The Federal Bureau of Investigation has made its first coronavirus-related fraud arrest. On Wednesday evening, the US Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California announced that the FBI had arrested 53-year-old Keith Middlebrook for selling a “patent-pending cure” and treatment for COVID-19 that he claimed to have personally developed. Needless to say, the CDC has repeatedly emphasized that there is currently no cure or treatment for COVID-19, nor is there a vaccine to prevent it. 

Middlebrook was arrested when he attempted to deliver pills he claimed would prevent coronavirus to an undercover FBI agent posing as an investor. According to release from the Justice Department on the arrest, Middlebrook had “fraudulently solicited funds” from the undercover agent by promising massive profits for his company, called Quantum Prevention CV Inc., which he said had planned to mass produce pills he claimed would prevent any person from becoming infected with COVID-19. Middlebrook also falsely claimed that former NBA star Magic Johnson was a member of Quantum Prevention’s board of directors, according to the Justice Department. (Johnson told investigators he knew nothing about Middlebrook’s company). 

Middlebrook, who describes himself as a “Genius, Entrepreneur Icon, Actor Writer Director Producer, Real Estate Mogul,” had posted a video on Instagram, where he has 2.4 million followers, claiming he had developed a cure for COVID-19, showing viewers a syringe with a clear liquid and explaining how it worked. “I am currently going into Mass Production. … The CDC, WHO and Mainstream Media have created a Pandemonium environment,” he wrote in the now-deleted Instagram video.

Middlebrook, who has had bit parts in some big budget movies and TV shows, according to his IMDB page, has also frequently used his Instagram to praise Donald Trump and repeat the president’s talking points as well as debunked right-wing conspiracy theories. According to Vice News, earlier in March, Middlebrook posted a video to his now-deleted Instagram page downplaying the coronavirus pandemic: 

“Don’t listen to the negative news and the negative media,” he says in a video posted March 9. “There is last year alone, 61,000 deaths of the flu. The previous year, there were 80,000 deaths of the flu. I think the coronavirus is at 16? Trump’s already got it nipped in the bud. There’s already an antidote. People are getting up out of the hospital and walking away.”

The video was posted on the same day that Trump tweeted similar rhetoric and statistics about the flu: 

So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 9, 2020

Since the novel coronavirus has evolved into a global pandemic, there have been people across the country trying to exploit the crisis to turn a profit. Earlier this month, the US Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission sent warning letters to a handful of companies for selling products they falsely claimed could prevent or treat COVID-19. And New York Attorney General Letitia James has ordered two far-right figures—conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and televangelist Jim Bakker—to stop using their platforms to hawk products they claim will prevent or treat COVID-19. But Middlebrook is the first person to be arrested for fraudulently suggesting that a product can cure the coronavirus and attempting to profit from it. He was charged with one count of attempted wire fraud, which is a felony offense that carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.

The Army contacted retired nurses, doctors, and other medics on Wednesday, asking whether they would be willing to return to active service to help the military respond to the coronavirus crisis. In doing so, the Pentagon has joined the Department of Veterans Affairs as the latest federal entity to take that remarkable step.

“These extraordinary challenges require equally extraordinary solutions and that’s why we’re turning to you—trusted professionals capable of operating under constantly changing conditions,” stated one typical email, which was signed by Army Deputy Chief of Staff Thomas C. Seamands and provided to Mother Jones. “When the Nation called—you answered, and now, that call may come again.”

For the past few weeks, the Army has battled a coronavirus outbreak among its own staff while assisting state and regional governments on their own virus preparation through components like the National Guard—nearly 11,400 Air and Army Guard personnel have already been activated across the United States, as of Thursday, distributing food and hand sanitizer in some of the states hardest hit by the pandemic. Within the Defense Department as a whole, cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus, have risen sharply. At least 600 personnel had tested positive as of Thursday, more than doubling the department’s total in just three days, the New York Times reported. 

