The 405 freeway between the 10 and 101 freeway, also known as the Sepulveda pass—or traffic.Ted Soqui/Getty

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

Just as the novel coronavirus has spread from person to person across the world, so too does traffic propagate through highways and city centers like a contagious disease. From a single crash, congestion ripples through a city, and now scientists have the models to prove it. Researchers in Australia, Iran, and the US have modified a common model for mapping the spread of disease to show that it also works for describing the spread of traffic jams—only in this case it’s cars infecting each other with congestion instead of people infecting each other with a virus.

Weirdly, they found that in six distinct cities—Chicago, London, Melbourne, Montreal, Paris, and Sydney—traffic spreads quite similarly. “We can calculate how fast congestion spreads in a network, and that is actually independent of the geography and topography of the city,” says University of New South Wales engineer Meead Saberi, lead author on a new paper in Nature Communications describing the work. “It could be anywhere in the world, and the dynamics of the spread is very similar.”

More later on how that could possibly be—but first, let’s talk about those models. One way to characterize the spread of a disease like Covid-19 is known as a susceptible-infected-recovered model. Susceptible means the group of people who haven’t gotten the disease before and can now get sick; infected means those who are sick now; and recovered means those who’ve beaten the illness. Because the recovered are now immune, a pandemic tends to wane over time, as the virus has fewer and fewer potential hosts available to infect.

Adapting this model to characterizing traffic, the researchers looked at “links” instead of people, which means the physical roads between any two intersections. (A four-way stop is technically two roads coming together, but each direction counts as one link.) And instead of studying biological symptoms like coughing or fever, they studied traffic congestion, aka the jams in which cars slow and back up as a congested mass. “We have three different kinds of links in the network,” says Saberi. “Links that are susceptible to become congested, links that are congested, and links that have been congested and now they’re recovered.” So it’s the same analogy, he says, but “from a traffic perspective.”

These traffic dynamics are already well understood. Let’s say you’re on a freeway. There’s an accident up ahead, and everyone is rubbernecking as they drive by. When one person slows, the cars behind them slow in a fairly predictable way. They all have to slow eventually, lest each car slam into the one ahead of it. But as traffic picks up again after the accident, the speed-up is less predictable. Drivers accelerate as they see fit—some slam the gas, while others speed up more gradually. That is, there’s no constraint: Drivers don’t have to behave in a certain way, because there’s no longer a rubbernecking driver in front of them.

As a result of this stop-and-go phenomenon, congestion spreads like a contagion between cars and recovers when the accident is cleared off the road. “We managed to show that, yes, contagion models at a macroscopic level can describe the spread of traffic jams,” Saberi adds. “And we used some empirical data from six different cities around the world to show that it is actually universal.”

But how can traffic spread the same way in a labyrinthine city like London as it does along a more orderly grid like the one in Chicago? It turns out that it’s not about the street layout itself, it’s how the streets intersect—that is, how many links connect each intersection on average.

In Chicago’s relatively orderly layout, it has a lot of intersections where two roads—or four links—meet. In Paris, sometimes five or six links might meet per intersection. “But when we look at all these different cities—although they have very, very different urban forms—that average number remains almost the same,” says Saberi. “So it’s somewhere between two and three—every junction, there is somewhere between two and three streets that are coming together. And that’s why, although the topographics are different, the results will be similar, because that average node number is almost the same for them.”

A model like this could help city officials better manage their traffic, treating the “disease” before it has a chance to spread. To add an economic twist to the metaphor, “if you’re traveling down a freeway, and it’s highly congested, there’s a cost to you in time lost, in wasted fuel,” says Bob Pishue, a transportation analyst at the traffic data firm Inrix, who wasn’t involved in this new work. “And so people in that case—if the cost is really high—they’ll divert onto a side street, where they perceive their costs to be less. That’s sort of how you see traffic ripple out.” Those costs pile up as the contagion of traffic spreads, until swaths of the city are sick and unproductive.

Shoppers wait in the checkout line at a Stop & Shop supermarket during hours open daily only for seniors in North Providence, Rhode Island. The dedicated shopping times at some grocery stores are designed to allow seniors, pregnant women and people with underlying health conditions to shop among smaller crowds and reduce their chances of acquiring the coronavirus. David Goldman/AP

While grocery workers across the country stocked shelves and rang up pantry items for a daily onslaught of customers and delivery couriers over the past few weeks, they’ve faced a higher-than-average risk of exposing themselves to the coronavirus. Now the virus is starting to kill them. At least six employees of grocery stores—including FoodMaxx, Trader Joe’s, Giant, Walmart, and Market Basket—have died after testing positive for COVID-19 in California, New York, Maryland, Illinois, and Massachusetts.

Some states, in an attempt to better protect these workers, have classified them as emergency personnel, which qualifies them for free child care. Yesterday, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union and Albertsons, a Boise-based supermarket chain that also operates Safeway, Vons, and Jewel-Osco, launched a national campaign calling for action by both federal lawmakers and states to designate grocery workers as first responders.

The UFCW and Albertsons announced the campaign with a full-page ad in Tuesday’s New York Times aimed at “our nation’s policymakers and influencers,” according to a statement by the union. “The temporary designation of first responder or emergency personnel status would help ensure these incredible grocery workers access to priority testing, have access to personal protection equipment, like masks and gloves, as well other workplace protections necessary to keep themselves and the customers they serve safe and healthy,” said Vivek Sankaran, CEO of Albertsons Companies, and Marc Perrone, UFCW international president, in a joint statement.

On Wednesday, the UFCW sent a letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asking for mandatory federal guidelines during the coronavirus outbreak that would require grocery stores to implement social distancing and sanitation policies and provide workers with personal protective equipment. While some grocery chains have introduced safety measures like plexiglass partitions at cash registers, the changes have not been consistent across the industry. Sean Krane, a butcher at a Vons in Los Angeles County, told me last week that crowd control was an issue in his store. “It says 100 people on the front of the door, but there’s no one at the front door counting people coming in and out,” he said. “And customers don’t adhere to the six feet of distance at all.”

Workers at Whole Foods and Amazon as well as at the app-based food delivery companies Instacart and Shipt have gone on strike in recent weeks, demanding better sanitation conditions, pay, and benefits. Trader Joe’s workers are pushing a union organizing effort.

In late March, California grocery workers along with the UFCW launched a petition to Gov. Gavin Newsom calling for personal protective equipment, the right to wash their hands every 30 minutes, additional paid sick time, and guaranteed child care. California has since joined states like Minnesota, Vermont, and Michigan in extending child care benefits to grocery workers. Other states, including Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, have issued executive orders to make grocery stores safer workplaces with occupancy limits and requirements for sanitation and social distancing. 

This week, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and other Senate Democrats proposed a $25,000 bonus, or an additional $13 per hour, to essential frontline workers, including grocery workers, as part of a “heroes fund” in the next coronavirus relief package.

“Essential frontline workers sacrifice daily for our collective health and well-being, and I, along with my colleagues, are fully committed to supplying these heroes the financial support they deserve,” Schumer said in a statement.

The distribution of personal protective equipment for medical professionals from the national stockpile was inept and insufficient, according to a House Oversight Committee report released Wednesday. The committee also found that the Strategic National Stockpile is now depleted, leaving states to compete with each other on the open market. 

This was the result of an accumulation of failures, said Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, who chairs the House Oversight Committee. “The President failed to bring in FEMA early on, failed to name a national commander for this crisis, and failed to fully utilize the authorities Congress gave him under the Defense Production Act to procure and manage the distribution of critical supplies,” Maloney said. “He must take action now to address these deficiencies.”

If the PPE demands from state officials, GoFundMes, and desperate Facebook pleas from medical professionals weren’t enough for you, here are some salient numbers from the report:

Only 11.7 million N95 respirator masks have been distributed nationwide.

That’s just a fraction of a percent—one-third of 1 percent, to be exact—of the 3.5 billion respirator masks the Trump administration estimated would be necessary for medical providers during the coronavirus pandemic. More than 26 million surgical masks have also been distributed from the stockpile, but they do no provide adequate protection for frontline workers. 

