The disturbing echoes of an Ebola outbreak in the U.S. coronavirus pandemic

The message seemed so obvious. Yet it was being blared constantly from truck loudspeakers and pasted on billboards and even printed on T-shirts throughout Sierra Leone’s capital city in the summer of 2014: “Ebola is real!” The world’s worst outbreak of the dreaded hemorrhagic fever was burning through West Africa at that very moment. Thousands already were sick and dying. To doubt the viral threat seemed bizarre. Superstitious. To a reporter sent to cover the outbreak, the “Ebola is real!” message was confusing. How can they not know the virus is real? But now it seems some Americans need to hear a similar message: Coronavirus is real! Vice President Pence even said at a coronavirus task force news conference Tuesday that the threat of the virus “can be very significant and very real.” The novel coronavirus — SARS-CoV-2 — is real. But many people are not acting like it. You can sense the exasperation of public health officials as they plead for people to stay home as much as possible and to practice social distancing. The rule of thumb among doctors and journalists during the Ebola outbreak when I was there was to act as though everyone in public was contagious. Because you didn’t know. That applies to the coronavirus pandemic, too. Any other argument — that it’s just the flu or it’s not so bad — is just a version of doubting whether the virus is real. I never imagined that an outbreak in the United States would so closely resemble what I witnessed in Sierra Leone six years ago. But the parallels are everywhere. The fear is familiar. So is the complacency. Schools were closed and large gatherings banned in both countries to slow the virus’s spread. There is the same anger about the government’s response, the same cries that the hospitals are not prepared, that masks and gloves are in short supply. Both outbreaks delivered crushing blows by killing doctors who were viewed as public heroes — Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist in Wuhan, China, who was among the first to sound the alarm about the novel coronavirus and last month died of it, and Sheik Umar Khan, a virologist in Sierra Leone who led his country’s fight against Ebola until it killed him in July 2014. The viruses are different in important ways: The coronavirus is more contagious than Ebola. It is also less deadly. But no


contagious. Because you didn’t know. That applies to the coronavirus pandemic, too. Any other argument — that it’s just the flu or it’s not so bad — is just a version of doubting whether the virus is real. I never imagined that an outbreak in the United States would so closely resemble what I witnessed in Sierra Leone six years ago. But the parallels are everywhere. The fear is familiar. So is the complacency. Schools were closed and large gatherings banned in both countries to slow the virus’s spread. There is the same anger about the government’s response, the same cries that the hospitals are not prepared, that masks and gloves are in short supply. Both outbreaks delivered crushing blows by killing doctors who were viewed as public heroes — Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist in Wuhan, China, who was among the first to sound the alarm about the novel coronavirus and last month died of it, and Sheik Umar Khan, a virologist in Sierra Leone who led his country’s fight against Ebola until it killed him in July 2014. The viruses are different in important ways: The coronavirus is more contagious than Ebola. It is also less deadly. But no one underestimated Ebola. The pathogen has haunted the world since it was discovered in the 1970s. That respect led to fear — which probably saved lives. Preparing to travel to Sierra Leone, I’d followed the advice of a collection of infectious-disease doctors and other journalists. It was ad hoc and probably over the top. But it was not insufficient. I buzzed my hair, shaved my face clean and trimmed my fingernails to eliminate places where the virus could build up. I probably didn’t need to do that. My suitcase carried full-body Tyvek suits, the kind of white protective coveralls that hospital staff members wear now. I had ample supplies of disposable exam gloves, splash goggles, rubber boots and N95 respirator surgical masks — versions of the ones suddenly gone from U.S. store shelves. I also had a giant tub of Clorox Healthcare bleach germicidal wipes along with “super disinfectant wipes,” plus three large bottles of hand sanitizer. I never wore the Tyvek suits on my two-week reporting trip. I donned a face mask just once — when we conducted interviews outside an Ebola hospital ward. Moving through the streets of Freetown, Sierra Leone’s crowded capital city, I quickly discovered that


PGA Championship postponed over coronavirus concerns

Golf’s first two majors of 2020 have now been postponed over coronavirus concerns after the PGA Championship, set for May 14-17, was pushed back Tuesday. The Masters, set for April 9-12, was postponed Friday, and it has not yet been rescheduled. Dates in June for the third major, the U.S. Open, are still being held by the USGA, but that organization said Tuesday it will “continue to monitor all available guidance and … do what is in the best interests of our community.” In announcing the decision regarding the PGA Championship, which was to be held at TPC Harding Park in San Francisco, PGA of America CEO Seth Waugh said, “Throughout our evaluation process, we have been committed to following the guidance of public health authorities and given the coronavirus shelter-in-place order in effect in San Francisco, postponement is the best decision for all involved." Waugh added that his organization was working with PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan and San Francisco Mayor London Breed to find “a date this summer when it is once again safe and responsible” to hold the tournament. The PGA Tour has been on hold since last week’s Players Championship was called off after the first round. At the time, the tour also canceled upcoming events through the Texas Open, scheduled for April 2-5, and on Tuesday four more events were canceled, wiping out the tour’s schedule through the week in May when the PGA Championship would have been held. “As we receive more clarity in the coming weeks, the TOUR will be working with our tournament organizations and title sponsors, in collaboration with golf’s governing bodies, to build a PGA TOUR schedule for 2020 that ensures the health and safety for all associated with our sport and a meaningful conclusion to the season,” the PGA Tour said. “We will provide further updates when those plans come into focus.” “You can plan for all kinds of situations, but this one is really unique — just think about how much it’s changed since last Wednesday night, think about how much it’s changed in the last 24 hours,” Monahan said. “I think we can expect more of that.” The first PGA Tour event that could be played under the revised calendar is the Charles Schwab Challenge, set for May 21-24 in Fort Worth. The PGA and other golf tours have been joined by nearly every major sports organization


Merkel says coronavirus presents gravest crisis since WWII

the Robert Koch Institute, the federal agency responsible for infectious disease control. Underscoring the lack of coordination, Gerald Gaß, president of the German Association of Hospitals, said he had been surprised by the Berlin state government’s announcement on Tuesday that it would build a new hospital with capacity for 1,000 patients. The confusion over responsibility and coordination at a time of such urgency has thrown open a debate over the very structure of Germany’s federal system — which traces its roots back to the Holy Roman Empire, but was also engineered to have weak central power in the wake of Nazi rule. The Rheinische Post newspaper described the flaws in the country’s coronavirus response as a “German tragedy.” The political magazine Cicero commented: “Federalism can be deadly.” “This really is a stress test for our federal system,” said Alexander Kekulé, who heads the institute of medical microbiology at the University of Halle. He said that while Germany’s problems may have parallels in the United States, where each state has been making its own determinations, the Robert Koch Institute lacks the powers of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He noted, for example, that one university clinic in Aachen said it couldn’t stick to 14-day quarantine rules for asymptomatic people exposed to the virus, as it would impact staffing levels. In recent days, German states have sought to act with more coordination, issuing a set of guidelines for countrywide closures. The measures — which included the shuttering of bars, nightclubs and nonessential shops, as well as restrictions on restaurant hours — have come alongside grim predictions from German virologists. Germany’s confirmed cases jumped by more than more than 1,000 overnight Tuesday, to a total of 8,198, according to the Robert Koch Institute, which warned that infections were growing at an exponential rate. The institute upgraded its assessment of the risk level for Germany from “moderate” to “severe.” If effective measures aren’t taken, researchers warned, 10 million Germans could be infected in the next three months. Still, some state governments have resisted the supposedly agreed-upon guidelines. The local premier of Thuringia said he wouldn’t be closing playgrounds for now, though some areas shut theirs anyway. The southwestern German town of Schramberg also kept playgrounds open on Tuesday. The local newspaper, Schwarzwälder Bote, quoted the mayor as saying it was not the federal government but rather the regional minister-president of Baden-Württemberg


For Tokyo 2020, the IOC is weighing many factors. Are athletes one of them?

and regimented training program designed to peak for qualifiers that might not take place? Or curtail training in hopes of protecting themselves and others — but risk falling behind if, against all odds, the show goes on as scheduled? “Athletes are in a no-win situation where they are trying to continue to prepare for the Olympic/Paralympic Games, but they are finding it more difficult to do so and will need to take more and more risks in order to get the appropriate training,” Han Xiao, a table tennis player who serves as the chair of the USOPC’s Athletes’ Advisory Council, wrote in an email to The Washington Post. “They will eventually be endangering both themselves and the public in order to prepare to compete, and it will not be their fault.” Xiao said his council does not have an official position on whether the Olympics should be postponed or canceled, but it has heard from athletes across sports. Right now, he said, athletes are against cancellation, which makes sense. These people aren’t just deciding whether to go for a run after work. These runs are their whole lives. Players in the NBA or Major League Baseball will have another season if this one is canceled. An athlete preparing for the Tokyo Games has been building to this point for four years — and more. The idea of cancellation makes the brain hurt and the heart fall. But Xiao said more athletes are open to the idea of postponement. Internationally, some are calling for it. Their training already has been disrupted. Like the rest of us, they’re concerned for their safety. They deserve clear and transparent messaging about contingency plans should the Games not be able to start as scheduled July 24. “I would like to encourage all the athletes to continue their preparation for the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 with great confidence and full steam,” IOC President Thomas Bach said March 3. Think about how long ago that feels and how much has changed since. Yet the IOC hasn’t backed down from that stance, as absurd as it seems. How is an athlete to train “with great confidence and full steam” in the current environment? Spain and Italy, for instance, are completely shut down. Try finding great confidence and full steam there. “We want the Olympics to take place, but with security,” Spanish Olympic Committee President Alejandro Blanco said in


How the world’s political artists are depicting the covid-19 pandemic

As the coronavirus pandemic spreads and intensifies, the editorial art spawned by the crisis is growing starker, with jokes about hoarding toilet paper giving way to grimmer images of an infected globe. There were “more China cliches in the early days of the pandemic,” says Daryl Cagle, who syndicates creators from around the world. And it is overseas cartoonists especially, the Cagle Cartoons editor says, who are often steering away from the wordier jokes about covid-19. “World cartoonists lean toward drawing more symbolic cartoons vs. U.S. cartoonists, who are more gag-oriented,” says Cagle. That’s because American editors, he notes, prefer the gags. As artists satirize a pandemic that has reached 200,000 confirmed cases worldwide, the visual metaphors often diverge, too. “Foreign cartoonists draw more cartoons based on the physical appearance of the microscopic coronavirus,” Cagle says. “They draw coronavirus cartoons with soccer metaphors and put face masks on everything." Here’s a closer look at how some overseas cartoonists are commenting on the covid-19 pandemic: Michael Kountouris Hajo de Reijger Manny Francisco Paresh Nath Sluka Nikola Listes Schot Osmani Simanca Dario Castillejos Read more: From a restricted Italy, an artist’s eye on the coronavirus This story has been updated.