The Army has struggled to expand its testing capacity in recent days, even as military leaders have struck an optimistic tone to describe a crisis that has all but brought the American economy to a standstill. “I think we have very aggressively moved forward in opening up our labs and our testing capability,” Air Force Brig. General Paul Friedrichs, surgeon for the Joint Staff, said Wednesday. “If someone’s aware within the DOD population where that’s not happening, please let us know, because we do have the capacity to perform the testing on our population.”

Evidently the Army is not satisfied with its existing staffing resources. Seamands’s email called for more nurses, critical care officers, medics, and anesthesiologists, among other medical personnel, but he welcomed other retirees, too. “While this is targeted at medical specialties, if you are interested in re-joining the team and were in a different specialty, let us know your interest,” he wrote. 

During previous crises like the September 11 attacks, the Pentagon has involuntarily extended the active service of some enlistees. Perhaps sensitive of the connection, Army officials have emphasized the voluntary aspect of this request. “The Department of the Army is gauging the availability and capabilities of our retired career medical personnel to potentially assist with COVID-19 pandemic response efforts if needed,” the Army noted in a statement sent to me on Thursday, adding that the request “is for future planning purposes only, and is completely voluntary.”

Earlier this week, the VA announced its own campaign to recruit retired health care workers to supplement its own response, which is geared at protecting the nation’s aging veteran population and preparing VA hospitals as backup facilities in case of overflows at civilian hospitals. On Tuesday, the Office of Personnel Management approved a VA request to waive a federal law pertaining to the rehiring of retired VA employees. Normally these employees are paid a lower salary to account for the retirement annuity they already receive, but OPM’s waiver “eliminates that salary reduction, making the prospect of returning to VA employment more appealing,” a department press release stated. 

The VA has long struggled with a chronic staffing shortage—including roughly 43,000 vacant positions in the Veterans Health Administration, according to federal data released last year.  

Last week I wondered whether the massive real estate firm partially owned by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner would give renters a break as the coronavirus spread, businesses shuttered, and tens of thousands of people lost jobs.

I never heard back from the White House or the Kushner Companies, but it didn’t take long for at least one Kushner tenant to provide an answer: Nope!

On Thursday, March 19, Westminster Management—which is owned by the Kushner Companies and boasts of holding more than 20,000 apartments across six states—sent residents in at least one property a notice about rent collection—but it wasn’t about giving them a break on rent, nor did it include any reference to the unfolding COVID-19 crisis, according to emails and other correspondence reviewed by Mother Jones.

Under the corporate logo—a “W” with the roof of a house perched on top—the email began “IMPORTANT CHANGES TO BILLING & PAYMENTS,” before outlining a new online platform that would accept credit or debit card rent payments for a fee, or by e-check without additional charge.

The notices were sent to tenants in multiple buildings across New York City, but it’s unclear if renters in Westminster properties in other states received it or one like it. The company did not respond to a request for comment. A superintendent in one building confirmed the notices went out, referring further questions to a manager who did not respond. An attorney representing Kushner Companies and Westminster Management also did not respond to a request for comment.

Two days later, on March 21, the company sent another email to residents. While it acknowledged the global pandemic by saying the company hoped “you all stay safe and healthy in these challenging times,” it went on to tell tenants to sign up for the new payment platform “asap.” Despite the request for prompt action on payment, the email told residents the management company was running on limited resources and that, due to the need to prevent contact between staff and residents, rent-payers could expect fewer services and directed that anything beside emergency maintenance requests should wait “until the situation has improved.” In a separate communication days later, the company announced the closures of its buildings’ fitness centers, asked tenants not to come to their management office in person, and noted the company would be asking about the health status of tenants before completing non-emergency repairs.

“Please all be safe and healthy,” the March 21 message concluded. “We will get through this, it is all just a matter of time.”

On Wednesday, March 25, the company again reminded tenants of the new rent-payment platform, this time via paper notices slipped under apartment doors. The messages had no mention of any rent breaks or a willingness to work with tenants facing financial hardship due to the coronavirus.

