There’s a particularly cruel aspect of the coronavirus pandemic. Patients have suffered, and often died, alone. Their families, meanwhile, have had to grieve in isolation. That reality was underscored by Sen, Elizabeth Warren, who discussed her older brother Donald Reed Herring’s death from COVID-19 with the Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere.

“It just feels like something that didn’t have to happen,” Warren says. She remembers losing her parents and a beloved aunt in a relatively short span of time years ago, but notes how different this loss feels—and how alone her brother must have been:

And so a little while later I called back, and then I got the news that he had been taken to an emergency room. In any other state of the world, I would have been there with him. We all would have been there with him. And instead he was by himself. I just kept imagining what’s happening to him. Is he afraid? Is he cold? I kept thinking about whether he was cold. There’s no one there to talk to him while he waits for the doctor. There’s no one there to be with him while he receives the news.

“And all I could do would be talk by phone with my brothers,” she adds. “It’s not the same. You need to touch people. We have to hug; we have to be with each other.”

The coronavirus has transformed the grieving process all over the world. Support systems and traditions that have long been the pillars of grief—funerals or memorial services, for example—have broken down in the age of social distancing. Sure, some people have tried. More than 200 people gathered at a funeral in Albany, Georgia, in February. That event was later identified by researchers as a “super spreading event.” By early April, more than 500 people in the county had tested positive for the coronavirus. In late April, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio broke up a large funeral gathering for a rabbi who had died of the disease.

Given the disastrous federal response to the outbreak, Warren—who’s in the running to become Joe Biden’s vice presidential nominee—is in a unique position. Her personal tragedy is one being shared by millions of potential voters, putting her in a position to maybe, possibly do something.

Martin Shkreli will not be let out of prison to research a coronavirus treatment.

US District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto issued a nine-page ruling Saturday denying Shkreli’s request, noting that probation officials viewed the notion that Shkreli might help solve the pandemic as the kind “delusional self-aggrandizing behavior” that landed him behind bars in the first place, according to the Associated Press.

Shkreli came to infamy in 2015 after buying the rights to a drug used to treat complications from AIDS and malaria and dramatically increasing the price—by more than 5,000 percent. That earned him the nickname “Pharma Bro” and, in the words of multiple media outlets, turned him into the “most hated man in America.” In 2017, he was convicted of three counts of securities fraud and sentenced to seven years in prison.

But maybe you can’t knock the man for trying. Recently, other high-profile convicts, including former Trump aides Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, won early release from prison because of the threat the virus poses in prisons—though Cohen’s release has been delayed for unspecified reasons. Last month, former Stormy Daniels attorney Michael Avenatti was released from a New York jail, where he was awaiting sentencing in an extortion case. 

Shkreli has been locked up in a minimum security federal prison in Pennsylvania where there have been no reported cases of the coronavirus. Still, detention facilities across the globe have become hotbeds for infection, as my colleagues Nathalie Baptiste and Samantha Micheals have reported.

States like California and New York have released low-level offenders who are highly vulnerable to COVID-19, which has drawn rebukes from some tough-on-crime critics. But Shkreli’s case proves that getting out of prison—even during a pandemic—isn’t all that easy.

With the United States death toll from COVID-19 approaching 90,000 and former President Barack Obama criticizing the federal government’s response, there’s at least one person who thinks things are actually going quite well: Donald Trump.

On Sunday, the president tweeted, “Doing REALLY well, medically, on solving the CoronaVirus situation (Plague!). It will happen!”

Doing REALLY well, medically, on solving the CoronaVirus situation (Plague!). It will happen!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 17, 2020

It’s not entirely clear what “it” means in this context, but it seems likely that the pandemic is here to stay for the foreseeable future. There are more than 100 vaccines in development globally, and only eight have started testing in humans, according to the Wall Street Journal. Trump tweeted last week that “vaccine work is looking VERY promising, before end of year. Likewise, other solutions!” Moncef Slaoui, who’s leading the US government’s effort to develop a vaccine, said in an interview with the New York Times that “12-18 months [from when work first began] is already a very aggressive timeline” but that the president’s goal was achievable. Other government experts are more skeptical.

Trump’s Sunday tweet comes one day after the Food and Drug Administration issued emergency clearance for an at-home coronavirus testing kit, but even that positive development comes with caveats. Users would still have to send their test samples to a laboratory for diagnostic testing in order to get a result. In fact, far from solving the crisis, the administration’s testing efforts are still failing to reveal a clear picture of the pandemic’s scope. Supply shortages have hampered efforts to ramp up testing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its own numbers recently, announcing that 1.4 million people have tested positive among the more than 10 million tested. But those number differ from what individual states have found. Take California, for example, which says it’s done more than 1.3 million tests, while the CDC counted just under 925,000.

Trump’s rhetoric once again seems to be at odds with the data. And while that’s certainly not a new development, the pandemic has made it far more dangerous.

As the pandemic cancels in-person graduation ceremonies at high schools and colleges around the country, institutions have turned to virtual commencements to honor the class of 2020. On a two hour live-streamed event hosted by actor and comedian Kevin Hart, former president Barack Obama addressed 27,000 graduates from historically black colleges and universities—and took a rare swipe at the Trump administration.

“More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing,” Obama said in the address. “A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.”

The nation’s first Black president highlighted the disease’s “disproportionate impact” on the African American graduates’ communities. “Let’s be honest. A disease like this just spotlights the underlying inequalities and extra burdens that Black communities have historically had to deal with in this country.”

The criticism, while unusual for the former president, is notable in its restraint. In just two months, approximately 88,000 people have died from the coronavirus, 1.4 million have been infected, and 36 million people have lost their jobs, the economy is in free fall. Donald Trump spent weeks downplaying the severity of the crisis and has largely left the response up to individual states who cannot marshal the nation’s full resources and, leaving them to develop large parts of the testing, tracing, and isolating strategies needed to safely resume normal activities.

For the last three years, President Trump has blamed his predecessor for problems taking place on his watch, and this pandemic has been no exception, as he has tried to pass the buck on poor planning, testing failures, and supply shortages. On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell falsely claimed in a live streamed conversation hosted by the Trump campaign that the Obama administration did not leave a pandemic playbook. Later in the week, McConnell walked back his comments in an interview on Fox News (“I was wrong. They did leave behind a plan. So, I clearly made a mistake in that regard.”)

Obama has rarely publicly criticized the current administration since Trump took office in January 2017. But in a leaked private call earlier this month, the former president was less measured. “It would have been bad even with the best of governments,” he said. “It has been an absolute chaotic disaster.”

On Friday, the Republican-dominated Texas Supreme Court put a pause on a lower court’s ruling that would have immediately expanded access to mail-in voting across the state, instead scheduling oral arguments to consider the issue itself for Wednesday.

The legal battle over expanded mail-in voting comes as the coronavirus pandemic is still raging across the country. So far, there have been more than 86,000 Covid-19 deaths in the United States. In Texas, more than 45,000 cases have been reported and 1,272 people have died. This spring, as health officials urged people to practice social distancing and avoid large crowds, many states delayed primaries elections and expanded access to mail-in voting to avoid polling place crowding on election day.

At issue in Texas is a lower court’s ruling that vulnerability to contracting the coronavirus qualifies as a disability under Texas voting laws providing access to absentee voting. Republican Attorney General Bill Paxton has argued the opposite, saying that voters deterred from voting are afraid—not disabled. 

The country has already seen what can happen if elections are allowed to proceed as normal. After the April 7 primary in Wisconsin, at least seven cases were linked to voting. But still, Paxton celebrated the ruling with a statement encouraging the high court to leave the state’s restrictive mail-in ballot access alone: “Protecting the integrity of elections is one of my most important and sacred obligations. The Legislature has carefully limited who may and may not vote by mail.”