The Daily 202: Six chilling estimates underscore danger of coronavirus to public health and the economy

residences and rooms. Of the four people who have died in New Orleans, two had been at Lambeth, where there are 12 additional cases.” A paper in the journal Pediatrics, based on 2,143 young people in China, provides the most extensive evidence on the spread of the virus in children, and there is bad and good news. “The study provides confirmation that coronavirus infections are in fact generally less severe in kids, with more than 90 percent having mild to moderate disease or even being asymptomatic. But it contains worrisome information about one subset — infants — and suggests that children may be a critical factor in the disease’s rapid spread,” Ariana Eunjung Cha reports. “The first thing to know is that children are getting infected across all age groups and genders. … According to the analysis by Shanghai Children’s Medical Center, … mild cases (52 percent) were marked by the typical symptoms of a cold — fever, fatigue, cough, sore throat, runny nose and sneezing. Some patients had no fever and only digestive symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain and diarrhea. Those with moderate infection (39 percent) had pneumonia with frequent fever and cough, mostly dry cough, followed by a wetter cough. … Severe cases were rare (5 percent), as were those who required critical care (0.4 percent.)” A student at a Dallas middle school tested positive after being sent home by a school nurse. “Leaders of the 26 European countries that are part of what is normally a free-movement zone also agreed Tuesday to shut their external borders to most nonresidents for the first time. The about-face in Europe is proving as disruptive as it would be if American states imposed border controls on one another,” Michael Birnbaum reports from Brussels. ”And since Europe’s countries are no longer built for self-sufficiency and no country manufactures or grows everything it needs, the effect of the internal blockade could quickly become catastrophic. Trucks trying to enter Poland from Germany were backed up 25 miles on Tuesday as Polish border guards checked drivers’ temperatures, overall health and documents before allowing them through. Meanwhile, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, whose only connection to the rest of the E.U. is through Poland, have had to mount a rescue operation by air and sea to help their citizens trying to get home. The Baltic states have deployed the Latvian national airline and even chartered


by a wetter cough. … Severe cases were rare (5 percent), as were those who required critical care (0.4 percent.)” A student at a Dallas middle school tested positive after being sent home by a school nurse. “Leaders of the 26 European countries that are part of what is normally a free-movement zone also agreed Tuesday to shut their external borders to most nonresidents for the first time. The about-face in Europe is proving as disruptive as it would be if American states imposed border controls on one another,” Michael Birnbaum reports from Brussels. ”And since Europe’s countries are no longer built for self-sufficiency and no country manufactures or grows everything it needs, the effect of the internal blockade could quickly become catastrophic. Trucks trying to enter Poland from Germany were backed up 25 miles on Tuesday as Polish border guards checked drivers’ temperatures, overall health and documents before allowing them through. Meanwhile, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, whose only connection to the rest of the E.U. is through Poland, have had to mount a rescue operation by air and sea to help their citizens trying to get home. The Baltic states have deployed the Latvian national airline and even chartered ferries so their nationals can scramble to German ports and sail around Poland. … “Leaders of the E.U. institutions in Brussels, watching national leaders erect walls all around them, have been desperately trying to keep the internal borders open, at least partially. One major risk, they say, is that medical supplies necessary to combat the coronavirus will pile up in trucks that have been stopped at national frontiers … France and Germany last week threw up political borders around crucial medical equipment produced in their territory, banning the export of protective gear, including masks, to any other country, even Italy, which is struggling with shortages. After entreaties by E.U. leaders, the countries loosened their bans, but not before the message was sent to Italians and others: In a crisis, don’t count on your neighbors to help you out.” Taiwan will deny entry to many foreigners. Chinese citizens abroad, including in the U.S., are seeking refuge from the coronavirus pandemic by returning home “From the start of the nomination battle, March 17 — the day by which roughly 60 percent of all pledged delegates were to be allocated — was circled on the calendars of many strategists and campaign staffers as


U.S. Olympic training centers close, sending Tokyo hopefuls scrambling

the athletes were told, “and the duration could be extended.” The center is the largest training hub for athletes training for the Olympics. Several U.S. Olympic teams use the space on a permanent or regular basis, including boxing, cycling, shooting and wrestling. There were about 200 Olympic and Paralympic athletes training there this week, about 75 percent of whom are considered resident athletes, which means they stay in dorms and train at the site full time. Athletes can stay at the training center and access medical and dining services, but all of the training facilities are off-limits. “Out of training for a month,” gymnast Sam Mikulak, a two-time Olympian and six-time national champion, posted on Instagram. “I know I’m not alone on this, how is everyone else dealing with their Olympic preparation in these times?” Many other Olympic hopefuls have been displaced this week, including scores of college athletes targeting Tokyo and those who train at universities’ facilities — gymnasts, swimmers, divers and track and field athletes among them — who also had to find new training accommodations after campuses closed down. The athletes who choose to leave Colorado Springs could struggle to find new training bases; facilities across the country have been shuttered in recent days, including private gyms, YMCA sites and many facilities with Olympic-size swimming pools. The Tokyo Games are scheduled to begin July 24. Even as concerns grow that a postponement might have to be considered, the International Olympic Committee has encouraged athletes to keep training and planning to compete this summer. “The health and well-being of all those involved in the preparations for the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 is our number-one concern,” IOC President Thomas Bach said in a communique issued Tuesday. “All measures are being taken to safeguard the safety and interests of athletes, coaches and support teams.” The Olympic training center in Lake Placid, N.Y., was similarly closed this week. New York’s Olympic Regional Development Authority announced Sunday that all training facilities, in addition to all ski mountains, must suspend operations. The site is the training base for many athletes who compete in winter sports, including bobsledders, lugers, biathletes and ski jumpers. Their competition seasons had largely wrapped, and many already had left the site. Similar to the Colorado facility, the Lake Placid gyms and training centers are closed, but athletes who remain still have access to dining and medical services and conditioning.


More lifesaving ventilators are available. Hospitals can’t afford them.

turn the switch on a lot of different things. We could change in a very short time,” said Brahim Ardolic, executive director of Staten Island University Hospital, which is part of a 22-hospital chain. Foster said she has not heard any American Hospital Association member hospital say it was not purchasing ventilators because of cost. “They want to be fully prepared to serve the needs of their community and to do so intelligently,” she said. Hospitals meanwhile are scrambling to buy as much personal protective equipment as they can for medical staff before the coming wave of infection, including disposable protective masks called N95 respirators, which are in short supply nationwide. On the front lines of one of the nation’s earliest outbreaks, J. Randall Curtis, a doctor in Seattle, has treated six coronavirus patients in the intensive care unit at Harborview Medical Center, three of them requiring ventilators (including one who died). He cited as unique in those patients’ care both the intense focus on infection control and also the heavy use of personal protective equipment for medical staff. The team managed the patients with the state-of-the-art ventilators, and he said more are available. “Right now, we are mobilizing additional staff and cordoning off ICUs to take care of these patients, canceling surgeries, but we’re not exceeding capacity,” he said. Nationally, the gap between demand and supply of ventilators could run into the tens of thousands, according to estimates. An analysis by the Society for Critical Care Medicine, citing figures developed for the American Hospital Association, said U.S. hospitals have 62,000 full-featured ventilators for advanced intensive care units with nearly 100,000 more with lesser capabilities. Contrast supply with potential demand: More than 900,000 patients may need ventilator care during the coronavirus pandemic, the analysis concluded. Keeping backup ventilators is impractical for most hospitals because of the need to service and maintain them and train additional staff during rare events when they are needed, said Lewis Kaplan, a trauma surgeon at the University of Pennsylvania and president of the Society of Critical Care Medicine. “It’s like taking military planes out of your boneyard,” he said. “There can be a variety of economic disincentives to be prepared for the worst thing that can happen." Not all patients would be sick at once, so the shortfall may not be as dire as it may seem, Kaplan added. And many coronavirus patients can be