Delays caused by the unfolding coronavirus crisis could play to the company’s benefit. One of its properties, 18 Sidney Place in Brooklyn, has at least two ongoing code enforcement violation actions from city housing inspectors, one related to mold, the other to roaches. That violation was ordered to be handled by March 26 and certified as complete by March 31, subject to court penalties. It’s not clear if that work has been done. A spokesperson for the agency told Mother Jones that inspectors are still working, but did not have any specific information about the resolution of violations pending at the building. A hearing in a lawsuit that could see the company pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars to that building’s tenants for allegedly overcharging rents was originally set for Friday but has been put on hold, according to documents filed in the case.

While it’s unclear how the Senate’s just passed coronavirus economic relief bill would effect large apartment companies like Kushner’s, the deal included language barring Trump family members, including his son-in-law, from getting direct federal assistance. But the bill is written, the New York Times has reported, in such a way that Kushner’s business interests may still benefit.

A new report out yesterday from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC)—the EU’s equivalent of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—suggests that the coronavirus pandemic probably won’t just disappear in the summer months.

The report notes that other strains of coronaviruses, which cause about 10-15 percent of common colds, peak between December and April. They mostly go away in the summer because humidity suppresses respiratory immune defense mechanisms, which means the viruses don’t lead to the debilitating respiratory symptoms from which people are dying.     

But so far, the research does not show that the same is true of the novel coronavirus that’s creating this pandemic. 

[B]ased on preliminary analyses of the COVID-19 outbreak in China and other countries, high reproductive numbers were observed not only in dry and cold districts but also in tropical districts with high absolute humidity, such as in Guangxi and Singapore. There is no evidence to date that SARS-CoV-2 will display a marked winter seasonality, such as other human coronaviruses in the northern hemisphere, which emphasises the importance of implementing intervention measures such as isolation of infected individuals, workplace distancing, and school closures.

This research flies in the face of the claims coming out of the Trump administration. At President Trump’s Fox News coronavirus town hall on Tuesday, he sent the message that the coronavirus will abate in the spring months, saying it’s possible to have the country “open by Easter.” 

Trump can't seem to stop talking about his fantasy timeline for the coronavirus—even if it means contradicting his own administration. pic.twitter.com/LK12Dl0EWg

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) March 26, 2020

Later in the town hall, Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, made assumptions that this coronavirus will be seasonal:

[U]ntil we get through this current pandemic, if it has seasonality, which we hope and believe it could, if it gets through this current season, it will be in everybody’s best interest to do as the President has recommended, our work on vaccines, our work on additional therapeutics and really getting to both pre and post prophylaxis. So that the healthcare providers can get a shot potentially that will protect them, we would call it pre-exposure prophylaxis. All of those things are being worked on to prepare us for the next season. So we’re focused today on what we need today and to get through this current epidemic, and then we’re also getting prepared in case it comes back in the fall or in case it comes back in the fall of 2021 when we’d have a vaccine.  

Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, shot back at President Trump’s “Easter” statement in an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo yesterday.

“You’ve got to be realistic and you’ve got to understand that you don’t make the timeline, the virus makes the timeline,” said Fauci. 

Residents of the District of Columbia pay more federal taxes than the residents of 22 states. They pay more per capita than any other state’s taxpayers. The population is greater than that of Wyoming and Vermont and comparable to that of several other small states. But, relative to states, the $2 trillion coronavirus aid package passed by the U.S. Senate on Wednesday night shorts Washington, DC by as much as $750 million.

While Washington, DC is regularly treated as a state for most federal funding purposes including highways, education, food assistance, and Medicaid reimbursement, according to Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md), Republicans crafting the aid package purposefully gave DC a bad deal. 

“Surely in a bill of $2 trillion dollars we can do right by the people of the District of Columbia and not shortchange them $750 million,” Van Hollen said on the floor of the Senate last night, urging Senate Majority Leader McConnell to offer up an amendment to fix the inequity. In his remarks, Van Hollen said that when he asked about the issue, he was told “‘No, no this was not a mistake. This was not an oversight. That Republican negotiators insisted on shortchanging the people of the District of Columbia.'” 

The aid package, which is expected to pass the House on Thursday and quickly be signed into law, gives a minimum of $1.25 billion to each state, with additional money doled out based on population. While other parts of the aid package treat DC as a state, Republicans apparently left DC out of this state formula and instead stuck it with US territories, whose residents generally do not pay federal income taxes, to divide a much smaller pot of money.