Texas elects justices to its highest court in statewide partisan elections. All of its current nine members are Republicans. Despite that, Texas Democrats vowed to fight on. “This is a dark day for our democracy. The Republican Texas Supreme Court is wrong to force the people of Texas to choose between their health and their right to vote,” Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa said in a statement. “They would have Texans die, just so they can hold on to power.”

On Thursday, Kevin Vesey, a TV reporter for News12 Long Island, visited a local protest against the remaining restrictions put in place by New York to stem the spread of the coronavirus, filing a studiously restrained segment for broadcast.

But on Twitter, he decided to share a small piece of raw footage showing how he was harassed by the demonstrators as he went about his job of capturing their demands and relaying them to a wider audience. The footage circulated widely among journalists on Thursday and Friday, often accompanied by laments about the protesters’ targeting of Vesey. In under a minute, the video captures him being called “traitor,” “hack,” “disgusting,””the enemy of the people,” and, inevitably, “fake news.” All are, of course, phrases President Donald Trump has deployed against journalists who cover his administration.

“FAKE NEWS IS NOT ESSENTIAL!”https://t.co/5286zgRVWQ

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 16, 2020

On Friday night, the President himself retweeted the video, mimicking a chant the protestors had shouted: “Fake news is nonessential.” On Saturday morning, he retweeted it again, endorsing his supporters’ harassment by calling them “great people” and claiming that “people can’t get enough of this.” 

Vesey shared the footage with his Twitter followers because it made him alarmed. Trump shared the footage with his Twitter followers because it made him proud. 

This piece was originally published in Slate and appears here as part of our Climate Desk Partnership.

Trains and buses are running half-empty, abandoned by frightened commuters. Fortune 500 companies are fleeing downtown, saying they don’t want expensive, centrally located office space anymore. And their workers are moving to the suburbs or the Sun Belt, sapping school enrollment, emptying apartments, and leaving huge holes in the tax base.

Excuse me, I’ve been reading up on the American city at midcentury. What have I missed?

American cities are turning back the clock. Today, it’s the ’50s, when a sudden shift from transit to car traffic threatened to make cities unusable. Streets were jammed. Parking was a nightmare.

You know what happened next: American cities demolished neighborhoods in a fit of concrete and racism from which many never recovered. It was a time when urban leadership was defined by desperate groveling to retain the very people who had abandoned cities. Project after project, from downtown renewal to highways, was supposed to appeal to suburbanites. If they wouldn’t live here, could we at least make it easier for them to drive here? To work here? To shop here? To park here?

Another carpocalypse is looming as coronavirus shutdowns ease. Traffic is rebounding but mass transit is not—and won’t for some time, if the experience of cities in Asia and Europe are any guide. Once again, city leaders will be under enormous pressure to accommodate drivers.

We’ve been down this road before: For most of the 20^th century, planners were convinced that faster, bigger roads and ample free parking would halt “decentralization” and save the centers where people worked. The results speak for themselves: Cities with overgrown highway networks and plenty of parking are, contrary to theory, now the ones that few people want to come to. Cities cannot beat suburbs at their own game. But they can destroy themselves in the process.

You don’t need to go to Little Rock, Arkansas, or Newport News, Virginia, to see what cars did to cities. You can also take a deep breath in Chicago, which, because everyone stopped driving for six weeks, has enjoyed the cleanest air in two centuries. Or you can go to the Bronx, where highways created some of the highest concentrations of respiratory health conditions in the country. That may or may not be related to the borough’s status as the epicenter of the pandemic.

This is likely only the first of history’s echoes. Cities are broke, office districts dormant, services cut to the bone. And wealthy white families will, in some number, move to the suburbs, sapping City Hall’s coffers when they go. Metropolises may get the gridlocked ’50s and the bankrupt ’70s all in six months.

You know what happened after that, too: “Law and order” policing exacted incalculable harm on black and Hispanic neighborhoods. School integration was abandoned to appease reactionaries in dwindling white ethnic communities. Housing integration too. Politicians plowed tax dollars into prestige projects like convention centers, stadiums, and corporate retention, while health clinics and libraries starved.

There’s a pattern here: Sacrificing the wellbeing of those who don’t leave the city to cater to those who might—or worse, those who already did.

Will cities repeat this tragedy, now, in the 2020s? They should look further back.

In the early 20^th century, when cities were filthy places swerving from one calamity to the next, the working classes traveled to amusement parks to see theatrical fireworks shows called pyrodramas. One particular subset of these was dedicated to firefighting feats, a subject that would have held considerable interest for workers familiar with catastrophes like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 or the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The architect Rem Koolhaas wrote of one production at Coney Island’s Dreamland Park, in which a burning city block was saved in the nick of time by heroic firefighters. It seemed to suggest a permanent condition of the metropolis, he wrote in Delirious New York, where “an astronomical increase in the potential for disaster [is] only just exceeded by an equally astronomical increase in the ability to avert it.”

In reality, the firefighters don’t always arrive on time. But Koolhaas’ description neatly captures the big city’s intoxicating mix of fragility and resilience. Vulnerable to blows of terrorism, hard to get on the ropes. Uniquely susceptible to an epidemic like cholera, but also capable of reversing a river to avoid it or seizing vast tracts for public parks to ameliorate it. Stricken by a viral pandemic, but with the world’s best hospitals to fight it. And right this moment, confronted by a threat that seems to threaten their very reason for being … and with millions of smart people ready to do what it takes to defeat it.

It will have to be something more creative than letting gridlock swallow the metropolis as residents avoid transit or flee for the ‘burbs. “If San Francisco retreats in a fear-based way to private cars, the city dies with that, including the economy,” Jeffrey Tumlin, who directs the city’s transit agency, said in a recent interview published on Streetsblog SF “Why? Because we can’t move more cars. That’s a fundamental geometrical limit. We can’t move more cars in the space we have.”

We can do a lot with space: Let restaurants, shops, and storefront churches take over adjacent parking spaces. Give people someplace to wash their hands. Get homeless people into vacant hotels. Open the streets for bicycles, scooters, wheelchairs, runners. Let vulnerable people have a car on the train. Let residents live closer to jobs, and bring services closer to where residents live.

We can do a lot with time: Work teams that don’t share hours in the office in case someone gets sick. Public exercise hours blocked out for seniors. Staggered hours at schools and government offices to flatten the rush-hour curve, reducing crowding on transit and traffic on roads. Freight dropped off and garbage picked up at night. Temporal distancing to go with the 6-foot rule.

Not all the odds are against the city, after all: Suburbs, too, have offices with elevators. They have crowded school cafeterias. They have mind-numbing traffic, and dying malls that fund their services.

The pandemic will pass. But in the meantime, one of its frightening effects is to expose a distressing lack of imagination about how to reinvent the places we live. (To take an extreme example of thinking creatively, Bogotá had men and women switch off days going outside.) That includes both short-term interventions, like buying pandemic-priced land for future affordable housing, and long-term ones, like forcing suburbs to pay their fair share. The system, we can now see, was broken all along. Why did we design the city to resist terrorism at the expense of public health? Why did we punish debtors by turning off their water, or decide that rich people can leave jail but poor people must remain, or use our public powers to make it so easy for landlords to throw tenants out on the street? We didn’t have to. The pyrodrama is raging, but the firefighters, actually, spend most of their days dealing with homelessness and drug addiction.

There’s only one sure thing: Make the city, even in its muted state, someplace people still want to live. If it’s not for you, someplace else will be. 

Over on Eater, Hillary Dixler Canavan has the scoop on how Noma, the legendary Copenhagen fine-dining temple, plans to adjust to the COVID-19 crisis: by re-opening as an outdoor burger-and-wine bar. For us in the United States, the saddest part isn’t that thousands of miles separate us from that delicious-looking cheeseburger.

Rather, it’s the explanation for why Noma doesn’t necessarily point a way forward for our dining scene. While US restaurateurs are “contemplating reopening without government guidance, in states where the rate of infection is still climbing,” here’s what Noma chef René Redzepi and his Danish peers have going for them, Canavan reports:

• “Denmark’s government covers 75 percent of payroll for businesses impacted by the pandemic, taking that burden off of restaurant owners and preventing mass layoffs without the labyrinthine and ultimately ineffective PPP stipulations.”

