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As news emerges every day of asymptomatic professional athletes and celebrities testing positive for the coronavirus, ordinary Americans are struggling to access tests. At a White House press conference Wednesday, NBC’s Peter Alexander asked President Trump the question that’s been on everyone’s mind: “Do the well-connected go to the front of the line?”
“Well, you have to ask them that question,” Trump said. “I mean, I’ve read—.”
“Should that happen?” Alexander asked.
“No, I wouldn’t say so,” Trump replied. But, as usual, the rich have easy access to services working class people struggle to find. “But perhaps that’s been the story of life. That does happen on occasion and I’ve noticed where some people have been tested fairly quickly.”
Watch the video below:
Holy crap. A reporter just asked @realDonaldTrump if well-connected people should be getting coronavirus tests before others. And Trump said, "No, I wouldn't say so, but perhaps that's been the story of life. That does happen on occasion." 🤦♀️ pic.twitter.com/y4pacVC0uK
President Trump said in a press conference Wednesday that he will start turning back anyone crossing the US-Mexico border illegally—including those seeking asylum—”very soon, probably today,” to prevent further spread of the coronavirus.
The plans to immediately turn people back to Mexico instead of detaining them was reported by multiple news outlets Tuesday. The New York Times reported that agents would drive people to the nearest port of entry and return them across the border “without further detention.”
The Times report also noted that Trump would invoke a federal legal code that states that once the surgeon general determines that there is a serious danger of introducing a communicable disease from a foreign country, the government has the power to prohibit people “from such countries or places” to avert danger.
Of course, while Mexico has reported about 90 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, the United States has currently more than 7,000 confirmed cases. The Mexican government said Tuesday that it had not received any “formal request” from the US government regarding Trump’s announcement, and that if or when it does, it will have to “consider public health and human rights” in receiving people who are not part of the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program.
Immigrant rights groups were quick to condemn the decision. “It is unbelievable that amid this global crisis, they remain consumed by this effort, using the pandemic as an excuse to turn back asylum seekers,” said Melissa Crow, senior attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Denying asylum seekers their rights will do absolutely nothing to solve this pandemic.”
For more than a year, the Trump administration has been sending tens of thousands of migrants back across the southern border through MPP, a.k.a. “Remain in Mexico.” Under MPP, most people seeking asylum are first detained by US Customs and Border Protection in temporary holding facilities at the border and then forced to wait in Mexican border cities for many months while their cases move through court. This has been the case for those crossing illegally and turning themselves over to Border Patrol, as well as for those who present themselves at ports of entry and request asylum. The policy does not apply to Mexican asylum seekers, and it has sent 60,000 people—mostly Central Americans—back across the border.
Joni Mitchell and Neil Young in The Last Waltz.Entertainment Pictures/ZUMA
CPAC is no stranger to making headlines. The annual conservative conference hosted outside Washington, DC typically offers the news cycle bite after bite of Trumpian incompetence. This year, though, in addition to letting the country watch Trump kiss an American flag, CPAC also may have helped spread the novel coronavirus. But do not worry! To help keep people occupied while they are stuck at home during the pandemic, CPAC is now promoting a new Spotify playlist—full of the nastiest of liberals and “Crazy Bernie” supporters. They’re calling it: “An Introvert’s Guide to Social Distancing by the CPAC Team.”
The conference became an early symbol for the spread of COVID-19, and was to blame for exposing top political guests like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Trump’s new chief of staff Mark Meadows, who both entered 14 days of self-isolation. As my colleague Stephanie Mencimer, who herself went into quarantine after she reported from CPAC, wrote:
By the time CPAC had started, other countries had already banned large gatherings of more than 5,000 people. The day after it ended, the French even closed the Louvre. But canceling the conference could hardly have been an option for a group of people who were publicly calling concerns over the virus a liberal conspiracy to bring down Trump. Besides, people had paid big money to get a chance to hobnob with Republican elites. The sick man from New Jersey paid nearly $6,000 for a gold-level VIP ticket, a privilege that put him up close and personal with all those government officials now in self-quarantine.
Since it’s now been over two weeks since CPAC, any asymptomatic person who had the sense to quarantine themselves after the conference is in the clear, even though the rest of the country begins lockdown thanks to the ever-increasing infection rate. To help with isolation, the conservative confab put together a Spotify playlist for the moment, according to Fox News personality Sarah Carter.
“You’re bonded with all the people who are at CPAC,” Ian Walters, the group’s communications director, told Carter, “and they’re wonderful people, and we work our tails off and we thought that this was a good way to stay connected with one another, to help with the inevitable cabin fever, and to give people some pleasant music to just think about the important things in life.”
The COVID-playlist generally hews to the type of music you’d expect, evoking the taste of your 78-year-old, Trump-loving, Boomer-great uncle. But it doesn’t hold firm to conservative orthodoxy, and includes plenty of anti-Trump artists. The playlist kicks off with a bop—Clairo’s “Softly.” The track hails from the Bernie supporter’s 2019 debut, and while it isn’t the best track on the album (looking at you “Bags”) it’s a strong start to the playlist. While the playlist also includes a song from Halsey, who just endorsed Bernie a week ago, it features some of the 70’s biggest and baddest music revolutionaries—Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. (Young just performed a digital concert for Bernie.) It also features “Paris in the Rain” by ardent LGBTQ supporter Lauv, Trump disavowers The Chainsmokers, and Beto O’Rourke supporter Leon Bridges.
As someone who’s crafted many a playlist for many a person, there’s no real right or wrong way to pull together a collection of music. This playlist isn’t even awful! But given Trump’s followers penchant for constantly boycotting of anti-Trump celebrities, artists, and companies, it’s a bit of a peculiar list. It also breaks the golden rule of curating music for someone else: know your audience.
As the coronavirus outbreak spreads to more communities across the United States, the Veterans Administration still has not used roughly 90 percent of its testing kits, leaving many veterans in the dark about whether they have contracted the virus.
The VA has only administered 322 tests nationwide for COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus, but has 3,000 tests available for use, Veterans Affairs spokeswoman Christina Mandreucci told me. Like other federal agencies, the VA uses the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines for administering tests, which had been criticized for making it difficult to obtain tests for patients without symptoms unless they had recently been in China or close to a confirmed COVID-19 carrier. These guidelines were implemented at a time when China was the only major country battling a coronavirus outbreak. That is certainly not the case anymore and, earlier this month, the CDC responded by relaxing its guidelines, which now allow doctors to “use their judgment” to determine if a patient should be tested in accordance with new criteria, including whether the patient resides in an area “where there has been community spread of COVID-19.”
The United States has lagged far behind other developed countries when it comes to making tests available; despite discovering its first coronavirus case around roughly the same time as South Korea, the United States has administered only 10 percent as many tests. The VA is far from alone in confronting this problem—state and regional governments have made similar mistakes—but its patients feel the effect of the coronavirus outbreak more acutely as the average American veteran is substantially older than the comparable civilian. Of the 322 tests administered so far, the VA has already confirmed five positive cases, is tracking 33 presumptive cases, and, on Monday, acknowledged the first veteran death linked to coronavirus. How the VA responds to the growing outbreak is key not only for veterans who rely on its health care system, but for civilian patients too, as private hospitals feel the strain of more coronavirus patients. The VA is legally designated as a backup health care system in national emergencies and Dr. Richard Stone, leader of the Veterans Health Administration, told the New York Times earlier this week that “the American people should know we are ready.”
