons against future pandemics and other major health threats, such as antimicrobial resistance, that will still loom when the world emerges from covid-19. Read more Leana S. Wen: We’ve reached 200,000 deaths. Our response has gotten even worse than it was at 100,000. Dana Milbank: Seven months into the pandemic, Trump’s testing plan enters its second wave of failure William Haseltine: Beware of covid-19 vaccine trials designed to succeed from the start The Post’s View: For the 200,000 dead Americans, mourn, be angry — and vote Joseph G. Allen and Linsey C. Marr: Yes, airborne transmission is happening. The CDC needs to set the record straight. The Post’s View: We must learn the lessons of the pandemic. A bipartisan commission can help with that.


Prince George’s will keep pandemic restrictions as D.C. region notches a week of falling infections

collaboration with county health officials. School leaders in Prince George’s County, which has plans for remote instruction through the end of January, had no comment Thursday on the high school sports announcement, a spokeswoman said. State Sen. Paul D. Pinsky (D-Prince George’s), chair of the Senate Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee, said he was “a bit surprised” by the move to resume high school sports, “since most of the 24 school systems have not felt it safe enough to return large numbers of students to in-person instruction.” Pinsky said too many questions are unanswered, including whether testing will be required to participate and if counties that opt in will be provided with rapid tests. He noted that college and professional teams have used testing to keep the virus at bay and have suspended or postponed games when tests come back positive. In making the announcement, Hogan — who has called for school districts to provide some in-person instruction — cited improving health metricsin urging schools to take steps toward returning students to classrooms and athletes to the field. “We’re not going to do anything to endanger our kids but we think it’s really important to try to make efforts to get more of them back into face-to-face instruction and give them the opportunity to have some of the sports activity that they also need,” he said. D.C., Maryland and Virginia on Thursday reported 1,461 new daily infections and 31 deaths. Virginia had 902 new cases and 24 deaths; Maryland had 503 new cases and seven deaths; D.C. had 56 new cases and no deaths. Virginia health officials attributed 18 of the state’s deaths to a backlog in reported fatalities announced last week. The region on Wednesday reported fewer than 1,000 daily cases for the first time since July 6. D.C. continues to have the lowest rate of infections in the region, with a rolling average of 46 infections per 100,000 residents over seven days. That number stood at 55 in Maryland and 72 in Virginia. The pandemic continues to take an economic toll in the region, as 24,130 residents of Virginia, Maryland and D.C. filed for unemployment benefits for the week ending Sept. 19. That’s up from the 19,418 who filed a week earlier. Labor Department figures released Thursday show 10,234 Marylanders filed new unemployment claims, 12,492 claims were filed in Virginia and 1,404 were filed in D.C. ovetta.wiggins@washpost.com


Supermarkets are powerful flash points in racial politics

In recent months, grocery stores have become sites of clashes over mask-wearing. In some cases, videos of customers (nearly always White customers) who refuse to wear their masks and harass employees and other shoppers have gone viral. In Minnesota, a couple insisted on their right to wear masks with swastikas. These episodes speak to the ways stores have become spaces to assert White privilege and autonomy. It is no surprise that consequential, racially charged battles are happening in grocery store aisles. Historically, grocery stores are key, if underrecognized, nodes in the history of racism and violence in the United States. Food, an object we so often imagine as bringing people together, has been a consistent backdrop for policing and assault of Black people in particular. Recognizing and addressing this is key to eliminating racism from day-to-day American life. Consider that early in the summer police were summoned to Cup Foods after George Floyd allegedly tried to use a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes — and he died. His case shares the same origin point with some of the most explosive cases of lynching and police violence in American history; many of these emerged from the seemingly simple act of buying or selling groceries. Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching campaign was sparked by the murders of an African American grocer and his employees. The lynching of Emmett Till in August 1955 came after he purportedly whistled at the White grocer’s wife. And Trayvon Martin died at the hands of George Zimmerman after Zimmerman thought he looked suspicious while walking back from a convenience store with Skittles and iced tea in 2012. Less famous but no less meaningful recent incidents — for instance, the deaths of Elijah McClain and Rayshard Brooks — also were occasioned by food purchases or visits to restaurants. Food has long been used as a tool for advancing White supremacy and colonization. For Africans and African Americans, the history of food can’t be untangled from the history of slavery. Beginning in the 17th century, plantations in the Americas used the labor of enslaved Africans to turn sugar and rum into global commodities. Even after the end of slavery, stereotypes of servile African American cooks, maids and children permeated food advertising. These images reinforced the idea that Black people’s relationship to food properly consisted of serving or amusing White people. The needs of people of color for food were