How to nurture your small piece of the Earth, without harming the rest of it

need. Old-fashioned compost tea was a passive concoction of compost or aged manure left to soak in a can of water for a few days. Today it is more likely to be a sophisticated brewed organic product. Home gardeners can make their own versions by investing in some equipment and devoting themselves to its manufacture. Optimally, a mesh bag filled with high-quality compost is placed in a tank of water and aerated for a day or two. The ensuing microbe-rich brew is then sprayed as a soil tonic to build populations of beneficial microbes, reducing the need for fertilizers. Its full value is debated — some say compost tea makes plants so healthy they shrug off diseases — but almost everyone agrees it invigorates plants. The problem with many pesticides is that they kill beneficial (or merely neutral) organisms that you are not targeting; this extends to systemic pesticides such as neonicotinoids or organic pesticides such as pyrethrins. “I like to say cobra venom is organic,” said Forrest, vice president for horticulture and living collections at the New York Botanical Garden. Gardeners who are trying to provide habitat for wildlife or encourage pollinators cringe when neighbors have their yards sprayed for mosquitoes. The best way to combat mosquitoes is to remove sources of standing water, where larvae develop. In ponds, you can add fish, which eat the larvae, or apply pellets of Bti, a natural larvicide. Rudek knows firsthand the effects of mosquito pesticides. He lives on a one-third-acre lot in suburban Philadelphia, where he kept honeybees. The township came along his street to spray for mosquitoes. “It killed my bees, immediately,” he said. Many pests can be handpicked and dumped in a bleach solution; they can be sprayed individually with a bottle of insecticidal soap, and some can be vacuumed up. Lawns are useful and have a visual appeal, but they are the most dependent areas for fertilizers, pesticides and precious water. If you want a lush, manicured lawn, “then you owe it to yourself and to the world to understand what you’re putting on the lawn and what your contractor is putting on the lawn, what they’re doing to the environment,” Forrest said. “Make sure you make an informed decision.” Most lawns can be reduced in size and still provide a place for the kids and the dog to let off steam. You can also do what a


U.S. government, tech industry discussing ways to use smartphone location data to combat coronavirus

nationwide scramble to stop a deadly malady that has shuttered businesses, skewered the stock market, sent students home from school and now threatens to overwhelm the U.S. medical system with patients in need of critical care. Over the past week, White House officials led by Michael Kratsios, the country’s chief technology officer, have convened meetings to leverage the tech expertise of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, IBM and other technology leaders. The government has encouraged social-media sites to take a more aggressive approach to thwart coronavirus conspiracy theories, The Washington Post has reported, responding to concerns that foreign misinformation might be stoking panic about the outbreak. And the Trump administration has explored partnering with the tech industry to improve telework and telehealth offerings for millions of Americans. The relationship hasn’t been without its hiccups: On Friday, President Trump announced Google would be developing a website so Americans could learn how to get tested for coronavirus, which causes the disease covid-19. That differed from the initial statements from Google’s parent company, Alphabet, which had indicated it planned a more limited offering targeting residents of California. Ultimately, though, Google said soon after it would unveil a website to provide information for U.S. patients nationwide. On Monday, White House leaders, tech experts and health officials struck a more unified note, unveiling a portal for roughly 29,000 research papers on coronavirus. The portal allows the tech industry’s artificial-intelligence tools — which can scan and analyze data en masse — to process the papers rapidly to uncover new insights about the global malady. “Decisive action from America’s science and technology enterprise is critical to prevent, detect, treat, and develop solutions to COVID-19,” Kratsios said in a statement. The new efforts by Washington and Silicon Valley arrived the same week that dozens of engineers, executives and epidemiologists issued an open letter, calling on companies to take a greater stand against coronavirus. Specifically, they encouraged Apple and Google to adopt “privacy preserving” features that might enable authorities to help doctors determine people who were in contact with a patient that later tested positive for coronavirus. “Technology companies have taken important steps already, such as closing offices in affected areas or showing custom search results in place of user generated content. But we believe there is a lot more that Silicon Valley can do to assist with large scale mitigation,” they wrote. Smartphones regularly transmit their locations to wireless


carriers and often to major tech companies as well, including Google and Facebook, to make some of their services work. The makers of apps that deliver weather reports, hail rides or help people find a coffee shop also frequently collect location information, and some sell it to firms that mine the data for business insights and opportunities. Privacy advocates typically look skeptically on such commercial uses of location data, calling for stricter laws governing its use. Recent news about Israel’s plans to use location data to help track the coronavirus similarly sparked intense discussions about the legal and ethical implications of deploying such data to thwart the spread of disease and get medical help to infected people. “The balance between privacy and pandemic policy is a delicate one,” Al Gidari, director of privacy at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, tweeted last week. “The problem here is that this is not a law school exam. Technology can save lives, but if the implementation unreasonably threatens privacy, more lives may be at risk.” The issues are all the more sensitive for Silicon Valley because the companies faced a severe backlash in 2013, following disclosures about the role of tech company data in surveillance by the National Security Agency, made public by agency contractor Edward Snowden. Relations between tech companies and government officials were severely strained for years after and have improved only gradually. “Privacy is the first to go when there are national security issues,” said Ashkan Soltani, a former Federal Trade Commission chief technologist who covered the Snowden revelations as a journalist. In seeking to battle the coronavirus, the U.S. government is not seeking to collect and maintain a database of Americans’ whereabouts, sources cautioned. Rather, U.S. officials have asked whether companies’ vast stores of geolocation data might help epidemiologists spot trends, including vulnerable populations, or identify areas at risk, such as hospitals under strain, two people said. Facebook is already working with health researchers and nonprofits in several countries to provide anonymized and aggregated statistics about people’s movements through a project called disease-prevention maps. Facebook populates its maps with the aid of its users, who have given the company permission to collect their location — harnessed via their smartphones — while its app runs in the background. Those locations are then aggregated and anonymized by Facebook engineers, who can calculate the likelihood people in one city or


Supermarkets are limiting the number of shoppers at one time. Temperature checks and delivery-only stores may follow.

The novel coronavirus has pitched grocers onto the front lines of an accelerating public health crisis, forcing many chains to reduce hours and put buying caps on such high-demand foods as ground beef and frozen pizzas. Now some chains and independent grocers are restricting the number of shoppers in their stores or offering hours only for the elderly. Industry experts and trade groups say it’s only a matter of time before supermarkets take even more drastic measures, as they look for ways to curb the spread of the highly contagious virus among customers and employees. Many are looking abroad for guidance. In Italy, Lidl is capping stores to 20 shoppers at a time, who are limited to 10-minute slots. In the United Kingdom, some supermarkets are opening an hour early, at 8 a.m., to accommodate elderly shoppers, who are at higher risk if they contract the virus. In China, at the height of its outbreak, stores checked customers’ temperatures at the door and required them to stand at least three feet apart from others in line. U.S. chains like Kroger, Walmart and Dollar General have already begun shortening store hours to allow employees enough time to restock and disinfect at the end of the day. Costco said in an email to members on Tuesday that it would begin restricting the number of shoppers in stores in the interest of social distancing but did not provide details on how it would do so. Target announced it would reserve an hour on Wednesday mornings for elderly shoppers and those with underlying health conditions. “We’re all having conversations, but we want to make sure we don’t implement these [measures] too early,” said Doug Baker, who heads crisis management for the Food Marketing Institute, a trade group for food retailers and wholesalers. “We’ll probably have to start limiting the number of people, but how do we do that so they’re not all just waiting in the parking lot?" Smaller grocers in some part of the country have begun experimenting with ways to curb the flow of shoppers. In Youngsville, La., NuNu’s Fresh Market has a 15-person limit from 6:30 to 7:30 a.m. — a move aimed at protecting vulnerable groups. Managers are also limiting essentials like bread, rice, eggs and baby formula to two per customer and have asked shoppers to limit the number of people they bring along on shopping trips. “We started


actual number of people who can be in stores. Stores could soon move to even more segmented schedules — with specific blocks for families with children, say, or those with weakened immunity, in coming days, said Brittain Ladd, a consultant to Kroger and other retailers. “This virus doesn’t treat everybody the same, so grocery retailers can’t either,” he said. The discussions on how to separate shoppers are part of a broader reckoning for supermarket operators being faced with unprecedented levels of demand and looming uncertainty, as entire cities and states order residents to shelter in place. Many are also worried about labor shortages, as tasks increase and workers fall Ill. Walmart and Kroger — the nation’s two largest grocers — are rapidly recruiting store workers and truck drivers to meet demand, while Amazon has said it will hire 100,000 warehouse and delivery workers. (Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.) “The message now is: If you’ve been laid off from your job at a restaurant or another retailer, we’re hiring,” said Phil Lempert, a California-based supermarket industry analyst. “There is a big need for people to stock shelves, to clean, to do absolutely everything.” The shifts are also accelerating grocers’ efforts to automate their fulfillment centers and make online ordering more efficient by investing in drones and autonomous delivery vehicles, industry consultants said. Online delivery has typically accounted for just 2 to 3 percent of a grocer’s business, said Ladd, “but if this thing keeps going the way it is, we could be looking at a situation where 50 to 60 percent of grocery retailers’ business comes from online.” At Giant Food, demand for delivery services — which include a new “contactless option” — has tripled in recent days, as customers look for ways to limit exposure, interim president Ira Kress said. Retailers have often used their stores to fulfill online orders. But as demand skyrockets — both in stores and online — many are finding there’s little inventory left for delivery orders. Some have started talking about quickly opening “dark stores” — locations where inventory is picked for online orders but closed to the public, Ladd said. “Grocery retailers are saying, ‘How quickly can we open dark stores and automate as much as this as possible, before the virus gets worse?’ ” he said. “This is unlike anything the industry has ever seen.”