Only 7,920 ventilators have been distributed. 

Though Trump has promised 100,000 ventilators, FEMA has said most of those additional ventilators won’t be available until at least late June. In the meantime, estimates for the number of ventilators needed ranges from slightly less than 150,000 to more than 750,000. The American Hospital Association has estimated that nearly 1 million American COVID-19 patients will need mechanical ventilation. 

90 percent of the federal stockpile has been depleted.

The US Department of Health and Human Services told Congress not to expect any more shipments—the remaining 10 percent is being reserved for federal workers. As Maloney put it: “Now that the national stockpile has been depleted of critical equipment, it appears that the Administration is leaving states to fend for themselves, to scour the open market for these scarce supplies, and to compete with each other and federal agencies in a chaotic, free-for-all bidding war.”

You can read the rest of the committee’s report here:

A man enters the road to Rikers Island.Spencer Platt/Getty

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

New York City is the epicenter of the country’s COVID-19 outbreak—and perhaps nowhere is that outbreak more dangerous than in the city’s most notorious jail complex: Rikers Island.

As of Tuesday morning, across the city 287 inmates (most of them at Rikers) and 406 corrections department staff members had already tested positive for COVID-19. On Sunday, the New York Times reported the first coronavirus death of a Rikers Island inmate. Recent news reports have indicated that inmates at Rikers lack even the luxury of basic precautions such as hand-washing (due to reported shortages of soap) and social distancing, which advocates and former inmates say is impossible to practice in the cramped facility.

Rikers Island, built on a landfill and surrounded by polluting infrastructure, has long suffered hazardous environmental conditions like extreme summer heat, flooding, and noxious pollution. These hazards exemplify the facility’s unpreparedness for a public health crisis like the novel coronavirus—and may have primed its inmates and staff to be especially vulnerable to the most severe effects of COVID-19.

Vidal Guzman remembers these hazards well. He was arrested twice as a teenager and spent a combined three years incarcerated on Rikers Island, awaiting trial.

“Living in Rikers means understanding not to drink the water, understanding how to be careful when rats and rodents are running around,” Guzman told Grist. “Having a rule to stay six feet away from each other for protection against the coronavirus—that is impossible in Rikers.”

Guzman, now 28, ultimately served five years in a state prison before going on to become the outreach and engagement organizer for Just Leadership USA, an organization that advocates for criminal justice reform. He recalls the “crazy rotten egg smell” that lingered at Rikers. The foul odor came from the landfill buried underneath the facility, which releases methane as the garbage decomposes over time and degrades the island’s air quality. The Poletti power plant, which was known as the biggest polluter in the Empire State before it closed in 2010, sat within a mile of Rikers when Guzman arrived there.

“Being around people who were young and with asthma—I saw them having problems with their breathing,” Guzman said. “There were individuals on Rikers who were saying things like, ‘I got asthma, I can’t breathe.’ And the elders are saying, ‘Well, you can’t breathe because the ground we’re standing on is built on landfill.'”

“That’s when I started to put things together,” Guzman remembered.

More than 10,000 people are normally incarcerated on the island at any given time. Roughly 90 percent of them are people of color, and 67 percent have not been convicted of a crime and are simply awaiting trial. Though the inmate population is currently around 5,000, the crowded shared spaces present unique challenges for social distancing. Guzman described beds that are only two to three feet apart in the dormitory housing units, an arrangement that appears to persist even as the facility faces down a pandemic. According to the New York City Department of Correction website, officials are attempting to ensure there is an empty bed in betweeninmates “where possible.”

“We are following the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene guidance to identify any individuals with whom patients had close contact,” the department told Grist in an email. “The health and well-being of our personnel and people in custody is our top priority.”

Public defenders and criminal justice reform advocates have been demanding the release of all inmates with preexisting medical conditions, anyone jailed for parole violations, and the elderly. The government response has been painstakingly slow, advocates say. Hundreds of inmates are now being held in isolation or in quarantined groups after being exposed to someone who tested positive. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio recently boasted that 900 inmates had been released from the city jail system, bringing the inmate population to the lowest it has been since 1949.

Last Tuesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo quietly introduced changes to the state budget’s legislative text that would completely overhaul the Empire State’s recent criminal justice reform, which has only been in effect for three months. The new provisions, which the state legislature voted to pass days later, would expand pretrial detention powers. Advocates fear that the new changes could exacerbate the coronavirus outbreak.

“As someone who was incarcerated and had $25,000 bail at 16 years old, I am very disappointed,” Guzman told Grist. “The new reform would undermine the presumption of innocence, dramatically increase jail populations across the state, and exacerbate racial disparities.”

Governor Cuomo’s office did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

After seven years of incarceration, Guzman returned home at 24 and has been working and organizing with a campaign to close the Rikers Island facilities and improve conditions within the New York City jail system. In 2019, the New York City Council approved an ambitious $8 billion plan to shutter the jail complex by 2026. Queens Councilmember Costa Constantinides, who represents Rikers Island and is the chair of the City Council’s Environmental Protection Committee, has long advocated to transform the 413-acre island into a renewable energy hub. To make that vision a reality, he introduced the Renewable Rikers Act alongside other lawmakers last June.

The Renewable Rikers Act would hand over control of the island from the Department of Correction to the Department of Environmental Protection. It would also invest in studies to determine if the island could be home to a wastewater treatment plant and explore the feasibility of building renewable energy sources such as solar panels and battery storage facilities on the island.

For now, however, advocates and medical professionals are focused on getting the city’s thousands of inmates and jail staff through the pandemic alive.

“The most important part, being in a pandemic right now, is staying in touch with our family members, especially the black and brown communities who are feeling the most of this,” Guzman said. “I’m gonna tell you straight up: I’m in fear of what’s next.”

Michael Conroy/AP

Mass layoffs have hit the National Rifle Association because of the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Politico, more the 60 NRA employees have been laid off in recent weeks, after the group was forced to cancel its annual meeting—a massive event that usually results in millions of dollars in revenue from attendance fees and fundraising. 

The layoffs come even as sales of firearms surge—due in part to the NRA’s efforts to pressure state and local governments to allow gun stores to remain open during the crisis. While most businesses are closed indefinitely as part of the effort to slow down the spread of the coronavirus, many states have issued orders allowing gun stores to keep operating. On March 28, the Trump administration released guidance on essential and critical businesses that should remain open, which included gun stores in the same category as grocery stores and pharmacies. The guidance came after much behind-the-scenes lobbying from the NRA and other players in the gun lobby. 

Even as the NRA was working overtime to fulfill its mission—filing lawsuits against states to keep gun stores open—it was feeling the full effect of the economic strain caused by the pandemic. Late last month, NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre told the group’s board of directors that there would be layoffs and pay cuts. LaPierre said he would also be taking a pay cut, NPR reports, but it was not known by how much.

Before the coronavirus crisis hit, the NRA was in a tough financial situation. Since the group’s historic financial effort to help elect Donald Trump to the presidency, the NRA has struggled, spending more money than it was raising, as internal scandals—involving infighting within its leadership, excessive spending, and questionable financial transactions relating to members of its board—turned public. All the while the group has been involved in several expensive legal battles that have drained its financial resources, including a particularly costly one with its former advertising firm, Ackerman McQueen.

Despite the layoffs, the NRA still appears to be moving full steam ahead in its fight to keep gun stores open throughout the pandemic. On Monday the group released a new video ad featuring Charlie Daniels—the country music star and NRA member—arguing that antigun politicians are using the pandemic to push gun control agendas. “I’d fight to my last breath to defend my home and my family,” Daniels says in the video. “And by the looks of the lines at the gun stores lately, it looks like an awful lot of other people feel the same way.”