In the past few days, the VA has rapidly increased its pace of testing. On Friday, the department said it had used 140 tests, but by Tuesday, that number was up to 322. VA officials expect roughly 20 percent of patients to test positive for COVID-19 as more tests are completed in next few days, a source familiar with the matter told me. “We expect there to be an uptick very soon when people settle into a routine and start pursuing health care at the VA in greater numbers,” Tom Porter, executive vice president of government affairs for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said, echoing the expert view that the coronavirus crisis in the United States will get worse, not better, soon. “I certainly hope the VA is in the right place to be able to respond to this if it gets much bigger.”
Whether the VA is up to the task is an open question. The department still has not filled nearly 50,000 vacant positions—many of them nurses and medical providers—and in February, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert Wilkie mysteriously fired his deputy after only five months on the job. During a White House press conference on Wednesday, Wilkie, a member of President Trump’s coronavirus task force, was asked how many veterans “of those who need to be tested” have been tested. “We believe we’ve caught most of them,” Wilkie replied. “Because the president had us out aggressively early, we have been in a better place than most health care systems in the country.”
That sunny assessment is belied by the department’s own recent pleas for help. As part of an emergency request for several federal agencies, the White House asked Congress on Tuesday for $16.7 billion in new funding for the VA. Nearly 80 percent of the funding would go toward the cost of health care, testing kits, protective equipment, and hospital expansion, Politicoreported. That funding could augment the VA’s ability to accept civilian patients, and increase its capacity for testing.
On Wednesday, a group of Never Trumpers is set to release an ad that compares Donald Trump to the coronavirus.
The Lincoln Project, a band of past and present Republicans who fervently oppose Trump (including George Conway, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver, and Rick Wilson), produced the spot, which shows a series of photos related to the coronavirus: empty streets, a medical lab, a hospital hallway. A narrator intones, “There’s a virus in the world. For some people, the virus is easy to see. Others don’t see it all. Some say the virus isn’t that bad. Others say it’s malicious and dangerous. Since there are those who still can’t see it. Wouldn’t it be smart to tell the truth about the virus?”
The ad—bam!—then lands on a photo of Trump, and the narrator concludes, “Since there is a virus.”
This hit on Trump and his failure to tell the truth about the coronavirus is based on a classic political ad the Ronald Reagan campaign aired in 1984 called “The Bear.” It was a Cold War shot at liberals and Democrats who didn’t accept the hardline view that the Soviet Union was an immediate threat to the United States and Washington had to dramatically increase the military budget.
Historians can argue whether the “Bear” ad was on the mark or not. (The Soviet Union started collapsing a few years later.) But at the time the spot was considered wily and effective.
This time around, there is no question about the danger at hand—and that the threat has been compounded by weeks of Trump’s inaction, incompetence, and false or misleading statements. In essence, the Lincoln Project is saying that the United States has been infected by not one but two viruses. And it’s a lethal combination.
As coronavirus spreads around the world, so do rumors on social media. Perhaps you’ve seen this list of tips, which includes quasi-scientific-sounding statements such as “Drinking warm water is an effective way to wash the virus into your stomach, where it is killed.” It started as a viral Facebook post, and even CVS’s Chief Medical Officer circulated similar advice of it to the company’s 300,000 employees. It’s bogus.
No one wants to spread bad information—but for non-scientists, it can be hard to distinguish facts from rumors. I asked a couple of experts in the ethics of science journalism on how best to use social media responsibly in the age of coronavirus.
Here are a few guidelines they shared:
1. It’s okay to admit what you don’t know.
“Step one is acknowledging there is uncertainty and being able to name what it is we don’t know,” says Siri Carpenter, editor-in-chief of the Open Notebook, a resource for science journalists, and president of the National Association of Science Writers.
Because the virus is so new, there’s still a lot we don’t fully understand. Carpenter warns that studies about coronavirus so far have been small, and there hasn’t been time for peer-review. So, start with recognizing we don’t know everything. For example: Speculation that the virus may be less dangerous when the weather improves (like President Donald Trump claimed) is just that: speculation.
So instead of retweeting a study about how most viruses go away in the spring, instead try something like: “Scientists still don’t fully understand how this virus will behave when the weather improves.”
Which brings me to the next point…
2. Science is messy.
“Anyone who follows science on a normal basis knows it’s a human enterprise and there will be mistakes,” says Deborah Blum, director of MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Program.
“Science is always a messy process,” Carpenter adds. “And science is a process of becoming less and less wrong over time.”
That explains why some studies have been confusing and even contradictory, such as those on how far the virus can travel in the air and how long it remains alive on surfaces. If studies show different findings, say so. For science journalists, their goal is to report on the conflicting evidence, “to just tell the story,” Blum says. “At our best we’re on the side of sifting through multiple sources and giving the most accurate portrait of what’s going on at the time.”
3. Know who to trust and where to get your information from.
The outpouring of advice and news on social media can be overwhelming. Both Blum and Carpenter suggest that readers consider limiting where they get they information to a smaller list of trusted media outlets, experts, and government websites. Beyond the CDC and World Health Organization, they also recommended Helen Branswell of StatNews and Kai Kupferschmidt of Science.
As for advice on avoiding or treating the virus: If you’re suddenly coming across tips that you haven’t seen anywhere else, they’re probably too good to be true. Instead, follow the same advice that’s been repeated everywhere: Avoid close contact and learn how to properly wash your hands. It may be boring, but it’s the best we have.
4. Avoid repeating misinformation.
Tempting though it may be to take to Twitter to slay every bad tip you see out there, you should probably hold back. Laura Helmuth, a Washington Post science editor, offers some tips on how to decide what’s worthy of the mythbusting treatment. “Avoid debunking a fringe theory if it hasn’t gotten much attention yet,” she wrote. “Repetition makes misinformation feel more true.”
5. Just because someone says they’re an “expert” doesn’t mean they actually have expertise in infectious diseases.
Suddenly, a lot of people are claiming to be infectious disease experts. A simple step to take to vet someone: It’s “super easy to plug their names in Google Scholar to see if they published,” Blum mentions. “Vet your sources here.”
She added: “A lot of journalists live in the community of science, but we’re not scientists. So it’s important for any science journalist I would find trustworthy would tell you that right off the bat. In the same way you appreciate it when a scientist says that’s not my area of expertise, science journalists are not virologists.”
6. Be a good human.
Find ways to support the most vulnerable people in your community. Speak up against racism and ignorant statements, like anyone calling the novel coronavirus a “Chinese virus” and hate crimes that have targeted Asian-Americans.
Global pandemic or not, Carpenter says, this is the golden rule: “Don’t behave online in ways that you would not in real life with people you would care about.”
A man waits for orders to fill boxes for the delivery app HungryPanda.Noah Lanard/Mother Jones
When the Flushing Chamber of Commerce met last Wednesday, the Knicks were about to tip off against the Hawks, Broadway was open, and a St. Patrick’s Day parade was set for Tuesday. But the situation in Queens’ main Chinatown was already dire: John Choe, the chamber’s executive director, said food courts were deserted and business at local restaurants was down by half or more. Choe announced a “solidarity lunch” that would be held at a Taiwanese beef noodle soup spot on Monday to help support the struggling restaurants.
