by MARTHA BELLISLE (5-21-20)
Washington state’s death toll from the coronavirus could be two to three times the current total because some people who died of virus-like symptoms early in the outbreak were never tested, health officials said Thursday.
As of Thursday, at least 1,037 people in Washington state have died from the disease, but health officials have identified 3,000 deaths dating back to Jan. 1, 2020 that involved symptoms like pneumonia or acute respiratory syndrome, which are commonly associated with COVID-19, said Katie Hutchinson, health statistics manager.
Since they occurred before the first case was identified in the state, officials are investigating those 3,000 deaths to determine whether they’re from coronavirus and should be added to the state death toll, Hutchinson said.
“It’s going to be extremely hard to figure out if any of these were covid-related,” Hutchinson said. “So we’re trying to work on that.”
Having an accurate death count helps health officials plan for and prevent the disease, said Cathy Wasserman, state epidemiologist for non-infectious conditions.
“We want to understand as fully as we possibly can the impact of COVID-19 on our population,” she said. “And that means we want to understand the full spectrum of the disease and of course the COVID-19 deaths are the most severe end of the spectrum.”
Those details will help officials understand who is most at risk and what they’re seeing in terms of manifestations of the illness, she said. This will help them take actions to prevent transmissions and prevent deaths going forward, Wasserman said.
The rapid onslaught of coronavirus forced officials to part from their normal process of counting deaths, Hutchinson said. Their goal was to get the data out as quickly as possible, “in near-real time so immediate decisions could be made to protect the health of Washingtonians,” Hutchinson said.
Some COVID-19 deaths were easier to confirm. They included people who were already in the system after testing positive for the disease, she said.
They’ve also identified about 100 deaths that are not linked to a positive case, but “we can’t rule them in or out,” Hutchinson said. About five case involved covid-positive deaths involving gunshot wounds, she said.
“Our current dashboard reflects anybody that has died from covid irrespective of cause of death,” she said. The data has a 3% variance, she said.
“There’s a commitment to provide data as rapidly as possible and we have to balance that with our commitment to accuracy,” Wasserman said. “So the data we are publishing on our website every day are the most accurate data that we have on any given day with the intention to be extremely transparent and make the information as understandable as possible.”
When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the world’s biggest lockdown, he gave the nation of 1.4 billion people only four hours’ notice.
He unleashed one of the biggest mass migrations in his nation’s history and left the poor in the cities with no means of earning an income or feeding their families.
Tens of millions of migrant workers, who’d moved to the cities to find work, lost their jobs, their wage and their homes overnight. To find food and shelter, hundreds of thousands hit the road to head back to their villages.
In a bid to stop the movement of people and the virus to the countryside, governments cancelled trains and buses, and closed state borders. Many kept walking anyway, often trekking hundreds of kilometres to get home.
While the government has tried to help those in need by providing food and financial aid, not everyone has benefitted.
Foreign Correspondent’s Emma Alberici tells the story of how the poorest of Indians are coping with this nationwide shut down, and asks, is the cure is worse than the disease?
We speak to families living in the slums of Mumbai and Delhi.
‘We are very worried about the lockdown. I can’t even get my daughter’s milk for her…She says, “Mummy I want milk” Where do I get her milk from?’ ‘They tell us to wash our hands, change our habits. Where do we have the means to change our habits?’ , says a desperate father in Delhi, whose family shares one tap with 20 others.
People are left to fend for themselves and you find migrant labour which is actually creating wealth for Mumbai are thrown under the bus’, says a lawyer who works with residents of the Dharavi slum in Mumbai.
We spend time with one of India’s most famous journalists Barkha Dutt who’s made it her mission to shine on a light on India’s most vulnerable.
‘If the lockdown has indeed worked…then a disproportionate amount of that price for keeping the country safe has been paid by the poorest Indian citizens’, says Dutt. We speak with the government who says if it hadn’t locked the country down, the virus would have spread and ‘ it would have led to a catastrophe’.
Celebrated author and activist Arundhati Roy observes, “The poor have been excised from the imagination of this country…This corona crisis sort of exposes the bare bones of what’s going on.”
About Foreign Correspondent: Foreign Correspondent is the prime-time international public affairs program on Australia’s national broadcaster, ABC-TV. We produce half-hour duration in-depth reports for broadcast across the ABC’s television channels and digital platforms. Since 1992, our teams have journeyed to more than 170 countries to report on war, natural calamity and social and political upheaval – through the eyes of the people at the heart of it all.
by Sarah Stillman. (May 18, 2020)
Community groups have pointed out the social costs of the prison system for decades. Now the pandemic has exposed its public-health risks.Arrested during the crisis, Roslyn Crouch feared she wouldn’t leave jail alive.On March 14th, Roslyn Crouch, a mother of twelve, left her house in New Orleans to stock up on toilet paper and canned goods, and didn’t return. Crouch, who is forty-two, with slender braids down to her knees, had been feeling anxious about the spread of the coronavirus. At home, she cared for her elderly mother, and for a half-dozen children, including a son with sickle-cell anemia, a blood disorder. She herself had chronic bronchitis, and worried that it put her at risk. Many people in her neighborhood lacked access to high-quality medical care. (Black residents of Louisiana have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic; they make up about thirty per cent of the state’s population, but account for almost sixty per cent of documented deaths from the virus.) She thought, This is some serious stuff. After scrolling through a few too many coronavirus stories on her phone that Saturday morning, she got dressed, spritzed herself with her favorite perfume, A Thousand Wishes, and drove to a dollar store with her two-year-old son, Kyi, to buy shelter-in-place supplies.
On the way, Crouch failed to stop at a stop sign in Jefferson Parish and was pulled over by the police. She was then arrested for a string of petty crimes, including driving without proper registration and with a stolen license plate that police valued at twenty-five dollars. The most serious charge resulted from a nine-year-old warrant for possession of marijuana. As Crouch was put in the back of a police car, with Kyi, she pleaded with the arresting officers to call her daughter Tae, who worked as a security guard. Tae sped across the Mississippi River, arriving just in time to pry her sobbing little brother from the police car and prevent him from being turned over to child-protective services. “I call him Hip Baby, because he’s attached to my mom’s hip,” Tae told me. She took Kyi home, but it was “hell on earth trying to tame him without her.” The cops drove Crouch to the Jefferson Parish jail.
