A Nation Ablaze.

• • Fires burn near White House as George Floyd protests rage. Curfews fail to deter a new wave of protests across US.

  • 
  • Police arrested about 4,100 people in U.S. cities over the weekend, according to the Associated Press. Nearly a week after Floyd’s death, it remains unclear whether tensions nationwide are calming or escalating. At least five people have been killed in violence that flared as demonstrations in parts of the country devolved into mayhem. Gunfire rang out from Detroit to Indianapolis, where authorities said people were slain in shootings connected to the protests. In Omaha, a 22-year old black protester was killed in a struggle with a local business owner on Saturday night. 
  • It’s the middle of the night in the US, where cities continue to reel under protest and violence and where Black Lives Matter leaders say president Donald Trump, has failed his country. This report from David Smith in Washington:For three years, the first president elected without political or military experience rode his luck and skirted past disaster. In the fourth year, the fates demanded payback.Not even Trump’s harshest critics can blame him for a virus believed to have come from a market in the Chinese city of Wuhan, nor for an attendant economic collapse, nor for four centuries of slavery, segregation, police brutality and racial injustice.But they can, and do, point to how he made a bad situation so much worse. The story of Trump’s presidency was arguably always leading to this moment, with its toxic mix of weak moral leadership, racial divisiveness, crass and vulgar rhetoric and an erosion of norms, institutions and trust in traditional information sources. Taken together, these ingredients created a tinderbox poised to explode when crises came.

Demonstrators start a fire as they protest the death of George Floyd near the White House. Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP

• Fires burned in Washington DC, including near the White House. 

• As the 11pm curfew passed, an area of a few blocks around the White House was thick with smoke.

• Groups broke windows of Sweetgreen, Compass Coffee and SunTrust Bank, among other buildings, in downtown D.C. On F Street, looters ransacked Zara and Sephora, leaving mascara, eyeliner, peach-colored striped shirts and distressed jeans strewn in the street.

  “Somebody get me something!” yelled one of the lookouts. One man came out with striped shopping bags, while another carried out an entire display case of body products.

  • Throughout the country, police responded use tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets and batons against demonstrators and press.

  •  Officers fired “beanbag rounds” at protestors in Austin, and in Denver police reportedly hit a Denver Post reporter with multiple nonlethal rounds despite him screaming “press”.

  • Journalists continue to be arrested, struck by police while covering protests

    Whether they were wearing press credentials around their necks

  • mattered little, as journalists around the country continued to be targeted by police with arrest, rubber bullets and tear gas while covering the protests.

    Los Angeles Times reporter Adolfo Guzman-Lopez showed photos of a large welt on his neck after being struck by a rubber bullet just after interviewing a man in Los Angeles. In Washington, MSNBC correspondent Garrett Haake was struck with a rubber bullet or bean bag — he said he wasn’t certain — while reporting live on the air near the White House, standing across from a line of police in riot gear.

    “I have some souvenir welts on my side to show for it,” he wrote later on Twitter. “And sorry for cursing on tv.”

• 

• New York descended into chaos once again, as thousands of demonstrators spread throughout the city, and at one point briefly shut down the Manhattan bridge. 

• Protestors thew trash at the police and officers responded by beating crowds back with batons and making arrests.

• The most jolting scenes of violence late Sunday appeared to take place in Manhattan, where chaos erupted in Union Square at around 10 p.m. Flames nearly two stories high leapt from trash cans and piles of street debris in the neighborhood, sending acrid smoke into the air.

  Protesters threw bottles and other objects at police officers armed with batons who pushed into crowds on Broadway and nearby side streets. As flames spread across one downtown street, officers ordered protesters to disperse. In Soho, looters smashed windows and stole merchandise from upscale stores.

• WASHINGTON POST

The downtown area of this New York City borough looked like it was under martial law as Saturday night turned into Sunday morning.

Dozens of police vehicles screamed to a halt in front of a McDonald’s near the DeKalb subway stop, as what appeared to be at least a hundred officers with plastic shields pushed back on crowds shouting “George Floyd,” and “Eric Garner,” two African Americans killed by police. “Go home!” officers shouted back, waving batons.

 

A pile of trash burned on the asphalt. Cars honked their horns. Sirens blazed. Fire trucks rushed to the scene. Multiple times, police pushback caused a stampede — sometimes prompted by glass bottles thrown at officers from the crowd, sometimes seemingly prompted by nothing at all.

One woman who said she was a medic rushed forward to help a man bleeding from his forehead. Seconds later, she ran the opposite direction, clutching her eyes, saying she’d been pepper sprayed and asking for someone, anyone to grab saline solution from her bag.

 

“At nighttime they get real dirty. They want you to go home and they become very, very aggressive,” said protester Derek Rutledge, 53, an unemployed accountant born and raised in downtown Brooklyn.

He’d arrived by bicycle for a way to escape if things got hairy and said this was his second night protesting. “There are good cops and there’s a whole bunch of dirty cops. If I was a cop and I saw somebody killing somebody for $20, I’d say, ‘Dude, get off of him!’ There’s no need.”

On Sunday morning, the police said that they’d made more than 300 arrests during the overnight protests in New York. At least 30 officers were injured and nearly 50 police vehicles were damaged or destroyed.

“I’m extremely proud of the way you’ve comported yourselves in the face of such persistent danger, disrespect, and denigration,” Police Commissioner Dermot Shea wrote to the NYPD force on Twitter. Shea noted that the spams of violence in the city were driven by “a mob bent solely on taking advantage of a moment in American history, to co-opt the cause of equality that we all must uphold, to intentionally inflict chaos, mayhem, and injury just for the sake of doing so.”

 

All along Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue thoroughfare were shattered windows and piles of glass, at a TD bank, a Men’s Wearhouse, and the downtown Brooklyn Apple Store, where a single panel of the store’s tempered glass facade had cracked but was not broken.

Photographer Flo Ngala, 25, came from Harlem and was wearing a Martin Luther King Jr. T-shirt. She carried a sign reading, “Can’t breathe with a mask on. Can’t breathe without one.” Most of the day, she said, had been inspiring, with crowds cheering protesters on from cars and balconies.

Among the bystanders caught up in the melee were a few people exiting the subway and a homeless woman pushing a shopping cart filled with her belongings. She leaned over and let out a hacking cough. A protester with his mask around his chin stood in the sidewalk, directing the traffic of fleeing protesters around her. “Yo brother, run that way,” he said. “Coronavirus is real.”

Around a corner, a 26-year-old black woman slumped on the sidewalk surrounded by five other protesters, all of them people of color who said they came from the city. They’d been strangers to her until moments earlier, when, they said, she’d gotten pepper sprayed. The woman’s face was caked with salt and milk from a solution the other protesters poured into her eyes to stop the burning.

Even when the stinging stopped, she cried. “They’re just good people who saw me in pain,” she said of her new protest friends. “I’m moved to tears by the kindness.”

A special education teacher from Brooklyn, the woman said she’d previously been arrested when an ex-boyfriend beat her and she physically defended herself. “I want to believe in them so badly. I want to believe that they’re good,” she said of police, but that was hard when she’d spent five hours in the same station as her ex-boyfriend.

She burst into tears explaining that she’d come out to protest, despite her fears of the police and the pandemic, because she felt like she’d be letting her students down if she didn’t.

The woman works in a poor school district with mostly children of color. “And they tell me, ‘I want to be an astronaut. I want to become a pilot,’” she said.

This protest was for them, she said, and getting pepper sprayed wasn’t going to stop her from staying out all night if she had to. “I want them to live long enough to achieve their dreams.”

• 
• Donald Trump was taken into a special secure bunker as protests sparked by the death of George Floyd raged outside the White House on Friday night, according to reports. Despite days of peaceful protests and violent clashes with police in some of America’s major cities, Trump has not addressed the nation and has repeatedly sent inflammatory messages over Twitter.