Rafael Henrique/Getty

WhatsApp, the world’s largest messaging app, announced today that it is taking new steps to curb the spread of misinformation on its platform, a problem that has become increasingly visible during the coronavirus pandemic. As I wrote in March, the platform has been a “petri dish for misinformation”—an incubator for false information and rumors about COVID-19. The company, which is owned by Facebook, says it will now monitor and limit the dissemination of forwarded messages.

This is a major change for an app that’s known as a place where friends and family send along memes, jokes, images, and multimedia messages. “Is all forwarding bad? Certainly not. We know many users forward helpful information, as well as funny videos, memes, and reflections or prayers they find meaningful,” the company posted on its blog. “However, we’ve seen a significant increase in the amount of forwarding which users have told us can feel overwhelming and can contribute to the spread of misinformation. We believe it’s important to slow the spread of these messages down to keep WhatsApp a place for personal conversation.”

The company says it will now track messages that have been forwarded five or more times and will only allow “highly forwarded” messages to be passed on one more time. The latest beta version of its app also includes a feature that displays a magnifying glass next to frequently forwarded messages so users can check if it  has been debunked by journalists or fact-checking sites. “Double checking these messages before forwarding may help reduce the spread of rumors,” wrote a WhatsApp spokesperson in an email.

The changes follow reports in Mother Jones and other media outlets as well as complaints by fact-checking organizations and governments that the platform was not doing enough to curb misinformation about the coronavirus.

WhatsApp’s encrypted, private chats can make it difficult to trace the origins of misleading viral messages. More than a year ago, researcher Harsh Taneja and his colleague Himanshu Gupta had suggested in the Columbia Journalism Review that WhatsApp could track highly forwarded messages on its platform and flag them as suspicious. A couple of weeks ago, a WhatsApp spokesperson told me that it wasn’t possible to do that. Yet the company’s latest change, say the researchers and CJR, is very similar to what they’d proposed.

Today, @CaseyNewton at the @verge reports that WhatsApp will police misinformation in one of the very ways Harsh and Himanshu wisely suggested in @CJR 18 months ago. https://t.co/zay9JY5Pdo

— Sam Quaranthielman (@samthielman) April 7, 2020

Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks during a primary night rally, at Eastern Market in Detroit, March 3, 2020. Patrick Semansky/AP

In recent days, Wisconsin has been thrown into political chaos, with the state’s Democratic governor pushing to delay Tuesday’s election amid rising cases of the coronavirus, and Republican leaders in the legislature refusing to either postpone voting or mail a ballot to every registered voter. On Monday, the state Supreme Court blocked a late executive order from Wisconsin’s governor that would have delayed the election, and the US Supreme Court, in a 5 to 4 decision, overturned a lower court order that would have extended absentee balloting. As a result, thousands of voters could be disenfranchised and the others left in a perplexing and potentially dangerous mess.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wants to make sure such a scenario never happens again. Today, Warren is releasing a new plan—shared in advance exclusively with Mother Jones—that calls for a series of provisions in Congress’ next coronavirus recovery package that would protect voters’ ability to safely cast a ballot during the pandemic. The proposals would require states to mail a ballot to every registered voter with a prepaid return envelope, as is standing practice in states like Oregon and Washington; outline $4 billion in federal funding to help states transition to universal vote-by-mail before November (10 times what Congress allocated in its first recovery package); and say states should refrain from removing voters from registration rolls unless they can prove the person has moved or died since it will be very difficult for anyone removed to reregister during the outbreak.

“In this moment, when peoples’ lives and livelihoods are on the line, it’s powerfully important that we protect our right to hold government and elected officials accountable at the ballot,” Warren told me. “What’s happening in Wisconsin is another clear signal to Congress that it must immediately pass much-needed reforms and equip states with the funding they need to protect the health and safety of voters, ensure our elections proceed during this pandemic, and secure our electoral institutions for the long haul. That’s what my plan is about.”

Her plan comes as a rebuke to recent statements by President Trump, who said on Friday that he opposed mail voting—even though he himself requested an absentee ballot to vote in Florida’s March primary—because “a lot of people cheat with mail-in voting,” and reiterated his support for requiring voter ID. The week before, Trump said that if voting reforms Democrats had suggested be included in the first recovery package were adopted, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” The Trump campaign and the Republican Party are planning a legal onslaught to oppose efforts to expand voting during the pandemic.

“We must not allow Republicans to exploit the pandemic to engage in voter suppression when people are least equipped to fight back because they are staying home, caring for loved ones, or struggling to make ends meet—and many government offices are closed,” Warren wrote in a post detailing the plan. “Republicans are using the crisis to accelerate an undemocratic power grab and disenfranchise millions.”

To prevent looming disenfranchisement, Warren is pushing for legislation that require states to ban onerous requirements, like ones in Wisconsin that require voters to include a copy of a government-issued photo ID with their mailed-in ballot and find a witness to observe them signing their ballot. The plan also calls for a major infusion of funding for the United States Postal Service to handle huge numbers of mailed ballots; she also envisions tools that would allow citizens to track their ballots to make sure votes are counted and reduce the possibility of fraud.

In recognition that not everyone will be able to vote by mail or feel comfortable doing so, Warren also is calling on every state to set up 30 days of in-person early voting to help avoid lines and large gatherings on Election Day. Poll workers should receive hazard pay, she says.

The plan builds off earlier efforts by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to help states expand vote-by-mail and early voting in the face of the virus’s spread. The efforts are part of a growing push from congressional Democrats to adopt major voting reforms in time for November’s general election. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week that the next economic stimulus bill should include more money to help states vote by mail; some progressives have said such steps should be a nonnegotiable demand.

“Donald Trump’s opposition to making it easier for Americans to vote isn’t about keeping voters safe or protecting our electoral systems from security threats, it’s about trying to suppress the vote,” Warren said. “That’s not how our democracy should work. It is Congress’ responsibility to step up and ensure that every eligible American can exercise their right to vote without fearing for their health. That’s as basic as it gets.”

President Donald Trump signing a $2 trillion coronavirus relief billEvan Vucci/AP

You might think that McDonald’s is a giant corporation. You are right. But you are also wrong. Under two coronavirus relief bills passed by Congress in March, a corporation like McDonald’s might be eligible for benefits as both a large and a small business—at the same time.

How can this be? As the New York Times reported, a carveout for the restaurant and hotel industry made its way into the $2 trillion CARES Act. It would allow loans intended to keep small businesses afloat to instead go to individual restaurant or hotel locations that are part of major international brands:

The provision says that if a company owns multiple hotels, even if the overall hotel or restaurant chain has more than 500 employees—the limit to qualify for treatment as a small business—it will still be able to take advantage of the small-business benefits offered in the rescue package.

That means loans from the federal government worth up to 2.5 times the firm’s monthly payroll that will not have to be repaid if the company uses them to keep paying employees during any coronavirus shutdowns…

The large corporations that own the big brands—like Marriott or Hilton—would not be eligible. But any individual hotel, including from one of these brands, that has fewer than 500 employees would be. Many hotels are owned by franchisees.

This loophole also applies to restaurant chains. So any individual corporate-owned McDonald’s restaurant can take advantage of these forgivable loans intended for small businesses. (Franchisees—the independent business owners that operate many brand-name hotel and restaurant locations, including most McDonald’s stores—will also be able to apply.)

McDonald’s did not answer my questions about whether the company intended to apply for these funds, though it told the Wall Street Journal Monday night that it had no plans to do so. “We don’t think it’s the right thing to do right now,” a spokesperson told the paper. “We feel like we are in a good financial position right now.” Still, there’s nothing stopping the company from changing its mind.*

At the same time, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act—which provided for coronavirus-related emergency sick and family leave through 2020—exempted all businesses with more than 500 employees from the paid leave requirement. So a restaurant owned by McDonald’s could qualify for a forgivable small business loan (because fewer than 500 employees work at that individual location) and be exempt from emergency sick and family leave requirements (because more than 500 employees work for the larger McDonald’s corporation). Think of it as Schrödinger’s Corporate Loophole.