The PPP—the Payroll Protection Plan, a program launched in the CARES stimulus act last month—is designed to help small businesses weather the lockdown. It offers low-interest loans to businesses, which are forgiven if the funds are spent within eight weeks and 75 percent of the funds are spent on payroll, with the rest going to rent and other expenses.

These terms don’t jibe well with the needs of most independent restaurants, as Mother Jones’ Kara Voght reported recently, and New York City chef/restaurateur Tom Colicchio teased out on a recent episode of Bite podcast. Colicchio helped organize  the Independent Restaurant Coalition, which is calling for a federal $120 billion “Independent Restaurant Stabilization Fund“—but President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have ruled out any new stimulus spending for the foreseeable future. 

• “Denmark has free healthcare, meaning that restaurant workers have had access to the care they need in the pandemic regardless of the operational status of their restaurant. It’s also a cost burden not carried by restaurant owners in Denmark (though Noma has offered supplemental private health care as a perk).”

Pre-pandemic, just 31 percent of US restaurant workers had health insurance, an industry survey found last year. Colicchio told me that his restaurant group pays “close to a half million dollars” annually for employee healthcare. 

• “Denmark’s chief epidemiologist says the chance of a “second wave” is low, and the country has a robust testing and contact tracing plan.”

Because of haphazard testing, lack of contact tracing, and hasty reopening at the state level, a second wave is “inevitable” in the United States, Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease doctor, recently warned. 

• “Denmark has reported no coronavirus deaths in the past 24 hours.”

Nationwide, Johns Hopkins University’s tally of cases found, the United States suffered 1,462 deaths on May 14.

In other words, Redzepi operates in an advanced, well-run economy; and our chefs operate, well, in the United States. The reservations app OpenTable recently forecasted that 25 percent of US restaurants will perish from the COVID lockdown. Colicchio thinks half of independent restaurants will fail unless the government takes directed action to help them through the crisis—which isn’t going to happen anytime soon. 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday conceded that he had been “wrong” to claim, as he did during an appearance on the Trump campaign’s YouTube channel earlier this week, that the Obama administration had failed to leave guidance on preparing for a pandemic.

“I was wrong,” the top Senate Republican told Fox News. “They did leave behind a plan. So I clearly made a mistake in that regard.”

McConnell, however, refused to make a judgment on whether President Trump had failed to follow the playbook. “I don’t have any observation about that because I don’t know enough about the details of that to comment on it in any detail.”

But McConnell’s claim of ignorance didn’t stop him from making his false allegation on Monday. 

“We want to be early and ready for the next one because clearly the Obama administration did not leave to this administration any kind of game plan for something like this,” McConnell had told Team Trump Online. Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law and host of Monday’s episode, smiled in agreement: “That’s exactly right.”

McConnell’s remarks—which echo the president’s ongoing efforts to blame his predecessor for the bungled pandemic response—sparked immediate pushback from former Obama officials, many of whom pointed to the literal documentation that had been made available to the Trump White House. Politico reported on the 69-page document back in March.

I've had people tweet at me in the past 24 hours:

Did the pandemic playbook really exist?
Was it really a clearly marked "playbook"?
Would it have helped?

Here's the cover, and the table of contents. You decide. pic.twitter.com/PMWr8YjIMu

— Ronald Klain (@RonaldKlain) May 12, 2020

 

There’s a verse in the iconic Mexican song “México Lindo y Querido” that translates to something like this: “My dear and beautiful Mexico, if I die far away from you, let them say that I’m sleeping, so they’ll bring me back to you.” The mariachi ballad, made famous in the early 1950s by legendary singer Jorge Negrete, speaks to that human desire to be buried in your homeland, near your family and ancestors—a last wish that, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, has become that much harder to fulfill.

As of May 5, more than 660 Mexican citizens had died from COVID-19 in the United States, but only one body had been repatriated to its final resting place in Mexico, according to a Mexican government spokesperson. Urns containing ashes “have left” the United States on their journey south, the spokesperson added, though he couldn’t say exactly how many. By comparison, nearly 47,000 remains were returned to Mexico from the United States from 2010 to 2019—an average of roughly 375 a month.

“Under normal circumstances, [repatriation of remains] can be done with a certain ease, but this is an unusual situation,” says Felipe Carrera, head of the Consular Protection and Legal Assistance Office at the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles. “This epidemic has truly complicated this process.”

Families who plan on returning a loved one’s remains to Mexico must now navigate a number of coronavirus-specific restrictions on both sides of the border. Last month, Mexico’s Office of Foreign Affairs updated its repatriation guide, which now reads, “If the deceased is a COVID-19 victim, local authorities may require special procedures for preparing and releasing the remains.” There also are paperwork delays due to the limited hours and staff at consulates and government offices in the United States and in Mexico. And beyond that, many commercial airlines prohibited the transportation of caskets carrying COVID-19 victims. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, the updated guide from the Mexican government says that “some authorities recommend or require cremation for health reasons” and that the Mexican Health Ministry has said it’s “preferable to cremate the remains, as there is no risk in handling the ashes.” (While there is little research on how long the virus survives on dead bodies, a European Centers for Disease Prevention and Control report notes that the virus may live on surfaces for seven days, and that there is a possibility of infection when coming in contact with bodily fluids, clothing, or surfaces touched by the deceased.) Still, there have been delays in cremation services over the past month due to increased demand, and conversations around cremation can be uncomfortable and complicated, says the LA consulate’s Carrera, who often hears pushback from families who want to have a more culturally traditional funeral and choose burial over cremation.

“Repatriating someone’s remains is a very personal decision in order to honor a family member’s last wish…like the song lyrics say,” he says. “Losing a family member is never easy, but the trauma of losing a family member right now is even larger, so families are having a tough time dealing with this emotionally complicated situation.”

It’s a logistically complicated situation, as well. In a pre-pandemic world, this is how the repatriation of remains to Mexico would normally work: First, family members would contact the nearest Mexican consulate to where the person died and provide the deceased’s birth certificate. The family then would be interviewed and asked to provide details of funeral homes in the United States and Mexico, and the location of burial. Local authorities in the US would provide a death certificate as well as an embalming or cremation certificate. At that point, the local US health department would issue a transit permit for the body or ashes. Once there had been a sign-off from local health and records departments, embassies and consulates in the United States would have to issue their own transit permit, so the remains could arrive in either Mexico City or Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-biggest city. Often, funeral homes in Mexico arrange for the transport of the remains from there. 

Not only is the process complicated, but at $900 to $2,200 to transport urns or caskets back to Mexico, it can also be cost-prohibitive for some families. Carrera notes that the Mexican government has earmarked funds for the last two decades to assist families who can’t cover the costs. He works directly with families who need this support and says that the LA consulate had about 300 of those cases in one year. Last week, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador added roughly $20 million to the assistance fund.

The cost, the logistics, and the public health risks of a funeral service can easily become secondary when grieving the loss of a family member, even more so if the deceased had a last wish to be buried in their home country—as Jorge Negrete did. The famous crooner died in Los Angeles in 1953, just two years after he first recorded “México Lindo y Querido.” His journey back to his homeland wasn’t a simple one—there were paperwork backlogs and flight delays—but when his body finally arrived in Guadalajara, half a million people turned up to pay their respects at his funeral service, while mariachis played the songs he loved so much.

On April 17, acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Matthew Albence told members of the House Oversight Committee that none of the people in ICE detention vulnerable to COVID-19 could be safely released. One week later, Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejía, a medically vulnerable detainee falsely accused of domestic violence by ICE, arrived at the California hospital where he’d die from complications of the new coronavirus.