of all these measures. Further, Psyche Williams-Forson has documented the more subtle policing of African American foodways, even by well-meaning health workers, policymakers, cookbook authors and writers. The use of police and policing at Cub, a large local supermarket chain, as well as the small, single-store Cup Foods store, reveals how grocery stores have stood at the center of policing. Fundamentally, supermarkets must do many things to protect the bottom line beyond pleasing customers: keep tabs on inventory, establish guidelines for worker efficiency and adhere to profit margins. To do so, stores have also preserved a social order that treats shoppers of different races differently, dispensing hierarchy along with food — and, in fact, creating it. Addressing this reality will involve reimagining the work of food. Activists have long tried to do this, transforming food into a vehicle for shattering hierarchies in lieu of reinforcing them. When Mississippi planters refused food to those who had registered to vote in the 1960s, Fannie Lou Hamer founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative, which provided food, medical care and sustenance to Black farmers and laid the groundwork for today’s Black-run community gardens and “food sovereignty” movements. In the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the Black Panthers built free breakfast programs across the country, grass-roots food justice movements swept cities such as New York, and a multiracial coalition pushed to make school breakfast and lunch programs a reliable source of food for children. This history set the stage for the food politics of the summer’s uprisings. The intersection at which Floyd died overflowed with food and other necessities for weeks during the subsequent occupation; even before this, the coronavirus sparked networks of mutual aid so that neighbors might help each other bear shortages and loss. In all of these cases, the availability of food facilitated daily well-being as well as larger reimaginings of our most basic systems. These examples make clear that racial policing around food is not inevitable; if we look at history closely, we find ample evidence that food can undermine racism and enact justice when it is less policed, more available and overseen by members of the community. As cities, towns, states and the nation rethink policing, they might also rethink what people have to do get things such as Skittles and iced tea. In so doing, we can create a more equitable way of distributing food now, and a truly just future.


What if all covid‑19 deaths in the United States had happened in your neighborhood?

At least 200,014 people have died of covid‑19 in the United States. It can be difficult to comprehend the loss of all these lives in a country so large. The pandemic’s heaviest tolls have occurred in clusters, and many Americans don’t know anyone who has died. But the disease has killed people in all 50 states, the District and most of the territories. What if all those deaths had happened near you? To better understand these losses, this simulation shows what would happen if all reported covid‑19 deaths in the country happened around your address. After you start this experience, you will see a circle drawn around your location: In this scenario, everyone who lives in that area would have died. How far would this emptiness go? The radius displayed around you depends on your location and on the number of people who live near you. In order to determine the size of the radius, we use data from the 2018 American Community Survey, which estimates people living in small tracts such as neighborhood blocks, for every location except Guam, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands. In those places, we use 2010 decennial Census Bureau data. Some tracts are buildings in a city. Others are blocks or neighborhoods. The simulation sums the population of all the tracts around you until it reaches a total that is close to the total covid‑19 deaths in the country. The full methodology involves drawing increasing radii, calculating intersections and making statistical estimates.


The Health 202: Congress could easily make the Obamacare lawsuit go away. It probably won't.

News’s Robert Lewis and Christina Jewett report. Over the past several days, the Centers for Disease Control waded into the middle of this debate, publishing — and then quickly unpublishing — guidance emphasizing airborne transmission as the “main way the virus spreads.” The agency claimed on Monday that the draft guidance had been released in error. “This wonky, seemingly semantic debate has a real-world impact on what sort of protective measures health care companies need to take to protect their patients and workers,” Robert and Christina write. If the virus spreads mainly through airborne transmission, it could mean that hospitals need to take further steps to prevent transmission — for instance, by providing more expensive and often hard-to-get N95 respirators to all staff who work with covid-19 patients. For hospitals, the mode of transmission touches on “everything from airflow within hospital wards to patient isolation to choices of protective gear,” Robert and Christina write. “Scientists in Houston on Wednesday released a study of more than 5,000 genetic sequences of the coronavirus that reveals the virus’s continual accumulation of mutations, one of which may have made it more contagious,” Chris Mooney, Joel Achenbach and Joe Fox report. All viruses accumulate mutations, and most are harmless. The new study, which has not been peer-reviewed, claims that a change in the spike protein on a particular strain of the virus could have made that particular strain more transmissible, but the study does not say that the mutations made the virus deadlier or changed clinical outcomes. David Morens, a virologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who reviewed the new study, said that if the virus becomes more contagious it could have implications for efforts to control it, including through a vaccine. Morens also cautioned, however, that these findings come from a single study, saying, “You don’t want to over-interpret what this means.” Researchers collected 5,085 DNA sequences as the virus spread throughout Houston, making the study appear to be “the largest single aggregation of genetic sequences of the virus in the United States thus far,” Chris, Joel and Joe write. The study found that when the coronavirus first came to Houston, about 71 percent of viruses sampled had a particular mutation, known as the D614G mutation, that affects the spike protein. By the second wave of the outbreak over the summer, 99.9 percent of viruses had this mutation. Researchers also