A few dozen, mostly Asian-American New Yorkers had gathered at the historic St. George’s Episcopal church—which has withstood many catastrophes since it was established in 1702—to discuss what could be done to help neighborhood businesses survive the impacts of the new coronavirus. Todd Leong, the sharply dressed co-owner of the Leaf Bar & Lounge atop Flushing’s Hyatt Place Hotel, took the mic and offered to hold a party to show the media that it was alright to go out. “I don’t know,” he said, unsure of how else he could help. “It’s an idea.” (By Sunday, the Leaf Bar & Lounge would be voluntarily shut down to help stop the spread of coronavirus.)
A woman, who spoke with endearing nervousness, proposed an elaborate plan to teach older people to use food delivery apps. A Korean-American bank manager said it was time to stop the hysteria, floating the idea of a “Purell party” that would bring together a clean-handed group to show that people could still safely gather.
The suggestions were made with admirable earnestness, but it was also painfully clear that the proposals would do far from enough for restaurants’ bottom lines and, worse, could spread the virus. Their efforts took place before most businesses had come to grips with the fact that this crisis could not be addressed by messaging or marketing. Indeed, Chinatowns in Flushing and across the country foreshadowed what the restaurant industry everywhere would come to look like in the age of coronavirus: layoffs, shuttered businesses, and potential bankruptcy.
Listen to Noah Lanard tour the hard-hit immigrant community of Flushing, New York City, where widespread closures could permanently endanger a food-lover’s paradise, in this edition of the Mother Jones Podcast.
Flushing was home to 72,000 people as of the 2010 Census, nearly 70 percent of whom were Asian and two-thirds of whom were born abroad. It is known for its mom-and-pop shops run by Chinese immigrants. But over the past decade, it has seen more luxury condo development than all but one New York neighborhood, Williamsburg in Brooklyn, according to data published by the New York Times. Choe said that commercial rents can now exceed parts of midtown Manhattan. The last stop on New York’s 7 train, Flushing is normally packed with locals, as well as food tourists from across the city. Both groups have been staying away.
James Chen, the founder of a delivery app called GoHive, told me last week that half the stalls at one Flushing’s main food halls had already closed. Chinese immigrants were growing fearful from what they saw happen in their homeland, as well as the sometimes misleading information spreading on the messaging platform WeChat that made the virus seem even more deadly than it already is. Another problem was that many American news outlets had used photos of Flushing to illustrate stories about the coronavirus, feeding the false impression that the neighborhood of small businesses and apartment buildings was at the heart of the pandemic. I had been one of those food tourists from Brooklyn two months ago, when I’d angled for a table in the packed New World Mall food court; now there appeared to be more staff than patrons.
The largely empty food court of the New World Mall last Wednesday night. Noah Lanard / Mother Jones
After I got home last Wednesday, NBA commissioner Adam Silver suspended the league’s season and Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the cancellation of the St. Patrick’s Day parade. On Thursday, Broadway closed, too. And the stock market closed the week down nearly 10 percent, despite Friday, when President Donald Trump finally declared a national emergency, ushering in the best day for stocks in more than a decade. But Joe DiStefano, a food writer whom I met at the meeting, kept an eating tour of Flushing on for Saturday.
When we met up over the weekend, he wore a flat brimmed hat with “Queens” on the front and “Nueva York” across the back. DiStefano and a few other foodies—two of whom brought handheld lights for photo taking—made their way through a parade of dumplings and noodles. He and Hannah Goldberg, a classically trained chef who started a catering company, Tanabel, that serves food cooked by refugee women, disagreed over the strength of a chopped noodle dish. He liked how unusual it was; she compared it to Hamburger Helper. They agreed on the strength of the pastries at New Flushing Bakery before parting ways.
Even though everyone had been careful not to shake hands or share utensils, the tour defied the recommendations on social distancing from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But DiStefano felt a deep loyalty to the businesses that have made his livelihood possible.
Podcast producer Molly Schwartz and I returned to New Word Mall food court after DiStefano’s group departed. Timmy Chen, who runs a stall called Shanghai Taste, held up the metal spike he uses to impale paper order tickets. He had only about 20 tickets at a point in the afternoon when he should have had80. Keeping the stall open costs at least $25,000 a month, but between March 1 and March 14 he’d made only $6,000. Daily business was down from about $1,200 to $350, and he estimated that at this rate he’d only be able to remain open for another month or two.
Long Chen, the owner of Heat Noodle, a Wuhan stall in the New World Mall, on Saturday. Chen temporarily closed his business on Tuesday. Noah Lanard / Mother Jones
His family lives outside Washington, DC, in Maryland, where Governor Larry Hogan has closed schools and activated the National Guard. They have another Shanghai Taste restaurant in Rockville, this one in a strip mall sit down establishment known for its soup dumplings. He’d just heard business was similarly bad there. He picked up his phone to show me photos of the empty shelves at a Whole Foods in DC. They were taken right after Trump spoke on Friday, he said.
On Sunday night, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that New York restaurants would have to stop sit-down service by Tuesday. When I called Choe, from the Chamber of Commerce, after the announcement, he said small businesses in Flushing were already struggling before coronavirus hit. He feared that the coronavirus would be the death blow for many of them, estimating that up to half of the places that are closing would never reopen. Some, he’s heard, are only staying open to sell the food they’ve already bought. They will likely sit vacant or be replaced by more of the chains from China and the United States—like Haidilao for hotpot or Sonic for burgers—that have already been moving into Flushing.
Choe, who has lived in Flushing for about 15 years, said the neighborhood managed to thrive during the Great Recession. This time is looking different. He’s hoping the government will declare the crisis a natural disaster so that more aid will flow to business owners. New York City has already announced an up to $75,000 zero-interest loan program for small business owners, but Choe said the details on how to apply are not yet available. For many businesses, he added, $75,000 would only last about about two months. The situation for their workers is likely to be even worse. Choe worried they’d wind up homeless or dependent on the food bank that also operates out of St. George’s.
When I caught up with Timmy Chen on Monday, he was still making sense of de Blasio’s announcement on restaurant closures. Maryland was also ending sit-down service, meaning his two restaurants will be further underwater. Carry out was a possibility in both places, but that was only about 20 percent of his sales in New York. It’s not enough.
I asked him what he would he would do. “No plan, my friend. No plan,” he replied. “Nothing I can do, you know.” I could hear him laughing over the phone. He seemed in oddly good spirts despite it all. Later that day, he decided to close the New York outpost. By the time we spoke on Tuesday, he was already back home in Maryland, where he’s still doing takeaway. At least, for now.
Of all the experts I’ve talked to about the coronavirus this week, Dr. Maria Raven is by far the most cool, calm, and collected. Maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise: It’s basically a part of her job description as the chief of emergency medicine at UCSF Medical Center, the Bay Area’s largest hospital. Now, the celebrated medical institution is smack dab in the middle of a coronavirus hot spot.
As of Monday afternoon, nearly 300 cases of the infection had been reported in six Bay Area counties, leading officials to call on more than 6 million residents in the counties to shelter in place. San Francisco is suspended in a sense of something like impending doom: As ProPublica recently noted, if the city follows what one set of Harvard researchers considers a “moderate” infection trajectory, more than 100,000 residents would require hospitalization. If those 100,000 cases occurred over a 12-month period—a timeline that is itself a moderate estimate—the city would need “three times the number of available hospital beds and ICU beds it has,” ProPublica reported.