On Thursday, Democrats on the oversight committee wrote to Albence and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf for the third time in three months about the danger posed by ICE detention during a pandemic. Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and civil rights subcommittee chair Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) stressed that those risks are no longer abstractions:

ICE has failed to take this crisis seriously, and three people—that Congress and the American people know about—have now died. At each step of the way, the agency has waited rather than acted, prioritizing continued detention of thousands of non-violent detainees regardless of the life-and-death consequences for immigrants, employees, contractors, or their families. One federal judge has ruled that ICE’s “systemwide inaction” has “likely exhibited callous indifference to the safety and wellbeing” of ICE detainees. 

On Thursday morning, I reported on a fourth death that appears linked to ICE’s refusal to release people from detention. On Sunday, Óscar López Acosta, a 42-year-old Honduran man with diabetes, died of complications from the new coronavirus. López developed his first symptoms days after being released from an ICE jail plagued by the new coronavirus. ICE released López without testing him.

The two representatives added that ICE has misled their committee and the public about the coronavirus crisis in detention centers. ICE also hasn’t answered basic questions from the committee, such as how many people still in custody are vulnerable to the virus, they wrote. Raskin and Maloney are demanding that information along with all documents related to Escobar’s death.

As of Wednesday, 943 of the 1,788 people tested in ICE custody had COVID-19. The letter states that ICE now has a higher infection rate higher than any state:

At a rate of 3,177 people per 100,000, it is 78% higher than New York State’s—the epicenter of the virus in the U.S.—which has an infection rate of 1,786 per 100,000.29

The true number of infections is likely far higher. Only 1,788 detainees have been tested, meaning that a staggering 53% of those tested are positive. According to CDC, only 18% of Americans who have been tested were positive.30 

“ICE has maintained that detention in its facilities is not punitive,” Maloney and Raskin wrote, “but the agency effectively sentenced Mr. Mejia to death when it opposed his release.”

Read the full letter below: 

 

  

 

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) is stepping down as the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee after federal agents served a search warrant on him Wednesday as part of an investigation into whether he used inside information on the coronavirus epidemic when he decided to unload stock ahead of a market crash.

“The work the Intelligence Committee and its members do is too important to risk hindering in any way,” Burr said in a statement Thursday. “I believe this step is necessary to allow the Committee to continue its essential work free of external distractions.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is expected committee’s temporary chairman while the investigation into Burr plays out. Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho) has more seniority on the committee, but is likely to chose to instead remain chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday night that federal agents had executed a warrant to seize Burr’s cell phone as part of an investigation into whether Burr violated a law preventing members of Congress from trading on insider information they receive from their official work. Agents previously used a warrant to obtain information from Burr‘s iCloud account from Apple, the paper reported.

Burr sold off between $628,000 and $1.72 million in stock after he and other senators received coronavirus briefings from US public health officials, ProPublica has reported. The sales allowed him to avoid losing money when the stock market subsequently crashed due to the pandemic.

Burr has claimed he traded only on the basis of public information. He has also asked the Senate Ethics Committee to review his stock trades.

Other senators, including Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.), also sold off stock after receiving Senate briefings on the virus.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said Thursday that she answered questions from the FBI about her husband’s stock trades. Unlike Burr, Feinstein has said she had no personal involvement in the trades.

Under Senate rules I report my husband's financial transactions. I have no input into his decisions. My husband in January and February sold shares of a cancer therapy company. This company is unrelated to any work on the coronavirus and the sale was unrelated to the situation.

— Senator Dianne Feinstein (@SenFeinstein) March 20, 2020

To get warrants, federal agents had to show they had probable cause to believe Burr broke the law. To investigate a sitting US senator, they also needed approval from Attorney General William Barr or other senior DOJ officials.

Burr’s decision to step down from the intelligence committee comes as the panel prepares to release the final installment of a series of reports on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Last month, the committee released a report affirming the assessment of intelligence agencies that Russia’s goal was to help elect President Donald Trump, a conclusion that Trump still disputes. Although the committee’s investigation under Burr has been far less aggressive than Democrats would like, Burr’s refusal to end it completely has made him a frequent target of criticism from Trump allies.

This article has been updated.

The Department of Health and Human Services ignored repeated warnings from the nation’s largest mask manufacturer in late January that the supply of personal protective equipment was inadequate for the coronavirus crisis, Dr. Rick Bright, the ousted head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, told Congress Thursday.

“I’ll never forget the emails I received from Mike Bowen,” who runs Prestige Ameritech, the top surgical mask supplier in the country, Bright said, “indicating that our mask supply, our N-95 respirator supply was completely decimated. And he said, ‘We’re in deep shit. The world is.'”

Bright’s whistleblower complaint includes more details about his email conversations with Bowen. According to the complaint, Bowen sounded the alarm about impending mask shortages on January 21 and offered to produce additional N-95 respirators “with government help.”

When Bowen testified later Thursday, Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) produced a January 31 email in which Bowen said that he would sell masks to the US government “if and only if the VA and DoD become my customers after this thing is over.” Bowen told Walden that he specified that condition because it would take him three or four months to ramp up production, and he didn’t want to hire and train employees only to fire them when the government no longer needed masks to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

On January 23, Bright suggested at a meeting with HHS officials that the coronavirus might already be in the United States and requested additional funds for his agency to combat the threat posed by the emerging disease, the report alleges. That same day, an HHS spokesperson said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had determined that the coronavirus posed a low threat to the US public.

The tents started popping up soon after the shelter-in-place order came down, in mid-March. By early May, some 90 of them were clustered in Civic Center Plaza, with more joining each day—a sprawling encampment of people without housing, little nylon domes dotting the square like a low satire of the ornate gold-leaf dome of San Francisco City Hall in the near distance. 

In the tree-lined open space, things have settled into something of a routine over the past few weeks. Vans from various nonprofits roll up and dole out hand sanitizer, masks, bagged lunches, and bottled water. Cops attempt to enforce social distancing, on at least one occasion reportedly instructing people to stay in their tents after a 10 p.m. “curfew.” (There is no such city curfew; a spokesperson for the San Francisco Police Department said the cops were there to “reduce crime and remind the public about sheltering in place and social-distancing requirements.”)  

Sarah Wasson, a 35-year-old who lives in a tent with her husband, noted that it’s hard not to spread germs when you don’t have access to bathrooms or showers. “They say we’re more at risk of spreading it to everybody else because we’re not clean like everybody else, but we can’t be,” she said when I visited the encampment at the end of April. “We don’t have a choice.”

Just this week, to help people like Wasson, the city unveiled a “safe sleeping village” in the plaza: Inside a fenced-off area, 50 tents sit in squares spray-painted on the ground like a checkerboard. Residents now have access to bathrooms, three meals a day, and 24/7 security. But there are far more people in the plaza than there are tent spots in the village. Asked what would happen to them, Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing spokesperson Emily Cohen said, “We continue to seek more stable housing solutions and, when possible, to guide people experiencing homelessness to safer and less concentrated locations.”

In recent weeks, San Francisco has made national news as a glimmering case study in flattening the curve. Since Bay Area counties became the first in the nation to order residents to stay inside, the city has mercifully avoided the devastation that the coronavirus has wrought in other urban areas. The city’s ICUs have plenty of space. Of nearly 900,000 residents, just 2,000 have tested positive for the virus.

The glaring exception to all the good news is the homeless population, which has grown significantly over the course of the spring. The encampment in front of City Hall is one of several such sites that have sprung up across the city. As homeless shelters have emptied to comply with social-distancing measures, between 500 and 1,000 additional people have spilled into the streets, experts estimate, joining the roughly 5,000 who were already there. The number of tents in the Tenderloin, the 49 blocks that make up the city’s most impoverished neighborhood, has tripled since January. Last week, Tenderloin residents, including the Hastings College of the Law, sued the city for the neighborhood’s “deplorable” conditions: “What has long been suffered in the Tenderloin has become insufferable,” read the complaint.