• 
• New York Mayor’s Bill de Blasio’s 25-year-old daughter was one of the demonstrators who was arrested this weekend. As outlets reported the news, a New York City police union tweeted personal information about Chiara de Blasio’s arrest.
  

•  New York police union ‘doxes’ mayor’s daughter

  As news outlets reported that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio’s 25-year-old daughter had been arrested at a protest last night, a New York city police union tweeted personal information about Chiara de Blasio’s arrest.

  Gizmodo reporter Dell Cameron reported on the tweet from the Sergeant’s Benevolent Association, calling it a “doxing.”

  “How can the NYPD protect the city from rioting anarchist [sic] when the mayors object throwing daughter is one of them. Now we know why he is forbidding Mounted Units to be mobilized and keeping the NYPD from doing their jobs,” the tweet read.

  • NYPD officer appears to point gun at protesters

    A New York police officer appeared to point a gun at protesters in Lower Manhattan on Sunday evening, according to a video posted to social media.

    The scene, captured in a 12-second video posted to Twitter by Gothamist reporter Jake Offenhartz, occurred at approximately 10 p.m., just steps away from the city’s famed Strand bookstore and a few blocks south of Union Square.

    While crossing the street, the officer reaches for the weapon with his left hand and, pointing it at a small crowd as they run down the block. He does not appear to fire the weapon and is later corralled by a supervisory officer in white.

    “Point your gun at the f—— ground,” someone can be heard yelling the video.

   

• Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison will lead prosecutions related to Floyd’s death, Gov. Tim Walz announced Sunday. The governor, like Ellison a Democrat, acknowledged many people’s distrust that authorities would bring justice for Floyd,
• Los Angeles county, the largest county in the US, has announced a regional curfew to go from 6pm to 6am, as a number of protests continue across southern California. Business owners and residents spent Sunday morning cleaning up after Saturday night’s explosive demonstration, with many merchants putting up “minority-owned” and “Black Lives Matter” signs on the boarded-up storefronts

‘I Can’t Breathe’: 4 Minneapolis Officers Fired After Black Man Dies in Custody

“Being black in America should not be a death sentence,” the city’s mayor said as video of the arrest was widely shared.

The F.B.I. and Minnesota law enforcement authorities are investigating the arrest of a black man who died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by an officer’s knee, in an episode that was recorded on video by a bystander and that sparked large protests in Minneapolis on Tuesday.

After the graphic video circulated widely on social media, the mayor denounced the actions of the four officers who were involved and said on Tuesday afternoon that they had been fired. He identified the victim as George Floyd.

Mr. Floyd, 46, a resident of St. Louis Park, Minn., a Minneapolis suburb, was pronounced dead at 9:25 p.m. Monday at Hennepin County Medical Center, according to the medical examiner.

Bystanders plead and curse, begging the officer to stop and telling him the man’s nose is bleeding. Another officer faces the people gathered on the sidewalk. An ambulance medic arrives and, reaching under the officer’s knee, feels for a pulse on the man’s neck.

The medic turns away, and a stretcher is wheeled over. The arrested man is then rolled onto the stretcher, loaded into an ambulance and taken away.

Jovanni Thunstrom, who employed Mr. Floyd as a bouncer at his restaurant, Conga Latin Bistro, said in an interview Tuesday that he was in disbelief when he saw the video.

“It’s hard to believe a police officer would do that,” said Mr. Thunstrom, who was also Mr. Floyd’s landlord. “He wasn’t a threat to justify excessive force used on him.”

Mr. Thunstrom said that Mr. Floyd had become a friend during the five years that he worked for him and the four years that he rented a duplex unit from him in St. Louis Park.

“No one had nothing bad to say about him,” he said. “They all are shocked he’s dead. He never caused a fight or was rude to people.”

The Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis did not immediately

Mr. Thunstrom, the restaurant owner, said that the last time he had heard from Mr. Floyd was when he paid his rent last week and told him that he was looking for a job. The restaurant where Mr. Floyd worked has been closed to on-site dining since March because of the coronavirus pandemic, he said.

Minneapolis Police, Long Accused of Racism, Face Wrath of Wounded City

Protesters returned to the streets on Wednesday, a day after George Floyd’s death. The city’s Police Department has received many excessive force complaints, especially by black residents.

NY TIMES

Earlier in his career, the African-American chief of the Minneapolis police sued his own department, accusing the leadership of tolerating racism. Once he took charge, he vowed to make mending relations with the city’s black residents a priority.

But the department, with its long history of accusations of abuse, finds itself under siege again after a video captured a black man suffocating beneath the knee of a white officer, with three other officers failing to intervene.

Medaria Arradondo, the chief, swiftly fired all four men on Tuesday and called for an F.B.I. investigation once the video showed that the official police account of the arrest of the man, George Floyd, bore little resemblance to what actually occurred.

But quelling the community rage has been a challenge.Hundreds of protesters poured into the Minneapolis streets for a second night on Wednesday, with officers using tear gas and firing rubber bullets into the crowds. Images on television and social media revealed at least one business, an auto parts store, on fire and people carrying goods out of a store that had been vandalized.

A police spokesman told reporters that Wednesday’s protests were not as peaceful, and that one person in the area had been fatally shot, although it was unclear if the death was directly related to the protests. “Tonight was a different night of protesting than it was just the night before,” said the spokesman, John Elder.

The chaos continued into Thursday morning, with additional reports of businesses burning. The Star Tribune posted video showing residents hosing down nearby homes in an effort to prevent them from catching fire.

Some demonstrators gathered at the house of the officer who detained Mr. Floyd and the house of the local prosecutor, according to The Star Tribune. There were also protests in Memphis and Los Angeles, where law enforcement faced off with those who had blocked the 101 Freeway downtown.

Mr. Floyd’s death — and the recent shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia — has also prompted comparisons to previous killings involving the police and black people, including those of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.

Community activists are now calling for it to be federally reviewed, and for murder charges against the officers involved in Mr. Floyd’s arrest and death.

Excessive force complaints against Minneapolis officers have become commonplace, especially by African-American residents. One of the officers involved in Mr. Floyd’s death, a 19-year veteran of the department identified as Derek Chauvin, 44, had several complaints filed against him, three of which led to reprimands for his language and tone.

Chief Medaria Arradondo of the Minneapolis Police Department. He once accused the department in a lawsuit of a history of tolerating racist remarks and behavior.Credit…Elizabeth Flores/Star Tribune, via Associated Press

Yet there is a deep rift between the city’s police force — which also is predominantly white — and the community, one that seems to grow larger with each killing.

There was Justine Ruszczyk, a white woman who was fatally shot by a black police officer in 2017, and whose family was awarded $20 million in a settlement with the city three days after the officer was convicted of murder.

There was Thurman Blevins, a black man who begged two white police officers closing in on him, “Please don’t shoot me. Leave me alone,” in a fatal encounter captured on body-camera footage. His death two years ago led to protests across the city.

And there was Chiasher Fong Vue, a Hmong man who was killed in December during a shootout with nine officers, who fired more than 100 bullets, according to The Star Tribune.

Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis on Wednesday called on the Hennepin County attorney to charge the officer who arrested Mr. Floyd.Credit…Evan Frost/Minnesota Public Radio, via Associated Press

“The fact that these officers were being filmed by bystanders and still continued to engage in that conduct shows you everything about the culture of the Minneapolis Police Department,” said Michelle Gross, the president of Communities United Against Police Brutality. “They feel they’re immune to any kind of accountability. They feel they can get away with it.”

One of the biggest challenges to reforming the department, analysts say, is the city’s powerful police union. It established its power in local politics in the 1970s, when Charles A. Stenvig, a former head of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, served three terms as mayor on a “law and order” platform.

Lt. Bob Kroll, the head of the union, was accused in Chief Arradondo’s lawsuit of calling a black congressman who was Muslim a “terrorist” and of wearing a motorcycle jacket with a badge that said “white power.” Lieutenant Kroll did not respond to messages seeking comment.