A guide to urban stargazing: What you need to start exploring the skies close to home

far away they are and how big space is,” Beall said. “It’s a great way to get a sense of escapism.” It’s not easy to gauge participation in a hobby that consists, mostly, of sitting quietly in the dark. Still, I found stargazers around the world looking for solace in the skies. In London, writer Megan Eaves live-tweeted stars and planets using the hashtag #starentine, while rangers at the Grand Canyon hosted a virtual star party. Meanwhile, telescopes joined bikes and boats as hot tickets amid the pandemic. Celestron, the world’s largest telescope brand, reported record sales. The company’s numbers were 50 percent higher than the previous year, with back-orders at all-time highs. And while many stargazers dream of escaping cities for landscapes free from light pollution, Beall insists that getting out is rewarding wherever you are. Like many, she once assumed the opposite — when she moved to London for graduate school, Beall figured stargazing was off the table. “That’s a big myth,” she said, recalling nights spent drinking wine and spotting stars with friends in the city. “There are still so many amazing things people can see.” Even after bringing home my bartered telescope, I did much of my stargazing with binoculars, which I found more convenient. Beall approved, noting that a lack of costly (and unwieldy) equipment shouldn’t keep anyone from astronomy. “You don’t even need binoculars,” she said. “Just go out and start looking with your eyes, and see what you can see.” If you want to upgrade, Beall said, binoculars are great, especially when steadied by a tripod or another fixed object. What you see might surprise you. A pair of binoculars resolves the moon into a detailed topography of lava plains, craters and shadowy basalt. Magnification reveals four moons hovering around Jupiter, and on a dark night you can see Titan, the largest of Saturn’s 82 moons. In Washington’s Rock Creek Park, it’s even possible to spot the Andromeda Galaxy, which is 2.5 million light-years away, with a pair of birding binoculars, said Guy Brandenburg of the volunteer-run National Capital Astronomers. Still, upgrading to a telescope makes a difference. Before the pandemic, the group led monthly stargazing sessions in a field near Rock Creek Park Nature Center and Planetarium. They revealed just how much you can spot from the city when using a more powerful telescope. When Brandenburg trained the telescope on Saturn’s spinning,


Massive genetic study shows coronavirus mutating and potentially evolving amid rapid U.S. spread

in how it spreads. It is called D614G, referring to the substitution of an amino acid called aspartic acid (D) for one called glycine (G) in a region of the genome that encodes the spike protein. By the second wave of the outbreak in Houston, the study found that this variant had leaped to 99.9 percent prevalence — completing its domination of the outbreak. The researchers found that people infected with the strain had higher loads of virus in their upper respiratory tracts, a potential factor in making the strain spread more effectively. Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute in California, who was not involved in the new research, downplayed the significance of the new study. He said it “just confirms what has already been described — G increased in frequency over time.” As for the numerous other mutations the study finds, “they just catalogue them, but we don’t know if any of them have any functional relevance.” Musser said his interpretation is that D614G has been increasingly dominant in Houston and other areas because it is better adapted to spreading among humans. He acknowledged that the scientific case is not closed on this matter. “This isn’t a murder trial,” Musser said. “We’re not looking for beyond a reasonable doubt. This is a civil trial, and clearly, it’s the preponderance of the evidence that I think forces all of us into the same conclusion, which is there’s something biologically different about that strain, that family of strains.” Recently, the even larger study of the spread of the coronavirus in the United Kingdom, based on some 25,000 genomes, also found evidence that this variant of the virus outdistances its competitors “in a manner consistent with a selective advantage.” In general, scientists would expect natural selection to favor mutations that help the virus spread more effectively — since that allows it to make more copies of itself — but not necessarily ones that make it more virulent. Killing or incapacitating the host would generally not help the virus spread to more people. The study found 285 separate mutation sites that change a physical building block of the spike protein, which is the most important part of the coronavirus in the sense that it is what allows it to infect and harm humans. Forty-nine of the changes at these sites had not been seen before in other genomes sequenced around