In late March, Governor John Bel Edwards announced that Louisiana had the fastest-growing coronavirus infection rate in the world. According to state reports at the end of last year, Louisiana also had the highest incarceration rate in the country. The pandemic posed an immediate threat in the state’s jails, where cells are crowded and poorly sanitized, and people frequently cycle in and out of custody. Since 2013, the main jail in Orleans Parish has been under a consent decree for what the Department of Justice called “dangerous and unacceptable” conditions, including “inadequate medical care.” Prisons, too, present a contagion risk; they have less rapid turnover than jails, but staff come and go, and large populations and underfunded health services make outbreaks hard to contain. Ben Smith, who served thirteen years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as Angola, remembers how quickly infections passed through the prison each year. Lacking accessible treatment, men devised remedies using instant soup, garlic, oranges, and peppermint leaves. Smith—who now works for the First 72+, a nonprofit that helps people adjust to life after incarceration—worried about his friends who were still inside, among them an older man with Stage IV colon cancer who was nearing parole. “Imagine a prisoner serving a life sentence, with age on him. If he got the virus, would they choose to give him a ventilator?” Smith asked. “It’s a very, very contagious virus. Now you could be sentenced to death.”
At the Jefferson Parish jail, Crouch shared an intake cell with four other women. There were mats on the floor, for sleeping, and the only source of drinking water was a faucet above a toilet without a lid, where some of Crouch’s cellmates, apparently detoxing from drugs, spent the night vomiting. She draped an extra sleeping mat over her body, hoping that it would shield her from germs, but a guard chastised her—one person, one mat, she was told. Crouch asked the guards, “Y’all sure those ladies don’t have the virus?” By the time she reached Tae on the jailhouse phone, she was crying. She told her daughter, “I’ve got to get out of here before this virus gets me.”
For decades, community groups have pointed out the social costs of mass incarceration: its failure to address the root causes of addiction and violence; its steep fiscal price tag; its deepening of racial inequalities. The coronavirus pandemic has exposed another danger of the system: its public-health risks. In April, the American Civil Liberties Union worked with epidemiologists and statisticians to show that, without protective measures in jails and prisons, including rapid reductions in incarcerated populations, the virus could kill an additional hundred thousand Americans. Families of the incarcerated—along with national legal organizations, grassroots groups, and religious leaders—began to push for mass releases, focussing on defendants arrested for nonviolent offenses, those nearing the ends of their sentences, and the medically vulnerable. In Philadelphia, outside the Criminal Justice Center, protesters lined up coffins to mark the coronavirus-related death of a woman who had been eligible to be released in a few months. In Columbus, Ohio, they wore masks reading “20K by May,” the number of releases they were demanding. A team based at U.C.L.A.’s law school started a spreadsheet to track such actions, calling itself the Covid-19 Behind Bars Data Project. By mid-May, it had tallied more than five hundred legal filings and court orders, along with dozens of protests.
Some efforts accomplished in weeks or months what activists had been working toward for decades, leading to large experiments in decarceration. Since mid-March, San Francisco has reduced its jail population by nearly forty per cent, and California has made plans to release thousands of people from state prisons. In New Jersey, the State Supreme Court authorized the release of as many as a thousand detainees from county jails. Each week in April, the federal-prison population declined by around a thousand people; by May, it had reached its lowest level in two decades. In dozens of cities, cops were ordered to make fewer arrests, district attorneys dropped low-level charges, and judges vacated bench warrants for unpaid fines and other minor infractions. “Advocates on the ground have been challenging mass incarceration for so long—and now much of what we’ve been calling for, pre-covid-19, we’re seeing it transpire,” Patrisse Cullors, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, told me, from Los Angeles, where she’s been organizing for releases with Reform L.A. Jails. “At the local, state, and national level, this is a moment when we can collectively transform how our country relates to the most vulnerable.”
One early push occurred in Santa Clara County, California, where the country’s first coronavirus deaths were recorded. Raj Jayadev runs Silicon Valley De-Bug, a grassroots group that helps incarcerated people devise creative strategies to fight their cases. Some eighty per cent of people in the county jail are awaiting trial, often because they can’t afford bail. At weekly De-Bug meetings, families put together “social biography packets,” stuffed with personal photos, letters, and eight-to-ten-minute videos, to present a fuller picture of defendants. In mid-March, as the virus spread, Jayadev worked with Carson White, an attorney with the public defender’s office, who compiled a list of people seeking release from the county jail. White negotiated with prosecutors, the sheriff’s office, and pretrial services, and an agreement was reached to shrink the jail’s population by twenty per cent. On March 19th, the county released an initial group of about a hundred and fifty people. Since then, the jail’s population has been reduced by more than a thousand. “This moment has flipped the script on mass incarceration,” White told me. “It’s laid bare that caging huge swaths of our society isn’t necessary—it’s just convenient.”
Even after mass releases began, Jayadev feared that many defendants were being “left off the rescue boat,” particularly those charged with felonies. “Just because someone has been accused of a crime with a higher bail schedule doesn’t mean they deserve a potential death sentence,” he said. With court systems shutting down because of the pandemic, it was harder to advocate for defendants. “I don’t even have access to my clients right now—that whole system is out the window,” White told me, in March. Normally, she could bring a defendant before a judge within two days of filing a motion; now a client’s only chance for release was a prosecutor’s mercy. (In April, the county court in Santa Clara began hearing a limited number of cases, with a focus on defendants with a strong likelihood of release.) Many clients had agreed to attend drug-treatment or mental-health programs as a condition of their release, but the programs had been suspended. White had a ninety-one-year-old client with dementia who had been arrested following an outburst in his home; he was being held in the jail’s infirmary with at least one coronavirus patient. “My in-box is full of heartbreaking e-mails from community members asking if our office can help release their sister with asthma, their father with emphysema, their fiancé awaiting a lung biopsy,” she told me.
Jayadev was working with Johnny Page, who was being held in the Elmwood Correctional Complex, in Milpitas, California, awaiting trial on drug charges. “He has Type 2 diabetes and he’s not taking his insulin shots,” Rebecca Rivera, the mother of his child, told me; several sheriff’s deputies had tested positive for covid-19, and Page refused to enter the common area of the jail, where medical staff administered the shots, because he’d noticed unsanitary practices there. “My son keeps asking, ‘Is Dad O.K.?’ ” she said. Page called her daily, with updates: men were shackled in dirty chains; they slept in bunk beds a few feet apart. Rivera jotted down notes—“The inmates are starving as they have not been allowed canteen for two weeks”—and urged Page to organize.