On Memorial Day, remembrances mix with new grief, and politics.UPDATES

Trump Tweets and Golfs, but Makes No Mention of Virus’s Toll

NY TIMES, PETER BAKER

As President Trump’s motorcade pulled into his golf club in Virginia on an overcast Sunday, a small group of protesters waited outside the entrance. One held up a sign.

“I care do U?” it read. “100,000 dead.”

Mr. Trump and his advisers have said that he does, but he has made scant effort to demonstrate it this Memorial Day weekend. He finally ordered flags lowered to half-staff at the White House only after being badgered to do so by his critics and otherwise took no public notice as the American death toll from the coronavirus pandemic approached a staggering 100,000.

While the country neared six digits of death, the president who repeatedly criticized his predecessor for golfing during a crisis spent the weekend on the links for the first time since March. When he was not zipping around on a cart, he was on social media embracing fringe conspiracy theories, amplifying messages from a racist and sexist Twitter account and lobbing playground insults at perceived enemies, including his own former attorney general.

This was a death toll that Mr. Trump once predicted would never be reached. In late February, he said there were only 15 coronavirus cases in the United States, understating even then the actual number, and declared that “the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” In the annals of the American presidency, it would be hard to recall a more catastrophically wrong prediction. Even after he later acknowledged that it would not be zero, he insisted the death toll would fall “substantially below the 100,000” mark.

As it stands now, the coronavirus has infected 1.6 million and taken so many lives it is as if an entire midsize American city — say Boca Raton, Fla., just to pick an example — simply disappeared. The toll is about to match the 100,000 killed in the United States by the pandemic of 1968 and is closing in on the outbreak of 1957-58, which killed 116,000. At this pace, it will stand as the country’s deadliest public health disaster since the great influenza of 1918-20 — all at the same time the nation confronts the most severe economic collapse since the Great Depression.

The historical comparisons are breathtaking. More Americans have died of the coronavirus in the last 12 weeks than died in the Vietnam and Korean Wars combined and nearly twice as many as died of battle wounds during World War I. The death toll has nearly matched the number of people killed by the initial blasts of the world’s first atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In terms of American deaths, it is the equivalent of 22 Iraq wars, 33 Sept. 11 attacks, 41 Afghanistan wars, 42 Pearl Harbors or 25,000 Benghazis.

Mr. Trump, who has been sharply criticized for a slow and initially ineffective response to the pandemic, focused on Sunday on the more recent progress, looking ahead, not behind. “Cases, numbers and deaths are going down all over the Country!” he exulted on Twitter.

Even that was not completely true. While total new cases nationally have begun declining, hospitalizations outside New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have increased slightly in recent days, as Mr. Trump’s own former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, pointed out.

Altogether, cases are falling in 14 states and Washington, D.C., but holding steady in 28 states and Guam while rising in eight states plus Puerto Rico, according to a New York Times database. The American Public Health Association said the 100,000 milestone was a time to reinforce efforts to curb the virus, not abandon them.

“This is both a tragedy and a call to action,” it said in a statement. “Infection rates are slowing overall in the U.S., but with 1.6 million cases across the nation in the past four months, the outbreak is far from over. New hot spots are showing up daily, and rates remain steady in at least 25 states.” 

Coffins in a viewing room at a funeral home in Elmhurst, Queens, last month.Credit…Stephen Speranza for The New York Times

The president’s critics said he would not be able to convince voters this fall that he should be celebrated for a death toll of 100,000 or more just because it could have been worse.

“It’s not the moving of the goal posts on loss of life that hurts Trump as much as the loss of life itself,” said Margie Omero, a Democratic pollster and principal at the firm GBAO. “The facts are what worry people — majorities hold Trump responsible for high death tolls, high unemployment and a lack of testing. And even more now than a month ago.”

On a three-day weekend in a stay-home era, when gatherings posed risks and remembrances of the war dead vied with mourning for the nearly 100,000 Americans who had died of the virus, the politics of the pandemic burst into fresh view.

President Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery on Monday morning for a wreath-laying ceremony, then traveled to Fort McHenry in Baltimore, where he spoke of the sacrifice of soldiers and described current service members as being “on the front lines of our war against this terrible virus.”

Mr. Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, did not wear masks, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has urged all Americans to wear them.

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, did wear a mask when he emerged in public on Monday for his first public appearance since mid-March, when he began campaigning from his home.

He and his wife, Jill Biden, both in black masks, laid a wreath at a veterans memorial in Delaware in an unannounced visit. “Thanks for your service,” Mr. Biden said, saluting a small group of veterans and other onlookers from a distance.

If the country’s losses were on his mind this weekend, Mr. Trump did a good job of hiding it. His Twitter feed was full of everything but that. He tweeted or retweeted messages falsely implying that “Psycho Joe Scarborough,” the MSNBC host, murdered an aide in 2001; suggesting that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has denture problems and likes to “drink booze on the job”; and declaring that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions “had no courage” and “ran for the hills” by recusing himself from the Russia investigation in 2017 as required by ethics rules.

Mr. Trump reposted eight tweets from John K. Stahl, a conservative who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in California in 2012. Mr. Stahl has a history of racist and sexist posts, especially against black women like Senator Kamala Harris of California (“Willie’s Ho”); Stacey Abrams, the former candidate for governor of Georgia (“Shamu”); and Joy Reid, the MSNBC host (“butt ugly” and a “skank”).

Imperial College London predicted last week that the relaxation of quarantine measures encouraged by Mr. Trump “will lead to resurgence of transmission” and that “deaths over the next two-month period could exceed current cumulative deaths by greater than twofold” — in other words, another 200,000 deaths by August.

As the nation reaches this macabre milestone, that is the grim worry: That it is not the last one. “To me,” Dr. Frieden said, “the most important question is are we going to do what we need to do to prevent the next 100,000?”

 

Tired of being inside, many people flock to beaches for the unofficial start of summer.

Memorial Day crowds flocked to beaches, amusement parks, lakes and boardwalks on Monday, on the first long weekend since the pandemic began to tear through the United States, taking almost 100,000 lives.

For many, the day was an attempt to turn the page from the grim shutdowns of the past months to something closer to the traditional beginning of summer. Still, the juxtaposition of past and present was at times jarring.

At beaches and seaside arcades even in states where infections remained on the rise, many did not wear masks and disregarded social distancing.

In Florida, near Daytona Beach, hundreds of people had to be rescued from the surf over the long weekend as huge crowds took over beaches in Volusia County.

Videos of partygoers enjoying the weekend at Lake of the Ozarks, Mo., and Ocean City, Md. — often with little more than sunscreen and bathing suits to separate them — dismayed and angered many on social media. But the mayor of one resort town in Missouri said nothing could stop the defiance of social-distancing guidelines, short of shutting down the whole area.

Even in places where the weather was rainy or overcast, a beach trip offered a chance at a feeling of normalcy.

In New York City, beaches were still closed to swimming, though most shorelines in the region were open. Still, the relatively cool weather and public safety measures — most beaches were operating at half-capacity, and many had limited their use to locals only — dampened the urge to pack the sand.

But many people simply stayed home, unlike in years past, when they gathered on stoops and in public parks to barbecue and toast the arrival of the warmer season.

Judge rules against Florida Republican-‘Pay to Vote’ law blocking felons from voting until they pay legal fees.

A federal judge in Tallahassee ruled on Sunday night that Florida law can’t stop felons from voting because they can’t pay back any legal fees and restitution they owe.

The judge’s decision could have deep ramifications as the state’s estimated 774,000 disenfranchised felons represent a significant voting bloc.

Florida is well known for razor-thin election margins, and many of those felons are people of colour and presumed to be Democrats, which could have a major impact on the 2020 election.