Nearly 200 of the world’s biggest food suppliers pledge to halve their food waste

of the world’s food is unharvested or thrown away at various points in the supply chain. And all that loss is a big contributor to climate change, accounting for 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. An oft-cited analogy posits that if food waste constituted its own country, it would trail only the United States and China in its contributions to global warming. Food manufacturers are only part of the equation. The vast majority of food waste — about 80 percent — happens in homes and in consumer-facing businesses, such as grocery stores and restaurants, according to a report by the nonprofit ReFED. Food manufacturers account for only 2 percent of the problem, while consumers are responsible for 43 percent, per the report. Brian Roe, a professor in the department of agricultural, environmental and development economics at Ohio State University, said producers can do more — not just to eliminate food waste in their operations, but to ultimately help keep consumers from pitching so much, too. “There may be systems that help the consumer to waste less food so it’s not just a matter of consumers acting badly,” he says. Those might include the right packaging and labeling, better instructions, or smaller portion sizes, he notes. Roe said the willingness of big manufacturers to sign on to such an initiative is encouraging, but he’s hoping that collaborations will lead to more transparency and data sharing. That way, companies will know what’s working and what’s not. Now, he says, it might not be clear that an action taken at one step on the supply chain actually keeps more food out of landfills at the end. For example, if a farmer has a bumper crop of tomatoes one year, it might seem like a good thing to save them. But, Roe said, it might not be such a good idea if the tomatoes get further along the supply chain — where they may have been transported and used other resources along the way — and still wind up getting thrown away. “Any data to help connect the dots can help develop a systems-level view of the problem,” he said. More from Voraciously Pandemic canning is so popular, stores are running out of jars and other supplies The Goya boycott could impact the brand, experts say — just not the way you think Everything is cake, except fondant hate, which is very real


Feared coronavirus outbreaks in schools yet to arrive, early data shows

we are following . . . outbreaks have not occurred, even when someone tests positive for covid-19,” Burris said. “We’re not seeing schools as crucibles for onward transmission,” said Sara Johnson, associate professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “It’s reasonable to say that it looks promising at this point.” She added that the data suggests that schools should bring students back “slowly and carefully” and with safeguards to protect teachers and staff members. “These data are promising but covid is still a very big threat to people,” she said. These findings were underscored by an analysis this week in Science magazine, a leading academic journal. It found that children and adolescents are at a “much lower risk” for the coronavirus and said assumptions that schoolchildren would be a “key component” of the transmission chain are “most likely” wrong. “Relative to their risk of contracting disease, children and adolescents have been disproportionately affected by lockdown measures,” it contended. The early data are emerging as school officials continue to evaluate their plans and consider whether they want to change course. Many districts that began with entirely remote education are considering whether they want to introduce in-person options for some students or on certain days. The data are helpful but superintendents will want more detail, such as information about districts similar to their own, and what covid mitigation strategies seem to have worked, said Noelle Ellerson Ng, an associate director at AASA, the School Superintendents Association, which is a co-sponsor of the new dashboard reporting tool. She called the early data “potentially optimistic” but said it is premature for districts to change course and decide to open their buildings. Much of the concern is focused on teachers and other adults in the building, because data shows that covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, is far more deadly to older patients. According to the American Federation of Teachers, 14 active teachers, principals and counselors have died of covid-19 since the school year started, although it is not possible to conclude that any one of them contracted the coronavirus at school. Some experts, including teacher’s union officials, say it appears that coronavirus rates are lower in school districts where face coverings are required and polices are enforced to keep distance between students in the building, although there is scant data to prove the correlation. Randi Weingarten, president of the