There has not yet been widespread coronavirus testing of the homeless in San Francisco, but the data that does exist is eye-popping: A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team responding to a coronavirus cluster at San Francisco’s largest shelter, MSC South, in April tested all 143 residents; 66 percent tested positive. The shelter promptly evacuated, with the residents moving into hotel rooms to self-isolate.

Homelessness has long been San Francisco’s glaring exception. As of 2015, the city had a higher rate of unsheltered residents than any other major city in the country. In the Civic Center Plaza today, there’s a sense of history repeating itself: In the late 1980s, Mayor Art Agnos could watch from his balcony at City Hall as a sort of makeshift city took shape in the same plaza. Then, as now, a natural disaster intensified a pre-existing crisis. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake forced people out of crumbling single-room occupancy hotels. They flocked to Camp Agnos, as it was known. The mayor refused to evict them until he had a place to send them, prompting the city to acquire its first two homeless shelters. As the fates would have it, one of those new shelters was MSC South.

With tents multiplying in the streets and the city government bitterly divided over what to do about it, San Francisco is facing the same old problems today, but dramatically heightened. “It’s what I went through, only multiplied by a thousand times,” Agnos told me. “Because, rather than just 3, 400 people, centralized, they’re all over the city. They’re all over the Bay Area.” 

Dr. Margot Kushel, who heads the University of California, San Francisco’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, described San Francisco’s pre-outbreak scenario as a “tinderbox.” Throw in a highly infectious disease, she said, “and you have the makings of a catastrophe.”

San Francisco’s successes thus far in combating the coronavirus look a lot more fragile from among the tents at Civic Center Plaza. An outbreak within the city’s substantial unhoused population could spread rapidly beyond it, to the people who in normal times are cosseted from the human consequences of the Bay Area’s housing squeeze.

“We are essentially fighting a plague while exempting tens of thousands of our residents from the protections that the rest of us have,” Supervisor Matt Haney, who oversees the Tenderloin, told me. “If you’re concerned about how long this is going to go, if you’re concerned about how much this is going to cost, if you’re concerned about whether or not the sacrifices that you are making and your family are making are going to be worth it, you should also be concerned about homeless people.”

Since Agnos’ tenure, the politics of housing in San Francisco have been characterized by a refusal to face homelessness head-on, as a matter of structural inequities with structural remedies. But in a pandemic, there is no denying that the well-being of those with shelter and the well-being of those without it are inextricably tied together. 

When I spoke with Diane Yentel, the president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, I asked if this coronavirus could, at last, force a reckoning with homelessness. “If this moment doesn’t,” she said, “I’m not sure what would.”

On March 17, the day that Bay Area counties ground to a halt, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors held an emergency meeting. Dr. Tomás Aragón, the city’s lead health officer, admitted that he was losing sleep over the possibility of a massive outbreak among the thousands of people living on the streets or in group housing, like shelters or SROs, where residents are lodged in close quarters. “Hours matter: This virus, the way that it moves, is explosive,” he said. “I think we can have an explosion just in those populations.”

Soon after, the city ordered shelters to stop taking new reservations. The decision was “one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” said Abigail Stewart-Kahn, the interim director of the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. “That immediately spilled people out into the streets.” The shelters typically hold about 3,000 people, a large portion of whom are same-day walk-ins. Today, the city’s shelters are between 5 and 40 percent full.

While virtually everyone agreed that shelters weren’t safe, city leaders were—and continue to be—deeply divided about what to do next.

On one side are the city’s left-wing supervisors, who insist on placing people without housing into San Francisco’s thousands of empty hotel rooms. As the supervisors explain it, this is a no-brainer: Hotels are desperate for business. Unhoused people are desperate for shelter. The city could get a large portion of the costs covered by Project Roomkey, a statewide initiative using FEMA and state funding to secure “isolation rooms” in hotels and motels for vulnerable populations. “We have the hotel rooms, we have the money, and we have the staffing,” said one supervisor, Hillary Ronen, at a press conference in early April, just after the first resident of a homeless shelter had tested positive for the coronavirus. “Why aren’t we doing this?” 

On the other side is the city’s executive branch, led by Mayor London Breed, the hero in the national narrative of San Francisco’s pandemic response. Breed maintains that it is not realistic to expect to solve in a matter of weeks a homelessness crisis that has been decades in the making: “I know that people are asking, ‘Well, why don’t we just open the doors and let everyone who is homeless get access to a hotel room?’” Breed said in early April. “I wish it were that easy to help people.”

Breed’s team agreed to acquire some hotel rooms but for a limited population—namely, homeless people who had tested positive, and people in homeless shelters or on the streets who are elderly or sick. But a number of obstacles prevent them from housing all the city’s 8,000 homeless people, they say. First, there’s the matter of the budget: Trent Rhorer, the executive director of the San Francisco Human Services Agency, said last month that “it would not be fiscally prudent” for the city to rent thousands of hotel rooms for “a population that does not require an urgent COVID health quarantine or isolation intervention.” Then there was the concern that isolating people with severe mental illness and addiction problems into hotels would be dangerous—particularly since people are far more likely to die of overdoses when they’re using drugs alone.

Cities across the country are facing similar debates, and a number of states have rolled out initiatives to put the homeless in hotels with the help of funding from FEMA. A team of academic researchers recently estimated that the nation would need 400,000 additional shelter beds to manage the pandemic among the homeless, who are twice as likely to need hospitalization and two to three times more likely to die from the coronavirus. Housing advocacy organizations put the price tag of these efforts at roughly $15 billion. In the most recent stimulus package, Congress allocated $4 billion in emergency grants for the homeless; just $1 billion has been released so far. 

The rift in San Francisco follows the same contours of the debate the city has been having for decades, only this time the stakes seem clearer. Homelessness in the city, and in America more broadly, took root in the 1970s and 1980s, brought on by a deadly mix of declining wages, deinstitutionalization, and cuts to welfare and affordable housing. In the ’90s, San Francisco was on the “cutting edge of solutions for homelessness,” said Kushel.

Under Agnos, it was one of the first cities to introduce a “Housing First” program—as it later became known—that provided permanent housing to the homeless with virtually no strings attached; the idea is that it’s impossible to get a job or tackle substance abuse if you don’t have a roof over your head. Agnos was voted out of office shortly after his proposed shelters opened, but the model expanded nationally. The program was rigorously studied, and the positive effects were incontrovertible. “We know what to do,” said Kushel. “Housing is the answer. Some people need just housing, some people with support. Some people need a lot of support, some people need a little support. It’s not rocket science.” 

But since the ’90s, housing costs in the city have shot through the roof, and residents have been internally displaced into homelessness. Successive mayors, faced with dwindling federal funding and steady political pressure to tackle the homelessness problem, promoted occasionally divergent grand plans. Frank Jordan, a former police chief, instructed cops to arrest the homeless. Willie Brown added to the city’s affordable housing stock before declaring homelessness to be a problem “that may not be solvable.” Gavin Newsom, as a supervisor, catapulted himself into the running for the city’s mayoralty with the passage of his “Care Not Cash” measure; the program took away cash assistance to the homeless and used it on services and housing instead. Last fall, voters approved a ballot measure supported by Breed that authorized the city to borrow $600 million for the construction of affordable housing.

But there have been no broad-based investments in affordable housing commensurate with the scale of the problem. Kushel was quick to point out that there are bigger culprits beyond City Hall. “This has been a crisis made from federal disinvestment from affordable housing,” she said. “Mayors always get blamed the most, then maybe governors, and the feds are usually left off the hook.” Still, local politicos have cited the same alibis for inertia that have been offered in recent weeks in the hotel debate: that people don’t want to be housed, that they are too sick to be housed, that they need to earn their way into housing, that they come to San Francisco from elsewhere and thus shouldn’t be housed—all of which Kushel described as “totally not true.” 