In 2018, Florida voters approved Amendment 4, restoring voting rights for felons in the state who have served their sentences.

A subsequent bill, passed by the state legislature and signed by Governor Ron DeSantis, attempted to define what it means to complete a prison sentence, requiring felons to pay all fines, restitution and other legal financial obligations before their sentences can be considered fully served.

In a 125-page ruling, US District Judge Robert Hinkle called the law a “pay-to-vote system” saying that court fees are a tax, and that it creates a new system for determining whether felons are eligible to vote.

Acknowledging the partisan nature of the bill, during a trial earlier this month Hinkle asked during the state’s closing argument: “Why is it all the Republicans voted yes, and all the Democrats voted no?”

“That was not a coincidence,” he said. “It would be stunning if somebody told me that they did not realise that African Americans tend to vote Democratic.”

The governor’s office is reviewing the ruling. “The court recognised that conditioning a person’s right to vote on their ability to pay is unconstitutional,” Ms Ebenstein wrote in an email. “This ruling means hundreds of thousands of Floridians will be able to rejoin the electorate and participate in upcoming elections.”

Convicted murderers and rapists remain permanently barred from voting, regardless of financial debts.

 New York will pay death benefits for essential public workers who died fighting the virus.

New York’s state and local governments will provide death benefits to the families of essential workers who died fighting the virus, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Monday.

The public employees whose families would receive death benefits included health workers, police officers, firefighters, transit workers and emergency medical workers, the governor said. The benefits would be paid out of state and local pension funds.

“We want to make sure that we remember them, and we thank our heroes of today, and they’re all around us,” Mr. Cuomo said at his daily news briefing.

As people paused on Memorial Day to remember military personnel who died while serving the country, Mr. Cuomo linked the fallen service members to New York’s front-line workers, whom he called today’s “heroes.”

Mr. Cuomo also called on the federal government to provide funds to give hazard pay to workers who were crucial to keeping states and municipalities operating.

Last week, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City urged the state to approve line-of-duty death benefits for the families of municipal employees who died of the virus. Some lawmakers in New Jersey are also urging their state to consider taking similar action.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs New York City’s subway and buses, has also said it would give death benefits to the families of virus victims.

As meatpacking plants reopen, data about how many workers are ill is elusive.

The Smithfield Foods plant in Tar Heel, N.C., is one of the world’s largest pork processing facilities, employing about 4,500 people and slaughtering roughly 30,000 pigs a day at its peak. And like more than 100 other meat plants across the United States, the facility has seen a substantial number of virus cases.

But the exact number is anyone’s guess.

Smithfield would not provide any data when asked about the number of illnesses at the plant. Neither would state or local health officials.

Along with nursing homes and prisons, meatpacking facilities have proven to be places where the virus spreads rapidly. But as dozens of plants that closed because of outbreaks begin reopening, meat companies’ reluctance to disclose detailed case counts makes it difficult to determine whether the contagion is contained or new cases are emerging even with new safety measures in place,

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there were nearly 5,000 meatpacking workers infected with the virus at the end of last month. But the nonprofit group Food & Environment Reporting Network estimated last week that the number had climbed to more than 17,000, with 66 meatpacking deaths.

Trump’s struggles to stand still didn’t go unnoticed during Memorial Day visit to Arlington

DAILY NEWS

Oh sway can you see.

President Trump’s struggles to stand still during a Memorial Day visit to Arlington National Cemetery lit up social media Monday, prompting users to recall past incidents in which the commander in chief, who turns 74 next month, battled to find a balance.

“Is the President having trouble standing up straight as the National Anthem begins at Arlington Cemetary (sic) or am I seeing things?” Joshua Potash from Queens asked on Twitter.

The Trump critic posted that video, along with another clearly showing the president swaying in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

 

Trump seemed to have significant trouble balancing as he approached the wreath today at Arlington Cemetery. pic.twitter.com/p6DHKC5Uqd

— Read Let This Radicalize You (@JoshuaPHilll) May 25, 2020

Potash wasn’t alone in finding the somber moment moving in a different way.

“I think it’s the bone spurs,” joked tweeter Kimberley Cooke, referring to one of the five draft deferments that got the president out of serving in the military during the Vietnam War

Some critics wondered about the president’s physical and mental well-being after seeing the bizarre video. Others suggested he may be wearing uncomfortable shoes.

It was also pointed out that the president could be tired from the weekend he spent on the golf course after several months away from the links on account of the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump started Memorial Day by rage-tweeting that the press was out of line for covering his decision to golf when nationwide deaths tied to the COVID-19 pandemic neared the 100,000 mark.

“What they don’t say is that it was my first golf in almost 3 months,” he wrote on Twitter.

The President frequently uses a golf cart rather than walking the course.

The fact that Trump recently said he’d been taking the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine also arose in the Twittersphere, though the president reportedly said Sunday he was no longer using that medication.

Weather.com indicates winds were coming in around 4 mph Monday.

 

 

 

Is Virus Death Rate in U.S. on a Slow Descent? Virus Rages at City Jails, Leaving 1,259 Guards Infected and 6 Dead. UPDATES

U.S. deaths reported per day

The novel coronavirus has taken a heartbreaking health and economic toll in America. But the course of the pandemic isn’t the same as it was a few months ago.  There are encouraging signs all over the country — and no early indications of an overall  reopening debacle. Nate Silver pointed out that the seven-day rolling average for deaths is 1,362, down from 1,761 the week prior and a peak of 2,070 on April 21. That’s still too much too high, but the trend is favorable.

Correction officers in New York City live in fear of bringing the virus home to families. They say the city has not protected them.

NY TIMES

For one Rikers Island correction officer, the low point came when he and his wife were both extremely sick with the coronavirus. She could hardly breathe and begged him to make sure she was not buried in a mass grave, he recalled. He was sure he had contracted the disease working in the jailhouse, where supervisors had discouraged him from wearing a mask.

 

“I’m looking at the person I care most about possibly dying from this thing I brought home,” he said, choking back tears. “That to me is the scariest thing I ever faced.”

Another officer at the Rikers jail said he worked for nearly two weeks while feeling ill but received no help from the jail’s administrators in getting a test. A third, who delivered mail to people in custody, some of them sick, was told he could not use a mask that he had at home but had to wait for a city-issued one. He, too, became infected.

The coronavirus has wreaked havoc on New York City’s 9,680 correction officers and their supervisors, who, like the police and firefighters, are considered essential workers. So far, 1,259 have caught the virus and six have died, along with five other jail employees and two correctional health workers. The officers’ union contends that the death of one other guard is also the result of Covid-19.

The virus has sickened more correction officers in New York, the center of the pandemic in the United States, than in most other large American cities, including Chicago, Houston, Miami and Los Angeles combined, according to data collected by The New York Times.

A majority of the officers in New York City are black and Hispanic and come from neighborhoods with high rates of Covid-19. Inmates also have also been hit hard: 545 have tested positive for the virus since the pandemic started, officials said. Three have died in custody, and two succumbed within hours of being released.

 

Correction officers and union officials have blamed the jail system’s management for the high number of infections. The union points to the department’s practice of asking officers to return to work after they recovered from the illness even if they had not yet tested negative for the virus. And they cited delays in providing many officers with protective gear during the critical month of March and failures to notify guards about colleagues who tested positive for Covid-19.

More than 160 inmates and 130 staff members at the Rikers Island jail complex have been infected with the virus.Credit…Todd Heisler/The New York Times

They also have said that extra-long work shifts — sometimes 24 hours at a stretch — contributed to the epidemic among officers. At the peak of the epidemic, 36 percent of the uniformed jail staff called in sick, leading to long shifts for those still on the job.

 

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Coronavirus ‘does not spread easily’ on contaminated surfaces: CDC

DAILY NEWS

The uncertainty surrounding coronavirus has been a huge source of anxiety throughout this pandemic, as scientists have struggled to uncover not just a treatment for the disease, but also basic facts about its existence.