In late March, I spoke with Page on the phone. He and other men on his cellblock had drawn up a list of fifteen grievances. Since covid-19 hit, the commissary had shut down, and the men could no longer buy meals, soap, Tylenol, or stamps and stationery to communicate with their families. (The phone service at the jail is run by a private company that charges steep fees.) Food was being delivered by people who had touched potentially contaminated surfaces. He asked if he could read me a statement. “We, the inmates in this county jail, want the public to know that we are human,” he said. “We are undergoing treatment that is inhumane and unjust.” Without swift depopulation of the jail and other protective measures, he went on, “the virus will spread like a California wildfire.” In the weeks that followed, officials instituted reforms, which included distributing masks and agreeing to a health inspection. On April 18th, after California temporarily suspended cash bail for those charged with most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, Page was released. He is now working with Silicon Valley De-Bug to help people still trapped in jails. “By far, the most effective driver of change right now has come directly from those locked up, on the inside,” Jayadev said. “Their voices, their demands for survival.”
On March 16th, at Crouch’s red brick home in New Orleans, where pink azaleas were on the verge of blooming, Tae managed to rustle up the money for her mother’s bail—nearly four thousand dollars. Crouch would be free by dinnertime; she could watch Lifetime that evening, curled up with her kids. But Crouch called her daughter in the afternoon. “I’m not getting out,” she said. She was being transferred to the jail in Orleans Parish, a neighboring jurisdiction, for reasons she didn’t understand. “I don’t even know why I’m here anymore,” she said. Tae promised to investigate, but, when she called officials at the jail and other authorities, “all I got was closed doors and brick walls.”
Even by mid-March, as infection rates began to soar, Orleans Parish resisted public pressure to reduce its jail population. Police officers continued to make arrests for nonviolent crimes, including graffiti, failure to return a rental car, and obstructing sidewalks. In bail hearings, when public defenders raised the threat of covid-19, the district attorney’s office accused them of trying to “exploit” the coronavirus to benefit their clients. “This is hardly a time to encourage lawlessness,” the D.A.’s spokesperson told the press. Prosecutors opposed some bond reductions, especially for defendants without a home address, arguing that, if they were released, they would “pose a threat to the general public by potentially spreading the virus to others.” This logic was pernicious; according to an open letter written by the dean of Tulane’s public-health school and other experts, the longer the parish delayed releases, the more genuine the threat of mass infection in the jail was—and thus the more likely it would be to spread to the public. (The D.A.’s office said that it has instructed prosecutors to stop making this argument in bond hearings.)
As coronavirus cases mounted in Louisiana, incarcerated people often had no access to their lawyers. At several juvenile-detention centers, minors were kept in lockdown or solitary confinement, ostensibly for their protection. The mother of a sixteen-year-old boy detained in northern Louisiana told me, in April, that the facility did not respond to her e-mails and calls. “It’s been a whole month, and I don’t know if my child is dead or alive, sick or healthy,” she said. Another woman reached out to Voice of the Experienced (vote), a local nonprofit, for help in finding her mother, who had tested positive for covid-19 in a state prison and then been shuffled to an unknown location, where her lawyer couldn’t contact her. “where is my mother!!!??? is she ok!?” she wrote, in a note that vote posted on social media. “That’s all we want to know. That’s it. Let me hear her voice! Anything!!!”
Crouch called her daughter Tae (left) from the Jefferson Parish jail. “I’ve got to get out of here before this virus gets me,” she said.
Tae worried about her mother’s transfer to Orleans Parish, and eventually got in touch with Thomas Frampton, a public-interest lawyer and a lecturer at Harvard Law School. Ordinarily, Frampton would have been on campus, teaching Legal Research and Writing to first-year students. But his class now met on Zoom, and he was in New Orleans, where he lives part time. Frampton started looking through court records and found that Crouch had a four-year-old material-witness warrant out for her arrest in Orleans Parish.
Material-witness warrants allow law enforcement to arrest and jail someone who hasn’t been accused of a crime—and may even be the victim of the crime in question—in order to insure her testimony. At the time, the Orleans Parish D.A., Leon Cannizzaro, routinely jailed domestic-violence and sexual-assault survivors as material witnesses, to secure their testimony against their alleged abusers. (In 2017, the A.C.L.U. and Civil Rights Corps sued the D.A.’s office over the practice, and the case is pending in federal district court.) Frampton found that, in 2016, an Orleans Parish prosecutor had requested a material-witness warrant for Crouch, to compel her testimony in the trial of a man accused of shooting one of her friends. The defendant was acquitted, rendering the warrant moot. Still, the D.A.’s office pressed a judge to keep it open. (A spokesperson told me that the warrant was the result of a “clerical error”; the prosecutor had intended to request a contempt-of-court warrant, which is more commonly held open after a trial.)
Instead of setting Crouch free, deputies at the Jefferson Parish sheriff’s office detained her for two more nights, then sent her to the Orleans Parish jail, called the Justice Center. Frampton worried that, with the courts closed, securing Crouch’s release could prove unusually complicated. Her bond had been set at a hundred thousand dollars. On March 19th, Frampton visited her at the jail. By the time he arrived, she’d fallen ill: her body ached and she had a bad cough. Hand sanitizer is banned in many jails and prisons. (Administrators argue that inmates will drink it, or use it to start fires.) Frampton stuffed an antiseptic wipe through an opening in the glass divider so that Crouch could disinfect her hands after wiping her runny nose.
Activists were heartened by the initial wave of mass releases this spring. But optimism gave way, for some families, to panic and indignation, as many facilities delayed reducing their populations and instituting safeguards, and coronavirus outbreaks began. At the end of March, by the time New York City released some six hundred and fifty people from Rikers Island, its main jail, the infection rate there was already seven times higher than in the city’s general population. The jail’s chief physician called it “a crisis of a magnitude no generation living today has ever seen.” In Chicago, the Cook County Jail, which is fighting a judge’s social-distancing order, has now recorded nine hundred cases among detainees and staff, and ten deaths. (One of the staff deaths was that of a sheriff’s deputy at a suburban courthouse.) Detained men held strikes to protest the lack of safety precautions, and placed handmade signs in their windows reading “Help us, don’t let us die.”
For those in New Orleans, the pandemic brought to mind how, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Orleans Parish jail. As the storm descended, many staff members fled, leaving behind some sixty-five hundred people—including minors—locked up without food, water, or ventilation. Gina Womack, who runs Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, told me, “People in prisons, especially kids, were an afterthought.” Although there was no official death count after the storm, Human Rights Watch later reported that more than five hundred incarcerated people were not accounted for; many who survived described beatings by staff and cellmates, and infections from contaminated floodwaters. According to a report by the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, when detained children were finally evacuated, a few days later, on floating mattresses, some were so hungry that they tried to scoop up bits of food drifting by in the water. (“One boy found some dog snacks,” the report read.) In the storm’s aftermath, Womack felt that the city “never took the necessary steps to divest from prisons, and invest in our children and our communities.” As a result, when covid-19 arrived, people in the Orleans Parish jail were “sitting ducks.”