McDonald’s recently announced it would provide 14 days of paid sick leave at its corporate stores for workers who have been affected by the coronavirus, similar to what the FFCRA requires. It also stated that “employees at a large percentage of franchised restaurants will receive emergency paid leave through” the FFCRA.

But the FFCRA offers another benefit, as well: It requires that companies with 500 or fewer employees provide workers with up to 10 weeks of family leave at two-thirds pay to care for children whose school or daycare is closed because of the pandemic. McDonald’s—which, again, is exempt from this provision because it employs more than 500 people—has not publicly announced a family leave policy for the tens of thousands of employees at its corporate-owned locations. 

When I asked whether McDonald’s would be providing paid family leave for its employees, a spokesperson directed me to this statement, which notes that “employees at our company-owned restaurants who are impacted by the virus are receiving two weeks paid leave to tend to their critical health needs.” The statement says nothing specifically about family leave.

So under these new laws, McDonald’s corporate-owned restaurants are small businesses with fewer than 500 employees, and therefore could qualify for forgivable small business loans. But because McDonald’s is a big business with more than 500 employees, those same restaurants don’t have to provide family leave.

“I really think these possible loopholes are evidence of the undue influence that some of these extremely large and politically influential businesses have over our labor policy,” says Jessica Mason, senior policy analyst at the National Partnership for Women and Families.

Sure, it may not be clear in a logical sense how a corporation can have more than 500 workers and fewer than 500 workers at the same time. But it’s clear that in a political sense, some corporations are happy to do the math in any way that qualifies them for the exemptions they’re seeking.

* This story has been updated to include McDonald’s statement Monday night to the Wall Street Journal that it does not intend to apply for small business loans.

Robin Utrecht/AP

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now officially testing Americans for coronavirus antibodies. This could be a major step in controlling the virus, as the tests will indicate whether someone has been infected with the coronavirus in the past—even if they were asymptomatic—and allow researchers to finally get some insight into just how far infection has spread.

As I wrote in a long story late last week, these “serological tests” work by detecting antibodies in the blood. People are hoping this means they can be used as defacto immunity tests: Though not proven—an important point to stress—it is likely that if someone has recovered from COVID-19, they have some immunity to the virus, at least in the short term. So, crucially, testing for antibodies could also help identify who among us is safe to return to the workforce. As Shane Crotty, a professor in the Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI), told my colleague James West, “Doctors and nurses are being exposed to this all the time. And if you knew you had a group of people who were immune, you might stratify some of the jobs differently in terms of who takes care of the most severe cases or whatnot.”

One other important thing to know about these tests is that they are different from the diagnostic ones taken so far by more than 1 million Americans. Unlike those tests, which can only detect the virus while someone is infected, serological tests can be accurate for a long time. As I reported last week:

Your body likely starts making antibodies against the coronavirus between seven and 21 days after you’re infected, [Vincent] Racaniello, [a professor of microbiology and immunology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University], says. Those initial antibodies typically stick around in your system for about three months, while other antibodies take a little longer to develop and will likely be found in your blood years after you’ve had COVID-19. “Their levels go down gradually,” Racaniello says. “But there will always be a low level in the blood that you can detect for years and years after infection.” Serological tests can detect both types of antibodies.

In addition to being a tool for uncovering the undiagnosed and the likely immune, experts told me some coronavirus antibodies could also play a role in treating people who are sick (for instance, using plasma from survivors) or even preventing COVID-19 in the first place. As I wrote:

While antibody treatment for sick patients will not directly give them immunity to the coronavirus, it’s possible that administering antibody treatments to people before they get sick could prevent illness temporarily. “When you inject the antibodies into your blood, they end up diffusing into all of your tissues, including your lungs. And so they would prevent infection,” Racaniello says. “That’s how a vaccine would work—except the vaccine would have you make your own antibodies.”

This isn’t the same as being immune, because…your body isn’t making its own response to the coronavirus; you’re still using someone else’s. That’s why, to prevent an infection with antibodies, you’d need an injection every month or two, Racaniello says. While this wouldn’t be considered effective long-term preventive care, this sort of treatment could be especially helpful for health care professionals on the front lines. 

The CDC plans to roll out three individual clinical trials focused on antibodies, STAT and the New York Times first reported. The first study, according to STAT, has already begun and will focus on identifying people who have not been diagnosed with COVID-19 in the country’s coronavirus hotspots. In the second study, which the CDC reportedly hopes to start this summer, health officials will test for antibodies in samples taken from people who were never diagnosed across the country, which will give experts an indication of how the coronavirus has spread nationally. The third study will focus on specific populations, like health care workers, to understand how the virus is spreading among those groups.

If you’re curious to read more about serological testing and some of the common antibody treatments in development, check out the rest of my story here.

Howard Antonio Benavides Jr., 18, a Venezuelan national detained at the Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Lousiana, in September.Gerald Herbert/AP

Another person being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement has tested positive for COVID-19, according to the sheriff of the Louisiana parish where the man was in custody. There are now at least 14 detainees across nine ICE detention centers who have tested positive.

LaSalle Parish Sheriff Scott Franklin wrote in a Facebook post Monday afternoon that a detainee at the LaSalle Correctional Center in Olla, Louisiana, tested positive on Sunday. In the post, he noted that the ICE detainee with COVID-19, along with all of the other detainees in his dorm, were “shipped” to an unspecified facility that has a “dorm set up for quarantine.” 

ICE spokesman Bryan Cox did not confirm the new case, but said the agency is updating the number of people in its custody who have tested positive on a daily basis. He noted he was not contradicting Sheriff Franklin but said he didn’t want to get ahead of the daily update.

“We should all be acting like everyone has the virus and follow all the CDC protocols,” Franklin wrote in his Facebook post. It is generally impossible for ICE detainees to follow the CDC’s recommendations on social distancing because they are crowded into dorms with dozens of other people. Franklin, who has not responded to a request for comment, added in his post, “Prayers for the other inmates, employees and their families are greatly appreciated.”

Documents I obtained through a public records request show that ICE was paying LaSalle Parish $76 per night per detainee as of last summer. The parish acts as a middle man, while LaSalle Corrections, a for-profit prison company, manages the day-to-day operation of the jail. Like other LaSalle Corrections facilities in Louisiana, the jail was built to hold criminal inmates. The company’s website states that the jail can hold 755 people.  

The news Monday comes just days after ICE announced another detainee had tested positive for COVID-19 in Louisiana—a 52-year-old Mexican national who was being held at a facility run by the private prison company GEO Group in Pine Prairie, about 80 miles south of LaSalle Parish. The detainee was asymptomatic and being quarantined, the Lafayette Daily Advertiser reported Friday night.

This man, according to Cox, the ICE spokesman, had recently come into ICE custody from a federal prison near Oakdale, Louisiana. Cox said on Friday that the man was transferred wearing a mask and gloves. The Oakdale prison has been ravaged by the new coronavirus; five inmates have died from COVID-19, while at least 25 inmates have tested positive. 

Louisiana is emerging as one of the world’s worst coronavirus hotspots. The state is now reporting 512 deaths from 14,867 cases of COVID-19; for reference, California has reported 372 deaths from 15,823 cases. As Molly Hennessy-Fiske of the Los Angeles Times noted on Twitter, California has nearly ten times as many people as Louisiana.

Last Wednesday, Kaitlin Bennett, a far-right social media darling who’s made her name trolling progressive college students, released a Twitter video suggesting Native Americans would each get $3,000 from the coronavirus relief bill, compared to the $1,200-maximum checks most Americans will receive. “Isn’t it racist to benefit one group of people over others based on their race?” she asked.

Did you know that Native Americans will get $3 billion in aid from the coronavirus relief bill? That's $3k for every Native on a reservation, compared to the $1,200 you'll get. Isn't it racist to benefit one group of people over others based on their race? https://t.co/YTpSVTobzM pic.twitter.com/Vrlpu4n7V7

— Kaitlin Bennett (@KaitMarieox) March 30, 2020

Bennett’s claims are doubly misleading. First, Native American taxpayers will receive the same stimulus check as anyone else. Bennett got $3,000 by dividing the CARES Act’s allocations for Indian health and housing programs among the estimated one million Native people who live on reservations. But she failed to include the four million Native Americans who don’t live on reservations, all of whom can benefit from the new funding indirectly; no one’s getting a bigger check.