Though many have been concerned about infection through items like groceries or mail deliveries, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recently issued updated guidance saying that coronavirus “does not spread easily” from touching surfaces or objects.

“It may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes,” the CDC says. “This is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads, but we are still learning more about this virus.”

The Striking Racial Divide in How Covid-19 Has Hit Nursing Homes

Homes with a significant number of black and Latino residents have been twice as likely to be hit by the coronavirus as those where the population is overwhelmingly white.

The coronavirus pandemic has devastated the nation’s nursing homes, sickening staff members, ravaging residents and contributing to at least 20 percent of the nation’s Covid-19 death toll. The impact has been felt in cities and suburbs, in large facilities and small, in poorly rated homes and in those with stellar marks.

But Covid-19 has been particularly virulent toward African-Americans and Latinos: Nursing homes where those groups make up a significant portion of the residents — no matter their location, no matter their size, no matter their government rating — have been twice as likely to get hit by the coronavirus as those where the population is overwhelmingly white.

More than 60 percent of nursing homes where at least a quarter of the residents are black or Latino have reported at least one coronavirus case, a New York Times analysis shows. That is double the rate of homes where black and Latino people make up less than 5 percent of the population. And in nursing homes, a single case often leads to a handful of cases, and then a full-fledged outbreak.

Disparity in the share of nursing homes hit

In many states, facilities with a population of at least a quarter black and Latino residents were more likely to have at least one coronavirus case.

The nation’s nursing homes, like many of its schools, churches and neighborhoods, are largely segregated. And those that serve predominantly black and Latino residents tend to receive fewer stars on government ratings. Those facilities also tend to house more residents and to be located in urban areas, which are risk factors in the pandemic.

Yet the disparities in outbreaks among homes with more Latino and black residents have also unfolded in confusing ways that experts say are difficult to explain.

The race and ethnicity of the people living in a nursing home was a predictor of whether it was hit with Covid-19. But the Times analysis found that the federal government’s five-star rating system, often used to judge the quality of a nursing home, was not a predictor. Even predominantly black and Latino nursing homes with high ratings were more likely to be affected by the coronavirus than were predominantly white nursing homes with low ratings, the data showed.

Cuomo: Westchester to reopen Tuesday as COVID-19 deaths drop below 100 for first time since March

The death toll dropped to 84 people Friday, the first time it’s dipped below 100 since the pandemic slammed the city and surrounding suburbs more than two months ago.

Cuomo called it a bittersweet benchmark that shows how far New Yorkers have come.

“It doesn’t do any good for those 84 families that are feeling the pain,” Cuomo said. ‘But we are making progress and that feels good.”

 

In the city, 52 people died of coronavirus in the 24 hours ending Friday evening. The total death toll rose to 21,138. There have been nearly 195,000 COVID-19 cases in the five boroughs.

 

Gov. Cuomo gave Westchester and the Hudson Valley the green light to reopen starting Tuesday as the coronavirus death toll dipped below 100 for the first time since the crisis erupted in March.

The governor also suggested hard-hit Long Island could start the reopening process on Wednesday if the death toll and case numbers keep dropping in Nassau and Suffolk counties.

U.S. government scientists finally publish remdesivir data.

Nearly a month after U.S. government scientists claimed that an experimental drug had helped patients severely ill with the coronavirus, the research has been published.

The drug, remdesivir, was quickly authorized by the Food and Drug Administration for treatment of coronavirus patients, and hospitals rushed to obtain supplies.

But until now, researchers and physicians had not seen the actual data.

The long-awaited study, sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, appeared on The New England Journal of Medicine’s website on Friday evening. It confirmed the essence of the government’s assertions: Remdesivir shortened recovery time from 15 days to 11 days in hospitalized patients. The study defined recovery as “either discharge from the hospital or hospitalization.”

The trial was rigorous, randomly assigning 1,063 seriously ill patients to receive either remdesivir or a placebo. Those who received the drug not only recovered faster but also did not have serious adverse events more often than those who were given the placebo.

 

What Americans Need to Understand About the Swedish Coronavirus Experiment.

Sweden made headlines for never shutting down. Here’s what’s really happening there.

MEDIUM

To outsiders, life in Stockholm, Sweden, appears perfectly normal: Walk down a cobblestone street, and you may see two friends sitting at a cafe enjoying the spring air or a group of kids kicking a soccer ball in the park. Cars and bicyclists may zip by; a family may walk past you on their afternoon stroll.

Whereas most of the Western world has been in lockdown for weeks, Sweden has opted to forgo any sort of shelter-in-place policy in response to the coronavirus and instead allow businesses and parks to stay open and groups of under 50 to gather.

That’s not to say the country hasn’t been proactive at all. The policy in effect in Sweden is similar to what had been implemented in much of the United States before shelter-in-place orders were issued — and the one that will soon be in place in states that reopen. The Swedish government has recommended that people wash their hands frequently, maintain social distance, work from home if they can, and those who are elderly or more susceptible to Covid-19 stay home. The government recommended that universities switch to online teaching; they quickly followed course. Social distance is required by law in restaurants, and bar service is banned. The government changed its sick leave rules to encourage anyone who is feeling symptoms to stay home. “Instead of saying ‘close down all of society,’ we have looked at society and closed down… aspects of society,” where the disease is most likely to spread, Anders Tegnell, the epidemiologist at Sweden’s Public Health Agency in charge of recommending policy to the government, told The Daily Show. “I think that’s had a great effect.”

Sweden’s approach has been hailed by critics of American and European pandemic policies as a less restrictive — and less economically devastating — alternative to state or national shutdowns, but it’s also been lambasted by others as an unnecessarily risky strategy that has led Sweden to have the highest Covid-19 death toll among the Nordic nations. As more and more areas of the United States reopen, Sweden may not be so much an alternative as a glimpse of the future.As of Sunday afternoon, the country had 25,921 confirmed cases and 3,220 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. These are much higher figures than those of the country’s neighbors, but lower than those in some other wealthy Western European countries on both an overall and population-adjusted basis. Sweden also has suffered problems familiar to residents of countries that have had more severe outbreaks and stricter policies. Nursing homes have been hard hit, and Tegnell described Sweden’s failure to protect nursing home residents as its greatest shortcoming so far. Immigrant and ethnic minority communities also have suffered, due in part to their larger households. Just over half of all households in Sweden in 2016 consisted of only one person, while immigrants were substantially more likely than native-born residents to live in overcrowded conditions or multigenerational households.

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Even with the less aggressive containment measures, the economic effects of the virus have been severe for the country. Sweden’s National Institute for Economic Research projected that gross domestic product would contract by 7% in 2020 and the unemployment rate would rise to just over 10%. The large fall in consumer and business confidence, the institute said in a release, point “to a rapid and severe downturn, not least in large parts of the service sector.”

“The economy will shrink both due to a drop in exports and is already contracting due to lower consumption. But the underlying causes differ: The export sector is mostly affected by the international situation, whereas the drop in consumption is directly related to the government’s recommendation of social distancing,” said Lina Maria Ellegård, an economist at Lund University.

In the first three months of the year, the Swedish economy contracted by less than 1% — less than the United States’ fall — but the production of both goods and services declined in March. The car industry — one of Sweden’s major export sectors — along with real estate, hospitality, and restaurants led the way.

That’s because even without lockdowns or orders, the behavior of Swedes still changed — to an extent. According to data collected by Google and Apple, Swedes have cut back on their travel to places like stores and restaurants and decreased their use of transit-like buses substantially, though not as dramatically as their Nordic neighbors in Denmark. Still, travel over the Easter holiday fell by 90%, Tegnell said on The Daily Show.

Multiple experts in Sweden I spoke to agreed that because a recommendation made by Swedish leadership is culturally viewed as more of a demand, the freedoms allowed have not resulted in free-for-alls. “There’s a basic misconception that there’s one big huge after-ski party,” said Lars Trägårdh, a Swedish historian. “That’s not true.”