As MLB scrambles to adjust to coronavirus, minor league players face fear and uncertainty

Baseball America reported that the Tampa Bay Rays, Detroit Tigers, New York Mets, Los Angeles Dodgers, Boston Red Sox, Cleveland Indians, San Diego Padres, St. Louis Cardinals and Miami Marlins will continue paying minor leaguers spring training stipends and meal allowances. Many other players were sent home without pay or any promise of weekly stipends, which were supposed to get them through the next few weeks, according to interviews with players, agents and executives and a handful of media reports. The minor league regular season was scheduled to start April 9 — a date that could get pushed back by a few months — and the players won’t get paid until games begin. They cannot apply for unemployment assistance because of their agreements with MLB. They will have trouble finding jobs, a few players noted, because they could have to pick up and leave in a week. Yet without a union, they have no negotiating power in these instances. Eight minor league players spoke with The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity for fear that doing so publicly and without their team’s permission could lead to punishment. The Nationals player who described himself and others as “definitely scared” made $7,500 in 2019, with his last check coming in early September. He budgeted his winter income, which he made working at a golf course, to last until the middle of April. But now he will have to get creative with the $140 stipend he received from the team Friday. “If it’s a couple weeks, fine, we can scrape by and handle this,” he said Sunday afternoon. “But if it gets to be a month, two months, you could see guys quit because they just have to do something else to support themselves. That’s my biggest worry, that this isn’t sustainable.” A few hours later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made an announcement that few players missed: It recommended that organizers “cancel or postpone in-person events that consist of 50 people or more throughout the United States” for the next eight weeks. MLB announced Monday that it would comply with those guidelines. It will be a while before there are minor league games. It was assistant general manager Mark Scialabba who broke the news to Nationals minor leaguers Saturday morning. Position players had arrived in West Palm Beach, Fla., toward the end of the week and had had only


French Open and U.S. Open jockey for position on September’s sports calendar

of the sport’s four Grand Slam events, originally was scheduled to run from May 24 to June 7 in Paris. But on Saturday, French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe announced that all nonessential businesses must close until further notice. The ATP and WTA tours Wednesday extended their suspensions of play through June 7, wiping out the spring clay-court season. The U.S. Open is the last of the season’s Grand Slam events. “The current confinement measures have made it impossible for us to continue with the dates originally planned,” the French Open said in a statement. “This is madness,” Vasek Pospisil, a member of the ATP player council, tweeted. “Major announcement by Roland Garros changing the dates to one week after the U.S. Open. No communication with the players or the ATP. [W]e have ZERO say in this sport. It’s time. #UniteThePlayers.” Tournaments and sporting events are jockeying for position in what hopefully will be a jammed fall sports calendar if the coronavirus is under control. Earlier in the week, U.S. Open organizers announced that “we are not implementing any changes to the 2020 U.S. Open” but acknowledged “that circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 virus are rapidly changing.” Should both events go on as planned, a six-day turnaround between majors would be massively tricky for many players. Grand Slams are the most grueling of all tennis tournaments; they take place over two weeks and require men to play best-of-five-set matches rather than the best-of-three-set matches they play during the rest of the year. The change in surfaces also would pose an unusual challenge: The U.S. Open is played on hard courts and the French on red clay, which requires entirely different footwork and strategy. Most players gradually ease from clay-court season in spring to hard-court season in late summer and fall. Former men’s professional player Guy Forget, now the French Open’s tournament director, recently told L’Equipe magazine that playing the tournament without spectators could be explored, but the French ban on large gatherings ended that hope. “We have made a difficult yet brave decision in this unprecedented situation, which has evolved greatly since last weekend,” Bernard Giudicelli, president of the French Tennis Federation, said in a statement. “We are acting responsibly, and must work together in the fight to ensure everybody’s health and safety.” On Monday, an All England Club spokeswoman said Wimbledon, the season’s third major tournament, was still scheduled to be


Covid-19 hits doctors, nurses and EMTs, threatening health system

among health-care workers. More than a dozen are related to travel. Authorities are investigating how the others happened. In previous outbreaks of infectious disease, and in other countries where the current pandemic arrived earlier, health-care workers have experienced a disproportionate share of infections. They have been put at risk in the United States not only by the nature of their jobs, but by shortages of protective equipment such as N95 face masks and government bungling of the testing program, which was delayed for weeks while the virus spread around the country undetected. At the EvergreenHealth hospital in Kirkland, Wash. — just a few miles from the nursing home at the center of the U.S. outbreak — and in Paterson, N.J., two emergency physicians are hospitalized in critical condition with covid-19, according to their professional association. It is unclear whether the doctors, in their 40s and 70s respectively, were infected at their hospitals or in their communities, the American College of Emergency Physicians said. “As emergency physicians, we know the risks of our calling,” the group’s president, William Jaquis, said in the statement. In Pittsfield, Mass., 160 employees of Berkshire Medical Center have been quarantined at home after exposure to patients who tested positive, forcing the medical center to hire 54 temporary nurses, who began arriving Friday, according to news reports. A providerhas tested positive at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. In another case, a former employee ofNYU Winthrop Hospital in Mineola, N.Y., flew from New York to Florida last week while awaiting results of a coronavirus test that ultimately showed he was infected, a spokeswoman told The Washington Post. In Philadelphia, St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children shut its intensive-care unit to new patients and closed a trauma unitafter a physician tested positive, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Bonnie Castillo, head of the 150,000-member National Nurses United, the largest nurses union, said the shortage of protective equipment is the most critical issue for those workers. “Nurses take risks every day because they’re willing to do that, they’re called to do that, and they want to do that,” she said. “When you’re being sent out there with one of the most highly contagious viruses without your tools and your weapons and without a coordinated plan, it’s frightening.” Caregivers outside hospitals and nursing homes may be even more vulnerable. A 36-year-old firefighter and emergency medical technician in Santa Cruz, Calif., was denied a test


know whether people walking through the door with respiratory symptoms are suffering from the flu or covid-19, providers said. Even when precautions are taken, the virus has found its way into health-care facilities. At a Veterans Affairs hospital in Tucson, 23 people with respiratory symptoms were brought to an outpatient clinic with no protections for staffers except masks, said a doctor who works at the facility. She spoke on the condition of anonymity because she is not authorized to discuss care with the news media. “They’re not doing the testing,” she said. “They marched them through the hospital to my clinic. They put masks on them but nothing else.” Marcelo Venegas, a doctor at an urgent-care center in Queens, woke up Thursday morning with symptoms consistent with covid-19, including shortness of breath and a low-grade fever. His flu test came back negative, and a coronavirus test is still pending. He is now is quarantined at home in Teaneck, N.J., until at least Friday. Venegas saw two patients with confirmed covid-19 infections and more than a dozen others whom he suspected had the virus. Many were under 50 and had negative tests for the flu. Venegas said he wanted to test at least 20 people for coronavirus but didn’t bother because he knew they would not fit the tight eligibility criteria. He said he’d called in sick only twice before in eight years on the job. “Being sick is daunting,” he said. “I’m never sick.” During Monday’s briefing on the pandemic, Vice President Pence stressed that health-care workers and people older than 65 would receive priority as the government increases the number of testing sites. “We’re putting a real priority on our extraordinary health-care workers,” Pence said. But the risks of caring for infectious, seriously ill people under the pressure of a pandemic are almost impossible to avoid. In hard-hit Italy, for example, 20 percent of health-care professionals in the Lombardy region have become infected with the virus, according to an update Friday in the Lancet medical journal. In China, 3,387 health-care workers were infected by Feb. 24, almost all in Hubei province, the center of the outbreak, according to Chinese health authorities. In the 2003 SARS outbreak in Toronto, most cases were acquired in hospitals. Of the 44 people who died, two were nurses and one was a doctor. During the Ebola outbreak of 2014-2016, more than 8 percent of


U.S. coronavirus death toll surpasses 100

Coronavirus has killed from coast to coast. It devastated a nursing home in Washington state and crept into the heartland. Across the United States, more than 100 people infected with the highly contagious new virus have now died — a toll that experts expect to rise quickly. This country’s first fatal cases offer a preview of the challenges ahead, as Americans battle a disease that has killed thousands of people worldwide. The Washington Post has tracked every known U.S. death and has analyzed data provided by state and local health officials, families of the victims, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of the first 100 reported fatalities, many people appear to have had underlying health conditions, making it harder for their bodies to fight off covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Some had diabetes, kidney failure, hypertension or pulmonary ailments. Nearly all — about 85 percent — were older than 60, and about 45 percent were older than 80. It’s unclear how some of them contracted the disease, but more than a third were living in residential care facilities when they became ill. What is known about the scale of transmission and the high number of deaths among vulnerable populations — like at the Life Care Center of Kirkland in Washington state, where 27 of the facility’s 120 residents have died — has experts deeply concerned. “I see that as the ‘canary in a coal mine’ situation,” said Fred Buckner, an attending physician at the University of Washington Medical Center. “I suspect it’s going to be taking off in other locations just like it is in the Seattle area. There’s no reason not to think that. Obviously, that means more deaths.” In addition to the cluster of cases at Life Care Center, health authorities are monitoring cases at Lambeth House Retirement Community in New Orleans, a high-rise with about 250 residences and rooms. Of the four people who have died in New Orleans, two had been at Lambeth, where there are 12 additional cases, spokesman Greg Beuerman said. Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said: “One particularly unsettling aspect of the outbreak [at Life Care Center] is the number of residents who have gotten sick and died in that facility. That’s a very high fraction.” The early profiles of those who have fallen victim to covid-19 should be “a reminder that this