An accelerated care unit at UCSF, where patients with respiratory symptoms are being triaged.
Noah Berger / UCSF
UCSF has a mere 600 beds at its main campus. Like many hospitals around the country, it has mobilized in recent weeks to prepare for an influx of new patients. “We’ve got all these things in place for if we see a huge surge,” Raven told me on Monday. “Everyone’s waiting with bated breath: like, when is this going to hit?” The hospital canceled elective surgeries to free up manpower, bed space, and, supplies, and it set up “COVID wards” for patients admitted to the hospital with coronavirus. As of Monday, security guards are posted outside the hospital to screen every person as they walk in, asking questions about respiratory symptoms, fevers, and “high-risk contact” with anyone with coronavirus.
Last week, the hospital erected two military-grade tent structures in the parking lot to triage incoming patients with respiratory symptoms: one for less ill, “treat-and-release” patients, the other for more serious cases that may necessitate being admitted to the hospital. It includes things you’d associate with an emergency room: gurneys, X-ray and electrocardiogram machines, computers and wifi. Together, the tents, called accelerated care units, can hold roughly 25 patients at a time. Dozens of patients are already are being treated in the structures each day.
UCSF is already rationing protective equipment: employees are now reusing masks, gowns, face shields, and the helmet-like gear, called PAPRs, that aren’t visibly soiled, disinfecting them and storing them in big Ziploc bags labeled with their names. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has okayed reusing protective masks when supplies are running low.) “We don’t want to burn through our [protective equipment] and then not have enough,” Raven explains. For now, the hospital has a two-week supply of most of the gear.
Some clinicians have tested positive for the coronavirus in recent days. A UCSF spokesperson didn’t specify how many, but said, “We have not confirmed any that have been infected while caring for patients. Given the broad community transmission right now, as well as their personal histories, there is reason to believe that all were infected in the community.”
Raven is acutely concerned with protecting the wellbeing of the many health care providers—physicians, nurses, and more—who staff the emergency room. Those with fevers or any hint of sore throat or cough are instructed to stay home. Should more colleagues fall ill, or if there is a big jump in patients, the hospital is staffing more nurses than usual and putting more physicians on backup call. And if need be, providers may be asked to practice outside their speciality; surgeons, for example, could be called on to provide emergency room care.
“It feels like nothing else I’ve ever been through before, either as a member of society or as a physician,” Raven said. “What we’re seeing in Italy and the other parts of the US are really, really frightening people.” She is hopeful that recent efforts throughout the Bay Area to stay home and socially distance will help. For now, it’s too soon to tell: “We’ll know a lot more in the next week,” she said.
At the end of our conversation, I asked how Raven herself was doing. She paused. “I don’t think it hit me until this weekend that it’s a lot. It’s a lot of—it’s a heavy prospect.”
President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, joined by members of the Coronavirus Task Force, field questions about the coronavirus outbreak in the press briefing room at the White House on March 17, 2020. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Twelve years ago, Congress approved a massive bank bailout to keep the economy afloat in the midst of the financial crisis. That bailout is generally viewed as having been necessary, but it has also been criticized for what the Bush and Obama administrations failed to do: dedicate sufficient resources to helping the people who lost their homes and jobs because of Wall Street’s recklessness. As the country faces another economic meltdown and possible recession, some lawmakers are pledging not to make the same mistake twice—they want to ensure that the enormous relief packages being crafted by Congress and the Trump administration prioritize policies that will actually help cash-strapped Americans.
There’s no guarantee they’ll be successful. For days, the White House seemed to prioritize efforts to bail out oil companies, struggling airlines, and other travel-related industries, while promoting fiscal stimulus policies—particularly a payroll tax holiday—that would flow disproportionately to the wealthy.
By contrast, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has proposed a $750 billion spending bill that includes boosting “hospital capacity, unemployment insurance, affordability of coronavirus treatments, forbearance of all federal loans, small business assistance, child care, remote learning, food delivery and public transportation costs, among other provisions,” according to the Huffington Post. A bill passed by House Democrats would include paid sick leave, but it had major carveouts that would exclude millions of workers.
At the same time, a bipartisan consensus has begun to emerge around the idea of making direct cash payments to millions of Americans. On Monday, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) proposed a one-time payment of $1,000 to all American adults. Meanwhile, a group of Democrats has gone much further, suggesting $2,000 checks for adults and children—with a possibility of additional $1,500 and $1,000 checks over the course of the year, depending on the length of the crisis.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration began to come around to the idea of direct payments. “We are looking at sending checks to Americans immediately,” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told reporters. “Americans need cash now.”
One practical question facing lawmakers is whether to send the checks to everyone or only to those who need it most. Romney’s proposal would be universal. The Democratic version, on the other hand, would phase out payments for some high-income earners. The White House has also suggested a means-tested approach. “I think it’s clear we don’t need to send people who make $1 million a year checks,” Mnuchin said Tuesday.
But the logistics of how exactly means testing would work remain unclear. In normal times, Congress would “try to identify the people who need it and those who don’t and do a very careful parsing,” says Joseph Stiglitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning economist and proponent of progressive economic policies. “But we don’t have time to do that. More than half Americans live basically hand-to-mouth, don’t have much in the bank.”
Instead, Stiglitz suggests sending a $2,000 check to every American—adults and children—right away. The government could then recoup money that went to the wealthy through next year’s taxes. “Get a check to everybody,” he says, then “in 2021, when [you] fill out your tax return, you’ll do a reconciliation, and those who got money who didn’t really need it will pay it back.” Gene Sperling, a former economic adviser to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, has suggested the same tactic.
Though Mnuchin didn’t say how much cash the administration wanted to send to Americans, the fact that President Donald Trump is coming around to the idea is a big deal. Over the past week, Trump has focused largely on a payroll tax holiday, a favorite policy of conservative economists. As of Tuesday morning, the payroll tax cut—which would suspend paycheck deductions for Medicare and Social Security, as well as the share paid by employers—was still a major piece of the administration’s proposed $850 billion stimulus, despite the fact that it is uniquely unsuited to the current crisis. The more you earn, the more you pay in taxes, so the cut would disproportionately benefit people drawing larger paychecks. That also makes it a relatively ineffective means of economic stimulus—wealthier Americans are less likely to spend the additional money they receive. And since this is a tax cut for wage earners, those who have lost their jobs would not be helped.
Another question facing lawmakers is whether to bail out industries hit hard by the downturn, including the airlines. Trump signaled Monday that he would “back the airlines 100 percent,” and Politico reported aid to the airline industry as another part of the administration’s proposed relief package. Major airlines have suggested around $50 billion in aid would be needed, including grants and low- or zero-interest loans.
Progressives are more circumspect. They point out that the airlines are in dire straights now despite 10 years of record profits because they sent that money straight to their CEOs and shareholders.
96% of airline profits over the last decade went to buying up their own stocks to juice the price – not raising wages or other investments.
If there is so much as a DIME of corporate bailout money in the next relief package, it should include a reinstated ban on stock buybacks.
“One thing that is discussed extensively is the bailouts for the airlines,” says Stiglitz. “I have no sympathy for that. They paid out billions of dollars in share buybacks. They should have thought about what happens in a rainy day.” If the government does decide to bail them out, he says, the money should come with the right to buy stock so that if any of the airlines fail to repay the loans, the government can take over the company and then resell it again to earn back its investment. “The public has to be compensated for the risk,” he argues.