Sweden’s voluntary restrictions policy is made possible by the high levels of trust throughout Swedish society. “We have a lot of social trust and a lot of trust in the institutions, and the institutions have confidence in the citizens,” said Trägårdh. “That’s why we decided to have this voluntary approach as opposed to one that’s more hardcore.”

The photos circulating online don’t fully represent the broader reality on the ground either. “I’ve seen pictures in the newspapers and news media of what looks to be crowded restaurants in Stockholm. What I’ve seen is mostly pretty sparse restaurants. Every other table is empty, and there’s very little business,” said Bo Becker, an economist at the Stockholm School of Economics. “Life doesn’t go on as usual, but maybe the lockdown is less severe than in other countries.”

But even if Sweden’s policy of allowing businesses to open and people to move out and about is not that different from some policies American states have or will soon implement, there’s been one major difference: the schools. Schools for children up to age 15 have remained open, all the way down to daycares and preschool. “That makes a world of difference,” Trägårdh told me. “It’s a gender issue.”

Sweden has one of the highest rates of female participation in the labor force for rich countries. Forcing young children to stay home would put many mothers in a bind or even knock them out of the workforce entirely.

“Closing down schools works well if you are in a well-to-do, middle-class family that has a house and a garden and can afford to have one person staying at home,” Trägårdh said. “That may not look like a doable proposition if you are a single parent or do not make a lot of money.”

Shutting down daycare and schools could increase risk as well, Angner explained, by leading working parents to turn to their own parents for help. “If you close daycares, then either one parent has to stop working or grandma or grandpa shows up,” he said. But since the elderly are most at risk, it was even more important to keep schools and daycares open.

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Asother countries work through their peak infections, they will have to figure out how to reach a new status quo where the disease’s spread is still slow but restrictions can be lightened. “Now that everybody else is starting to shift toward opening up, people are talking about Sweden,” said Trägårdh. “Other Nordics are realizing you can’t keep schools closed forever. We’re in the long run here. It’s not a 60-meter race, it’s more like a marathon.”While Sweden has a higher death rate than its Nordic neighbors and other wealthy European nations like Germany, it has been lower than rates in the Netherlands, France, and the United Kingdom. According to the Financial Times’ figures, Sweden has seen an 18% jump in excess deaths since the start of the outbreak, while Denmark has seen a 5% rise. Excess deaths in England and Wales are up 37%.

“The data out of Finland, Norway, and Denmark looks much better,” said Angner. “But everything will hinge on what will happen next.”

There’s some evidence that Sweden has managed to take the heaviest blow from the virus already — about a fourth or fifth of the population of Stockholm may have been infected, which would put the infection rate at a level similar to that found in New York City, which has had many more deaths and been under a near-total lockdown for almost two months. On Tuesday, health officials in Stockholm said the number of new deaths linked to Covid-19 was slowly decreasing from one week to the next.The Swedish example carries both optimistic and pessimistic tidings for the United States as it embraces a partial, scattered reopening cheered on by the White House. It suggests that, even without punitive mandates, people can and will take measures to keep themselves safe from the disease. But even though people are protecting themselves without formal orders, the economy will be only slightly better off than it was under lockdown. Meanwhile, the American push to reopen is being driven by distrust of the government combined with the absence of robust safety-net programs to stem the economic bleeding. In the American context, Sweden’s example may be no example at all.

Amid the Coronavirus Crisis, a Regimen for Reëntry

Health-care workers have been on the job throughout the pandemic. What can they teach us about the safest way to lift a lockdown?

NEW YORKER, Atul Gawande

In places around the world, lockdowns are lifting to various degrees—often prematurely. Experts have identified a few indicators that must be met to begin opening nonessential businesses safely: rates of new cases should be low and falling for at least two weeks; hospitals should be able to treat all coronavirus patients in need; and there should be a capacity to test everyone with symptoms. But then what? What are the rules for reëntry? Is there any place that has figured out a way to open and have employees work safely, with one another and with their customers?

Well, yes: in health care. The Boston area has been a covid-19 hotspot. Yet the staff members of my hospital system here, Mass General Brigham, have been at work throughout the pandemic. We have seventy-five thousand employees—more people than in seventy-five per cent of U.S. counties. In April, two-thirds of us were working on site. Yet we’ve had few workplace transmissions. Not zero: we’ve been on a learning curve, to be sure, and we have no way to stop our health-care workers from getting infected in the community. But, in the face of enormous risks, American hospitals have learned how to avoid becoming sites of spread. When the time is right to lighten up on the lockdown and bring people back to work, there are wider lessons to be learned from places that never locked down in the first place.

These lessons point toward an approach that we might think of as a combination therapy—like a drug cocktail. Its elements are all familiar: hygiene measures, screening, distancing, and masks. Each has flaws. Skip one, and the treatment won’t work. But, when taken together, and taken seriously, they shut down the virus. We need to understand these elements properly—what their strengths and limitations are—if we’re going to make them work outside health care.

Start with hygiene. People have learned that cleaning your hands is essential to stopping the transfer of infectious droplets from surfaces to your nose, mouth, and eyes. But frequency makes a bigger difference than many realize. A study conducted at a military boot camp found that a top-down program of hand washing five times a day cut medical visits for respiratory infections by forty-five per cent. Research on the 2002 sars coronavirus outbreak found that washing hands more than ten times a day reduced people’s infection rate by even more. Disinfecting surfaces helps, too, and frequency probably matters, although I haven’t found good research on this. The key, it seems, is washing or sanitizing your hands every time you go into and out of a group environment, and every couple of hours while you’re in it, plus disinfecting high-touch surfaces at least daily.

That is not enough, however, because environmental transmission may account for as little as six per cent of covid-19 infections. sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, spreads primarily through respiratory droplets emitted by infected people when they cough, sneeze, talk, or simply exhale; the droplets are then breathed in by others. (Loud talking has even been shown to generate measurably more droplets than quieter talking.) This is why physical distancing is so important. We have all now learned the six-foot rule for preventing transmission of contagion-containing droplets. In my hospital system, observers gently remind us to stand the prescribed distance apart on escalators and in the elevator line; we allow no more than four people on elevators that used to carry more than twenty (a nightmare at shift changes). We’ve turned as many internal meetings, patient visits, and team huddles as possible into video meetings, even if someone is right across the hall. When we can’t avoid face-to-face encounters, we’ve put up Plexiglas barriers and spaced our chairs and work stations farther apart.

[But] respiratory illnesses frequently travel farther. Past guidelines from the C.D.C. also cited a 1948 military study in which almost fifty young men with confirmed Streptococcus infection—strep throat—were asked to cough, sneeze (with the help of a sneezing powder), and talk. Petri dishes and air samplers were placed at various distances to capture bacteria. All three activities dispersed contagion. Sneezing was the worst.

A study conducted at a naval base in the nineteen-forties found that germs were most commonly collected within a foot and a half of the sneezing subject, but in some cases they could travel much farther.

In the most common pattern, bacteria grew only on petri dishes placed on the floor a foot and a half from the sneezer. In ten per cent of cases, bacteria were captured only by the air samplers. In twenty per cent, no streptococci were recovered anywhere. But one recruit spewed large quantities of bacteria into petri dishes and air samplers almost ten feet away.