Even if they were, there’s nothing racist about providing special services for Indigenous peoples. The needs of Native communities, which were brutally colonized through overt violence and smallpox, a pandemic, hold a particular place in US jurisprudence—one that has long been overlooked. 

Their unique status under US law dates back to the Constitution, which references “Indians” only twice: to specify that they won’t be taxed, and that the federal government will facilitate commerce between tribes and states. In 1831, the Supreme Court interpreted these parts of the Constitution as creating a “trust relationship” between Native Americans and the federal government.

That relationship is modeled on the legal connection between parents and children, says tribal lawyer Wes Furlong of the Native American Rights Fund. This imposes “heightened obligations on the federal government when it acts on Indian affairs,” which go beyond its obligations to states and municipalities. Native tribes are legally considered dependent on the US, which has promised to fulfill “trust responsibilities” like providing health care, housing, and education to Natives, as well as caring for their lands.

This has always been more theory than practice. Since colonization, Native communities have struggled to get basic needs met, and their lands have been stolen and scarred. Yet in recent decades, the US inched closer to meeting its trust obligations. Under Republican presidents in the 1970’s, millions of acres were returned to tribes, and Congress passed the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, entrenching its duty to fund health services for Indigenous people. That law became permanent under President Obama, who also created and invited tribes to co-manage Bears Ears National Monument, protecting over a million acres of sacred lands previously held “in trust.”

The trend was abruptly reversed under President Trump, who removed protections from 85 percent of the Monument, green-lit oil drilling and pipeline projects on Native lands, and repeatedly proposed cutting funding for tribal college scholarships—to say nothing of his long history of slandering Natives.

If Trump had his way, the CARES Act would have funded only $3 billion of the Congressional Native American Caucus’s $20 billion request, according to Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), who comes from the Laguna Pueblo tribe and is one of the first two Native American women in Congress. “Tribes have been neglected and underfunded for decades,” she says, but today, “it’s clear that the US needs to live up to its trust responsibility with respect to this coronavirus.”

Along with fellow Caucus members Rep. Tom Cole (R-O.K.), who is Chickasaw, and Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), Haaland negotiated to ultimately carve out $8 billion in the CARES Act for Indigenous-focused services. One billion dollars will be managed by the federal Indian Health Service, while most will go straight to tribal governments “for them to use as sovereign nations…the way they need to use it,” says Haaland. That could mean economic relief efforts, as well as supporting tribal-run clinics on reservations. 

But the trust responsibility “is not restricted to the borders of reservations,” says a spokesperson for the National Council of Urban Indian Health, which asked Congress to provide $94 million to meet the rapidly growing health care needs of Natives in cities; they got $3 million instead. The NCUIH says Congress “absolutely must pass” further legislation to adequately fund urban facilities and help tribes access the national stockpile of medical supplies as local reserves dwindle.

In the past week, the number of COVID-19 cases in Navajo Nation jumped from 49 to 174, leading New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham to suggest the pandemic “could wipe out those tribal nations,” where health systems are still underfunded.

Haaland, whose district includes Navajo communities, suggested that their vulnerability stems from centuries of federal neglect.

“Many parts of Indian Country are lacking in fundamental infrastructure,” says Haaland. “When you don’t have running water or water that’s potable, it’s difficult to stay hydrated, wash your hands, and exercise all the precautions you need to  during this virus.”

So no, Kaitlin Bennett, fulfilling Constitutional obligations to support Indigenous nations during a deadly pandemic is definitely not racist—but your Party City “Indian” costume certainly is.

Marci Stenberg/Zuma

“Mass incarceration is a policy that makes no sense,” says Lauren-Brooke Eisen, the director of the justice program at the Brennan Center, a public policy institute. “This moment proves we don’t need to have jails and prisons bursting at the seams.” As the novel coronavirus has swept across the globe, infecting approximately 336,000 people in the United States and killing more than 9,600 as of Sunday night, epidemiologists and public health experts have warned that prisons and jails are the perfect incubators for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Packed in tight and often unsanitary living conditions, incarcerated people routinely have no access to soap and water and are frequently at higher risk for contracting illnesses because of underlying health conditions. These realities are at odds with the advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and public health advocates that self-isolation and frequent hand-washing are the two best strategies for containing the spread of the disease.

The virus has illustrated just how vulnerable many people in the United States are, including low-income workers, unhoused people, and those behind bars. In response to fears of further contagion, many harsh criminal justice policies that were once seen as essential strategies for keeping the public safe are being abandoned as the virus spreads in prisons and jails across the country, where more than 2 million people are housed. All it took was a global pandemic.

“We’re seeing really important changes that we hope district attorneys and correctional departments will continue to push for once this pandemic is over,” Eisen explains. Across the country, people who have been arrested for low-level crimes, those who are getting close to their parole dates, suffering from certain illnesses, or otherwise pose no threat to public safety are being released back into the community in order to stay safe from COVID-19. 

In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, for instance, judges began working to release people in jail last month. “It’s not a matter of if this virus hits us, it’s a matter of when,” administrative judge Brendan Sheehan told a CBS-affiliated news outlet in Cleveland last month. “If it hits us and the jail, it will cripple our criminal justice system.” The jail houses 1,900 inmates, a number he’s hoping to reduce by a few hundred by holding hearings to determine who is eligible to be released.

Similar measures are being taken in St. Louis, Missouri, where officials have sought to release more than 100 inmates from the St. Louis County jail, which was holding around 840 people. In neighboring St. Charles County, the jail population has been reduced by 14 percent. California is planning on releasing up to 3,500 inmates from state prisons over the next several weeks. Those inmates are those with nonviolent convictions who were set to be paroled within the next 60 days. While it’s a fraction of the 131,000 people incarcerated in the state, advocates say it’s a step in the right direction.

Some prosecutors are going further by not arresting people for committing the types of crimes that typically land individuals in jail in the first place. Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby ordered her staff to immediately dismiss pending charges for drug possession, prostitution, trespassing, urinating in public, and other low-level crimes. “An outbreak in prison or jails could potentially be catastrophic,” Mosby said. “Now is not the time for a piecemeal approach where we go into court and argue one by one for the release of at-risk individuals.” In Philadelphia, District Attorney Larry Krasner advocated for police officers to reduce in arrests for low-level arrests, and his counterparts in San Francisco urged the same. Time will tell if police officers heeded the advice.

Individual correctional departments are also becoming more flexible in their operations. Many prison and jail inmates have long been subjected to fees for basic needs like phone calls to their loved ones, soap, and medical care. Given the urgency of maintaining medical care, contact with family, and hygiene, some facilities are waiving fees. Ideally, Eisen says, she would like to see every facility waive fees for medical care.

Even the nation’s death penalty system has been impacted by the novel coronavirus. Death row inmates have seen their executions halted as neither the state nor defense teams can gather in large groups to carry out lethal injections. Texas has issued stays for inmates set to be executed between March and June. Indeed, one of the long-term consequences of the pandemic may be hastening the end of capital punishment nationwide. “I think there will be very strong arguments that this punishment is a kind of ‘legal luxury’ that we really cannot and ought not invest resources in while we try to rebuild after COVID-19,” Douglas Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University wrote in a blog post. 

Of course, as with the state-by-state approach to battling the coronavirus, responses in the criminal justice system have varied, even from locality to locality. Criminal justice advocates have been advocating for releasing inmates at Rikers Island, New York’s jail where thousands are held before their trials and for short sentences. The jail facility, which is scheduled to close by 2026, is notorious for its dangerous conditions. As my colleague Samantha Michaels reported last week, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that 300 inmates would be released—but the jail complex currently has 5,000 people:

Public health experts say more drastic measures must be taken to keep the outbreak from growing. Public defenders are now petitioning the courts to free their clients who are still behind bars—many of whom are elderly and with preexisting health conditions. “New York cannot leave people in jails behind to suffer and die,” attorneys at the Legal Aid Society of New York City wrote in a lawsuit.