Such a policy would also incentive smart use of the money. “If they’re not going to lose ownership,” Stiglitz says, “they have to make sure that they they don’t pay out dividends and don’t pay their CEOs outrageous salaries, but they actually reinvest in the company.”
On a day when four states were scheduled to hold their presidential primary elections, the coronavirus outbreak has threatened a key pillar of our democracy: the right to safely cast a ballot.
While Ohio has postponed in-person voting slated for today, three other states—Arizona, Florida, and Illinois—are proceeding, raising concerns among voting rights advocates that not everyone who wants to vote will feel safe, or be able, to do so. But, as Mother Jones’ voting rights reporter Ari Berman explains, there are a number of ways officials could make it easier for people to vote amid a public health and economic crisis.
We're in the middle of an election year, and the coronavirus outbreak has threatened our right to safely cast a ballot.
There are a number of ways officials could make it easier for people to vote amid a public health and economic crisis. Mother Jones' @AriBerman explains. pic.twitter.com/e7LK9eXgrt
“The safest way to vote by now is from your home, and the way to do that is to vote by mail,” Berman says. Some states make voting by mail harder than others, he explains, by requiring an excuse to request an absentee ballot. “You would hope that fear of dying from a global pandemic would be enough of a reason to request an absentee ballot. But I think every single state if they can’t move to universal mail voting can at least say ‘We’re going to make it so that you don’t need any sort of an excuse to get an absentee ballot, and that we’re going to encourage people to vote by mail as much as possible.'”
Meanwhile, the Brennan Center for Justice has issued a new report recommending a five-pronged approach to protecting the vote from the coronavirus: ensuring social distancing and sanitation at polling places, allowing early in-person voting to reduce crowds, extending a vote-by-mail option to all voters, boosting voter registration efforts, and increasing public education about these efforts. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights has encouraged Congress to enact similar measures.
The states voting today have taken some preventative measures. Arizona will allow curbside voting at many locations, and all three states voting today permit early voting and no-excuse absentee voting.
For the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have to visit clinics for daily doses of opioid addiction medication, social distancing is nearly impossible. But on Tuesday, the federal government eased some of its long-held restrictions in response to the coronavirus.
That’s good news, because continual access to two primary treatment medications, buprenorphine and methadone, is key: If patients miss a dose, they could go into withdrawal and turn to street drugs, risking overdose.
Those struggling with addiction are particularly vulnerable in the age of coronavirus for a host of reasons. Opioid users have far higher rates of health conditions including hepatitis C, HIV, and chronic bronchitis. Many are well over the age of 60. Infectious disease can spread like wildfire among communities of drug users (think the HIV outbreak in Indiana in 2015). And then there are the psychological factors: “We all know that stress is one of the major triggers for people to go into relapse,” said Bethany Hallam, an Allegheny County councilwoman and outspoken addiction treatment advocate. “To think of all the additional stressors that people have in their lives right now, on top of the regular every day stressors—and then you add into that people sitting at home stewing.”
As Corey Davis, an attorney at the Network for Public Health Law, put it, “We’re now facing two deadly, concurrent declared public health emergencies: the opioid crisis and COVID-19.”
Methadone: Daily Trips to Clinics Will No Longer Be Required
Some 350,000 Americans rely on methadone clinics for daily opioid addiction treatment, and, under normal circumstances, they’re required by law to take their doses at methadone clinics, where they often wait in long lines to take their doses in a supervised setting.
Federal guidance so far when it comes to methadone clinics during the pandemic has been confusing, to say the least. Until this week, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration’s directed clinics to follow each state’s lead on a coronavirus response. On Monday, SAMHSA released two conflicting sets of guidelines for methadone clinics and patients. The first permitted a take-home supply of up to two weeks, but only if a methadone patient had coronavirus or symptoms of it, got a clinician to sign off, and applied with that sign-off to SAMHSA.
But separate guidance, also released Monday by SAMHSA, is much more lax, allowing for four weeks of take-home doses for stable patients—with no state or federal sign-off required for each patient—and two weeks for less-stable patients who the clinic believes “can safely handle this level of take-home medication.” This is the guidance that will hold during the pandemic, says SAMHSA spokesperson Christopher Garrett: Monday’s more restrictive guidelines were taken down this morning.
The coronavirus is putting pressure on an age-old controversy over just how much red tape should exist around opioid addiction treatment. Methadone is among America’s most highly regulated medications, relegated to special clinics rather than accessible at a typical doctor’s office. In theory, that’s because methadone is itself an opioid, but one that is meant to ease the cravings of opioid addiction without getting the patient high. The highly regulated setting is beneficial for some: The idea is that it ensures people aren’t abusing the medication or selling it on the street. But methadone advocates, including many leading public health experts, have long pushed for methadone to be treated just like any other medication: For now, the average doctor is allowed to prescribe a number of addictive opioids like OxyContin, Vicodin, or fentanyl, but isn’t allowed to prescribe methadone, the opioid addiction treatment.
Buprenorphine: In-Person Requirements Will Be Eased
The second primary opioid addiction treatment is buprenorphine, also itself an opioid, also to be taken daily, but treated more like a normal medication: Patients can go to doctors’ offices for their prescriptions and pick up their medications from pharmacies.
Until Tuesday, one big concern about buprenorphine access was the requirement that providers meet prospective new patients for evaluations in person, rather than using telemedicine for the initial consultations. Given the push for social distancing and the overrun medical system, many feared that this rule would effectively prevent any new patients from being able to start buprenorphine. On Tuesday, DEA eased these restrictions: Now, initial consultations can be done virtually.
There are still a lot of restrictions around buprenorphine: Providers have to get special licenses from the DEA to prescribe the medication, and once they do, they can only prescribe it to a certain number of patients. Given the pandemic, some are advocating for an ease on the those caps: “We don’t know what proportion of our prescriber population is going to fall ill,” said Greg Marotta, president of Clean Slate, the nation’s largest office-based opioid treatment provider. “For us to have to turn away patients because we don’t have the prescribing capacity available to us would be an absolute disaster.”
Members of the New York National Guard hand out food as part of the state's response to the coronavirus outbreak.Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty
Pressure is building on the Trump administration to deploy the US military to the front lines of the coronavirus crisis—and the Pentagon doesn’t seem to be thrilled about it.
During Sunday night’s debate, Joe Biden called for the military to build field hospitals as the pandemic spreads across the United States. “They have the capacity to build 500-bed hospitals that are completely safe and secure, and provide the help to get it done,” Biden said, echoing comments Andrew Cuomo made earlier that day in a New York Times op-ed, in which the New York governor urged Trump to “task the Army Corps of Engineers to expand hospital capacity.”
On Twitter, Cuomo continued badgering Trump to involve the military in the federal government’s coronavirus response. The White House now appears to be warming up to the idea.
At a press conference Tuesday afternoon, Vice President Mike Pence said the Pentagon “could be helpful in terms of expanding medical capacity” and setting up field hospitals “that could be deployed very quickly.” Trump added that the Army Corps of Engineers will “probably supplement” New York as it confronts the daunting task of providing health care to thousands of residents seeking treatment. Cuomo said on Tuesday that he expects the state to need 55,000 to 110,000 hospital beds to deal with the virus, but that its current capacity is just for 53,000 beds.