deaths among vulnerable populations — like at the Life Care Center of Kirkland in Washington state, where 27 of the facility’s 120 residents have died — has experts deeply concerned. “I see that as the ‘canary in a coal mine’ situation,” said Fred Buckner, an attending physician at the University of Washington Medical Center. “I suspect it’s going to be taking off in other locations just like it is in the Seattle area. There’s no reason not to think that. Obviously, that means more deaths.” In addition to the cluster of cases at Life Care Center, health authorities are monitoring cases at Lambeth House Retirement Community in New Orleans, a high-rise with about 250 residences and rooms. Of the four people who have died in New Orleans, two had been at Lambeth, where there are 12 additional cases, spokesman Greg Beuerman said. Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said: “One particularly unsettling aspect of the outbreak [at Life Care Center] is the number of residents who have gotten sick and died in that facility. That’s a very high fraction.” The early profiles of those who have fallen victim to covid-19 should be “a reminder that this virus can be very dangerous,” Rivers added. “It should serve as additional motivation to take every opportunity to reduce transmission.” Darlene Kimball, 72, was one of those who died of covid-19 after a stay at Life Care Center. The avid gardener, animal lover and grandmother of five had been living with ovarian cancer for four years when she fell in mid-February and went to Life Care Center for rehabilitation, said her daughter, Tami Kahler. Kimball at that point was lucid, talkative and mobile. She was in the process of finding a new oncologist. But at Life Care Center, she developed a cough, becoming increasingly raspy and finding it difficult to breathe. While visiting Kimball — who was surrounded by her children, grandchildren and friends “24 hours a day,” Kahler said in an interview — family members noticed that much of the facility’s residents appeared to be sick. When Kimball began complaining of chest pains in late February, they urged a nurse to call the hospital. It was only after the doctors and nurses had started wearing masks and gowns in Kimball’s presence; after her pneumonia was diagnosed and she was transferred to hospice care; and after the family pleaded for


percent for patients who develop the severe complications of respiratory failure, septic shock or multiple organ dysfunction. There is no treatment for covid-19 except supportive care. The rising toll in the United States is following the pattern of deaths in the countries that have been hit the hardest. In China, where the disease has killed more than 3,000, a study of early coronavirus cases in Wuhan — where the first case was diagnosed — found that the odds of a patient dying rose with age and a host of underlying maladies, such as a lower level of organ function. The study, published in the peer-reviewed medical journal the Lancet, found that preexisting health conditions were present in two-thirds of those who died, with hypertension and diabetes the most common afflictions. A Kaiser Family Foundation report published last week hints at Americans’ vulnerabilities: Four in 10 adults are older than 60 or have serious underlying medical conditions. That means 105 million adults in the United States are at high risk of becoming severely ill if infected. At Tulane Medical Center in New Orleans, John Dwyer, an infectious-disease specialist and an assistant professor of medicine, said this week that he was already seeing a disturbing harbinger of what is to come. “We have several obese patients, which is one challenge I think we’re going to have nationwide in the United States because of the levels of obesity that we have,” said Dwyer, who on Monday said Tulane had “just received our sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth positive results about 10 minutes ago,” less than a week after running its first test. “We have a lot of patients with diabetes and hypertension down here in Louisiana and those patients tend to do worse,” Dwyer said. “We also have a large amount of uninsured people who don’t always have access to care, and we have a lot of people who don’t have access to transportation.” Of the nine people hospitalized at Tulane with the disease, four were in the intensive care unit, including a 27-year-old woman with multiple preexisting conditions, who had been on a mechanical ventilator. And none of those patients were known to have traveled to another country. Dwyer said he thinks cases in New Orleans have been spread locally, what scientists call community transmission. At Life Care Center, family members and friends came and went until the facility imposed a strict


Pandemics spread in hospitals. Changes in design and protocols can save lives.

In February 2003, a 78-year-old Canadian woman returned home after a 10-day trip to China. In the days that followed, she spiked a fever, then developed muscle aches and a persistent cough. She deteriorated rapidly, and in early March she died at her Toronto apartment. Doctors didn’t know it yet, but she had severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. Her son soon developed symptoms and sought care at a hospital. While in the emergency room, he transmitted the illness to two patients in nearby beds, who then passed it to more than two dozen others, including family members, hospital staffers and other patients. Those people then infected an additional 34 people, who sickened 17 more in an ever-growing chain of disease. One irony of an infectious-disease outbreak is that it turns hospitals, which should be a refuge for the sick, into hot zones, putting everyone inside at risk. But a silent culprit tends to be overlooked. It is not the patients or the staff or the visitors. It is the building itself. Thoughtful modifications to the built environment — to how health-care facilities are designed, operated and maintained — could help curb the spread of infectious disease, reducing the toll of future outbreaks as well as the covid-19 pandemic raging today. Seventeen years after the Toronto woman’s son set foot in that Canadian hospital, we’re watching history repeat itself with covid-19, which, like SARS, is caused by a coronavirus. When doctors in Wuhan, China, where the new virus first emerged, studied 138 early cases, they concluded that 41 percent of patients had most likely contracted the disease in the hospital. Several urgent steps must be taken to keep hospital occupants safe, including significantly expanding diagnostic testing and ensuring that health-care workers have access to personal protective equipment such as gloves and masks. But hospitals should also consider some environmental tweaks. One simple change would be to rethink where we provide hand sanitizer. Many U.S. hospitals post dispensers in the hallway or at the door to patient rooms, but several studies suggest that making these dispensers even more conspicuous and accessible, and placing them closer to the point of care, could improve staff hand hygiene. “Ninety-nine percent of alcohol hand rub is way at the door entry or outside the door,” says Eli Perencevich, an infectious-disease doctor and epidemiologist at the University of Iowa, who recommends that hospitals reconsider this practice.


of future outbreaks as well as the covid-19 pandemic raging today. Seventeen years after the Toronto woman’s son set foot in that Canadian hospital, we’re watching history repeat itself with covid-19, which, like SARS, is caused by a coronavirus. When doctors in Wuhan, China, where the new virus first emerged, studied 138 early cases, they concluded that 41 percent of patients had most likely contracted the disease in the hospital. Several urgent steps must be taken to keep hospital occupants safe, including significantly expanding diagnostic testing and ensuring that health-care workers have access to personal protective equipment such as gloves and masks. But hospitals should also consider some environmental tweaks. One simple change would be to rethink where we provide hand sanitizer. Many U.S. hospitals post dispensers in the hallway or at the door to patient rooms, but several studies suggest that making these dispensers even more conspicuous and accessible, and placing them closer to the point of care, could improve staff hand hygiene. “Ninety-nine percent of alcohol hand rub is way at the door entry or outside the door,” says Eli Perencevich, an infectious-disease doctor and epidemiologist at the University of Iowa, who recommends that hospitals reconsider this practice. If doctors, nurses and technicians have to leave a patient’s bedside every time they touch something, they’re far less likely to comply with standard hand hygiene protocols, he notes. Putting hand sanitizer by the bed sounds obvious, but alcohol-based hand rubs are flammable, and fire safety codes have prompted many U.S. hospitals to keep dispensers away from patients, Perencevich says. However, sanitizer-fueled-fires are exceedingly rare, and the benefits of relocating the sanitizer are likely to far outweigh the risks, especially during a pandemic. Adding lids to toilet seats is another easy fix, Perencevich says. Flushing an uncovered toilet can spray aerosolized droplets of water and waste around the room; although covid-19 appears to spread mainly via respiratory droplets, scientists have also found the virus in toilet bowls and stool samples. Some hospitals may be able to bump up their ventilation rates or bring more fresh air in from outside, diluting the concentration of the virus in indoor air. Since opening hospital windows is rarely an option, many hospitals could do that with their current air-handling infrastructure, simply by opening the damper to outside air, says Kevin Van Den Wymelenberg, who directs the Institute for Health in the Built Environment at


Coronavirus cases surge as Northam bans gatherings of more than 10, Hogan postpones primary

Maryland and Virginia reported dramatic spikes in their cases of the novel coronavirus Tuesday, as Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam banned gatherings of 10 or more people in restaurants, gyms and theaters, and Gov. Larry Hogan postponed Maryland’s April 28 primary election. With nearly every local county and jurisdiction now affected by the coronavirus, the region’s total had climbed to 162 by Tuesday evening. Maryland added 22 more covid-19 cases — its largest per-day increase so far — bringing the state’s total to 63. Officials said nearly two-thirds of the state’s reported cases were locally spread and not linked to foreign travel, a major concern and a significant shift from the virus’s early days. Five of the new cases were reported Tuesday evening by Prince George’s County. Virginia reported 15 more cases, for a total of 67, including the Washington region’s only two deaths so far. The District reported nine new coronavirus patients Tuesday evening, also the largest increase for the city reported in a single day, bringing its total to 32 cases. A D.C. firefighter-paramedic has tested positive for the coronavirus and is in self-isolation at home, according to the District’s fire chief and president of the union representing firefighters. Fire Chief Gregory M. Dean said the city Health Department is working to trace the firefighter’s past movements and contacts. The virus’s continuing impact left the region’s economy at a near standstill on a St. Patrick’s Day holiday that normally means crowded bars and restaurants. Many of those establishments sat empty in the wake of orders by Hogan (R) and D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) this week to temporarily shut down businesses where large groups of people gather. On Tuesday, Northam (D) also prohibited larger gatherings, though he refrained from ordering businesses to close completely — seeking to balance concerns over public health and the economic damage caused by the pandemic. In the morning, Northam urged Virginians to follow federal guidelines restricting public gatherings of 10 or more people in any businesses, but he stopped short of declaring a ban. But by the evening, he said compliance was mandatory. His administration stressed that officials hope enforcement will not be necessary and that Virginians will have the good sense to comply. But aides said they wanted to make it clear that local law enforcement officials have the authority to act if someone defies the order. “Our strategy must focus on