Surely in a $2 trillion in emergency relief, we can do right by the people of the District of Columbia.

But the answer I got back was no, it's not a mistake.

Republican negotiators insisted on shortchanging residents who pay more taxes than people in 22 states. Shameful. pic.twitter.com/fus3okWqgb

— Senator Chris Van Hollen (@ChrisVanHollen) March 26, 2020

“In this bill they decided to treat the District of Columbia in a very discriminatory way,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said at a Thursday press briefing. “It really makes no sense unless you have some other motivation. The District of Columbia has always been treated like a state in terms of distribution of funds.” She continued to say she hoped it would one day be fixed: “It wasn’t an accident. It was a decision. So let’s make a decision to correct that.” 

But it’s unclear when such a correction could come. The Senate won’t be back in session for almost a month, and the coronavirus could keep Congress from working for much longer. Without two senators or a voting member of the House, DC lacks a strong advocate in any debate over future responses to the crisis.

“I am so heartbroken” tweeted Jen Budoff, budget director for the DC City Council. She estimated that DC would see under $500 million in aid, less than half what states with fewer people than DC will receive. Mayor Muriel Bowser and Phil Mendelson, the council’s chair, sent a letter Wednesday to McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer asking for the inequity to be corrected. “The District has the densest population of any state or territory which puts us at higher risk of transmission of the virus,” they wrote. “We also have to work in unison with Maryland and Virginia—each of which will get at least $1.25 billion under the legislation. It is also bad policy as well as unfair to pay our smallest states at least $2,000 per capita while funding District around $700 per capita.” 

Washington needs the money. The Washington-Maryland-Virginia region has 1,277 known coronavirus cases as of Thursday, and the city council, which before the pandemic had been exploring how to use a budget surplus, now expects to make as much as a billion dollars in cuts as tax revenue plummets. “I have to say, the very idea of being treated like a territory is shocking, infuriating, wrong, and outrageous,” Bowser said Thursday during a press conference.

Republicans haven’t offered an explanation for the shortfall, even as the nation’s capital deals with a rising number of coronavirus cases. Washington, DC is a minority-majority city made up of African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, immigrants, and mostly progressive white people. They work alongside lawmakers in Congress, feed them, wash their clothes, and clean their homes. They vote overwhelmingly Democratic. 

“I’m not going to hold up a $2 trillion emergency rescue package that is urgently needed by the country for this, but I think it’s shameful,” Van Hollen said shortly before the bill’s passed the Senate Wednesday night. “To do it intentionally is really outrageous.”

For the third time in three days, people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement were pepper-sprayed on Wednesday as the coronavirus pandemic raises tensions within immigration jails. All of the pepper-spraying incidents have occurred at detention centers run by the private prison giant GEO Group. 

ICE spokesperson Bryan Cox wrote in a statement that four people were pepper-sprayed while in a room with 75 other immigration detainees at the LaSalle ICE Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana. Cox said these measures were used after the detainees tried to “force their way out of the housing area.”

A draft of a court declaration from Mariel Villarreal, an immigration attorney at Pangea Legal Services, presents a more comprehensive and disturbing picture. Villarreal’s declaration states that the pepper-spraying occurred as women received a presentation about the coronavirus yesterday morning. The declaration is based on a conversation Villarreal had with a client, who was one of the 79 women in the room where people were pepper-sprayed on Wednesday. 

“[My client] informed me that during the presentation, the women had questions about the virus and were expressing fears about their safety in the detention center,” the attorney wrote in the declaration. “[My client] stated that the women’s questions were going unanswered and their concerns were being ignored by the officers.” (Mother Jones is withholding the client’s name because Villarreal has not yet obtained permission to share it publicly.)