Over the years, the homeless population in San Francisco became older, frailer, and more geographically concentrated. Today, more than a third of people in San Francisco without housing are over the age of 50, and nearly half live in a single district, consisting of the Tenderloin and SoMa neighborhoods. African Americans make up five percent of the city’s population but more than a third of its homeless population.

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that pre-existing civic inequalities have been mapped onto the city’s coronavirus outcomes: A few weeks ago, a team of researchers tested 3,000 residents of the Mission, a predominantly Latinx neighborhood that has gentrified at warp speed over the past decade. Of those who tested positive, 89 percent came from households with an annual income of less than $50,000, 95 percent were Latinx, and zero percent were white.

As of Wednesday, homeless people have moved into 1,100 rooms in small, budget hotels and motels acquired by the city. Most of the occupants came from homeless shelters; 115 adults have been relocated from the streets into hotel rooms. There, they have three meals a day delivered to their rooms—eating in a communal cafeteria isn’t an option given social-distancing measures. For those dealing with addiction, medications like methadone, are provided. 

The hotels are staffed by local nonprofit employees and disaster workers, some of whom are city employees furloughed from their usual jobs—like librarians, airport analysts, or coat checkers at the museums. “People from up, down, all around are raising their hands” said Stewart-Kahn, “and stepping into work with something that probably makes them quite nervous.”

Michael Lambert, the city librarian, typically oversees San Francisco’s dozens of library branches; now he works from 3 to 11 pm, Tuesday through Saturday, at a city-contracted hotel. With a colleague from the library, he serves dinner to guests in their rooms. “The guests are very grateful for the service,” he wrote in an email. “This is some of the most rewarding and humbling work I have ever performed in my career.”

Urban Alchemy, a nonprofit that employs formerly incarcerated people, currently staffs three hotels, as well as the newly-formed safe sleeping village. “We’re like the concierge: We try to act like we’re real hotel staff—the same ones you would get at a four-star,” said CEO Lena Miller. Robert Cedillio, 54, spent three decades years in prison before getting out two years ago. Now, he supervises staff at a hotel. “I make sure that the guests wear their masks, wear their gloves,” he said. “We give them their [meals]. We hand out laundry bags for their personal laundry. We clean up around here. Whatever needs to be done, we’re there to assist.”

All of this comes at a price. The hotel initiative will cost the city an estimated $105 million over three months, estimated Cohen, the homelessness department spokesperson. FEMA reimbursements could cover as much as half of the costs. But in the meantime, the city’s economy is hobbled by the coronavirus, facing a budget shortfall of more than $1 billion over the next two years. 

Depending on if you ask Breed’s advisers or the supervisors, the pace of converting hotel rooms into shelter is either turbo-charged or glacial. 

“It’s the hardest thing the city’s ever done, and we’ve done it faster than at least every county in California and possibly every city in the country,” said Stewart-Kahn. With each hotel placement comes a series of critical questions, she explained: “If they can’t self-care, how do we get the additional staff? How do we feed people three times a day? Does each space have Narcan? How do we transport people when you can’t put more than one person on a bus?”

The supervisors, meanwhile, say that Breed and her team have been dragging their feet, wasting precious time. “They’re hoping that if they move slowly enough on this, the need for these rooms will go away at some point,” said Supervisor Dean Preston. In this version of events, grassroots efforts have had to fill in critical gaps in the absence of aggressive action from the city government. Preston’s team raised more than $80,000 on GoFundMe to transfer 39 shelter residents to a vacant motel. Haney also secured funding, from the United Methodist Church, to rent rooms at a hotel; in early April, 22 shelter residents piled moving carts with their belongings and rolled them down the street to their temporary new home.

In mid-April, the dispute in the city government came to a head when the supervisors unanimously passed emergency legislation mandating that the city procure 8,250 hotel rooms for homeless people and frontline safety and healthcare workers. Breed refused to sign the legislation. In a lengthy Medium post, she explained, “I will not support a law requiring us to open thousands of rooms before we can do so safely.” Last week, the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights, backed by the ACLU, threatened to sue the city if Breed didn’t follow the supervisors’ order. Breed responded, “We’re not housekeepers, we’re not babysitters, but we’re being treated that way.”

It’s possible that both glosses on the hotel initiative, “the city is moving as fast as possible” and “the city is too slow,” are true: San Francisco is taking unprecedented action, and the help can’t come fast enough. What’s certain is that, to the average person living on the streets, getting into a hotel will remain virtually impossible unless more rooms are acquired and staffed.

“We feel super vulnerable, and we keep hearing all these places for people to stay,” said Jessica Dutton, who lives in a tent in the center of the city. “We’re pretty much ‘nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.’”

In late April, I shadowed employees at Glide, one of the city’s biggest nonprofit social service providers for homeless people. The Glide employees and clients I spoke with had the air of people hunkering down for the long haul. As one man lamented as he waited in line for a meal, “I picked a bad time to be homeless.” 

Before the outbreak, the organization’s drop-in center, in the heart of the Tenderloin, helped clients fill out applications for transitional housing and get shelter reservations. Now, employees give out hygiene kits from a table on the sidewalk during the day, and blankets starting at 4 p.m. “Every interaction now is just, ‘Take this and go,’” said Glide case manager DeMarco McCall.

With libraries, restaurants, and drop-in centers closed, there’s nowhere to charge phones and use the internet, which is particularly problematic when access to social services requires people to hop on the phone or online. When I asked Michael Kenney, a man who recently had to leave a shelter, if he was considering cashing a stimulus check, he said, “I don’t know—how would I find out about that?” He has no phone and he lost his ID, which means he has no access to food stamps. “I can’t contact my family back east because I don’t have their phone numbers and I don’t have any way to go online,” he told me, clutching a new green tent he’d picked up from Glide. “I’m basically SOL. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Glide normally operates a busy soup kitchen that relies on volunteers. Now, with the volunteer operation shut down, the organization offers shelf-stable meals from Gate Gourmet—yes, the airline food company. Each week since the shelter-in-place order, Glide has distributed more than 10,000 of the bagged meals, which are funded by a national volunteer-driven initiative called Project Isaiah. “This windfall has saved us,” said Glide’s director of meals George Gundry. When I visited, the line for breakfast meandered around three of the four sides of the block.

Glide’s outreach has changed, too: What was once a van offering mobile needle exchange and infectious disease testing services to homeless encampments across the city has transitioned into offering the essentials. Under overpasses and outside abandoned warehouses, case manager Felanie Castro doles out food, water, hygiene kits, and face masks. She gives clean needles to the injection drug users, and two-person tents to those with no shelter. (Between stops, she explained her name: After 22 years in prison, she underwent a gender transition. When deciding on a new name, she thought, “You know what, I’m going to reclaim that shit.”)

The hand sanitizer that Castro gives out comes from University of California, Berkeley, where student scientists have made full-time jobs of producing hundreds of gallons of hand sanitizer each week for the needy. Abrar Abidi, a second-year microbiology PhD student at the center of the effort, said that 10 labs at the university are participating in the effort, which involves acquiring the ingredients, making the sanitizer, and organizing its distribution. “We’ve been very reluctant to let this be reduced to a cute story of a few young people who just want to help out the community or something,” he said. “Because most of us take quite a tragic view of what’s happening: that in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, something like this is the only resource that many of the poorest people have.”

What’s often left out of the debate about the hotel rooms in San Francisco is any consideration of what happens after the pandemic has passed. Could a policy built on the fly in an emergency become a permanent feature of social provision? 

“That’s the elephant in the room,” said Preston, the supervisor. “I think one of the things that the administration fears is that this could work. That the sky doesn’t fall. That lots of homeless people are homeless not because of such severe mental illness, but because they can’t afford housing in the Bay Area.”

It would be a bleak victory, in a way, for Agnos’ original vision: Housing First, at long last. The former mayor for his part was careful not to take sides in the fight over hotel rooms. But he said he hoped the pandemic would spur “new ideas that we haven’t thought of in the 35-, 40-year history of homelessness,” recalling how the city acquired its first shelters in the aftermath the earthquake.