It has now become well recognized that, under the right conditions of temperature, humidity, and air circulation, forceful coughing or sneezing can propel a cloudburst of respiratory droplets more than twenty feet. Yet it wasn’t until the sars epidemic in 2002, after several cases documenting more distant spread, that authorities doubled the at-risk distance from three to six feet. In one case, a man with sars on a three-hour flight from Hong Kong to Beijing infected twenty-two people, five of whom died. The twenty-three passengers in the same row or the three rows in front of the index patient bore the highest risk: eight fell ill. So did the flight attendant for the patient’s section. Extending the recommended distance made sense. But six feet was simply a choice guided by practicality. People seven rows away—around eighteen feet—developed sars, too.We’ve seen similar events in the current pandemic. Take, for instance, the now infamous Skagit Valley Chorale practice, on March 10th, at a church in Washington State. It was pre-lockdown, but there’d been enough coronavirus news to lead the group to suspend the usual hugs and handshakes and to sit farther apart than usual. According to choir members who were present, no one seemed ill at the start of the rehearsal. No one coughed. The singing was as powerful as ever. And that may have been the problem. There was an index patient who had been experiencing cold-like symptoms for three days, which worsened after the rehearsal and led to a diagnosis of covid-19. According to an investigation by the Skagit County Public Health department, fifty-two of the sixty other choir members in attendance subsequently fell ill. Thirty-two choir members tested positive for covid-19. Two died.

covid-19 isn’t actually crazy infectious. Measles is crazy infectious: for instance, in a 2008 outbreak in San Diego that began in a school where thirty per cent of students were unvaccinated, each infected child spread the virus to, on average, eighteen others—meaning that the disease has a “reproductive ratio,” or R0, of eighteen. By comparison, a person with covid-19 will infect, on average, only two to three others out of all the people he or she encounters while going about ordinary life. Exposure time matters: we don’t know exactly how long is too long, but less than fifteen minutes spent in the company of an infected person makes spread unlikely. (For instance, among four hundred and forty-five people who were within six feet of a covid-19 case for ten minutes or more, only two tested positive, both of whom had confirmed cases in their households.) But an R0 of two or three is more than enough to cause a pandemic. Given an average incubation period of five days, a single unchecked case can lead, over two months, to more than twenty thousand infections and a hundred deaths. The six-foot rule goes a long way toward shutting down this risk. But there are clearly circumstances where that is not sufficient. At the right point in the illness, under the right environmental and social conditions, one person can produce a disaster. In ninety minutes of choir practice, in a crowded church on a March day, with a woman at the height of infectivity, the R0 was in the dozens.

Hence the practices begun in Asia, and adopted by my health system, to institute daily screening of all employees, patients, and visitors for symptoms of covid-19. Anytime I want to enter a hospital building, I have to go to a Web site that I’ve bookmarked on my phone, log in with my employee identification, and confirm that I have not developed a single sign of the disease—a new fever, cough, sore throat, shortness of breath, loss of taste or smell, or even just nasal congestion or a runny nose. (Administrators could also have added a formal temperature check with an infrared touchless thermometer, but, although ninety per cent of symptomatic covid-19 patients eventually develop fevers, early on, fever is present less than half the time. So it’s the mild symptoms that are most important to screen for.) A green pass on my phone indicates no symptoms and grants me access to the hospital. Otherwise, I can’t work. In that case, the Web site directs me to call our occupational-health clinic and arrange for possible testing.

Testing when people have symptoms is important; with a positive result, a case can be quickly identified, and close contacts at work and at home can be notified. And, with a negative result, people can quickly get back to work and keep the hospital going. (Owing to false-negative test results, you are still required to wait until your fever has been resolved, and your symptoms have improved, for seventy-two hours.) Tests for people with symptoms are becoming increasingly available; this is no longer a problem for our hospital. Without these tests, people with symptoms have to self-quarantine for much longer—for at least seven days from the start of their symptoms and until they’ve been fever-free and with improving symptoms for seventy-two hours.

This self-screening is obviously far from foolproof. Anyone could lie. Nonetheless, in the first week of rollout, more than five hundred colleagues indicated through the Web site that they had symptoms. Through the first week of May, symptoms, often mild, prompted more than eleven thousand staff members to stay home and receive testing. Fourteen hundred of them tested positive for sars-CoV-2 and avoided infecting patients and colleagues. Daily check-ins are equally important for less measurable reasons: they send the right message. Embarrassingly, people in health care have often seen calling in sick as a sign of weakness. Screening has changed that. Toughing it out is now a shameful act of disloyalty.

Even the most scrupulous check-ins, however, can do only so much in this pandemic, because the sars-CoV-2 virus can make people infectious before they develop symptoms of illness. Studies now consistently indicate that infectivity starts before symptoms do, that it peaks right around the day that they start, and that it declines substantially by five days or so. This is the pattern we see in influenza. But it’s the opposite of the pattern we saw with the coronavirus that caused China’s sars outbreak eighteen years ago. That virus had a low risk of transmission until after five days from the onset of symptoms, which made it easier to identify and isolate cases before others got infected. No large-scale lockdown was necessary. It seems that there are also plenty of people who are infected by the virus that causes covid-19 who never become symptomatic, especially children. So far, studies of transmission networks have not revealed such silent carriers to be a major source of spread. Nonetheless, patients who do not yet show symptoms, or have just begun to, are turning out to be important vectors of disease.That’s why we combined distancing with masks. They provide “source control”—blocking the spread of respiratory droplets from a person with active, but perhaps unrecognized, infection. Since March 25th, my hospital system has required all employees to wear disposable surgical masks. In early April, we began providing masks to all patients on-site. As cases have become widespread in the community, however, staff have been at increased risk of picking up the virus at home and then spreading it to patients and colleagues.

So how effective are surgical masks? A study published in Nature last month shows that, if worn properly and with the right fit, surgical masks are effective at blocking ninety-nine per cent of the respiratory droplets expelled by people with coronaviruses or influenza viruses. The material of a double-layered cotton mask—the kind many people have been making at home—can block droplet emissions as well. And the sars-CoV-2 virus does not last long on cloth; viral counts drop ninety-nine per cent in three hours. Cloth masks aren’t as breathable as surgical masks, though, and that’s important….Cloth masks feel warm and smothering by comparison, and people tend to loosen them, wear them below their noses, or take them off more frequently. The fit of improvised masks is also more variable and typically much worse. A comparison study found that surgical masks did three times better than homemade masks at blocking outward transmission of respiratory viruses.

Don’t ditch your T-shirt mask, though. A recent, extensive review of the research from an international consortium of scientists suggests that if at least sixty per cent of the population wore masks that were just sixty-per-cent effective in blocking viral transmission—which a well-fitting, two-layer cotton mask is—the epidemic could be stopped. The more effective the mask, the bigger the impact.

Cloth and surgical masks do not fit tightly. You can breathe air coming in around the sides. They are designed to safeguard others, not the wearer. The basic logic is: I protect you; you protect me. Benefit to the wearer may be limited, but it’s likely not insignificant: laboratory research has found that surgical masks reduce inhalation of respiratory-droplet-size particles by about three-quarters. Two-layer cotton masks filter about half as much, on average, though a good fit can improve that considerably. Masks also prevent wearers from touching their noses and mouths. In a study of the sars epidemic in Hong Kong, people who wore masks in public frequently were half as likely to become infected by the sars coronavirus as those who didn’t.

There are masks specifically designed not only to protect others but also protect the wearer from infection: N95 respirators. These are masks that are designed to fit tightly around the nose and mouth, so that the air you breathe comes entirely through the mask, not around it…. I protect you and I protect me. If we had an unlimited supply of N95s, all health-care workers would wear them—indeed, lots of people would. But supplies are scarce even in hospitals, so we reserve N95s for respiratory therapists, intensive-care staff on covid-19 units, and other clinicians whose work exposes them to high levels of airborne sars-CoV-2.

Even N95s aren’t foolproof. The seal around the face is often imperfect. Your eyes remain a portal of entry for sars-CoV-2, too. And breathing through an N95 all day is uncomfortable. Talking and being heard while wearing one is a challenge. So people usually prefer to use them for limited periods of time. …

Evidence of the benefits of mandatory masks is now overwhelming. Our hospital system would not be able to stop viral spread without them. But will supplies keep up? Factories are increasing production of both surgical masks and N95s as rapidly as possible, but they don’t come close to meeting health-care workers’ needs, let alone supplying the general public, and they won’t for months to come. It should therefore be no surprise that foreign factories have prioritized meeting their own countries’ needs, often under government edict, and the world is fighting over what’s left.