After a summer of starts and stops, Maryland football begins preparation for a fall season

not practiced in pads since the week of their 2019 season finale against Michigan State. The coronavirus kept the team from holding spring practices, and preparation was about to ramp up when the Big Ten punted on the season Aug. 11. Even without games in sight, teams continued with five hours of on-field work per week. Junior defensive back Tahj Capehart said he “always focused on us having a season, regardless if they said we weren’t.” Maryland football had to pause practices in early September after dozens of athletes in other sports tested positive. After the team returned to campus in June for voluntary workouts, the Terps also had a brief stoppage in July following nine positive tests. For months, players dealt with the mental strain of having football, a core piece of their lives, in limbo. “We’ll be working hard, getting in the groove of things and then, say, something gets shut down or we get suspended again,” junior wide receiver Brian Cobbs said. “And then having to kind of ease off and then come back into it, that’s probably the most frustrating part.” The Big Ten’s recently released schedule and fall practices offer some reassurance that a sense of steadiness could return. These players no longer have to watch other teams compete on Saturdays wondering when they will return. Locksley said the coaches and players have gained an appreciation for being on the field, practicing and preparing for games — the standard pieces of their daily routines that have been intermittently missing since March. “For me, the grass has been my solace when dealing with tough, difficult times,” Locksley said. “… I know for our players, dealing with a lot of the issues that are going on in society, whether it’s social justice, covid, all the different things — it’s the one place you go where you really don’t have time to think about those things.” Senior offensive lineman Johnny Jordan, who started six games at center in 2019, returned to the team after opting out of the season in early August — before the Big Ten postponed its season and later developed more stringent medical protocols. However, Maryland lost senior defensive lineman Oluwaseun Oluwatimi, who opted out of the 2020 season, according to a team spokesman, after starting every game last year. Five other players opted out last month — quarterback Josh Jackson, offensive lineman Austin Fontaine,


Olympian Wyomia Tyus sprinted to gold and spoke out in Mexico City. America forgot her.

that, as a Black person from Griffin, Georgia, they would do something like that,” Tyus said. “I never felt that they would.” Tyus was inducted to the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame in 1985. She’s encouraged by the progress that has been made for women’s sports and athletes but believes there is still a long way to go. “Yes, we have a lot more visibility,” she said. “Yes, we have a lot more sports that women can compete in, but that’s about it. It’s not equal. Will it happen in my lifetime? I hope so.” In the wake of George Floyd’s death in police custody, the police shooting of Jacob Blake and the subsequent protests of racial and social inequity, Tyus feels athletes must make their voices heard. “The new athletes now should be at the forefront,” she said. “You have the spotlight and you have the cameras on you. You have to make the decision on how you want to protest.” While athletes in the NBA and other leagues have been active in the Black Lives Matter movement, Olympic athletes are prohibited from protesting during the Games. The International Olympic Committee’s long-standing Rule 50 bans political demonstrations, including kneeling or other protests, on the medal podium. The IOC Athletes Commission is consulting with other athletes’ groups about possible modifications to the rule ahead of next year’s Tokyo Olympics. “I think they should get rid of the rule,” Tyus said. Tyus speaks on the phone every day with her old teammate McGuire. She still wishes that Temple, who died in 2016 at 89, would get more credit for coaching so many champions and making sure they finished college. In 1984, Tyus was among 11 athletes who carried the Olympic flag during the Opening Ceremonies of the Los Angeles Games. She has thought about reprising her role when the Games come back to Los Angeles in 2028. “I can look forward to that,” Tyus said with a hearty laugh. “How old will I be then? I’ll start working out a little bit more. I’ll start setting my goals for that like I did for ‘68.” Read more: Athlete protests are now celebrated. One Olympian says she’s still paying for hers. An Olympic gold medalist said she was ‘brave’ for not wearing a mask. It was not well-received. Olympic track champion loses final appeal of rule forcing her to lower testosterone levels


When can Americans travel to Europe again? We asked 4 insiders.