The latest use of force comes as immigrants and asylum seekers detained by ICE grow more fearful about being crammed into immigration jails in the midst of a pandemic. On Monday, about 60 people were pepper-sprayed at another GEO Group ICE detention center, in Texas, after they demanded to be released to protect themselves from the virus, the San Antonio Express-News reported. ICE announced on Tuesday that a detainee in New Jersey had tested positive for COVID-19, the first confirmed case in its custody. On Wednesday, I reported that seven men were pepper-sprayed at GEO Group’s Pine Prairie, Louisiana, immigration detention center after they refused to go outside because they were fearful of being mistreated by guards while isolated from other detainees. 

The women believed they were teargassed, but Cox said it was pepper spray that was used against them. Villarreal’s declaration continues:

[My client] then informed me that the officers grew impatient and angry with the women and released tear gas into the room where they were giving the presentation. The officers promptly left the room and locked the doors.

[She] told me that her and the rest of the women were left locked inside the room with tear gas for approximately one hour. She stated that the women were screaming to be let out of the room, but no one came to their aid.

[She] stated that the women were coughing, crying, and that some fainted throughout the approximately one hour that they were locked in the room with tear gas.

[She] said that after approximately one hour, officers came and unlocked the doors, and they entered wearing full protective face gear to prevent effects of the tear gas.

[She] informed me that, as we were speaking, her eyes were red and burning and that her whole neck area and throat were in pain.

In the middle of our conversation, the call was lost and I did not receive a call back from [my client]. I called the ICE Processing Center to attempt to be reconnected with [her], but I was informed that it was not possible at that time.

Data released by ICE on Wednesday showed that the number of people in the agency’s custody increased by more than 700 between March 14 and March 21, rising to more than 38,000 in total. Health experts and immigrant advocates are calling on ICE to release people from detention who don’t pose a threat to public safety, but ICE is refusing to do so.

Working from home amid a pandemic can be rough. Add restless, newly homebound children to the mix and you’ve got a storm featuring awkward Zoom interruptions, screaming, and an impossible balancing act that restarts the very next morning.

But don’t despair! What better time instead to check in on the all-time vets of this herculean challenge than the Kelly’s of Busan, South Korea. Nearly three years after going viral with the greatest live interview interruption, the crew and their ever-lively kids returned to the BBC on Thursday to offer some advice on how to cope with remote work life. 

So, take a break from this oppressive news cycle and watch:

On February 25, the pro-Trump internet provocateur Mike Cernovich wrote a blog post titled “Coronavirus is Trump’s Katrina,” highlighting some of Trump’s overly rosy tweets about his administration’s response to the epidemic. Top on his list was the February 24 tweet in which Trump said, “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. … Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” Then there was the one on February 26 when Trump blamed “fake news” for trying to make the coronavirus look as bad as possible and panic the markets. “USA in great shape!” Trump crowed. 

In his post, Cernovich described Trump and the others who were comparing the coronavirus to the flu as being “moronic and glib.” He wrote, “I wonder if they’ve ever had a 104 degree temperature. The flu is awful, and in the 2018-2019 flu season, 61,200 people died. Are we prepared for an additional 60,000+ to die from a new strain of flu?” He pointed to early estimates that the coronavirus could kill anywhere from 1.5 million to 5 million Americans. The coronavirus should have been a “slam dunk” for Trump, Cernovich wrote, a time for Trump to say, “This is why we need border security and domestic manufacturing!” Instead, Cernovich lamented, Democrats had seized the high ground, and it was Elizabeth Warren talking about the need to mitigate supply chain impacts from the outbreak in China while Trump was “tweeting some Bush / ‘heckuva job’ b.s.”

Coronavirus was a slam dunk for Trump,

“This is why we need border security and domestic manufacturing!”

Instead, Democrats are taking the high ground on trade, with Elizabeth Warren (!) talking about domestic manufacturing. pic.twitter.com/nFsmtUjNJk

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) February 26, 2020

 

The post represented a rare moment of criticism of Trump from one of his own most vocal supporters, at a time when the entire GOP establishment, including Fox News, was marching in lockstep with the president dismissing any concerns about the virus as mass panic fueled by the liberal media to keep him from being reelected. Two days before Cernovich was warning that the coronavirus was Trump’s Katrina, right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh told his 25 million listeners, “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus…The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.”