Along with other activists, Womack attended Zoom strategy sessions to discuss mass releases, and encouraged parents with incarcerated children to call politicians and the press. The Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition sent more than three hundred letters to elected officials. “This virus may not be as visible as floodwaters, but it’s just as deadly,” Sade Dumas, who runs the group, said. The city initially resisted, but, on March 26th, the sheriff sent a letter to criminal-court judges, asking them to “give consideration to releases, even on a temporary basis, of any non-violent individuals without a prior criminal history.” The D.A. also stopped opposing most bond reductions and releases. By the last week of March, the Orleans Parish jail population had dropped by nearly a quarter, to below eight hundred, its lowest level in decades. The D.A.’s office wrote to me that “only a tiny fraction of those still inside have been jailed for non-violent offenses.” This was a remarkable shift, one that Frampton had assured me wouldn’t happen “until hell froze over.”
The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, meanwhile, set up a panel that would review the cases of certain people in state prisons seeking temporary release. Frampton took on the case of Candice Bowie, who contracted covid-19 in Louisiana’s Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, in April, when she was eight months pregnant. Some eighty-five per cent of the women at the prison had tested positive for the virus, and two inmates in her housing block had died. She was scheduled to give birth by C-section. Frampton successfully lobbied for her release. On May 4th, he and Kelly Orians, who works for the First 72+, the organization that eases reëntry into society, filled a rental car with balloons, created a makeshift divider out of duct tape and a plastic tarp, and drove to pick Bowie up. (When they arrived, the guard mistook them for morticians.) On her way to the hospital to deliver her son, the next day, Bowie called me. “I didn’t want to give birth with a prison guard beside me, but I’d mentally prepared to harden my heart to it,” she said. “Now I’m excited . . . I wasn’t trying to die in there!”
Kisha Edwards, who works for the First 72+, told me that those who are released still face circumstances that are “surreal and devastating.” Jobs, especially for those with criminal records, are almost nonexistent. To receive food stamps, you need an I.D., but the office that issues such documents is closed. Many homeless shelters, which often house the newly released, are also closed. Edwards had a client who was let out after ten years in prison but whose mother was hesitant to take him in, for fear of infection. He found a job with a small business, but got laid off soon afterward because of the shutdown. “So now he’s homeless,” she said. Released parents face additional hurdles. “Mothers want to be reunited with their kids,” Edwards said. “But if they can’t get a job that means they can’t get a place to live, which means they can’t get their kids back.”
Many people risk ending up on the streets. Steven Berrier, a sixty-year-old man who served thirty-five years in prison, was released late one night in mid-April, with a pair of prison jeans, a blue shirt, and sneakers a half-size too small. “I had eleven dollars and a bus ticket,” he told me. With no family to take him in, he spent the first night sleeping on a bus-stop bench. A few days later, he found out about the First 72+. Edwards took him to Walmart and bought him some new clothes, a cell phone (which made him feel like a “baby with a new toy”), and a face mask. He’s been self-quarantining in a hotel room outside of New Orleans that the group rented for him for two months. “To have assistance and a helping hand, that’s really something special,” he said. Still, some nights he lies in bed worrying about what will happen when his time there runs out. “Nobody’s hiring in this pandemic, and you can’t mingle or meet people, so I’m lost out here,” he told me. “I just want to earn an honest living, and have a roof over my head—those aren’t wants, those are needs,” he said. “People have killed themselves over things like this.”
Instead of setting Crouch free, deputies in Jefferson Parish detained her for two more nights, then sent her to the Orleans Parish jail. “I don’t even know why I’m here anymore,” she said.When Thomas Frampton visited Crouch at the Orleans Parish jail, he confronted an officer, pointing out that the warrant on which she was being held was four years old and, he believed, illegitimate. “I absolutely created a scene,” he told me. A sheriff’s deputy called a judge, who agreed that Crouch should be released. “That’s a lesson of the moment—that people are seeing the urgency, and that a whole range of actors stepped up to insure Ms. Crouch’s release,” Frampton said. Shortly after 5 p.m. on March 19th, Crouch walked out of the jail and asked a stranger if she could borrow her cell phone to call her family. “My kids started to cry when I got home,” Crouch told me. “I made them baked macaroni and barbecued chicken.”
Crouch felt lucky to be free. But she had grown sicker: her aches and shivers had increased, and she had lost her sense of smell. A few days after her release, she found out about a local drive-through clinic that did covid-19 testing, but to get a test one had to have a state-issued I.D. Her arresting officers had confiscated hers and forgotten to return it. Her daughter Tae drove her there anyway, and they waited for an hour, but Crouch was not able to obtain a test. At home, she tried to self-quarantine in her bedroom. She quickly realized that, when you care for young children and an elderly parent in a small house, “it’s not happening.” The week after Crouch’s release, she told me that her toddler had a fever. “So my baby’s sick, and I don’t want my mama to get sick,” she said.
When she was released, the parish jail was still full of people who couldn’t afford bail. At the end of March, according to the Orleans Public Defenders, more than two hundred people were still being held “on felonies that are NOT crimes of violence.” A month later, more than a hundred people in the jail had tested positive for covid-19, and two sheriff’s deputies had died. State and federal prisons followed a similar trajectory. In mid-May, according to the Times, seven of the top ten case clusters in the nation were in prisons and jails, including Marion Correctional Institution, in Ohio (2,439 cases), and the Trousdale Turner Correctional Center, in Tennessee (1,284). At Oakdale, in Louisiana, where the first federal prisoner died from covid-19, the death toll has now reached at least eight. The A.C.L.U. unsuccessfully sued the prison, seeking the release of vulnerable people. “Imagine if someone sick with covid-19 came into your home and sealed the doors and windows behind them,” the complaint read. “That is what the Oakdale federal detention centers have just done to the over 1,800 human beings currently detained there, where a covid-19 outbreak is rampant, social distancing is impossible, and no one detained can leave.” Recently, Louisiana prison officials revealed a controversial plan: incarcerated people across the state who tested positive for covid-19 would be transferred to units at Angola and the Allen Correctional Center, which critics worry will cause large outbreaks in those facilities.