The closure of European borders to American tourists in March, with no clear off-ramp, has been one painful blow of the pandemic. Six months later, Americans are starting to travel again, but international destinations are still limited. Even with some pockets of Europe available to American tourists, including Croatia, the United Kingdom and North Macedonia, the question of when the rest of the continent will reopen remains. And with Europe’s uptick of coronavirus cases and the U.S. death toll still rising, there doesn’t seem to be a clear end in sight to the travel ban. Does that mean Americans should hold off on planning trips across the pond? We spoke with four insiders on European travel to get their thoughts on when Americans may be able to return. Rick Steves, America’s Godfather of European travel, sounds sullen on a phone call to discuss the pandemic and its impact on travel. “It’s whack-a-mole until we get a grip on the virus,” Steves says, explaining that when one pocket of the United States starts to reduce its cases of the coronavirus, others lighten restrictions and see new surges of cases. “I’m really disappointed that people are so impatient and they don’t realize that you can’t just jump back to normalcy when things start to look good.” Earlier this year, Steves’s company was scheduled to take tens of thousands of Americans to Europe on guided tours; those trips were of course canceled and refunded, and now he’s started a waitlist — already 10,000 families deep — for potential 2021 tours. “The idea is when it’s safe, we want to go [to Europe] with you,” he says. “We’ve booked the tours. We want to do the tours, but we are going to provide the leadership and the integrity not to risk anybody’s health by doing these tours.” Steves says he’s hopeful that Americans will be able to return to Europe in 2021, although he’s more concerned that the businesses that make European travel so special won’t survive the economic fallout from tourism remaining on hold, not to mention the economic crisis would-be American travelers are facing at home. “We have more immediate needs right now, and that’s dealing with the reality of the economic division in our own society here,” Steves says. “When the easy money from the government runs out and this pandemic stretches on because of our inability to get a grip


Jamal Khashoggi wanted a more tolerant Saudi Arabia. Two years later, his truth still scorches the kingdom.

Khashoggi was a complicated man. His personal life was sometimes ragged, and his political beliefs were a mix of his yearning for reform, his Islamic faith and his ties to a royal family that had nurtured him. In his time at The Post, he became increasingly passionate about journalism. The last column he wrote, published on Oct. 17, 2018, after his death, was a plea for free expression and independent media in the Arab world. What has happened in the real Saudi Arabia since his passing? Some of the liberalizing reforms that Khashoggi favored have gone forward under MBS. Women are freer overall: They can drive, travel without a male guardian, play sports more easily and hold prominent public positions such as ambassador. Life in the kingdom is more open, too, on the surface: Young Saudis can attend movies, or concerts, or wrestling matches. But there’s a dark underside to MBS’s kingdom — a fear factor deepened by Khashoggi’s death and the imprisonment and torture of many other dissenters. Female activists and other potential critics are held in a network of prisons; children of dissidents are banned from travel; prominent princes are muzzled and jailed. Saudis tell me they don’t take their phones into traditional gatherings known as dewaniyas, so their conversations can’t be secretly intercepted. They are buying U.S. SIM cards to evade MBS’s surveillance state. “People are scared,” one Saudi told me this week. “There’s a lot of silent dissent.” MBS’s grip on power seems as strong as ever, partly because of the climate of fear. He has crushed opposition within the royal family and intimidated other princes and wealthy Saudis by seizing their assets. One Saudi describes the crown prince as “strong and paranoid,” but not “strong and confident.” The crown prince’s popularity in Washington, once glittering, has been irrevocably tarnished by the murder. He allied with President Trump (who boasted “I saved his ass” to journalist Bob Woodward). But the Trump connection meant that MBS and Saudi Arabia were taking sides in a bitterly partisan Washington, and that the kingdom lost whatever bipartisan support it once enjoyed. The saddest legacy of Khashoggi’s murder is the lack of accountability for the crime. A secret trial was held last year, and eight defendants were sentenced to prison this month, after earlier death sentences for five of them were reversed by a pardon from Khashoggi’s eldest son. U.N. Special


The code: How genetic science helped expose a secret coronavirus outbreak

taken from patients at the system’s hospital and clinics. The first vials of virus arrived in early April, carried by courier in a cooler packed with ice. Sequencing them was a multistep operation that took the better part of 48 hours, but the data was more useful the faster it came in. To keep the process going, Kenny would drive to his darkened laboratory at odd hours of the night, carefully pipetting samples onto sequencing chips while the world around him slept. When he at last had results in hand, Kenny uploaded each genome to a global database, then sorted the sequences into their spots on the coronavirus family tree. This allowed him to identify distinct sub-strains introduced to the region from outbreaks around the world. Two sub-strains, found in La Crosse and Postville, shared a distinctive mutation, marking them as part of the same major lineage. By the time the viruses arrived in the Midwest, they had acquired additional key mutations that Kenny could use to track each sub-strain. Each virus variant acts as a spark; if it lands on poor kindling — say, someone who practices social distancing and is able to quarantine as soon as she realizes she is sick — it will soon die out. Most of the sub-strains Kenny sequenced, including the La Crosse variant, showed up only a few times in his data, suggesting these sparks were quickly extinguished. But the Postville sub-strain — characterized by three distinctive mutations that have not been found in combination anywhere else in the world — appeared over and over again, picking up additional mutations along the way. Kenny found 27 cases, mostly from Postville and the surrounding area. “I thought, ‘Wow. This is a crazy, out-of-control situation,’ ” Kenny said. “The fact that they all . . . clustered together on this tree really indicated there was a single introduction to that region that really took hold and expanded.” The scientist began to scour the documents that accompanied his virus samples. Though the tiny vials of virus had no names attached to them, they came with fairly detailed medical records. The patients ranged in age from 7 to 80. Their symptoms spanned from mild coughs and headaches to breathlessness and raging fever. But most compelling was this: The majority of initial patients infected with this sub-strain worked at Agri Star or lived with someone who did. Something