Cernovich is a lawyer, filmmaker, and blogger who first gained public notice as an agitator in the controversial men’s rights movement, where he was known for denying the reality of date rape. “Have you guys ever tried ‘raping’ a girl without using force?” he tweeted in August 2012. “Try it. It’s basically impossible. Date rape does not exist.” Along with his blog, he writes self-help books on such things as how to be an “alpha male,” including recently MAGA Mindset: Making YOU and America Great Again. He supported Trump “back when everyone said he had a 3 percent ceiling,” he told me in an interview. 

In the midst of the 2016 election, his notoriety skyrocketed after he started referring to Hillary Clinton as “Sick Hillary” and implying in Periscope broadcasts, blog posts, and on social media that she suffered from a severe neurological disorder. His hashtag #HillarysHealth turned the candidate’s physical fitness into a campaign issue. Later during the campaign, he helped spread the conspiracy theory that claimed Clinton was involved with a pedophile sex cult housed in the basement of a DC pizza place. A North Carolina man took the conspiracy theory seriously and in December 2016 showed up at the pizza parlor, where he fired an assault weapon in the hopes of rescuing the trapped and victimized children. Following Trump’s victory, Cernovich helped organize the alt-right inaugural “DeploraBall,” in which some of Trump’s most extreme fans gathered to celebrate his election. And he started co-hosting “The Alex Jones Show” on InfoWars, the far-right conspiracy theory site.

Since then, Cernovich’s social media presence has exploded, with more than half a million followers on Twitter and more than 400,000 on Facebook, many of whom are diehard Trump-supporting MAGA people. He’s a regular on the conservative and university talk circuit, and last year he released a documentary called Hoaxed, billed as an “insider’s look” at “fake news.” But with the coronavirus, Cernovich broke with the official White House line. “This bootlicking blind loyalty is not helpful for anyone, including Trump,” Cernovich told me. 

I asked him how he went from Pizzagate conspiracy theorist to truth-teller about the coronavirus. He explained that in January, he had been hearing about disruptions in the supply chain from China, where the virus had hit hard. Friends who worked in e-commerce weren’t able to get anything done, and deals were getting delayed. He said he realized then that “China is not going to shut down its economy just because some people had some sniffles.” That’s when he began sounding the alarm, launching his first tweets on the subject on January 24 when only 41 people in the world had died from the disease and the US had just two confirmed cases.

That day, Cernovich tweeted at Trump urging him to add China to his travel ban, as a way of slowing the spread of the coronavirus. (On January 31, Trump did just that.) The next day, Cernovich tweeted links to stories on the virus from around the globe, urging followers to read them. “I’m not someone who freaks out as we’ve seen so many mass hysterias,” he wrote. But “this flu is the real deal.” He even wrote an advice column on how to prepare for a pandemic without going crazy long before stores were running out of toilet paper. “It won’t be a ‘Mad Max’ scenario,” he assured his fans. “But you may be forced to go days without a food resupply…Forget the Rambo fantasies. Most people don’t need an AR-15. You need a tactical flashlight.” And don’t fall for the gold scams, he warned.

His followers, though, didn’t want to hear it. “QUIT THE HYSTERIA. HOW MANY AMERICANS ARE KILLED BY DRUNK DRIVERS IN A YEAR? SCREAM ABOUT THAT,” wrote one Trump supporter. Another said, “All this panic for nothing. First, its [sic] fake news folks, second, Spring is coming soon and this virus will be gone.” As Cernovich continued to criticize Trump’s response to the epidemic, the MAGA crowd pummeled him on social media. Hundreds of people responded to his posts about the virus with angry tweets, using similar language accusing him of fomenting panic. Cernovich is no stranger to online abuse, but the virus tweets prompted such a surge of so many similar replies that he started to suspect that maybe a pro-Trump super-PAC or dark-money group had launched a bot attack to troll him.

QUIT THE HYSTERIA. HOW MANY AMERICANS ARE KILLED BY DRUNK DRIVERS IN A YEAR? SCREAM ABOUT THAT.