Local organizers are ramping up their fight. The Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition is pressing for an agreement from police to reduce arrests. Court Watch NOLA, a watchdog group, is pushing for court proceedings, now held on Zoom, to remain accessible to the public. Bruce Reilly, at vote, has been encouraging his staff to use the trauma of the moment to effect lasting reforms, including an end to incarceration for people too poor to pay court fees, less zealous use of solitary confinement, and fairer parole policies. “We need to make sure that when people realize the house is on fire—when they’re looking for firemen, for water, for a way out—that they know we’re standing right there, ready to help,” he said. Frampton has been thinking about “The Shock Doctrine,” Naomi Klein’s book from 2007, in which she argues that large-scale catastrophes—wars, floods, terror attacks—tend to favor “disaster capitalists,” who use chaos to enact policies that serve private enterprise. He reminded me that one of Klein’s case studies was New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina: in a short period of time, a range of schools, hospitals, and public-housing complexes were privatized, at the expense of the poorest residents. “The city was fundamentally remade,” Frampton said. “I’m really hoping that this moment can be like ‘Shock Doctrine’ in reverse—a chance to build on the growing consensus that our current model for criminal justice needs to be entirely rethought, since it isn’t making our communities any safer or healthier.”
Roslyn Crouch has a similar hope for her city, but she wonders how many incarcerated people will die before any such changes take place. If she ever crosses paths with the Orleans Parish D.A., she knows what she will tell him. “I want to thank you for getting me out of the dog cage,” she said. “But, Lord, there are other things for you to worry about right now, instead of harassing people for petty-ass shit.” ♦
This article has been updated to clarify the nature of the staff deaths recorded by the Cook County Jail.
A Guide to the Coronavirus
Twenty-four hours at the epicenter of the pandemic: nearly fifty New Yorker writers and photographers fanned out to document life in New York City on April 15th.
Seattle leaders let scientists take the lead in responding to the coronavirus. New York leaders did not.
A photo from Master’s Ranch – West’s Facebook page shows an Easter church service this April above the Christian boarding school in Prescott. A suspected child molestation, abuse and car theft are among the allegations under investigation at the facility east the Tri-Cities.Molestation, abuse and ‘riot’ being investigated at Christian boarding school near Tri-Citiesby ALLISON STORMO AND MERON PROBERT; ALLISON R. STORMO
WALLA WALLA, WA (5-20-20)
A suspected child molestation, abuse and car theft are among the allegations under investigation at a Christian boarding school east of the Tri-Cities.
On Tuesday, Walla Walla County deputies were again called to the Master’s Ranch in Prescott after 30 angry teens armed themselves with shovels and brooms.
It was the latest of seven calls in 13 days made to sheriff’s deputies.
Trouble at the ranch came to a head Tuesday after state Child Protective Services officers removed eight boys from the school on Monday, and 30 more were removed by CPS or parents on Wednesday.
While ranch owner Pastor David Bosley called the CPS action a “raid,” a sheriff’s office news release Wednesday said it was a standard site visit from the state after receiving multiple allegations about possible abuse and neglect.
“A site visit is common and may or may not yield a child being placed into protective custody after an investigation by law enforcement and CPS is conducted,” the sheriff’s office.
Bosley posted on Facebook that the facility is shutting down until it can work out its issues with the state. The boarding school cares for about 40 at-risk boys ages 9 and 17 from several states.
Earlier on Tuesday he called the state’s move “unplanned” and “poorly thought out,” saying that it converted a normally peaceful academy into “Lord of the Flies chaos.”
“That’s exactly what you started. Now I’ve got a situation on my hands that you did. … Now, it’s getting out of hand or it’s not even controllable. .. I’ve never had anything like this happen in the history of our ranch…,” he said on a Facebook video that has since been removed.
He could not be reached Wednesday. He told the Herald on Tuesday that he is driving from Missouri to return to Washington state.
Pastor David Bosley
Bosley and his wife Tresa took over the former Jubilee Christian Academy and ranch from orchardists Ralph and Cheryl Broetje in 2018.
The Bosleys have operated a similar school in Missouri since 1997.
A series of complaints have led the state Department of Children, Youth and Families to start an investigation into whether the unlicensed facility is following state laws. It was not clear Wednesday what state laws govern the faith-based facility.
Bosley told the Herald on Tuesday that the allegations came after he fired two employees.
Two former employees contacted the Herald on Wednesday to say that they weren’t fired, but resigned on their own.
Derek Lorenz told the Herald he quit May 6 over a disagreement with managers about disciplinary actions toward the boys, some policies and procedures and concerns about the welfare of the boys.
Lorenz said he made a call to DCYF about some of his concerns.
Another employee who called the Herald said he also contacted the Walla Walla Sheriff’s Department.
The sheriff’s office confirmed Wednesday that multiple investigations are ongoing. A news release said their main concerns are the children’s well being and making sure all allegations are investigated thoroughly.
SHERIFF’S DEPUTIES CALLED
The sheriff’s office said they were first called May 7 after five boys ran away from the ranch and stole a car from Vista Hermosa in Prescott.
They turned up in Walla Walla after shoplifting from the College Place Walmart. The teens were booked into the county’s juvenile justice center.
Three days later, two other boys ran away from the ranch and were found and returned to the school.
Then on May 12, deputies investigated a report that a staff member used excessive force with an 11-year-old boy. There is no report of an arrest, or whether the investigation is continuing.
The next day, a male employee at the school was arrested. Jail records show Max Shelton, 20, is being held on $10,000 bail on investigation of third-degree child molestation and communication with a minor for immoral purposes.
He allegedly had inappropriate contact with a teenage girl.
When police talked with Shelton, he had a swollen eye, blood on his jeans and complained about being hit several times in the chest by Bosley and another staff member, according to court records.
Then on Monday, detectives and CPS case workers showed up to investigate the allegations of abuse and neglect. After an extensive investigation, eight boys were taken into protective custody.
The kids were taken to Walla Walla to be cared for until parents could pick them up.
A mother of one of the boys called the Herald to say that she had extensive concerns about her son’s time there. She saw videos on Facebook on Tuesday of Bosley saying he was driving from Missouri to Washington and that was the first she knew fully of the situation.
She then called CPS to make the necessary arrangements for them to remove her son from the facility and take him to the Pasco airport to meet his father, who flew in from out of state to pick him up.
On Tuesday, there was a report of 30 angry teens with shovels and brooms outside the main house at the ranch.