There’s some evidence that such a process is underway. The city is securing hotel rooms with an eye toward the long term, said Stewart-Kahn. The goal is to lease or purchase the rooms and add them to the city’s permanent supportive housing stock when this is all over. This would be no small feat: With the addition of the 2,700 rooms that the city has acquired during the coronavirus outbreak (most of them are still being prepared for move-in), the city’s permanent supportive housing stock would increase by nearly 40 percent. But there have been no long-term leases or purchases made to date. “Any philanthropist or financier or smart person who wants to come help with that, we are working on a daily basis [to] raise the funds to own these in a long-term way,” said Stewart-Kahn.

When I asked Kushel what she thought would happen, she laid out two scenarios. The “big, big, big nightmare scenario,” is that the city and state governments will run out of money, the federal government won’t fill in the needed gaps, and residents will be evicted as soon as the eviction moratorium, implemented by Gov. Gavin Newsom in March, is lifted. Residents who were hanging on by a thread won’t be able to pay their back rent, higher-income people will move in, “and we will lose what little affordable housing we have,” she posited.

Kushel’s dream scenario, meanwhile, would involve a dramatic increase in federal funding for affordable housing and rental assistance. “My optimistic scenario is people will finally realize what we’ve been saying all along,” she said. “There’s no way to have a healthy society when you have this many people living without housing.”

Top photo: Gabrielle Lurie/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty

The United States will experience the “darkest winter in modern history” in the continued absence of a significantly more robust response to the coronavirus pandemic, the federal scientist who was abruptly ousted as the head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority last month will tell Congress on Thursday. 

“Our window of opportunity is closing,” Dr. Rick Bright plans to tell the House’s Energy and Commerce Committee, according to an advanced release of his opening remarks. “If we fail to develop a nationally coordinated response, based in science, I fear the pandemic will get far worse and be prolonged, causing unprecedented illness and fatalities. While it is terrifying to acknowledge the extent of the challenge that we currently confront, the undeniable fact is there will be a resurgence of the COVID-19 this fall, greatly compounding the challenges of seasonal influenza and putting an unprecedented strain on our health care system.”

The statement also said it was “painfully clear” that the administration was woefully underprepared for the crisis, and Bright urged the US to work with international partners in the race for a vaccine. The dire warnings stand in stark contrast to Trump’s premature rush to declare victory, even as the death toll soars past 80,000, but mirrored the assessment Dr. Anthony Fauci gave before a much-anticipated Senate hearing on Tuesday.

Bright is expected to speak about his removal, which he alleges came as a retaliatory move after he had protested President Donald Trump’s aggressive push of hydroxychloroquine, an unproven and potentially dangerous anti-malarial drug, as a coronavirus treatment. 

Today, like any good politics blogger, I tuned in to watch the first major hearing by the Senate on the government response to the coronavirus pandemic. And, like any good politics blogger, I had Twitter open in a separate tab. Much to my surprise, instead of Dr. Anthony Fauci—the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—or Centers for Disease Control head Dr. Robert Redfield, who was trending but Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). I clicked on her name. Surely, I thought, her absurd defense of the dental lobby was going viral.

Sen. Susan Collins: “Dentists tell me that teeth with cavities that could’ve been filled are now going to need root canals.” pic.twitter.com/vdnD0BqtNu

— The Hill (@thehill) May 12, 2020

 

But no! Instead, I found post after viral post criticizing her for not wearing a mask.

For all the reasons to criticize Collins—her decisive vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, for example, or her reluctance to convict President Donald Trump in his Senate impeachment trial—this one actually seems to be unfair. Here’s why.

At the beginning of the hearing, the chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), announced that senators were allowed to remove their masks when speaking because they were all six feet apart. From the footage I have been poring over to get to the bottom of this pressing issue, I can see that Senator Collins, also known as the villain, entered the hearing room wearing a mask. She said hello to Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.), sat down at her isolated seat, and, after a few minutes, slipped off her mask. During that time, the Twitter outrage began.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is about to testify before the Senate. Everyone in this camera shot is wearing a mask, except for Susan Collins.

Because wearing a mask to protect yourself and others from a deadly virus is now deemed partisan and anti-Trump. pic.twitter.com/t4K7cMl4YC

— Charlotte Clymer 🏳️‍🌈 (@cmclymer) May 12, 2020

Later in the hearing, her mask was back on, where it remained for the rest of the hearing, except when she was speaking. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends wearing masks “in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain”—not in Senate hearings where all who are attending are amply spread apart. There isn’t even a scientific consensus on how effective face coverings are in preventing the spread of the coronavirus, but we don’t need to get into that here. (President Trump, it turns out, wouldn’t be caught dead in a mask.) So, please, can we stop with the mask shaming and figure out why Collins wants to risk lives to appease Maine’s dentists? 

Looking our best during an online work appearance is a real struggle. The public had a rare opportunity on Tuesday to see some of their leaders and top medical officials share that pain, during a Senate hearing into the Trump administration’s coronavirus pandemic response that mixed in-person attendance with video conferencing.

Putting aside the substance for one moment (my colleagues are doing a great job of highlighting the best moments), there were mixed results—ranging from terrifying to broadcast-worthy—in terms of production value. Perhaps their failures and successes can be used to make your next Zoom better.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases 

Fauci’s setup is good. Very on-brand: lots of books; a neat but busy mind. It’s exactly how I imagined (and wanted) his home office to be. But he’s taken the “lift your camera higher” advice too far. Usually this guidance helps lift a subject’s face, smoothing out necklines, and establishing a direct line of eye contact with the viewer. In this case, the camera being too high has a counter-effect, closing Fauci’s face off to the viewer, because he needs to look down to read his notes or cast his eyes to other participants on his screen. The camera angle shows too much floor, and not enough wall.

But overall, his composition is good. Most importantly, he knows how to find his light. He has placed himself in the center, and given himself a nice amount of headroom so he’s not butting the top of the frame. The array of interesting props doesn’t distract from his performance. I’d like him a bit closer to the camera. That could mean bringing his computer closer, because that chair doesn’t look like it will come in any more under the desk. But that’s a quibble.

Anthony Fauci has so much credibility that books get out of bookcases and settle behind him on the floor. The chevron made by the desks produces two streams away but Anthony and the books are central and immovable. He is the tip of the credibility spear and they are his shaft. pic.twitter.com/8LI0Uev6Yz

— Bookcase Credibility (@BCredibility) May 12, 2020

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)

Bernie’s frame is good. Normally, I’d be worried about this amount of backlight throwing a face into silhouette. But he appears to be countering that with another light source behind the camera, either another window, or a fixed light from his campaign? I like the vermilion wall, which gives character and makes his face pop. But there’s crowding in his wall furnishings. I think it’s good to leave as much room around your head as possible (even though my colleagues were very excited to learn about his Red Hot Chili Peppers fandom).

Don’t think we can’t see the people who spent years angrily insisting that their Bernie fandom is 100% about rigoroous policy analysis gushing over his Red Hot Chili Peppers posters.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 12, 2020

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.)

Murray is doing a few things to avoid, and a few things to embrace. She’s not in the center, and the top of her head bumps the top of her frame. Also, there is a lot of echo in her room. If that’s happening, it’s because there are a lot of hard surfaces; you can break that up with soft furnishings like cushions, a blanket, a rug, or curtains. That said, her light is good, especially the way it’s catching her hair. A great tip before you hop on camera is do the thing that makes you feel good. If it’s showing off your hair (hard in a pandemic, I know), do that. If it’s your favorite shirt, the one that always gets great comments, wear that. Make yourself feel good. It gives you confidence. So whatever that thing is you do to make yourself feel sharp, do it.