— lemel KEEP AMERICA GREAT TEXT TRUMP TO 88022 (@gslemel) March 9, 2020

 

After I scrolled through the responses, I had to conclude that most of the tweeps hating on Cernovich may just be Fox News viewers parroting people like Sean Hannity, who said on his February 27 show that “the Democratic extreme radical socialist party” was “now sadly politicizing and actually weaponizing an infectious disease, in what is basically just the latest effort to bludgeon President Trump.” Recent polls show just how far outside of Trumpworld Cernovich has been when it comes to covering the epidemic. An NPR poll taken on March 13 and 14 showed that 54 percent of Republicans believed the coronavirus had been blown out of proportion, a number that had doubled since February.

Cernovich is not the only voice in the wilderness on the right who’s been bashed by Trump supporters for having told the truth about the coronavirus early on. Raheem Kassam is a co-host of the pro-Trump War Room radio show and podcast, with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. Last month, Kassam attended CPAC, the largest conservative political conference in the country, where an attendee later tested positive for the coronavirus and was hospitalized. When Kassam realized that the sick man had come in contact with a number of high-level public officials at the conference, he started tweeting their names, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who only days before had scoffed at the seriousness of the virus by wearing a gas mask on the House floor. They both self-quarantined.

Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and almost half of the administration’s coronavirus task force was at the conference as well, where they spent much of their time downplaying the seriousness of the contagion. Former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said the media was whipping up hysteria over the virus—“They think this will bring down the president, that’s what this is all about”—while Pence bragged about all the things Trump was doing to protect American’s health. “We’re ready for anything,” he told the gathered faithful.

Kassam’s tweets describing the CPAC outbreak spoiled their messaging, as he publicized just how close the virus was coming to the White House, and how serious it was. Instead of acknowledging that Kassam’s warnings encouraged people to self-quarantine to help slow the spread of the virus, Matt Schlapp, chair of the American Conservative Union, which organizes CPAC, ascribed a different motivation. He accused Kassam of having an ax to grind with CPAC. “I’m sorry that Raheem was not included on our speaker schedule,” Schlapp said on the podcast Skullduggery on March 10. “And I’m sorry he has a bone to pick with us but using a healthcare moment—where people are worried—to use that to try to stick a stake in my heart was a mistake.”

The mainstream GOP response to the virus in its early days was yet another example of just how much Trump has taken over the party. The blind, cult-like loyalty among Republican members of Congress left a leadership void that meant that the only meaningful action they took before Trump decided to embrace the role of “wartime president” was apparently to sell off some stock. As long as Trump was insisting that the worst thing about the virus was his media coverage, the only people in Trump’s orbit sending up emergency flares about the need to combat the virus were people on the fringes like Cernovich. The conspiracy theorists turned out to be right about the coronavirus. 

These outliers share something in common beyond a penchant for conspiracy theories and an appreciation for the public health implications of ignoring what would become a pandemic: They all traffic in a visceral disdain for China. Consider Steve Bannon, who has been broadcasting a pandemic podcast and radio show since January 25 and who likes to refer to the Chinese Communist Party as “gangsters.”  

“The biggest story in the world is not President Trump’s impeachment, but a pandemic coming out of China,” he said on the first episode. “You may not have an interest in the pandemic, but the pandemic has an interest in you.” (And then he brought on Jack Posobiec, another Pizzagate conspiracy theorist, to talk about it.) On Sunday, Bannon went on Fox News and called for a “full shutdown” of the country to go “full hammer on the virus,” even as Trump was tweeting about sending people back to work.

Or there was Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), a hardcore opponent of immigration who once falsely claimed that George Soros had turned his own family over to the Nazis. Gosar called for a ban on travel from China on January 27. “If #Coronavirus is as contagious as recent reports suggest,” he tweeted. “We need @CDCgov & @DHSgov advising Congress and @POTUS on how a quarantine would be implemented.” Gosar ended up having to self-quarantine after being exposed at CPAC.