A chilling scientific paper helped upend U.S. and U.K. coronavirus strategies

disease specialist at Imperial College, who was not a part of the study, said Britain probably had much more to do. “I don’t know if these measures are enough yet,” he said. “And I wish we had done them last week.” If Britain had continued on the go-slow, step-by-step course that it set just days ago, the Imperial College modeling envisioned hundreds of thousands of deaths and a tidal wave of cases that would overwhelm the National Health Service and its hospitals. There are currently 7,000 ventilators available for all of England, the largest nation within the United Kingdom, with a population of 56 million. The British forecast also influenced thinking at the White House. On Monday evening in Washington, President Trump said that Americans should avoid gathering in groups of more than 10 people, eating in restaurants or taking nonessential trips — his most significant push yet to combat a viral outbreak. At a news conference Monday at the White House, Birx said her group has been working with modelers around the globe, including in Britain. “So, we had new information coming out from a model, and what had the biggest impact in the model is social distancing, small groups, not going in public in large groups. But the most important thing was if one person in the household became infected, the whole household self-quarantined for 14 days. Because that stops 100 percent of the transmission outside of the household,” she said. To suppress spread in Britain, widespread school and university closings might also be necessary, though Ferguson worried about its impact on staffing at NHS hospitals, where as many as a third of nurses have school-age children, the Guardian newspaper reported. In their forecast, the modelers envision that strict measures over the coming months will occasionally be loosened, but as soon as they are, viral spread could come roaring back. “The major challenge of suppression is that this type of intensive intervention package . . . will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more), given that we predict that transmission will quickly rebound if interventions are relaxed,” the study concludes. “Intermittent social distancing — triggered by trends in disease surveillance — may allow interventions to be relaxed temporarily in relatively short time windows, but measures will need to be reintroduced if or when case numbers rebound,” the research team said. william.booth@washpost.com


A libertarian’s unlikely pandemic plea: Subsidize everything

Last week, Atlantic writer Yascha Mounk called on America to “cancel everything.” At the time, this seemed radical. This week, approximately 17,000 years later in covid-19 time, it is conventional wisdom. As Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin stepped up to the lectern on Tuesday to announce that the government would be looking for a way to send checks to every American in the next week or so, I thought of my own parallel proposal to Mounk’s: subsidize everything. Those are hard words for a libertarian to say. But then this is a harder crisis than we’ve faced in anyone’s living memory. To put this in perspective: By some of the higher estimates, this virus could kill more than 1.5 million Americans. That’s more than all the Americans who have died in all wars since the country announced its independence from Britain. To avoid this disastrous outcome, we need to “cancel everything” for some, hopefully short, period of time. But that won’t work unless we ensure that the people who will be most hurt — people and businesses who make things or provide services in a physical location — come through this relatively unscathed. We’re going to have a recession, and in a certain sense we want a recession; if the economy is growing, it means too many people are still moving around. So there’s little use for traditional policies like payroll tax cuts, which aim to get people back to working and shopping as fast as possible. Instead, we have to think first about mitigating the suffering of those who have lost their jobs and, second, about keeping businesses on life support so they can go back to normal production as quickly as possible whenever we get the virus under control. In this unprecedented situation, the government will need novel, creative policymaking to minimize the damage — and not just the same old predigested ideological programs. The first priority should be laid-off workers, who need secure access to what financial guru Dave Ramsey has dubbed the “four walls”: food, transportation, rent or mortgage, and utilities. That will mean, in part, putting cash into the hands of individuals who have been laid off or quarantined, first through checks, then through unusually generous unemployment insurance and some sort of federal sick-leave program. It will also mean declaring a moratorium on evictions and utility shutoffs, like the one Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) has


DMV hospitals work to expand testing, free up beds as covid-19 cases climb

testing sites Monday outside their facilities in Hampton Roads, not far from the part of the state where two men in their 70s died after testing positive for the coronavirus. They are the only two coronavirus fatalities reported so far in Virginia; no deaths have been reported yet in the District or Maryland. The health-care system said it was adapting a drive-through model it has used to administer the flu vaccine. All Sentara facilities have the ability to expand by adding tents and overhangs. Many hospitals in the region are setting up tents outside their facilities to prevent emergency rooms from being overwhelmed with covid-19 patients. Shady Grove Adventist Hospital set up tents Monday where they plan to eventually treat patients, and MedStar Montgomery plan to do so later this week, said Montgomery County health officer Travis Gayles. “Let me be clear that none of these tents are being used or operationalized at this point,” he said. “It is again a standard part of preparedness in the event that we need to move quickly” to screen more potential patients. Holy Cross Hospitals in Silver Spring and Germantown expect to be treating patients in tents by the end of the week, spokeswoman Kristin Feliciano said. In the first tent, patients will give their names and vital information. If they are showing signs of the illness, they will report to a second tent for further assessment, care and possible testing. While awaiting results, patients will be quarantined at home, or admitted if their symptoms are severe or if they have preexisting conditions. The regular hospital triage space will be used for non-virus patients. Many area residents are still reporting difficulty getting tested. One woman from Northern Virginia, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of privacy concerns, said her 20-year-old son has been sick with a fever and respiratory issues since this weekend. But he has been turned down for testing online, at the doctor’s and at urgent care because he had not traveled abroad or been exposed to someone known to have the virus. “It’s just really frustrating,” the woman said. “He’s sitting there and nobody is listening to him.” Her son, who attends George Mason University, had a chest X-ray Monday night that showed his lungs were clear. He’s feeling better, and he is now on antibiotics and cough syrup. Hospital networks such as Johns Hopkins are prioritizing testing


Hikers are starting their annual trip north on the Appalachian Trail. Coronavirus could make it complicated.

could get sick or injured in the wilderness, many now worry a bad fall might mean diverting crucial emergency resources, or there could be a shortage of hospital beds. Though the Pacific Crest Trail Association has canceled volunteer trail work and special events until May 1, some hikers have expressed frustration over the lack of guidance about whether thru-hikers should still embark on the 2,653-mile trek, which was famously popularized in Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 memoir “Wild” and inspired the movie of the same name. The virus also threatens to complicate the logistics of a long-distance trek. A number of hostels catering to Appalachian Trail thru-hikers in Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Maine and New Hampshire have already closed, citing sanitary concerns about shared bunkhouses and bathrooms. Meanwhile, some backpackers fear there will be a general reluctance to pick up hitchhikers who haven’t bathed in awhile, and that backcountry cooking staples like powdered milk, instant mashed potatoes and ramen noodles could be in short supply. Late last month, Mountain House, an Oregon company whose freeze-dried meals are popular with hikers and doomsday preppers alike, temporarily shut down its website after seeing a 1,093 percent increase in sales compared with February 2019. While the company says it’s prepared to handle the demand, thru-hikers emerging from the woods in search of hand sanitizer, biodegradable soap and toilet paper may be out of luck. The White House’s decision to restrict travel from most European countries has also thrown some hikers’ plans into chaos. One French woman spent a year planning her Appalachian Trail hike, quit her job and sublet her apartment, only to find out her nonrefundable flight from Paris to Charlotte had been canceled, according to the The Trek, an online news outlet covering long-distance hiking. While the woman could try to wait out the ban, or fly to another country and self-quarantine for two weeks, either option increased the likelihood she wouldn’t make it to the trail’s northern terminus at Mount Katahdin in Maine before it closes in mid-October. Meanwhile, for backpackers who have already started on long treks, or those who plan to begin their hikes in coming weeks, there’s one major lingering question: What will the world look like when they get out? “Ignoring all other considerations, as a PCT hiker you rely on society to a high degree,” one hiker wrote. “But soon U.S. society is going to be broken.”


How to get around the region as public systems make changes because of coronavirus

social media accounts for updates on service changes. Here’s what we know about operations this week. Starting Monday, service between Washington and Boston was reduced by more than half. About 40 percent of Amtrak trains are operating. Amtrak said its Northeast Regional and Acela services will operate among Boston, New York and Washington and its Northeast Regional service to Virginia, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York, Vermont and other states will operate with reduced frequency. Other services also may be impacted, Amtrak said. The Café service is suspended on some trains operating between D.C. and New York. Travelers with reservations on trains being modified will be contacted and accommodated on trains with similar departure times on other days. Amtrak is waiving change fees on all existing or new reservations made before April 30. To change reservations, log in to your account or go to Modify Trip on Amtrak.com. Metro moved into the third phase of its pandemic plan Friday, reducing service and disinfecting cars and buses more often. The Maryland Transit Administration reduced service Tuesday on all three MARC lines. Citing “sharply reduced ridership as a result of increased teleworking,” the MTA said MARC began operating on the “R” schedule Tuesday, a limited service plan that is usually implemented during severe weather. That means MARC is operating less than 50 percent of its regular service. The Penn and Brunswick lines will have a few more supplemental trains in addition to the scheduled “R” trains. The “R” schedules can be found here. State transportation officials had said they wanted service to continue as normally as possible. In a message to riders, the MTA said it was evaluating conditions and service needs. “If it becomes necessary, we will adjust service based on guidance and recommendations from the Maryland Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” said Kevin Quinn, chief of the Maryland Transit Administration. “We recognize the essential nature of MDOT MTA services, and will do our utmost to get you where you need to go, to keep our vehicles and facilities clean and safe, and to keep you informed of any changes that could affect you.” VRE shifted to a reduced service schedule starting Tuesday. The commuter train system is running an “S” schedule on its two lines, Fredericksburg and Manassas. Ridership has dropped significantly in recent days, VRE said, citing an increasing number of area businesses and government