The federal government, unsurprisingly, is not following the advice of public health experts in their treatment of federal prisoners. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) recently proposed legislation that would have released at least tens of thousands of low-risk and elderly inmates in federal prisons and jails. Instead, the US Bureau of Prisons announced that federal facilities would be going on full lockdown, which could have the effect of further jeopardizing the health of prisoners, guards, and other prison workers.  The virus is spreading in federal facilities and at least four inmates have died at a federal prison in Louisiana. 

Some police officers and others opposed to wide-scale releases have claimed that crime will go up. It may be too early to tell, as John MacDonald, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania told the Marshall Project, “So many people are sheltering in place, crimes of opportunities are dropping. There are fewer potential victims out there.”

Eisen doesn’t yet see any reason to believe that a coronavirus crime wave is coming. “I don’t know what the future holds,” she says, “but this moment is illustrative that we don’t need to have so many people behind bars to create safe and thriving communities.”

Mother Jones illustration; Getty

I run to relax. It is a peaceful time alone, in which all my anxieties and obsessive analyzing of the day take a backseat to simple action. In his book about running, Haruki Murakami compares it to raising a bar. I would say my version of running is becoming a bar—somehow transforming into a blissfully thoughtless object.

But, with the coronavirus pandemic, this has ended. Now when I run I feel like Larry David. I am all thoughts.

Every morning, as I trot in parks near Berkeley, I point and I argue. I quibble with strangers. I (kind of) yell. The refusal to follow the written rules of the shelter-in-place order, which allows outdoor exercise so long as everyone stays six feet apart from each other, has become an all-consuming annoyance in my former respite from society. I run with rage. My form, once focused on striking near the front of my foot and relaxing my arms, now centers on controlling wild arm gesticulations that aren’t for speed but for a purpose: Please move to that one side of the fucking path so we don’t get near each other!

My anger is not unique. Other people (including my boss) have pointed out that the privilege of being outside, of getting fresh air, is being tainted by people’s behavior in public.

I don’t know who needs to hear this—EVERY RUNNER IN AMERICA—but it is your responsibility to give a way wider detour around any pedestrian than six feet as you speed past them huffing and panting.

— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) March 31, 2020

Yes, runners are in the way. We are a noticeable problem, probably because we’re moving more quickly, annoying more people per minute. Or maybe because gyms are closed (and thus more people are running, many stupidly), but streets are still open to traffic, leaving everyone getting out of their house sequestered to a few feet of sidewalk.

But sunrise walkers, who stop in the middle of the path to take a picture of a flower for their Instagram, are also a problem.

It’s everyone. Not just runners, young people, old people, hippies, finance bros, students, male viewers ages 13 to 34, or any other “type of guy.” It’s all of us. We, as a great nation, have come together—across all our various backgrounds—to refuse to be six feet apart. I have seen you, my fellow patriots of idiocy: the whole family walking in a horizontal line; the texter; the child, finally free of the indoors, who ran up to my leg; the walker of seven dogs; the heavy panting jogger passing within inches of me like it’s a NASCAR race; the elderly birdwatcher with a tripod across the whole route; the couple stretched across the park’s cement walkway like a blockade, with one of you on each side and a dog in the middle. I cannot pass you without being within six feet.

It is probably you too, reader, and I need you to stop! 

I want to stop yelling, for the 200 meters leading up to you, random walker, “On your left!” without you budging an inch.

I want you, over-friendly runner, to stop huffing behind me like we’re training partners for the postponed Tokyo Olympics.

Why are we crashing the whole economy to stop people from dying if you, artist painting watercolors in the middle of a gravel path with a full easel, are going to roll your eyes when I ask, “Can you go to one side with that?”

My theory is that there’s a deep craving for normalcy that’s almost impossible to shake. We’ve been told that nothing can be the same—except you can still go outside. The outdoors is a small oasis. It’s hard for us to actually lodge into our minds that even the one thing that’s “normal” can’t be normal. One of the only pieces of life that feels like the Old Times, when our bodies take over our anxious minds, must be made anew in the light of the pandemic, too. We want to live in the past. We cannot.

(My other theory is that I live in Berkeley and share air space with anti-vaxxers or coronavirus truthers.)

Now, to my people, the runners: If you’re running, you should be more vocal and tell people you’re approaching. When passing, use some athleticism to veer, dodge, and create beautiful looping swirls to not be anywhere close to other folks. Don’t run with headphones if you’re in an even semi-crowded area, so you can appreciate the company of the people you’re avoiding. Take a few strides in the street to sidestep getting anywhere near people, if you can. Run during off-times. Slow down to circumvent. And it wouldn’t hurt to say thanks to those working to elude you.

Yes, run. But run away.

Rawpixel/iStock/Getty

The federal government still isn’t sharing any official statistics regarding the racial breakdown of coronavirus deaths. But this information is starting to seep out at the local level from some states and cities, showing that the pandemic is disproportionately killing Black Americans and other communities of color.

In Chicago, new data released Saturday showed that 70 percent of people who have died from COVID-19 in the city were Black, according to a report by the radio station WBEZ. Black people make up 29 percent of the city’s total population.

Similar numbers are emerging elsewhere. In New York, the epicenter for the coronavirus in the United States, the highest concentration of infections has been in low-income neighborhoods with big immigrant populations. In Wisconsin’s Milwaukee County, 81 percent of people killed by the virus have been Black, according to a ProPublica investigation, though just 26 percent of the county’s population identifies as Black. In Michigan, where Black people make up 12 percent of the population, 40 percent of those killed have been Black, many of them in Detroit.

The novel coronavirus is infecting people of all races and income levels, but it is also exposing familiar patterns of racial gaps in health outcomes that stem from systemic discrimination in access to employment, housing, and medical care. Black people are more likely than white people to use public transportation to travel to jobs that can’t be worked from home, making social distancing more difficult. They’re also less likely to have health insurance, and more likely to have preexisting conditions like asthma that make them particularly vulnerable to the virus. In Chicago, health experts noted that Black people are more likely to have diabetes, high blood pressure, and respiratory problems, conditions that can stem from and be exacerbated by poverty, environmental pollution, and limited access to doctors.

For those who can get to a hospital, more problems may await. One study of several states, highlighted by NPR, indicated that doctors may be less likely to refer Black individuals for testing when they come in with symptoms like fever, coughing, and trouble breathing. And in some low-income neighborhoods, it can take longer to get a test because testing centers have struggled to acquire equipment and protective gear.

On March 27, a group of Democratic lawmakers pushed Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar to start tracking and addressing racial disparities in the national response to the coronavirus outbreak. In a letter signed by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker, as well as Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Robin L. Kelly, they said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had failed to collect and publicly report racial data about who is tested and affected by the virus. “Any attempt to contain COVID-19 in the United States will have to address its potential spread in low-income communities of color, first and foremost to protect the lives of people in those communities, but also to slow the spread of the virus in the country as a whole,” they wrote.

According to ProPublica, the CDC normally tracks information about age and race when monitoring an outbreak, as well as the location of people affected. For this pandemic, the agency has released data about age and location, but not race.

Navy Capt. Brett Crozier addresses the crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt during an all-hands call in 2019. US Navy Photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Nicholas Huynh via AP

Brett E. Crozier, the Navy captain ousted this week after writing a letter to senior military officials about a coronavirus outbreak on the warship USS Theodore Roosevelt, has reportedly tested positive for COVID-19.

His symptoms started before he was removed from the ship, according to a New York Times report, citing two of the captain’s Naval Academy classmates who are close with him. He was being quarantined at the Naval Base Guam, they added.