required to come to work ill,” the complaint said. “Management is telling workers that covid-19 is a lie and it has been made up by the government.” IOSHA never visited the plant to investigate these claims; on-site inspections in Iowa have been curtailed during the pandemic. Instead, the agency asked Agri Star for a written response. “Not everyone understands the value of our operations being open, but we can assure you we have taken precautions to ensure our employees are safe,” Guerrero wrote in an April 14 letter. She denied all the allegations in the complaint and offered a long list of the measures she said the company had adopted: handwashing trainings, homemade masks. The complaint was closed. Those early months of the pandemic were a scramble, Guerrero recalled. She’d never handled a health crisis like this — no one had — and the government provided little help. The Department of Labor and the CDC didn’t release guidance for meatpacking facilities until April 26. The Iowa health department rarely communicated with her about tracking new cases or tracing their contacts, leaving Guerrero to cobble together a spreadsheet of sick workers on her own. When she walked outside the plant, she said, it seemed as though the rest of the town wasn’t taking any precautions at all. “Nobody was really able to guide us on how we should maneuver through this,” she said. It wasn’t until May 5, more than seven weeks after the first Postville cases were diagnosed and 15 days after Agri Star requested help, that a state testing strike force finally came to the plant. Over 450 workers were tested for current and past infections. Iowa did not make the results of that event public, and Guerrero said the state provided no interpretation when it sent the company its lab report. The state’s policy, articulated by Department of Public Health deputy director Sarah Reisetter at a May 27 news conference, is to only disclose outbreaks in workplaces like meatpacking plants if 10 percent of employees test positive, and then only if specifically asked by a member of the media. (A nursing home is considered to have an outbreak once three people test positive.) The state declined The Post’s requests for Agri Star’s case data. “We didn’t really provide any information about them at all,” Polly Carver-Kimm, a former spokeswoman for the Iowa health department, said of towns like


shared the data had been told they could be fined, fired, even imprisoned for violating medical privacy laws. Ellingson stopped clamoring for data. The number of cases in Postville has not been released since. Toj and Pérez spent three weeks battling the coronavirus. Their oldest daughter also apparently came down with the disease: The 14-year-old lost her sense of taste for several days. Even more frightening was when Toj’s mother fell sick. She spent six days in the hospital, breathing oxygen through a tube. She recovered, Toj said, because God was protecting her. This whole time, God was the only one protecting them all. Toj walked back into the plant for the first time in late April and encountered a changed Agri Star. All around the building, posters proclaimed the importance of hand washing. New workstations had been marked out on the floor to help people maintain social distance. Every employee was given a homemade mask. “Now we need masks?” Toj asked, infuriated. “Six feet of distance — for what? Everybody is already infected because there were lots of people who got sick and they didn’t even notice." But Kenny did. He kept a vast chart of the region’s coronavirus outbreak pinned to a cork board in his office in La Crosse. Tiny colored dots represented cases for which he had a genome. Thin lines connected them according to the mutations they shared. Looking at the Postville cluster — more than two dozen yellow dots linked by three distinctive mutations — it was clear to him what happened. The sub-strain started with a single case. But in the crowded conditions of the meat processing plant, it exploded. “A single viral introduction led to unrestrained spread within the facility,” Kenny wrote in a study on the website MedRxiv, where scientists post “preprint” research that has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. His research, he said, showed “the collateral damage resulting from widespread dissemination of this disease from a meat-packing epicenter across a large midwestern region.” Multiple lines of evidence put Agri Star at the epicenter of this outbreak, Kenny said. The fact that patients from across Postville’s diverse communities were infected with the same sub-strain — despite living, shopping and worshiping in different places — suggests they contracted the illness in the one setting they shared: the plant. Also key was that Kenny found a husband and wife with