Dr. Stephen Hahn, Commissioner, Food and Drug Administration

Whoa. He looks like a ghost popping up to say “Boo!” to a small child, sponsored by Shutterstock. To get that kind of shallow depth of field would require a ridiculously low f-stop on a proper camera, and then tons of front-light to combat the extreme back-light. The haziness around the edges indicates it’s almost certainly a fake background. There’s just no way he’s actually pulling off the look he’s faking. Not cool.

In fact, it looks like someone has found the exact background, called “school library or office lobby waiting area for educational business background,” from Getty:

Stephen Hahn is using a Getty stock image as his background during his testimony: https://t.co/OypfcCJGdH

— Andrew P. Scott (@apscott) May 12, 2020

Admiral Brett Giroir, Assistant Secretary for Health

Okay, Brett, look, some real missed opportunities here. The light is great. You look great in that uniform. You’re facing a window. The eye level is spot-on. But the flag composition is wrong, interrupting your head space. Set them further aside so you exist in the middle of the frame without competition. Or place two on each side? Or just no flags? Feature that nice bureaucratic wood paneling without guilt—don’t be shy about that government chic. Also I feel like I’m on a slant, like everything is about to slide starboard, like you’re calling in from a boat. For some reason your connection craps out. Hardwiring your computer to your router can sometimes squeeze out a bit more bandwidth. Do a speed-test beforehand. Make sure your kids aren’t hogging your home system during an important call.

Robert Redfield, Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

This got quite a bit of criticism from our Slack chatter, but I have to say, he’s got pretty good general composition, placing himself centrally, and has put in some thought and prep. The main problem: His camera needs to be slightly above his eye line; Fauci went too far, Redfield not far enough. Rob, put some more books under your computer. This angle makes it look like you’re about to fall at us. Your background is a too chaotic for my tastes. But good lighting and I love the pop of teal.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.)

His hunting cabin man cave thing is dialed up. Big Energy! That… pelt? But the amazing background here is squandered by lazy composition. He’s (obviously) too close to the camera, and he hasn’t centered himself. If you have a background like this, lean into it! Make it a feature. Show a bit more of it by moving back into the room. As long as your sound is good and clear (and given the amount of soft furnishings and angles that would interrupt echoes, I think Adele would be happy to record something in this room), just let your personality shine. 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)

Total pro. A little more space above the hair would be a bonus. Otherwise, no notes.

Important update, 7 p.m., ET: Lest a competitor in the pandemic video-conferencing wars casually slip into the lexicon unchallenged, like Hoover, or Kleenex, Cisco Public Relations contacted me Tuesday evening with a clarification: the Senate committee was, in fact, using Cisco’s Webex video system, not Zoom, like our headline suggests. “Some have made that error so wanted to be clear,” a spokesperson said. She did, however, concede “those images of the Senators and Dr. Fauci are iconic.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified today’s day as “Wednesday”. It is Tuesday. (But, honestly, what are “days” anymore?)

Sen. Mitt Romney on Tuesday decried the Trump administration’s ongoing claims that the US leads the world in coronavirus testing, saying that the country’s record in uncovering and tracking the virus is “nothing to celebrate whatsoever.”

“I understand that politicians are going to frame data in a way that’s most positive politically,” Romney said during a much-anticipated Senate hearing with top health officials helping lead the country’s coronavirus response. “But yesterday you celebrated that we had done more tests and more tests per capita even than South Korea. But you ignore the fact that they accomplished theirs at the beginning of the outbreak, while we treaded water during February and March.”

“By March 6, the US had completed just 2,000 tests,” he continued, “whereas South Korea had conducted more than 140,000 tests. So partially as a result of that, they have 256 deaths and we have almost 80,000 deaths.”

The scathing rebuke came just one day after the White House staged a press conference to try to take a victory lap amid the rising death count by celebrating the growing number of cumulative tests, even while the tests available per day remain far below what experts say is necessary to safely monitor a more mobile population. And the Utah senator didn’t stop there.

With the limited time he had left, Romney asked Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading expert on infectious diseases, if there was any truth to Trump’s accusations that former President Barack Obama is to blame for the lack of a coronavirus vaccine. “No, no senator, not at all,” a straight-faced Fauci responded. “Certainly President Obama nor President Trump are responsible for our not having a vaccine.”

.@SenatorRomney just wiped the floor with the Republican's talking points: "I understand that politicians are going to frame data in a way that's most positive politically… I find our testing record nothing to celebrate whatsoever." pic.twitter.com/iCxrdZ06sW

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) May 12, 2020

It was a stunning thing to witness: A former GOP presidential candidate coming to the defense of the Democrat who defeated him in order to knock the current leader of his party. But perhaps even more extraordinary was the fact that Romney was the only Republican Senator willing to use the hearing to do more than air some polite strain over the president’s disastrous pandemic response.

During a hearing before the Senate health committee on Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci—the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—had a heated exchange with Sen. Rand Paul. The back-and-forth came when the Kentucky Republican argued that it would be a “huge mistake” not to reopen the schools in the fall and pointedly criticized Fauci. “As much as I respect you, Dr. Fauci, I don’t think you’re the end-all,” Paul said. “I don’t think you’re the one person that gets to make a decision.” Paul also downplayed the dangers of reopening the US economy and blasted scientists for making “wrong prediction, after wrong prediction, after wrong prediction.”

“We’re opening up a lot of economies around the US, and I hope that people who are predicting doom and gloom, and saying, ‘Oh, we can’t do this, there’s going to be a surge,’ will admit that they were wrong if there isn’t a surge,” Paul said. “Because I think that’s what’s going to happen.” He added that “outside of New England, we’ve had a relatively benign course for this virus nationwide.”

Paul noted that death rates from COVID-19 among children have been extremely low and went on to argue that local authorities should decide on a case-by-case basis whether to open schools in the fall. “If we keep kids out of school for another year, what’s going to happen is that poor and underprivileged kids who don’t have a parent that’s able to teach them at home are not going to learn for a full year…I think it’s a huge mistake if we don’t open the schools in the fall.”

In his response to Paul, Fauci—who had not actually asserted that schools should not open in the fall—said, “I have never made myself out to be the ‘end-all’ and only voice in this. I’m a scientist, a physician, and a public health official. I give advice according to the best scientific evidence…I don’t give advice about economic things. I don’t give advice about anything other than public health.”

Fauci also addressed Paul’s assertions about the risks to children. “We don’t know everything about this virus,” he said. “And we really better be very careful, particularly when it comes to children. Because the more and more we learn, we’re seeing things about what this virus can do that we didn’t see from the studies in China or Europe.” For instance, a small number of children have shown symptoms of a mysterious inflammatory syndrome thought to be linked to COVID-19.

“You’re right in the numbers that children, in general, do much, much better than adults and the elderly and particularly those with underlying conditions,” Fauci concluded. “But I am very careful, and hopefully, humble in knowing that I don’t know everything about this disease.”

Sen. Rand Paul, to Dr. Anthony Fauci: "I don’t think you’re the end-all. I don’t think you’re the one person that gets to make a decision.”

Fauci: "I have never made myself out to be the end-all and only voice in this. I'm a scientist, a physician, and a public health official." pic.twitter.com/6gQ6i1awhn

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) May 12, 2020

In recent weeks, Dr. Anthony Fauci has served as a quiet dissenting voice to President Trump’s calls for states to reopen their economies despite the threat of resurgences in coronavirus cases. On Tuesday, the director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases heightened his warning, telling a Senate committee that if states open too soon, “there is a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you may not be able to control.”

More than 40 states have eased stay-at-home orders to various degrees, allowing their economies to partially reopen, even as case counts surge in meatpacking plants, nursing homes, and prisons. Governors are anxious to let their constituents get back to work, but, according to Fauci, reopening states now could cause adverse economic effects in the long run.

A new outbreak “paradoxically will set you back, not only leading to some suffering and death that could be avoided, but could even set you back on the road to trying to get economic recovery,” Fauci said during questioning by Sen. Bob Casey (D-Penn.). “It would almost turn the clock back, rather than going forward.”