Crozier was removed from his command over the warship Thursday after his letter was leaked to the media. In the missive, he warned that more than 100 sailors on the ship had been infected, and that they would need to disembark to ensure that the virus did not spread among thousands of others in close quarters onboard. “We are not at war,” he wrote. “Sailors do not need to die.”

The days since have seen a heated back and forth, with sailors and many others, including former Vice President Joe Biden, largely standing in support of Crozier, while the White House and top military brass have doubled down on their decision. “I thought it was terrible, what he did,” President Trump said during a briefing Saturday. “To write a letter? I mean, this isn’t a class in literature. He shouldn’t be talking that way in a letter. He could call and ask and suggest.”

Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Sunday said he supported the Navy’s decision to oust Crozier from his duties. “I think it’s just another example of how we hold leaders accountable for their actions,” Esper bluntly told CNN’s Jake Tapper. The defense secretary said an investigation was now underway, and that was “not unheard of” to fire a commander before an investigation concluded.

CNN’s @JakeTapper presses Defense Sec. Esper on why Capt. Brett Crozier of the USS Theodore Roosevelt was removed from his position before a completed investigation. Crozier was fired after writing a memo saying that crew needed help after the coronavirus hit his ship. #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/Oo1vdKdVYI

— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) April 5, 2020

Esper declined to answer whether he agreed with Trump that it was “terrible” to write a letter pleading for the safety of sailors. “I can’t get too much into the facts of the matter because there is an investigation ongoing. This could ultimately come to my desk,” he told Tapper, adding that it was Navy Secretary Thomas Modly’s decision to fire Crozier. “I think acting Secretary Modly made a very tough decision, a decision that I supported. It was based on his view that he lost faith and confidence in the captain based on his action.”

Modly said he no longer trusted Crozier after the captain sent his letter in an unclassified email system to 20 to 30 people. “In sending it out pretty broadly, he did not take care to ensure that it couldn’t be leaked,” Modly said. “And that’s part of his responsibility.”

According to Esper, more than half the ship’s crew has now been tested for coronavirus. At least 155 of the sailors tested positive. The defense secretary said none of them have required hospitalization.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, Biden said it was “close to criminal the way they’re dealing with this guy.” “I think he should have a commendation rather than be fired,” Biden said on ABC’s This Week. 

Yuri Gripas/CNP via ZUMA Wire

For weeks, President Donald Trump has been pushing two anti-malaria drugs—chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine—as treatment for the novel coronavirus, despite a lack of scientific evidence that they, well, actually work to treat the novel coronavirus. Now Reuters has published a report that highlights how the president intervened to pressure federal health officials last month to put out a little-noticed but “highly unusual guidance informing doctors they had the option to prescribe the drugs, with key dosing information based on unattributed anecdotes rather than peer-reviewed science.”

As the story notes:

The episode reveals how the president’s efforts could change the nature of drug oversight, a field long governed by strict rules of science and testing. Rarely, if ever, has a U.S. president lobbied regulators and health officials to focus their efforts on specific unproven drugs.

“The president is short-circuiting the process with his gut feelings,” said Jeffrey Flier, a former dean of Harvard Medical School. “We are in an emergency and we need to rely on our government to ensure that all these potential therapies are tested in the most effective and objective way.”

The CDC guidance, Reuters notes, was essentially published without any sourcing. That is alarming! Experts agree:

Dr. Lynn Goldman, dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, says she was surprised to read the document guidance, after Reuters pointed it out to her. “Geez!” she said. “No references, no nothing! Why would CDC be publishing anecdotes? That doesn’t make sense. This is very unusual.”

Flier, the former Harvard dean, agreed. “It’s kind of offering these drugs up and suggesting that doctors might prescribe them when it’s obviously not established whether or not they are effective or harmful,” he said.

Just last night, Trump (again) spent a significant chunk of his press briefing encouraging Americans to take the drugs:

Wow:

"I think people should—if it were me—I might do it anyway. I may take it."

"What do you have to lose?"

"They should look at the lupus thing. I don't know what it says. But there's a rumor out there […] maybe it's true, maybe it's not. Why don't you investigate that?" pic.twitter.com/WKNQxHwon5

— Mark Helenowski (@markhelenowski) April 4, 2020

The story of how the guidance came to be is unsettling, somewhat complicated, and, unfortunately, given that it includes something the president saw on Fox News, not all that surprising. Read the full story here.

Rep. Devin Nunes on Fox and FriendsScreenshot

In the latest installment of misinformed, offensive comments from politicians during the pandemic, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) went on Fox and Friends Sunday morning and described his state’s homeless population as a “zombie apocalypse” of “criminals,” while falsely suggesting they had extra protection against coronavirus because they live outside.

“The situation out here in California with the homeless population is quite dire—that was before the coronavirus,” Nunes said. “It’s almost like zombie apocalypse…You’ve seen the pictures.”

“I’ve got several thousand just in my district,” the California congressman added. “It’s largely due because we let our criminals out. So we pass laws that let multiple convicted drug abusers out. Now look, unfortunately, a lot of these people—I call it zombie apocalypse, because a lot of these people have done drugs for a long period of time. You know, they’re just not well.”

“One of the positive things in all this,” he continued, “is if you’re outside in the outdoors, you’re social distancing, we haven’t seen it run through homeless population—at least, that we know of yet—like we’ve seen, to my earlier point, in these group homes with older people that have underlying health conditions.”

You can watch the full segment over at Fox here; the relevant exchange starts around the 3:30 mark. Or here’s a clip:

(This is, by the way, the same congressman who last month scoffed at the advice to social distance when he told Fox viewers that the pandemic was a “great time to go out and go to a local restaurant” because “likely you can get in easy.”)

It’s hard to know which part of Nunes’ comments are most offensive—comparing families without homes to corpses come back to life, or seeming to say that people who struggle with addiction should be incarcerated for the rest of their lives. While it’s true that California has a large population of unhoused individuals, and that a majority of them were incarcerated before becoming homeless, locking people up for decades for nonviolent crimes will only fuel mass incarceration and do little to ease the underlying poverty and poor medical care that force people to sleep on the streets.

And suggesting that homeless people are in some ways lucky to sleep outside during the pandemic is also contrary to everything that public health experts are saying right now. Homeless people are actually at a higher risk of serious complications to the virus—both because they tend to have preexisting health conditions that haven’t been treated, and because they can’t follow orders to isolate themselves indoors. California is now trying to house hundreds of homeless people in hotel and motel rooms around the state as part of its emergency response. “Homeless Californians are incredibly vulnerable to COVID-19 and often have no option to self-isolate or social distance,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement Friday.

“It’s never been as clear as it is right now that housing is health care and our collective health depends on our ability to stay at home,” Diane Yentel, who leads the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told my colleague Nathalie Baptiste. “If we don’t have homes to stay in we put people at an immediate and extreme risk, and we risk the health of entire communities. As long as there are people who don’t have homes to isolate in, we are not truly containing this pandemic.”

Giles Clarke/ Getty

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

The predominantly black and low-income communities living near the back-to-back petrochemical refineries of Louisiana’s “cancer alley” have long suffered compromised immune systems and high rates of disease. Now, the state’s fast-growing COVID-19 outbreak is poised to hit them especially hard.

Yet behind the veil of the pandemic, last week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a temporary policy—with no end date specified—to suspend its enforcement of key environmental regulations, allowing industries like Louisiana’s petrochemical giants to make their own determinations as to whether or not they are complying with requirements to monitor pollution levels. Ironically, as the EPA relaxes its rules for polluters, the link between long-term exposure to environmental hazards and the most severe outcomes of coronavirus infections is starting to come into focus.

Jvion, a healthcare data firm, has collaborated with Microsoft to launch a new COVID-19 community vulnerability map to identify the populations most vulnerable to severe complications following a coronavirus outbreak. The interactive map aggregates socioeconomic and environmental factors, such as lack of access to transportation, exposure to toxins, unemployment, and mortality rate. According to the map, these factors make certain “cancer alley” communities particularly vulnerable.