Israel’s Netanyahu turns to anti-terrorism tools in battle against coronavirus

JERUSALEM — Israel plans to deploy electronic counterterrorism measures to track the movements of people who might be infected with the coronavirus, officials said, a confluence of crime fighting and public health that could become more common even as it sparked civil liberty concerns. Officials did not specify the techniques to be used but hinted they would include monitoring individuals’ cellphone locations, presumably without their consent, as well as the more sophisticated electronic intelligence and data analysis that Israel is known to have in its terror-fighting arsenal. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who announced the initiative in a televised address Saturday night, acknowledged that applying Israel’s vaunted digital surveillance tools could infringe on privacy. He said it was an acceptable price for slowing the spread of the virus. “We are one of the few countries with this capability, and we will use it,” he said. “We must do everything, as a government and as citizens, to not become infected and not to infect others.” Israel, which has reported 200 cases of the virus and no deaths, has already proved willing to take sweeping measures to stave off a wider outbreak. Netanyahu announced that restaurants, bars and museums across the country would shut down indefinitely. Gatherings of more than 10 people are banned (10 is the minimum number for a minyan, a quorum of adult men required by orthodox Judaism for certain religious obligations). The country previously closed schools until at least the middle of April and won’t let anyone, citizen or visitor, enter the country without a two-week quarantine. Israel’s digital surveillance technology systems could prove to be an effective health tool, analysts said, because the question in monitoring coronavirus patients and terrorists is largely the same: Who are their contacts? “In both cases, you’re trying to track back in history to determine who has been where and who has met whom,” said Zak Doffman, owner of a London-based surveillance firm and a cybersecurity columnist for Forbes magazine. “I can’t imagine there won’t be dozens of countries thinking about doing the same thing.” Doffman said there’s evidence such techniques have already been employed. China seems to have utilized its mass surveillance tools, including facial recognition, as it restricted movement in hard-hit areas, he said. Taiwan reportedly used geolocation systems to ping the cellphones of people detected outside of their quarantine locations. In Iran, Doffman said, the Health Ministry had to disavow


Trump claims China travel restrictions prove he took coronavirus ‘very seriously.’ There are two major problems with that.

mentioning quarantines and the “significant travel restrictions.” “We strongly support your recent decision to declare a public health emergency in response to the ongoing outbreak of the 2019 novel Coronavirus,” they wrote. Similarly, 2020 Democratic presidential candidates including Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) at the time criticized Trump for dismantling a White House office that dealt with pandemics, but they made no mention of opposing travel restrictions. Around the time the travel restrictions were put into effect, Hawaii Lt. Gov. Josh Green (D) did criticize the Trump administration’s rush to implement them. “We will be prepared. We are spending 24/7 on this to make sure that whatever steps necessary be taken to keep our people safe,” Green said. “We do, but we never like a rushed job and that’s kind of what the federal government did to us by just announcing this on Friday.” Green, though, didn’t actually take issue with the concept of travel restrictions. About the closest Democrats have come to criticizing the substance of the restrictions was a Feb. 5 subcommittee hearing featuring experts on responding to such situations. One of the experts, Johns Hopkins University’s Jennifer Nuzzo, said travel bans could be counterproductive in a situation like this. “I am concerned by our singling out China for travel bans we are effectively penalizing it for reporting cases,” Nuzzo told lawmakers. “This may diminish its willingness to further share data and chill other nations’ willingness to be transparent about their own outbreaks.” She also suggested it wouldn’t do much to contain the spread. Other experts on the panel also expressed concerns about how the restrictions were being implemented. But even in that hearing, the Democrats on the committee asked probing questions but didn’t decry the travel restrictions. The subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.), asked Nuzzo: “How effective is this travel ban? You touched on it, that it actually may worsen things right now and concentrate this.” Bera later asked another witness what impact the restrictions would have on the global supply chain. He added at another point that “there are discussions taking place backwards and forwards as to whether that actually will help us get a handle on this or if the travel ban will actually potentially make things worse.” Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) asked, “Not only does travel ban or restrictions or monitoring impact the economy, doesn’t it also make it more difficult to


Mexico is not ready for the coronavirus. Just look at AMLO’s behavior.

There’s an old joke in Mexico: a man is driving on the wrong side of a crowded freeway. Cars swerve, some spin out of control; others barely manage to avoid a collision. It’s utter chaos. The man keeps driving, undeterred by the reality around him. He turns on the radio and an alarmed newscaster comes on. “Careful, there’s a crazy man driving on the wrong side of the road!” The driver frowns, looks around and remarks out loud: “Just one? There are thousands!” Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has been driving on the wrong side of the road during the coronavirus crisis. At first, López Obrador followed the Trumpian playbook of denial and finger pointing. Two weeks ago, when the virulence of the disease was already apparent, he suggested Mexicans should carry on hugging each other, social distancing be damned. “There are those who say we should stop hugging because of coronavirus,” he said. “But we should hug. Nothing’s going to happen.” A few days later he went after his “conservative” opponents. “They want us to get infected,” he said. “ That’s what they want so they can blame me for everything.” On Sunday, López Obrador turned even more defiant. “Pandemics and other unfortunate events won’t do anything to us,” he argued in the southern state of Guerrero, one of the poorest in the country. Although Mexico’s popular soccer league has been suspended and schools will be closing earlier for spring break, the López Obrador administration has been oblivious to the challenges ahead. Sometimes stubbornly so. The government has refused to shut down international travel, much less close off its borders. The president has also resisted calling for the cancellation of massive public gatherings. On Sunday, some 40,000 people gathered at the Vive Latino music festival in Mexico City. López Obrador himself has set an astonishingly bad example. In late February, he insisted on shaking as many hands as possible during public events, sticking to his gregarious routine despite warnings. Last Saturday in Guerrero, though, the president turned the habit into a provocation. “I greeted people and listened to their concerns outside Ometepec,” he tweeted. The video shows López Obrador being kissed by a woman in the middle of a crowd. He poses for selfies. Someone hands him a small girl, whom López Obrador embraces and kisses. This goes on for a few minutes, with him touching as many


Ireland deals setback to Trump Organization’s sea wall plan

reporter to Doonbeg last fall, residents were divided on the sea wall project. Several complained that a large rock barrier would destroy the aesthetics of the barren, windblown beach and the natural interplay of tide and sand. “I would be totally and utterly horrified if a wall was built here,” said Rachel Meehan, as she was on one of her regular walks on the wide expanse of Doughmore Beach. Meehan is a birdwatcher and a beachcomber who runs a shop where children can come and paint the bits of wood and stone she finds in the sand. She grew up in a seaside home where a couple times a year the waves would reach the house; it’s something one gets used living by the sea, she said. Her family has picnicked under the dunes for generations, and she sees the shifting of the sands as a natural dance that a pile of rocks would destroy. “It’s like the fisherman out in their boats. You go with the wind. You go with the waves. You don’t fight it,” she said. “Trump should just build a very big wall in a circle with him in the middle of it.” Others had embraced the proposal as a way to protect their livelihoods; in the rural area, the Trump resort is one of the largest employers, with more than 200 staff members. Jenny Lynch, who lives next to the course, was afraid her own home could be washed away. She recalled one winter gale a few years back where the wind peeled off the roof of her greenhouse like the skin of an onion and knocked over her daughter. “She was thrown down. She was six. But a sturdy six. I took her out of the Jeep and she just flew,” recalled Lynch. Lynch, whose husband used to work as a greenskeeper at the course, said she knows Trump “drives people mad.” “I don’t care whether it’s Trump, Genghis Khan, or whoever,” she said. “This is all we have to leave our children. And the sea’s going to take it away.” Without a sea wall, some worried Trump could be driven out of Ireland. While the sea wall battle had dragged on for three years, the waves have been at work, noted John Flanagan, a farmer who lives near Trump’s course and wanted the sea wall approved. “They have now taken three years of


Crippled by coronavirus, restaurants want assistance from the same governments that shut them down

From New York to California, governments have told restaurant operators to shutdown their dining rooms to prevent to spread of the coronavirus. The orders have placed an untold number of workers on the unemployment line and cut off the primary source of revenue for restaurants. Now individuals, companies and nonprofit groups are trying to fill in the gaps and assist the crippled hospitality industry — by buying gift cards, setting up virtual tip jars, handing out groceries to the unemployed and other acts of charity. But one high-profile member of the industry says it won’t be enough, not by a long shot. “Charity can’t deal with something this big,” said Tom Colicchio, the chef, restaurateur, activist and “Top Chef” head judge. “This [demands] government intervention.” Without it, and possibly even with it, 75 percent or more of the restaurants in America could be history, he predicted. Colicchio’s request for government intervention is being echoed around the country by other chefs and restaurateurs who have either closed establishments or reduced them to carryouts and/or delivery operations. Dozens of chefs — including such high-profile names as Stephanie Izard, J.J. Johnson, Preeti Mistry, Alon Shaya and Patrick O’Connell, the three-Michelin-starred chef behind the Inn at Little Washington — have signed a Change.org petition, asking government officials to “come to a swift plan for how you can meaningfully give your local restaurants the best chance for survival.” And on Wednesday, Danny Meyer, the influential New York restaurateur, announced that because of the effects of the coronavirus shutdown, he is laying off 80 percent of his staff at Union Square Hospitality Group, approximately 2,000 people in both the restaurants and home office. Meyer said he has forfeited his salary “immediately and indefinitely” and that every executive in the company will take a “significant pay cut.” USHG will funnel the money from those pay cuts — plus revenue generated with gift cards — into an employee relief fund to help workers in the weeks ahead, as the pandemic continues to devastate the industry. Meyer said in a statement that part of the reason for the layoffs is so employees can file for unemployment benefits. The state of New York is waiving the standard seven-day waiting period for workers to file. Like Colicchio, Meyer said stop-gap measures and the kindness of strangers will not be enough. “We cannot depend simply on the generosity of our community alone,”