Trump’s and Pence’s comments come only hours after Pentagon officials suggested that there was not a strong demand for the military to involve itself further in the federal coronavirus effort. Outside of assisting the federal government in quarantining US citizens returning from China or on cruise ships, Pentagon spokesperson Jonathan Hoffman said the department had “not received any other” formal requests for help. During a press conference, Hoffman and Air Force Brigadier General Paul Friedrichs, surgeon for the Joint Staff, lowered expectations for how effective a military response might be.
Could the Army Corps of Engineers construct hospitals? Hoffman said “we would look at” such an idea, but otherwise dismissed it. Military doctors are more accustomed to dealing with traumatic injuries and younger, otherwise healthy patients, he said. Older patients who are more likely to contract COVID-19 “require a different type of attention than we normally do.” Military doctors, if forced to regularly treat coronavirus patients, would also be at risk themselves. Two emergency physicians in Washington state and New Jersey are already in critical condition due to coronavirus.
Even if the hospitals were set up, Friedrichs said they would likely be limited in the kinds of care they could provide. “We want to be factual about what we have,” he said. “Our fixed facilities are designed to the force that we have. They’re not thousand-bed medical centers all over the United States. They’re, for the most part, small community hospitals.” Hospital ships like the USNS Mercy and the USNS Comfort have up to 2,000 available beds and could be used as a last resort, but they would probably not be able to accommodate the distancing required to treat coronavirus patients. Friedrichs said he would “feel uncomfortable” with the notion that a “hospital ship is designed to take care of highly contagious infectious disease patients.”
There’s a staffing problem too. Doctors and nurses would need to be brought in to address the inflow of people needing treatment and, while that movement of resources would almost certainly be possible, it would complicate the Pentagon’s efforts to maintain social distancing among its own staff. On Sunday, Deputy Defense Secretary David Norquist instituted a domestic travel ban for members of the military and DOD civilian employees until at least May 11, as nearly 40 service members have already tested positive for COVID-19. Much of the department’s gargantuan complex in Arlington, Virginia, is off-limits to visitors, and most Pentagon employees now working from home.
Without much in the way of answers from the US military, governors have already begun using Air and Army National Guard members in their states to deal with the crisis. By Friday, nearly 400 Guard personnel across six states had been activated; by Tuesday, that figure had rocketed to 1,560 members across 22 states, according to the National Guard Bureau. The lion’s share of the activated troops are in New York, where they have been tasked with distributing hand sanitizer, cleaning public buildings, and handing out food.
The need to maintain social distancing during the pandemic certainly complicates what Guard members can do to help, but “it’s very realistic” to expect them to build field hospitals and retrofit existing buildings—such as warehouses—into temporary care centers, retired Brigadier General Stephen Xenakis, a former Army medical officer, told me. “It’s why in a national disaster, you prepare the Guard to do that.”
Xenakis acknowledged that the current situation is undoubtedly a tough one, but he argued that the military is prepared to handle it. “For years, we’ve trained to work in these dangerous environments,” he said. “We’ve got special equipment to protect us.”
The coronavirus pandemic has sent parents across the country into disarray, with a storm of school shutdowns, canceled daycare facilities, and working from home protocols forcing scrambled families to create ad-hoc, on-the-fly procedures to keep everyday life afloat.
And that’s if you’re lucky.
Countless others, particularly those without remote work advantages or paid leave, are now struggling with unemployment and shuttered businesses. Meanwhile, the gig economy, hospitality industry, federal workers, and many more attempt to strike a dangerous balance of keeping their families safe as they seek limited forms of income.
But as coronavirus exposes the cruel inequalities of the American workplace, Ivanka Trump is apparently failing to read the room. On Tuesday, the self-professed champion of working families shared the following advice:
Staying home today w/ kids?
Plan living room camp out!
Throw a bedsheet over some taped together brooms. Plan a menu & ‘pack’ sandwiches, salads (S’mores optional😜)
A fun activity that also brings family together for a meal!
The tweet, which reached new heights of tone-deafness, came as her father finally appeared to come to grips on how the public health crisis was affecting the country. It was perhaps her biggest diamond-encrusted middle finger to American families yet.
As the novel coronavirus pandemic continues to paralyze communities across the country—now with at least 4,800 cases confirmed in the US and 88 deaths—President Donald Trump in recent days has targeted Democratic governors in New York, Michigan, and Washington for supposedly mismanaging the public health crisis.
“Failing Michigan Governor must work harder and be much more proactive,” Trump tweeted shortly after Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer appeared on an MSNBC segment Tuesday morning criticizing the president’s lack of action. “We are pushing her to get the job done. I stand with Michigan!”
The new line of attack follows similar attempts by the president to accuse the media and Democrats of capitalizing on the virus in order to undermine his reelection prospects in November. Meanwhile, states are scrambling to enact their own measures to slow down the spread of the virus after the Trump administration repeatedly failed to mount a significant response.
But as Trump publicly lashes out at Democratic governors, the New York Times reports that the president is privately advising states to go it alone. “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment—try getting it yourselves,” he told governors on a conference call on Monday. Though he insisted that his administration would back state efforts to obtain emergency medical supplies, Trump failed to clarify exactly what that support would mean.
As governors grow increasingly frustrated by the federal response and the number of reported cases are growing throughout the country, Trump has also resurrected his longstanding feud with Andrew Cuomo, claiming that the New York governor must “do more” to fight the pandemic. It was a particularly random attack to make given Cuomo’s decisive action on a string of stringent measures to combat the pandemic, including shutting down schools and public spaces across the state, while Trump had, until yesterday, repeatedly minimized the seriousness of the threat.
Trump foreshadowed his need to politicize even a global pandemic by focusing his anger at Democratic governors nearly two weeks ago, when he called Washington Gov. Jay Inslee a “snake” for criticizing his slow response to the virus. “I told Mike [Pence] not to be complementary to the governor because that governor is a snake, okay, Inslee,” Trump told reporters at a press conference on March 7. “I said if you’re nice to him, he will take advantage…we have a lot of problems with the governor.”
After repeatedly dismissing the coronavirus pandemic as a liberal hoax designed to bring down the president, Fox News appears to have finally woken up to reality. On Tuesday, the network joined others in practicing on-air social distancing, telling viewers that such measures were crucial to curbing the spread of infections.
“We’re doing exactly the same thing people all across America are trying to do, and that is stay away from each other because you don’t want to get infected and you don’t want to spread infection,” said Steve Doocy, sitting alone on the Fox & Friends’ curvy couch.
“We have a responsibility to slow down this virus and to think of other people during this time,” co-host Ainsley Earhardt added. “So if you can keep your distance, and prevent someone from getting close to you that might be sick, you can save your family, you can save the elderly, and help our country as a nation.”
It was a dramatic shift in tone, and one that seemed to reveal who had won the internal debate taking place within Fox News’ top ranks over how to cover the coronavirus as it rapidly spreads throughout the United States, prompting unprecedented state-mandated shutdowns and restrictions on everyday life. The conflicting views collided in real-time last week when Fox Business’ Trish Regan—who has since reportedly been removed from the network and is unlikely to return—claimed that the coronavirus was an “impeachment scam” aimed at destroying Trump. During the same time slot, Tucker Carlson was striking a very different tune. As I wrote last week:
Not everyone at Trump’s favorite news network is falling in line. Over on Fox News on Monday, Tucker Carlson pushed back on efforts to minimize the scale of the virus—he described the epidemic as “a very serious problem.”