In order to stretch our supplies, our hospital now limits workers to just a mask a day. We’ve also found ways to decontaminate masks for reuse. That hasn’t been easy: if a disinfectant gets a mask wet, the electrostatic charge is lost. A major breakthrough was the development of a hydrogen-peroxide decontamination system by Battelle, a nonprofit research institute in Columbus, Ohio….

Domestic production of masks in the U.S. has been delayed by inadequate federal support and coördination, but it is nonetheless ramping up. For instance, Joanna Newton, a pediatric hematologist and oncologist, spearheaded a collaboration among a group of institutions—including ExxonMobil, nasa, and Georgia Tech’s Global Center for Medical Innovation—to reduce the bottlenecks in the supply chain and create reusable N95 masks. She explained to me that although American production of medical masks has largely shifted abroad, the melt-blown-fibre fabric is produced domestically for lots of other things: diapers, air-conditioning filters, disinfectant wipes, vacuum-cleaner bags, acoustic insulation in automobiles. Her coalition has persuaded several idled manufacturers to help churn out mask fabric. That has required costly investments in retooling and training, but they’re now producing enough material for a hundred and twenty million face masks per month.

My hospital system’s four-part combination strategy has been in place for a month and a half, and we have increasingly strong evidence that it works. Michael Klompas, my hospital’s leader for infection prevention, tracks all new covid-19 diagnoses among admitted patients. (We’ve averaged more than a thousand suspected and confirmed covid-19 patients a day for most of the past month.) The patients he worries about most are those who are diagnosed more than four days after admission for unrelated complaints, and who haven’t had any cases in their households, suggesting that they could have been infected in the hospital. “I can count those patients on one hand,” he said. Every health-care worker who gets infected is extensively interviewed. Many have an unknown source. But when there is an identified source, it is overwhelmingly in the community, usually the family, he said. “We certainly have a subset of cases that we can attribute to a patient or a co-worker. Those cases are diminishing.”In tracking our health-care workers who have tested positive, Klompas has looked for correlations with high-risk hospital assignments, and he’s found none. What seems to matter isn’t where you work in the hospital—say, in the covid-19 unit—but where you live. Workers who test positive are more likely to have a home Zip Code in known hot spots—such as Chelsea, a town across the river from Boston, where intergenerational housing is common and where random testing has found a thirty-per-cent infection rate.

The four pillars of our strategy—hygiene, distancing, screening, and masks—will not return us to normal life, but, when signs indicate that the virus is under control, they could get people out of their homes and moving again. …however, I have come to realize that there is a fifth element to success: culture. It’s one thing to know what we should be doing; it’s another to do it, rigorously and thoroughly.

My eighty-three-year-old mother lives in a senior-living community called Lasell Village, not far from my home. It has two hundred and fifty residents, nearly two hundred staff members, and three levels of care, from independent living to twenty-four-hour skilled nursing. Initially, the leadership implemented three of the four measures of the plan used at my hospital: hygiene, distancing, and screening. They put up hand-sanitizer dispensers and secured enough disinfectant to wipe down every door handle and high-touch surface multiple times per day. They banned family visitors (like me) and asked residents to stay in their apartments or in outdoor walking spaces. The dining room was closed, and meals were delivered to residents’ doors. Temperature and symptom checks were instituted at the entrance for all, which resulted in many personnel going into self-quarantine.

But it was not enough. An outbreak occurred in a housing unit for disabled residents. Four of the eight residents there became infected, possibly by a staff member who subsequently tested positive for covid-19. All four died. The week that my health system mandated masks, Lasell Village began requiring its staff to wear them, too, although because of a shortage of surgical masks, most employees got only one per week, plus a backup cloth mask. A few days later, residents and local nonprofits had sewed enough cloth masks to distribute one to every resident as well.

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In hospitals, we have had to learn how to bring the stringent antiseptic standards of the operating room into the professional culture of other parts of our institutions. This requires absorbing the detailed practices that keep us from transmitting germs in a given setting—like the rule at the operating table that, once you’re scrubbed in, you never let your hands fall below your waist. Even more, this requires developing norms about how to address lapses in rules, so you can comfortably call one another out when you see a standard slipping and still enjoy working together. This isn’t simple; I’ve seen surgical colleagues in the hallway pop their masks down below their noses to talk, which they never would have done across an operating table, yet I am hesitant to call out the lapse.

Culture is the fifth, and arguably the most difficult, pillar of a new combination therapy to stop the coronavirus. People tend to focus on two desires: safety and freedom; keep me safe and leave me alone. What [we need] to embrace is the desire to keep others safe, not just themselves. “I’m worried about my sore throat, and I am going to stay home.” Or “I am O.K. with being reminded to pull my mask up.” That is the culture of the operating room. It’s about wanting, among other things, never to be the one to make someone else sick.

At Lasell Village, Doyle is doing what she can to create cultural change under pressure. She has made sure that all her staff has enough paid sick time. “Most people have a ton of sick days. For those who don’t, we make it clear that we’ll top up whatever they have in order for them to adhere to precautions around the coronavirus,” she said. She’s worked to foster an atmosphere in which everyone will take a runny nose seriously. Residents, however, often have outside aides. When it became clear to Doyle that these aides weren’t necessarily getting adequate support, she had her team track them down, and made sure they had masks and training. In March, feeling flu-like symptoms, Doyle set an example by putting herself into self-quarantine. Her symptoms worsened, and it was a full three weeks until she was able to be tested and to return to work.

Every day, there’s a new problem to solve, and she asks employees and residents alike to figure out how to rise to the challenge. “When you have a community that cares about each other, then people are interested in adhering [to the guidelines] for other people,” Doyle told me. All the effort appears to be making a difference. The frequency of cases among residents fell substantially after the initial outbreak. Lasell Village went from five cases per week down to two and then one.

The combination therapy isn’t easy. It requires an attention to detail that simply staying in lockdown does not. But, during the crisis, people everywhere have shown an astonishing capacity to learn from others’ successes and failures and to rapidly change in response. There is still much more to learn, such as whether we can safely work at less than six feet apart if everyone has masks on (the way nurses and patients do with one another) and for how long. But answers will come only through commitment to abiding by new norms and measuring results, not through wishful thinking.As political leaders push to reopen businesses and schools, they are beginning to talk about the tools that have kept health-care workers safe. The science says that these tools can work. But it’s worrying how little officials are discussing what it takes to deliver them as a whole package and monitor their effectiveness. On April 24th, as the first states began relaxing restrictions, the Times ran a picture of a barber in a suburb of Tulsa, Oklahoma, [above] mask askew, nose poking out, clipping the hair of an unmasked customer. The week before, the county had experienced ninety-one new coronavirus cases and five deaths, an increase from the prior week. The government had no formal plan for surveillance testing to look for early signs of failure. Many leaders didn’t even seem interested. President Trump has sought to compel meatpacking plants to stay open, even though thousands of workers have been infected by covid-19. He has encouraged protesters to flout public-health guidelines, and seems to consider it embarrassing to set the example of wearing a mask—even as the virus became the country’s top cause of weekly deaths in mid-April …. This is about as far as you can get from instilling the culture of the operating room.

Still, regardless of what model politicians set, more and more people are figuring out how to do what has worked in health care, embracing new norms just as we accepted social distancing. We see proof of a changing culture every time we step out and find a neighbor in a mask. Or when we spend time to make our own fit better. Or when we’re asked whether we have any concerning symptoms today. Or when we check to see whether the number of covid-19 cases in our community has dropped low enough to warrant reëntry. If we stick to our combination of precautions—while remaining alert to their limitations—it will.