How the U.S. can defeat coronavirus: Heed Asia’s lessons from past epidemics

HONG KONG — When But in wealthy places on China's periphery — Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea — a rapid response swung into action. One reason was that they had learned from the past. “We were the SARS countries,” said Leong Hoe Nam, an infectious-disease specialist at Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore who contracted severe acute respiratory syndrome during the 2002-2003 outbreak. “We were all burned very badly with SARS, but actually it turned out to be a blessing for us.” Political will, dedicated resources, sophisticated tracking and a responsible population have kept coronavirus infections and deaths in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore relatively low. South Korea, with more deaths, has led the way in widespread testing. Now, after seeing unprecedented increases of imported cases, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore have all moved to implement travel bans, essentially closing their borders to nonresidents or mandating 14-day quarantines, to prevent a new uptick of cases. This offers lessons for the United States and Europe as they grapple with thousands of new cases and sometimes-confused responses to the crisis. Just hours after China’s disclosure of the first cases in the city of Wuhan, Hong Kong’s Center for Health Protection warned local doctors to obtain travel and exposure histories from patients who had fever and acute respiratory symptoms, and to isolate those patients. In Taiwan, officials boarded planes arriving from Wuhan and assessed passengers for symptoms before allowing anyone to disembark. Within days, Singapore, South Korea and other Asian states had implemented similar steps. Asian economies have close links with mainland China and were among the first hit by the novel coronavirus. Yet, with 100 cases in Taiwan, 181 in Hong Kong and 266 in Singapore, their infection rates are dramatically lower than the West’s. Spain has recorded more than 11,000 cases; New York state — whose population is similar to Taiwan’s — has more than 2,300 cases. China learned some lessons from SARS but failed to grasp the danger of covering up an outbreak, while South Korea learned plenty after grappling with Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, in 2015. Both countries struggled with big outbreaks of the coronavirus this year but appear to have brought them under control, thanks to stringent and sometimes unprecedented measures within their borders. Experts are urging countries including the United States, France and Spain to use time bought by newly enforced social-distancing measures, lockdowns and


Their college year upended, Gen Z journalists keep breaking news on coronavirus (some from home)

For the first time, the editors of the Cavalier Daily — the student newspaper at the University of Virginia — were having to plan out their issue via webcam. The screen jumped from face to face Monday as the young journalists, many of whom had returned to their childhood homes after cases of covid-19 cropped up across the state and school officials urged everyone to leave campus, ran through a long list of stories. They were covering the school’s first infection, the concerns over how students in rural areas would access online classes, and the question of whether tuition would be reimbursed. Just a few days ago, this week’s print edition was going to be a special issue on March Madness. Now, suddenly, it had turned into a special issue on a global pandemic. “I’m not sure what’s going to happen,” editor in chief Nik Popli, 20, told his staff before they signed off for the day. “None of us are. We’ll take it one week at a time. ” It was a feeling shared by budding journalists at campus news outlets across the country. As the virus sends shock waves across the globe, shuttering schools, battering the markets and compelling state governments to force businesses to close, the students have not stopped working. Instead, they’ve diligently chronicled the impact of the virus on their communities — even as they found themselves losing advertisers, unable to access their newsrooms and unsure when, or even if, they’d be able to return to school. “In a time of uncertainty, what we can assure you of is this: The State News isn’t going anywhere,” Michigan State University senior and editor in chief Madison O’Connor wrote in a note to readers. “With the responsibility — and honor — of empowering you through credible information, we will continue to provide accurate, reliable coverage of covid-19 and its effects on our community. ” Many college newspapers are independent of the institutions they cover and are run entirely by students, meaning that the most experienced person on staff typically has four years under their belt at most. Despite being so early in their journalistic careers, college journalists across America are pulling long hours and churning out thoughtful work as their daily lives have been upended by the growing threat of the virus. The Daily Tar Heel, the University of North Carolina’s paper, built an interactive map showing


Of course the rich are getting tested first. The wealthy always do better during a pandemic.

he said, “Perhaps that’s been the story of life.” Will it be any different this time? The streets of Palm Beach The exclusive Florida enclave is home to some of the richest people in the country and some of the oldest. Last week, a man infected with the coronavirus flew from New York to West Palm Beach, causing a quiet freakout among the regulars on the island. So the sidewalks in front of the beautiful mansions on this man-made paradise have proverbially rolled up. “People are staying in place,” says Shannon Donnelly, longtime social editor of the Palm Beach Daily News. “Everything has been canceled.” The wealthy are hunkering down in their very big houses and telling staff to stay home or work half days. They’ve just discovered home grocery delivery. Prices are high — as usual — but not out of control. High-end stores are open, but who is going out? “There’s not a bottle of Purell in Tiffany’s window — yet,” says Donnelly. One business-as-usual site had been Mar-a-Lago, where Trump and his family celebrated together less than two weeks ago, when some thought the coronavirus was still something to joke about. Now club regulars are staying home because the virus doesn’t care how rich or powerful you are. Not everyone can stay in place. For those who want or need to fly, demand for private jets has soared. “We have seen a substantial increase in the desire to fly private,” says Stephanie Chung, president of JetSuite, a top luxury rental company. “In the past few weeks and particularly this past week, we have seen an uptick of about 5 to 10 percent in new inquiries from travelers that have not flown private in the past.” New customers include families traveling for spring break and corporate clients restricted from flying commercially who are able to spend up to $7,000 an hour for a charter flight. And this isn’t just about the plane: Many clients have expressed fear of traveling through large airports, especially after seeing news reports of crowds crammed into Chicago’s O’Hare and New York’s JFK. Most private planes fly out of small terminals reserved for VIP customers. Chung’s current sales pitch is anti-virus focused: “For those that are looking to minimize mass public exposure, private jet travel allows passengers to avoid crowds in security lines and large waiting areas as boarding is often conducted immediately upon


Five tips for students on the coronavirus pandemic — news literacy lessons

the role of a free press. The following material comes from the project’s newsletter, the Sift, which takes the most recent viral rumors, conspiracy theories, hoaxes and journalistic ethics issues and turns them into timely lessons with discussion prompts and links. The Sift, which publishes weekly during the school year, has more than 10,000 subscribers, most of them educators. Here are lessons from the Monday edition of the Sift, as provided by the News Literacy Project: The parallels between the spread of the new strain of coronavirus and the spread of misinformation and confusion about it — between the actual pandemic and what the World Health Organization called an “infodemic” — offer a number of important and urgent lessons in news and information literacy. Just as covid-19 has thrown the weaknesses of our global health infrastructure into stark relief and dramatically raised the stakes of our personal choices and habits, the outbreak has underscored defects in our information infrastructure and is emphasizing the potential impact of our choices and habits online. Much of the public health messaging in the last week has focused on the importance of practicing good hygiene (for example, the #WashYourHands hashtag that trended across social media platforms) and on the need to “flatten the curve” by engaging in “social distancing.” At the same time, we all need to focus on “information hygiene” and flattening the curve of dangerous falsehoods online by taking proactive steps to reduce their spread. Our decisions about which pieces of information to “like” and share can have a surprising impact on others. For example, a false claim about ways to avoid the virus or cure covid-19, however well-intentioned, may cause someone to downplay the seriousness of the outbreak or the recommendations of public health officials. Or something posted to social media as a joke might, after being “liked” and shared a number of times, be taken seriously and exacerbate public confusion and panic about the crisis. (Remember, “likes” are also known as “passive sharing,” because many platforms’ algorithms suggest things you “like” to your followers.) As this crisis unfolds, more and more people will be asked to stay home, meaning more and more people will be online more than ever before: searching for answers and trying to make sense of the events around them. It is essential that we bring the same seriousness and sense of responsibility to our roles as creators


The Daily 202: Trump’s corporatist response to coronavirus shows no concern for national debt

pathogen by late December last year, but they were ordered to stop tests, destroy samples and suppress the news,” the Times of London reports. “A regional health official in Wuhan … demanded the destruction of the lab samples that established the cause of unexplained viral pneumonia on January 1. China did not acknowledge there was human-to-human transmission until more than three weeks later. The detailed revelations by Caixin Global, a respected independent publication, provide the clearest evidence yet of the scale of the cover-up in the crucial early weeks when the opportunity was lost to control the outbreak. Censors have been rapidly deleting the report from the Chinese internet.” “Political will, dedicated resources, sophisticated tracking and a responsible population have kept coronavirus infections and deaths in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore relatively low,” Shibani Mahtani and Simon Denyer report. “South Korea, with more deaths, has led the way in widespread testing. … Experts are urging countries including the United States, France and Spain to use time bought by newly enforced social-distancing measures, lockdowns and quarantines to reset and work out their strategies before it is too late.” The mass loss from Greenland alone was enough to raise global sea levels by 2.2 millimeters, according to a new study based on NASA data. “Between 2002 and 2019, across the full time series of both satellite missions, the study finds Greenland lost 4,550 billion tons of ice, or an average of about 261 billion tons per year,” Andrew Freedman reports. “The petitions for the Bureau of Land Management’s September lease sale, some of which come from anonymous potential bidders, could transform a region renowned for its pristine night skies and stunning topography. Some of the parcels are also within 10 miles of Bears Ears National Monument’s current boundaries. … While the BLM can reject nominations as it prepares lease sales for auction in September, Trump administration policy tilts decisions in favor of energy development,” Juliet Eilperin and Darryl Fears report. “The earthquake struck around 7 a.m., its epicenter located about four miles west-southwest of Salt Lake City International Airport. Heavy shaking was felt across north-central Utah west of the Wasatch mountains. There were no reports of any serious injuries, though many people were evacuated from the airport and the Federal Aviation Administration issued a ground stop for all inbound flights for several hours,” Matthew Cappucci reports. “Within three hours of the initial