“It’s definitely not just the flu,” he added, a thinly-veiled criticism of Trump’s repeated assertions that the coronavirus and the flu pose similar threats. (Carlson, who has a long record of xenophobia, did refer to the disease as the “Chinese coronavirus,” ignoring experts’ strong warnings against using such terms.)
But Carlson was largely an outlier. Fox News personalities, including Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, have spent recent days relentlessly mocking the coronavirus as nothing more than liberal panic. (Ingraham appears to have deleted a tweet insisting that it was a “great time” to fly despite official CDC warnings; her accusations that the media and Democrats are mismanaging the virus continue.)
When it comes to embracing social distancing practices, Fox News isn’t alone in its about-face. After advising Americans to simply “take it easy” and “relax” amid the public health crisis last week, Trump on Monday presented a newly serious tone as he introduced stringent federal recommendations aimed at slowing the virus, including limiting social gatherings to 10 people. “This is a bad one,” he said referring to the virus at a news conference. “This is a very bad one.”
As my colleague Kevin Drum notes, Trump’s shift was likely prompted after reviewing a new study from the Imperial College in London that predicted over a million deaths if governments failed to adopt serious control measures. Or as others like to call it, science.
One bright side of the coronavirus crisis has been the use of data visualization to convince people of the merits of social distancing. As a data nerd, it makes me incredibly happy to see a sizable chunk of the non-nerdy population talking about “flattening the curve.”
If you only learn one thing about #COVID19 today make it this: everyone's job is to help FLATTEN THE CURVE. With thanks to @XTOTL & @TheSpinoffTV for the awesome GIF. Please share far & wide. pic.twitter.com/O7xlBGAiZY
If you understood this chart, you’ve understood normal distribution, standard deviation, and variance, three foundational statistical concepts. The idea behind social distancing is to stay at home or away from people (whether you have the virus or not) so you can slow the spread of the virus and not overburden the healthcare system. The flatter the curve, the higher the standard deviation, which in this case means fewer people are infected at the same time.
If you’re not still not convinced that social distancing would help, here’s a series of simulations by the Washington Post that go through various hypothetical scenarios from forced quarantine (as China did in some provinces) to moderate self-imposed social distancing. The interactive charts clearly show that when fewer people are out and about, the virus takes much longer to spread.
Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to "flatten the curve" https://t.co/AEnMikff6c
This chart from Datawrapper shows some countries have been able to slow down the spread of the virus by visualizing how long it takes for the number of COVID-19 cases to double. Turns out that many European countries and the U.S. are still seeing cases double every 2-3 days, but South Korea and China have been able to slow the number of cases doubling to much longer, thus flattening the curve.
Last, but not the least, this positive chart from epidemiologist Britta Jewell shows how one person can make a huge difference. According to her estimates, your choice to socially distance yourself today can prevent 2,400 people from being infected over a month. Yet if you wait another week to hole up, you’ll only avert 600 infections. The coronavirus may spread exponentially, but so do the benefits of staying home and checking out cool charts.
Timing really matters with exponential growth. Simple example: if you could avoid just one #covid19 case in the UK tomorrow, vs. avoiding one case a week later, you would avert over 4x as many infections by end of April (assuming 20% daily growth in cases). pic.twitter.com/6Ib5FRZ4jX
President Trump at a rally for evangelical supporters in Miami on January 3.Lynne Sladky/AP
As the coronavirus continued to kill, hospitalize, and harm thousands of people this weekend, President Trump declared that Sunday was, rest assured, a National Day of Prayer. “We are a Country that, throughout our history, has looked to God for protection and strength in times like these,” he tweeted.
Except we aren’t.
Whatever you make of Trump’s stunning incompetence in orchestrating the government’s response to this outbreak, he was unmistakably wrong about this country’s history, the Constitution, the extent of federal powers, and the underpinning of government. The United States was founded not on state-sanctioned faith or godly government prayer, but on the right to practice any religion, or none at all, free of presidential proclamations about if, when, and how you do; it was founded on the slavery of bodies, not the slavery of conscience or minds. It’s a country rooted in Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which explicitly separated God and government as the forerunner to the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause forbidding state endorsement or sponsorship of religion.
Trump’s proclamation of prayer isn’t unique to him. It’s an echo of the endless invocations of God in presidential life. From the inevitable thoughts-and-prayers stock response to deadly tragedy, to the requisite “God bless America” postscript of every political speech, pious nods to religion have been thoroughly incorporated into presidential rhetoric. The cost of this unconstitutional practice is amplified right now, when there’s lethal harm—not just in terms of being ill-prepared for a pandemic, but in the erosion of confidence in our institutions. Some of this harm is exacerbated because we continue to collapse church and state and (unconstitutionally) substitute federal faith for the full deployment and funding of scientific research.
And it’s especially cynical in an administration that bows before evangelical voters who are proving to be the president’s most loyal supporters. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has linked his religious beliefs to foreign policy, and delivered a state-sponsored speech on “Being a Christian Leader” in his official capacity. Vice President Mike Pence is a walking billboard for government’s religious claims. Attorney General William Barr invokes God as the legal, moral, and political precept for government whenever he can. The good doctor Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, named God as the groundwork for government action in addressing the coronavirus.
To freely practice religion, or none, requires freedom from the state having any say in when and whether you do so—pray all you want, publicly or privately. But at a time when millions of lives are on the line, the president’s federal call to prayer isn’t just unconstitutional—it’s obscene. A lot of us are going to get this virus. The need for solidarity, solace, and comfort is crucial in crisis, and that may be found in prayer for some. But these are moral imperatives discoverable and defendable through many means of knowledge, which shouldn’t be predicated in the public sphere on any that are theocratic.
The National Day of Prayer was signed into law by President Harry Truman in 1952 as an endorsement of religion, which even though plainly violating the First Amendment—“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”—took nearly 60 years for a federal judge to declare unlawful, in 2010. US District Court Judge Barbara Crabb wrote simply, “The government may not endorse a religious message.” Nonetheless, Trump trafficking in yesterday’s National Day of Prayer was different from similar bromides from previous presidents. He trespassed overtly on the urgent secular search for disease control. The government should busy itself exclusively with preventing more deaths. That starts with amplifying public health as indispensable, not promoting federal prayer as if it were constructive. The federal day deserves rejection because prayer itself deserves protection.
When ruling against the law, Crabb found that the day “goes beyond mere ‘acknowledgment’ of religion because [the day’s] sole purpose is to encourage all citizens to engage in prayer, an inherently religious exercise that serves no secular function in this context.”
She found in favor of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the challenger, but was overturned on appeal by a court that said the group had no legal standing to file the claim because it suffered no “injury,” ruling not on the merits of the challenge but on the group’s right to bring it.
The National Day of Prayer during a pandemic has especially troubling implications. It privileges the pairing of religious rhetoric and government action. Any president singling out and supporting a federal day of prayer erodes that separation. But this administration has been blatant about it. Consider Barr’s boast to the law school at Notre Dame: “Judeo-Christian moral standards reflect the rules that are best for man,” he told students in October. “They are like God’s instruction manual for the best running of man and human society.”
The president’s podium should not be a pulpit. Despite all the religious apologia left and right in government, it never will be. This president recites prayerful words as if spraying perfume on preventably dead bodies. If we continue to equate prayer and patriotism—and confuse the pageantry of prayer with meaningful action—the loss of life will continue, long after this particular contagion is gone.