“A large police patrol response, from multiple agencies, along with detectives and CPS answer the call,” said the news release, though it’s unclear what happened after they arrived but no injuries were reported.
The sheriff’s office said by 3:20 p.m., Bosley announced the ranch was shutting down and all remaining students, about 30, were taken by parents or CPS officials.
“We understand this is a very concerning situation for parents, students and staff alike. We ask for cooperation as we work to determine the extent and validity of every allegation,” said the release.
The Master’s Ranch website schoolforboys.com describes its program as a mentoring, military-like environment that integrates educational, spiritual and personal growth curriculum to help at-risk boys succeed in life.
The one-year program also offers vocational training, athletics and community service projects as part of the Master’s Baptist Church which does business as the Master’s Ranch and Christian Academy.
by CHRISTOPHER RUGABER AND MARTIN CRUTSINGER
WASHINGTON
Facing the gravest U.S. economic crisis in decades, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell offered Congress contrasting views Tuesday of what the government’s most urgent priority should be.
Striking a theme frequently pushed by President Donald Trump, Mnuchin warned that prolonged business shutdowns would pose long-term threats to the economy, from widespread bankruptcies for small businesses to long-term unemployment for millions of Americans.
“There is risk of permanent damage,” Mnuchin said.
Powell, by contrast, stressed, as he has in recent weeks, that the nation is gripped by an economic shock “without modern precedent” and that Congress must consider providing further financial aid soon to support states, localities, businesses and individuals to prevent an even deeper recession.
“What Congress has done to date has been remarkably timely and forceful,” Powell said. “But we need to step back and ask, ‘Is it enough?’”
Mnuchin and Powell offered their views at an oversight hearing of the Senate Banking Committee at which members of both parties questioned them about when their agencies will distribute more of the emergency aid that Congress provided in late March to struggling small businesses and households.
Powell said that a highly anticipated lending program the Fed is creating for small businesses should be operating by the end of the month. And in a turnaround, Mnuchin said the Treasury is now prepared to absorb some losses in that program, which is funded by Treasury. Doing so could enable the Fed to take on further risk with the program and help more struggling companies.
The hearing was the first in a planned series of quarterly oversight sessions focused on spending programs authorized in the $2 trillion federal relief package that is overseen by the Treasury Department and Fed. They include the $660 billion small business lending facility, known as the paycheck protection program, as well as $46 billion in grants to airlines and $454 billion to support the Fed’s lending.
The Fed announced in March that it would set up the Main Street Lending Program, which will provide up to $600 billion in loans to medium-sized businesses that are too large to participate in the Paycheck Protection Program. The Treasury has provided $75 billion, drawn from the $454 billion set aside by Congress, to cover any losses from the Main Street program.
Mnuchin said that under some scenarios the Treasury could lose some or all of that $75 billion.
“Our intention is that we intend to take some losses,” he said.
Mnuchin said in prepared testimony that so far, the paycheck program has processed more than 4.2 million loans for over $530 billion “to keep tens of millions of hardworking Americans on the payroll.” The loans need not be repaid as long as the borrowing business uses 75% of the money to cover workers’ paychecks.
But many small companies say the terms are too onerous. To have the loans forgiven, they must rehire all their employees within eight weeks of receiving the funds, even if they have little business or work for them to do. These companies argue that they might have to lay off their workers again at the end of the eight weeks – and may have little money left to help ramp up when business does return.
Mnuchin, pressed about those issues and about opening the loan program to more nonprofits, said his department was considering making changes.
An Associated Press review found that officials in most states are sharing the addresses of people who have the coronavirus with first responders. At least 10 of those states also share the names of everyone who tests positive.by KIMBERLEE KRUESI
NASHVILLE, TENN. Public health officials in at least two-thirds of U.S. states are sharing the addresses of people who have the coronavirus with first responders. Supporters say the measure is designed to protect those on the front line, but it’s sparked concerns of profiling in minority communities already mistrustful of law enforcement.
An Associated Press review of those states found that at least 10 states also share the names of everyone who tests positive.
Sharing the information does not violate medical privacy laws, under guidance issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Law enforcement officials say the information helps them take extra precautions to avoid contracting and spreading the coronavirus.
But civil liberty and community activists have expressed concerns of potential profiling in African-American and Hispanic communities that already have an uneasy relationship with law enforcement. Some envision the data being forwarded to immigration officials.
In Tennessee, the issue has sparked criticism from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers who only became aware of the data sharing earlier this month.
“The information could actually have a ‘chilling effect’ that keeps those already distrustful of the government from taking the COVID-19 test and possibly accelerate the spread of the disease,” the Tennessee Black Caucus said in a statement earlier this month.
Many members of minority communities are employed in industries that require them to show up to work every day, making them more susceptible to the virus – and most in need of the test.
The AP review shows that public health officials in at least 35 states share the addresses of those who have tested positive for the coronavirus – provided by the state or local health departments to emergency dispatch centers that request it. In at least 10 of those states, health agencies also share their names: Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Tennessee. Wisconsin did so briefly but stopped earlier this month.
Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said law enforcement agencies should explain why they are collecting names or addresses and assure minority communities that the information won’t be turned over to the federal government. He noted the Trump administration’s demands that local governments cooperate with immigration authorities as a concern.
“We should question why the information needs to be provided to law enforcement, whether there is that danger of misuse,” Saenz said.
Law enforcement officials note they have long been entrusted with confidential information – such as social security numbers and criminal history. The COVID-19 information is just a continuation of that trend.
According to the national Fraternal Order of Police, more than 100 police officers in the United States have died from the coronavirus. Hundreds more have tested positive, resulting in staffing crunches.
“Many agencies before having this information had officers down, and now they’ve been able to keep that to a minimum,” said Maggi Duncan, executive director of the Tennessee Association of Chiefs of Police.
Critics wonder why first responders don’t just take precautions with everyone, given that so many people with the virus are asymptomatic or present mild symptoms. Wearing personal protective equipment only in those cases of confirmed illness is unlikely to guarantee their protection, they argue.
In Ohio, Health Director Dr. Amy Acton issued an order April 24 requiring local health departments to provide emergency dispatchers the names and addresses of people within their jurisdictions who tested positive for COVID-19. Yet the order also stated that first responders should assume anyone they come into contact with may have COVID-19. That portion of the order puzzles the American Civil Liberties Union.
“If that is a best or recommended practice, then why the need or desire to share this specific information with first responders?” said Gary Daniels, chief lobbyist for the ACLU’s Ohio chapter.
Duncan said having the information beforehand is valuable because it allows officers “to do their jobs better and safer.”