“Our most heavily weighted and frequent determining risk factor was air quality, though that doesn’t mean that it’s the most predictive factor,” said John Showalter, chief product officer for Jvion. “There’s definitely a biologic rationale that environmental health hazards that lead to pulmonary and cardiovascular conditions would then lead people with those conditions to do poorly during a COVID-19 outbreak.”

Jvion used machine learning to analyze block-level data from the U.S. Census to help identify “environmental health hazard” as one key socioeconomic factor that makes a population more vulnerable to severe COVID-19 outcomes, based on the health effects of polluted air, contaminated water, and extreme heat. They also factored in how chronic exposure to outdoor air pollutants, such as fine particulate matter, can increase the risk of cancer, respiratory illnesses, and cardiovascular disease—preexisting conditions that physicians say can make the novel coronavirus more severe and fatal.

A side-by-side comparison of Jvion’s vulnerability map with the EPA’s Environmental Justice Screen (EJScreen) suggests a stark correlation between a community’s proximity to industrial facilities and its projected risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes.

Jvion labels Harris County, Texas, as having a high vulnerability for COVID-19—and a key socioeconomic influencer for that determination is its “above average environmental health hazard.” A new analysis from the University of Texas Health Science Center echoes Jvion’s map: The report shows where risk factors for severe COVID-19 outcomes (mostly preexisting health conditions) are distributed across Harris County to determine which neighborhoods are most at-risk of hospitalization and intensive care for COVID-19. Cross-referencing the EJScreen, it becomes clear that the Harris County map highlights communities in close proximity to industrial facilities and those at a higher risk of cancer from breathing airborne toxins.

“There’s a familiar pattern in these maps, and it’s a pattern that you see in mobility rates and mortality rates, race and ethnicity demographics, as well as the distribution of industry in our country,” said Corey Williams, the research and policy director for Air Alliance Houston. “All those things overlap to a great extent, so there is a correlation, but it’s difficult to prove causation.”

Philadelphia has seen a rapid uptick in coronavirus cases, and its pockets of vulnerability have similar characteristics to Houston’s. Jvion’s map shows that the predominantly black and low-income neighborhoods of Point Breeze and Grays Ferry are considered to have an “extremely high” vulnerability risk for COVID-19 due to environmental hazards, elevated unemployment rates, and low incomes. The EJScreen shows that the areas are close to major highways with heavy traffic, wastewater plants, and industrial facilities.

It’s clear that the novel coronavirus is already compounding underlying systemic inequities in communities with more people of color, poverty, migrants, and those without access to resources like medical care. These maps can help ensure that government response and medical capacity in these at-risk populations can meet the needs of those likely to be severely ill from the virus, including those living near heavy industry and fossil fuel infrastructure.

In a letter submitted to the EPA last week, environmental groups demanded to know why polluting facilities are now excused from complying with environmental regulations, even as their operations continue relatively unfettered. “What is the basis for presuming that the pandemic means companies can no longer comply with environmental rules while they continue to operate and process all other forms of corporate ‘paperwork’?” the memo asked.

Winn McNamee/Getty

The Washington Post on Saturday described the details of President Trump’s blundered response to the novel coronavirus pandemic that led to the critical loss of time that might have avoided some of the worst outcomes the country is now facing. “It may never be known how many thousands of deaths, or millions of infections, might have been prevented with a response that was more coherent, urgent and effective,” the Post wrote. “But even now, there are many indications that the administration’s handling of the crisis had potentially devastating consequences.”

As the Post noted:

Other failures cascaded through the system. The administration often seemed weeks behind the curve in reacting to the viral spread, closing doors that were already contaminated. Protracted arguments between the White House and public health agencies over funding, combined with a meager existing stockpile of emergency supplies, left vast stretches of the country’s health-care system without protective gear until the outbreak had become a pandemic. Infighting, turf wars and abrupt leadership changes hobbled the work of the coronavirus task force.

Tracing the systematic failures of the administration during the first 70 days of the epidemic, Post reporters note that concerns about the possible pandemic were first raised several months ago. 

The CDC learned of a cluster of cases in China on Dec. 31 and began developing reports for HHS on Jan. 1. But the most unambiguous warning that U.S. officials received about the coronavirus came Jan. 3, when Robert Redfield, the CDC director, received a call from a counterpart in China. The official told Redfield that a mysterious respiratory illness was spreading in Wuhan, a congested commercial city of 11 million people in the communist country’s interior.

There followed a toxic but now familiar combination of denial, attempts to politicize science, crushing internal efforts to address the issue, and relentless wishful thinking by the president and some members of his administration. This time with deadly consequences: The United States has the most cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, topping 300,000 on Saturday, with more than 8,000 deaths. Read the Post story here.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) attends a news conference in Miami Gardens, Florida this week.Joe Raedle/Getty Images

After weeks of resistance, the Republican governors of both Florida and Georgia finally acceded to calls for shelter-in-place orders this week. But with notable exceptions. These include Georgia beaches and religious services just before the busiest week of church attendance of the year, with Palm Sunday tomorrow and Easter coming up on April 12.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis classified religious services as “essential business” that could continue despite a stay-at-home order that went into effect on Friday. DeSantis signed a second order that overrode local orders, including actions already taken by local officials to shut down in-person religious services. Earlier this week, Tampa pastor Rodney Howard-Browne was arrested and charged with two misdemeanors for holding services at his megachurch last weekend in violation of local restrictions. But DeSantis’ decision to override local restrictions appeared mainly aimed at keeping church doors open. “We absolutely ask them to abide by social distancing guidelines,” DeSantis said. “But in times like this, the service they’re performing is going to be very important for people.”

Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, issued a stay-at-home order that went into effect on Friday evening. His order allows religious services as long as people stay six feet apart when worshipping. But given how how crowded services may be, and the constraints of church pews, it seems impossible to maintain at all times. Moreover, the six-feet-apart guidelines are more of an estimate, and scientists say that for indoor encounters, six feet of separation is a minimum. 

Like DeSantis, Kemp also chose to override local coronavirus orders in his statewide shelter-in-place order, with the effect of invalidating restrictions from counties and municipalities that went further than the governor’s order. The most immediate effect was that the order effectively re-opened the state’s beaches that had been shuttered by local officials. In response, Tybee Island Mayor Shirley Sessions, who had closed one of Georgia’s most popular beaches, blasted Kemp’s order. “As the Pentagon ordered 100,000 body bags to store the corpses of Americans killed by the Coronavirus, Governor Brian Kemp dictated that Georgia beaches must reopen, and declared any decision makers who refused to follow these orders would face prison and/or fines,” Sessions said in the statement. She told the Associated Press that she did not have the personnel to enforce social distancing on the now-open beaches. Kemp’s spokesman said that Georgia’s state patrol would monitor the beaches to enforce the six-foot rule.

But religious services present a more immediate concern, since services are indoors and last more than an hour. Church services have already worsened outbreaks. In Georgia, the state’s public health commissioner has called attention to the fact that outbreaks in three cities have all been linked to large church services and called for houses of worship to offer online services. 

Florida and Georgia are not alone in allowing religious worship to continue in person. Earlier this week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued what amounted to a stay-at-home order, though he rejected the label, but exempted religious services. In Louisiana, by contrast, a hotspot for the pandemic, a pastor faces misdemeanor charges for holding services for more than 1,200 congregants in violation of the governor’s order against such gatherings.

Most religious leaders are likely to move their services online, or at least into their parking lots during this crisis. But some appear determined to hold indoor services despite the serious risks to public health. Ohio also exempted church services and one Cincinnati megachurch has continued to hold services. New York did not deem religious services non-essential but also discouraged in-person services. 

“Those that are continuing to have services are most likely to be those who subscribe to prosperity gospel beliefs that claim God will protect them from adversity,” Scott Thumma, an expert on religion at Hartford Seminary, told the Los Angeles Times, “or are pitting their claims of religious freedom against the welfare of those they would like to evangelize.”