On Monday morning, the chief medical officer of CVS Health sent an email containing tips for combating the coronavirus to the company’s 300,000 employees. The text of the email included many common-sense suggestions, like practicing social distancing and disinfecting frequently touched surfaces. But some of the tips are strikingly similar to a viral Facebook post that has been circulating for weeks—and they have no basis in science.
Here’s an excerpt from the email:
One of our health centers distributed tips regarding self-care and suggested that we consider the following when thinking about symptoms of the common cold vs. the coronavirus:
If you have a runny nose and sputum, you likely have a common cold.
Coronavirus pneumonia presents as a dry cough with no runny nose, often accompanied by a fever. If you experience these symptoms, you should call your doctor.
Drinking warm water is an effective way to wash the virus into your stomach, where it is killed. Stay hydrated and get plenty of sleep.
You should wash your hands frequently.The virus can only live on your hands for 5-10 minutes, but a lot can happen during that time: you can rub your eyes or touch your nose or mouth unwittingly.
Most importantly, remember that this illness is very mild in 80% of people who have it, and our children to not appear to be getting sick at all except in very rare cases.
The first two bullet points sound a lot like the message that was being passed around on Facebook last week, which stated, “If you have a runny nose and sputum, you have a common cold. Coronavirus pneumonia is a dry cough with no runny nose.” As I reported last week, the three most common symptoms of COVID-19 are fever, cough, and shortness of breath, according to the CDC—but that doesn’t mean you should rule out the coronavirus if you have a runny nose as well.
But the third bullet point—that drinking warm water is an effective way to wash the virus into your stomach, where it is killed—is false. “The temperature of your drinking water has no impact on getting infected, treating infection, or rinsing the virus from your system,” says Brandon Brown, an epidemiologist and associate professor at the University of California, Riverside. “Drinking an incredible amount of water also will not help. It is important to stay hydrated at all times, irrespective of any epidemic.”
And, while washing your hands frequently is essentialadvice, it’s difficult to say exactly how long the virus can live on them. “How long the virus can live on hands is not as important as what you do with your hands,” says Brown. “If you are washing your hands regularly, the virus will not live on your hands for a long time. The virus can live on surfaces for days, and we are constantly using our hands and touching surfaces. More important than thinking how long the virus lives on your hands is to avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth with unwashed hands.”
As for the last bullet point: One in five people who are infected with the coronavirus, or 20 percent, require hospitalization, according to the World Health Organization. The so-called “mild” cases include everything that doesn’t land someone inpatient at a hospital, and can include serious illnesses such as walking pneumonia. This is the word from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:
Reported illnesses have ranged from very mild (including some with no reported symptoms) to severe, including illness resulting in death. While information so far suggests that most COVID-19 illness is mild, a report out of China suggests serious illness occurs in 16% of cases. Older people and people of all ages with severe chronic medical conditions — like heart disease, lung disease and diabetes, for example — seem to be at higher risk of developing serious COVID-19 illness.
CVS’s Senior Director of Corporate Communications confirmed that the internal email, which Mother Jones reviewed, was authentic. “This memo is part of an ongoing effort in developing travel, Work from Home, and other HR-related guidance to help employees stay safe and healthy as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to evolve,” he wrote in an email.
When misinformation about the coronavirus seems to be spreading as fast as the illness itself, it’s important to question everything—even tidbits of misleading information sandwiched between truths—not from official sources. So go ahead, drink a glass of water with ice.
Detainees at the Strafford County Detention Center wave back to marchers rallying near the center where ICE detainees are being held, in Dover, New Hampshire.JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Northwest Immigration Rights Project sued ICE Monday afternoon, calling on the agency to release some detainees at an immigration detention facility at the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States.
The suit is focused specifically on immigrants who are considered high-risk for serious illness or death if infected with the new coronavirus. It lists nine people held at the Tacoma Northwest Detention Center who are older adults or have medical conditions that could make them vulnerable to COVID-19, the disease that develops from the novel coronavirus, including lung disease, heart disease, diabetes, epilepsy, kidney disease, autoimmune disorders, asthma, and hypertension, according to court filings. The facility is located just outside Seattle, an area that has been particularly hard hit by the coronavirus; the state department of health reports more than 700 confirmed cases and 42 deaths across Washington.
ACLU staff tell me that in addition to the nine people named in the lawsuit, it estimates that roughly between 50 and 100 people could also be at high risk in the detention center, but without having access to a complete roster of detainees or their medical records, the estimate is based on what people who are already working with attorneys have reported. The Tacoma Northwest Detention Center has a capacity of 1,575 and is privately owned and operated by the GEO Group, which contracts with ICE.
At a time when social distancing and improved hygiene are the new norms, ICE detention centers, much like prisons, have hundreds of adults held in close quarters, often in facilities known for having notoriously bad medical services.
“Immigrant detention centers are institutions that uniquely heighten the danger of disease transmission,” Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at ACLU’s National Prison Project, said in a press release. “In normal circumstances, ICE has proven time and again that it is unable to protect the health and safety of detained people. These are not normal circumstances, and the heightened risk of serious harm to people in detention from COVID-19 is clear.”
My colleague Noah Lanard wrote last week about the dangers to immigrants in ICE custody, saying the agency could “reduce the risk of the coronavirus spreading and potentially causing more deaths in its custody” by releasing vulnerable detainees, particularly those who don’t pose a threat to public safety. Noah spoke with one Cuban asylum seeker held in Louisiana:
The man, whom I’ll call Alberto to protect him from potential retaliation, had more reason to worry about the coronavirus than most: He was detained in a crowded room alongside nearly 100 others at a jail run by LaSalle Corrections, a company with a long record of providing shoddy medical care. “If coronavirus gets in here,” he said, “it’s going to be a massacre.”
“It’s going to be a massacre because everyone will get it at the same time,” Alberto explained in Spanish. “Not just one person. Everyone will get it at the same time because we’re all breathing the same air.” His concern is shared by immigrant advocates and detention experts who have spent years documenting Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s in some cases fatally substandard medical care.
As Noah reported, “ICE has broad authority to release people in its custody.”
The agency has posted online a page with its “guidance on COVID-19” where it claims to have no confirmed coronavirus cases in its detention facilities. According to this page, ICE is screening people when they arrive at detention facilities and is isolating detainees with fever and/or respiratory symptoms “who meet these criteria and observe them for a specified time period.” If needed, the agency says it will “consult with the local health department, as appropriate, to assess the need for testing.”
Monday’s lawsuit is the latest of many public calls for ICE to release vulnerable detainees held for immigration violations. Last week, a coalition of immigrant rights groups and human rights organizations sent a letter to ICE requesting that the agency “immediately grant humanitarian parole to all vulnerable persons” held at the Adelanto Detention Facility in California. The group of 14 organizations—which includes Al Otro Lado, Human Rights First,Immigrant Defenders Law Center, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice Los Angeles—has asked for a meeting with representatives from ICE and Adelanto no later than March 19. They haven’t gotten a response.
It’s hard to believe it was just three days ago that President Donald Trump took time out of his busy coronavirus response schedule to autograph a stock market chart for Lou Dobbs. That was Friday, when the Dow rose nearly 2,000 points. A day earlier, it had fallen by almost 2,400 points. Today, it plunged nearly 3,000 points.
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