To use the data, officers aren’t handed a physical list of COVID-19 patients. Instead, addresses and names are flagged in computer systems so that dispatchers can relay the information to officers responding to a call.
In Tennessee, the data is purged from the emergency communications system database within a month, or when the patient is no longer being monitored by the health department, according to health officials and agreements the AP reviewed.
First responders also must agree they won’t use the data to refuse a call for service, a requirement also implemented in most other states using the information.
On April 26, empty lanes point toward Los Angeles. The world slashed its daily carbon dioxide emissions last month. In the United States, California and Washington state recorded the biggest changes, at more than 40%.by SETH BORENSTEIN (4-26-20)
KENSINGTON, MARYLAND The world cut its daily carbon dioxide emissions by 17% at the peak of the pandemic shutdown last month, a new study found.
But with life and heat-trapping gas levels inching back toward normal, the brief pollution break will likely be “a drop in the ocean” when it comes to climate change, scientists said.
In their study of carbon dioxide emissions during the coronavirus pandemic, an international team of scientists calculated that pollution levels are heading back up – and for the year will end up between 4% and 7% lower than 2019 levels. That’s still the biggest annual drop in carbon emissions since World War II.
It’ll be 7% if the strictest lockdown rules remain all year long across much of the globe, 4% if they are lifted soon.
For a week in April, the United States cut its carbon dioxide levels by about one-third. China, the world’s biggest emitter of heat-trapping gases, sliced its carbon pollution by nearly a quarter in February, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Climate Change. India and Europe cut emissions by 26% and 27% respectively.
The biggest global drop was from April 4 through 9 when the world was spewing 18.7 million tons of carbon pollution a day less than it was doing on New Year’s Day.
Such low global emission levels haven’t been recorded since 2006. But if the world returns to its slowly increasing pollution levels next year, the temporary reduction amounts to ‘’a drop in the ocean,” said study lead author Corinne LeQuere, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia.
“It’s like you have a bath filled with water and you’re turning off the tap for 10 seconds,” she said.
By April 30, the world carbon pollution levels had grown by 3.3 million tons a day from its low point earlier in the month. Carbon dioxide stays in the air for about a century.
Outside experts praised the study as the most comprehensive yet, saying it shows how much effort is needed to prevent dangerous levels of further global warming.
“That underscores a simple truth: Individual behavior alone … won’t get us there,” Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann, who wasn’t part of the study, said in an email. “We need fundamental structural change.”
If the world could keep up annual emission cuts like this without a pandemic for a couple decades, there’s a decent chance Earth can avoid warming another 1.8 degrees of warming from now, study authors said. But getting the type of yearly cuts to reach that international goal is unlikely, they said.
If next year returns to 2019 pollution levels, it means the world has only bought about a year’s delay in hitting the extra 1.8 degrees of warming that leaders are trying to avoid, LeQuere said. That level could still occur anywhere from 2050 to 2070, the authors said.
The study was carried out by Global Carbon Project, a consortium of international scientists that produces the authoritative annual estimate of carbon dioxide emissions. They looked at 450 databases showing daily energy use and introduced a measurement scale for pandemic-related societal “confinement” in its estimates.
Nearly half the emission reductions came from less transportation pollution, mostly involving cars and trucks, the authors said. By contrast, the study found that drastic reductions in air travel only accounted for 10% of the overall pollution drop.
In the U.S., the biggest pollution declines were seen in California and Washington, which recorded plunges of more than 40%.
A leaked unreleased White House coronavirus task force report showing cases spiking in areas across the country has undercut President Donald Trump’s claim that cases are declining across the nation.
“You know, the numbers are coming down very rapidly all throughout the country, by the way,” Trump declared at a Monday news conference. “There may be one exception, but all throughout the country, the numbers are coming down rapidly.”
This is, of course, not true. Though cases are decreasing in 14 states, they are rising in nine states, according to The New York Times. A lack of widespread testing in 27 other states, plus Washington and Puerto Rico, suggests that cases in those areas are being undercounted.
But a leaked coronavirus task force report obtained by NBC News shows that some parts of the country — rural counties in Tennessee and Kansas — have seen cases balloon by more than 1,000% in a matter of one week. Other counties in Missouri, Nebraska, Minnesota and Wisconsin saw increases of more than 400%.
Dr. John Ross, a professor at Harvard Medical School, pointed out that all but one of the top 10 counties that saw the largest increases voted for President Donald Trump in 2016.
The top 10 cities in the report, which was produced on May 7, saw cases increase by more than 72% over seven days. Some areas, like St. Louis and Central City, Ky., saw cases skyrocket by 650% over that span. St. Cloud, Minn., saw cases increase by more than 400%. Other cities like Gainesville, Ga., Racine, Wisc., and Nashville saw increases of more than 100% over a single week.
A separate graph listing “locations to watch” include Kansas City, Mo., and Charlotte, which saw increases of more than 200% over the previous week.
The report found that statewide cases in Minnesota increased by nearly 100% over a single week while New Mexico, Tennessee, Wisconsin and the nation’s capital saw increases of more than 40%.
Despite the alarming increases, Trump has continued to publicly and falsely claim that cases are falling nearly everywhere.
“Coronavirus numbers are looking MUCH better, going down almost everywhere,” he tweeted Tuesday.
Medical professionals criticized Trump’s attempts to spin rising death counts.
“Anybody that claims we’re on a downward trajectory nationally is out of touch with reality,” Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the Columbia University National Center for Disaster Preparedness, told NBC News, adding that even the rising numbers do not tell the full story. “There isn’t a single state in the union that has sufficient testing.”
Though states like New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, which were hit hard early, have seen numbers decline, the nation has a rising curve when New York’s massive totals are excluded.
“It’s not appropriate to say the U.S. is consistently on a downward trend at all,” Redlener said. “In some places, it might be the direct opposite of that.”
Trump has also complained to advisers about the way that deaths are counted, arguing that the “real numbers are actually lower,” Axios reported last week.
But medical experts, including those on Trump’s own task force, say the opposite is true.
“Most of us feel that the number of deaths are likely higher than” the 80,000 that is currently reported, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified to a Senate committee on Tuesday. “The number is likely higher. I don’t know exactly what percent higher, but almost certainly, it’s higher.”
Fauci also pushed back on Trump’s optimism and pressure on states to reopen businesses during the hearing.
“If some areas, cities, states or what-have-you jump over those various checkpoints and prematurely open up without having the capability of being able to respond effectively and efficiently, my concern is that we will start to see little spikes that might turn into outbreaks,” Fauci said. “I have been very clear in my message — to try to the best extent possible to go by the guidelines, which have been very well thought out and very well delineated.”
Critical information for the U.S. trading day
Another 3 million Americans (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/almost-3-million-workers-likely-filed-jobless-claims- last-week-as-record-unemployment-grows-2020-05-13) filed for jobless claims.
And markets are showing less resilience than they have been, after Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell put a pin in hopes (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/more-fiscal-spending-may-be-worth-it-as-the-recovery-will-take-time-to-gain- strength-feds-powell-says-2020-05-13) that global economies can rebound quickly from the pandemic. And warnings (http:// www.marketwatch.com/story/why-druckenmiller-says-the-risk-reward-of-investing-in-stocks-has-never-been-worse-2020-05-13) from big investors (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-second-most-overvalued-stock-market-that-billionaire- investor-david-tepper-has-ever-seen-2020-05-13) (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-second-most-overvalued-stock- market-that-billionaire-investor-david-tepper-has-ever-seen-2020-05-13) over too-pricey stocks have been plentiful. (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-second-most-overvalued-stock-market-that-billionaire-investor-david-tepper- has-ever-seen-2020-05-13)
Our call of the day comes from a money manager who advises keeping things stripped for speed right now, which he does by trading just two instruments.
“We offer a very simple, scalable strategy that involves the S&P 500 ETFs (SPY) and cash,” being in one or the other, Thomas H. Kee Jr., President and Chief Executive of Stock Traders Daily (https://www.stocktradersdaily.com/index.php/ general/aboutanalysis) and portfolio manager at Equity Logic (https://www.equitylogic.net/about.php), told MarketWatch in an interview.
Kee argues that a complicated and cumbersome portfolio, like some of the more popular ones with 20 or 30 stocks to keep track of, makes it tough to manage risk in a timely manner.
“The ease of use of simplifying a portfolio so that it just tracks the market or goes to cash allows it to protect itself quickly, and that’s essential when markets conditions are like they are today,” Kee said, referring to Wednesday when a big market drop saw him initially move to cash, but later switch to buying the S&P 500 due the depth of that fall.
Kee believes we are in a three-phase “greater depression era,” with the first coming when stocks and Main Street crashed in March. “The second stage is when the stock market is disconnecting with Main Street and that’s what we’re in now,” he said.
This period, which he expects to last for months, involves a wave of “fake money” coming from central bank stimulus, which will keep markets rising even if there are “swift and harsh declines” along the way. In this phase, investors need to “stay broad based and ride the wave until the music stops,” said Kee, whose models are predicting respective 95% and 50% chances of highs for the Nasdaq-100 highs and S&P by year-end.
That brings us to the dark final stage, likely at the start of next year, when Fed stimulus policies end, debt levels get “ridiculous,” and the solvency of the Fed gets questioned, potentially a big problem the financial industry and stocks, he said.
Stage three is usually “fast and harsh and brutal,” he said. And he has a bit of advice for 401(k) players when that last stage rolls around — move to cash. But ride the market out in the meantime.
The market
The Dow , S&P and Nasdaq have had a rough session, while European stocks fell (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ european-stocks-lose-ground-on-worries-over-speed-of-recovery-2020-05-14), along with Asian stocks (http:// www.marketwatch.com/story/asian-markets-slip-as-hopes-for-a-quick-economic-rebound-fade-2020-05-13). Crude is rising. (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/eurozone-manufacturing-pmi-drops-in-september-to-worst-level-in-nearly-7-years-2019- 09-23)
The chart
A survey from MagnifyMoney (thanks to The Daily Shot (https://blogs.wsj.com/dailyshot/2020/05/14/the-daily-shot-about- 50-of-americans-plan-to-or-have-taken-money-from-retirement-accounts/)) shows that around 50% of Americans have either pulled money from retirement funds or plan to over the last 60 days, more than half to cover expenses:
The buzz
Chinese hackers have been accused by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of trying to steal a U.S. CO (http:// www.marketwatch.com/story/us-says-china-trying-to-steal-covid-19-vaccine-2020-05-14)VID-19 vaccine (http:// www.marketwatch.com/story/us-says-china-trying-to-steal-covid-19-vaccine-2020-05-14). (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ us-says-china-trying-to-steal-covid-19-vaccine-2020-05-14) (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-says-china-trying-to- steal-covid-19-vaccine-2020-05-14) (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-says-china-trying-to-steal-covid-19-vaccine- 2020-05-14)
The ousted director of a key government health office has warned of the “darkest winter in modern history” (http:// www.marketwatch.com/story/darkest-winter-in-modern-history-coming-without-stronger-coronavirus-response-rick-bright-to- testify-2020-05-13) without a stronger U.S. pandemic response, and a World Health Organization official says the virus ” may never go away.” (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/who-officials-grim-outlook-on-covid-19-this-virus-may-never-go- away-2020-05-13) A Wisconsin high court tossed out (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/wisconsin-high-court-tosses-out- governors-extension-of-stay-home-order-2020-05-13) an extended stay-at-home order, President Donald Trump wants schools to reopen, (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-want-schools-to-reopen-expresses-frustration-with-fauci-2020-05-13) and Italian researchers have warned of a spike (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-14/coronavirus-spurs- spike-in-serious-blood-disorder-in-children?srnd=premium-europe&sref=acfjrZ8Z) in a potentially coronavirus-linked blood disorder in children.
Shares of Cisco (CSCO) are up after the networking giant’s earnings and revenue drop were better than forecast. Investors may have reasons to be hopeful (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/cisco-says-pandemic-worse-than-dot-com-crash- and-recession-but-earnings-are-faring-just-fine-2020-05-13).
Random reads
(https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-masks/beijing-drug-store-fined-434530-for-hiking-price-of-masks- idUSKBN1ZS07I?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews&utm_source=reddit.com) (h)The first dancing grass harvest (https:// www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/may/13/its-time-to-embrace-the-history-of-the-country-first-harvest-of-dancing- grass-in-200-years) in 200 years.
Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos’s trillionaire prospects are triggering Twitter (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ amazons-jeff-bezos-is-trending-on-twitter-as-users-debate-possibility-becoming-a-trillionaire-2020-05-14).
(http://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazons-jeff-bezos-is-trending-on-twitter-as-users-debate-possibility-becoming-a- trillionaire-2020-05-14)Cranes (https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/2020/05/14/uplifting-idea-cranes-reunite-families- in-corona-crisis/) are bringing families back together.
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