It’s not a coincidence that the only Republican senator to publicly criticize Trump’s response to the pandemic is also the only Republican who voted to impeach him. On February 25, three days before Trump claimed that the virus was going to disappear “like a miracle,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told reporters that the administration wasn’t prepared to deal with the coronavirus. He warned that the country had failed to stockpile critical medical equipment and protective devices that would be needed as the virus spreads in the United States. He called for Trump to appoint a virus czar to coordinate the work needed to halt a pandemic. “I think we should be pulling out all the stops,” he said.

Trump fans weren’t happy with his assessment. The Gateway Pundit blogger Jim Hoft simply posted Rommey’s comments, called him a “NeverTrumper” and wrote, “Ugh.” On March 16, when Romney became the first member of Congress to propose sending $1,000 payments to help Americans ride out the crisis, the only Republican senator to initially endorse the idea was Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who since January has been parroting conspiracy theories claiming the coronavirus was made in a Chinese bioweapons lab. 

The failure of the GOP to acknowledge early the threat of a coronavirus epidemic marks a notable shift in Republican politics. After all, most “preppers”—the survivalists preparing for the end of the world or coming civil war who’ve got the bugout kits, MREs, and AR-15s in the basement and all their money invested in gold coins—are conservatives. They have a tendency to freak out about germs, especially those that might be transmitted by foreigners. (See Trump and Ebola.) But Trump has upended these dynamics, with his ability to strike fear in any Republican who might go off message by threatening to back primary challengers or simply focus his Twitter rage on them. 

Cernovich, who has close ties to the White House—he’s broken news about White House personnel changes—doesn’t much worry about such calculations. On March 11, he did a Periscope broadcast, lamenting to his 87,000 subscribers that the country had completely botched the virus response. “The lesson here of the coronavirus is we failed the stress test. We learned our infrastructure cannot handle what we face,” Cernovich continued. “We, the United States of America, we still can’t get testing. We still can’t get mass testing.” And he addressed his critics, calling the “MAGA conservatives” “losers” who watch bad conservative news and don’t understand math. “Go away,” he said. “If your whole life is Daddy Trump, you’re so not needed.”

He told me he’d rather be accused of overreacting than ignoring the obvious crisis in the works and turning out to be wrong. “I’m widely perceived as a Trump supporter,” he said, “and it’s up to people widely perceived as Trump supporters to scream at him to do a better job.”

Last week, after San Francisco announced a citywide “shelter-in-place” order, but before the order went into effect at midnight, a guy who I’ve seen on and off for a few months texted me. “Well, looks like tonight might be the last opportunity for this for a while,” he wrote. “Are you free?”

An apocalyptic booty call is, I have to say, a very weird experience—it felt like at the strike of midnight, we’d turn into asexual pumpkins. Before he left, I asked him for a favor unusual for any sort of booty call: Could he, um, unscrew the cap off a bottle of olive oil that I couldn’t open? Believe me, I was judging me, too. But the metal band on the cap wasn’t fully perforated, and taking a knife to the metal hadn’t worked, and all the olive oil at the nearby supermarket had been snatched up, and I genuinely didn’t know the next time another human would set foot in my apartment.

This is the thing about quarantining: It makes the dynamics of personal relationships crystal clear. Is there a person in your life who you’re willing to be stuck with, maybe even to get sick with? Oil Man and I had established long ago that things between us weren’t serious, but I can only imagine the conversations going on in nascent relationships, like the universe forcing a DTR: We may be dating, but are we quarantining?

I am a 30-year-old living in a sunny studio in San Francisco—a proudly independent woman, with the apparent exception of olive oil caps. Compared to many people in the world, I’ve had it incredibly easy over the past few days: My quarantine life has consisted mostly of me sitting on my couch, interviewing people over the phone and tapping away at my computer. Zoom dinners with dear friends have become a near-nightly fixture. My parents and brothers call all the time. I feel, in many ways, more connected to my social circles than ever before. (Sometimes, even, too connected—I’ve had to mute myself in Zoom meetings because the couple who live in the apartment next door have made it clear that they feel very connected to each other at around 11 a.m. every day.)

At the same time, there’s no getting around the fact that the Age of Coronavirus is a bizarre—and, at times, acutely lonely—time to be single. The rabbit holes of singledom seem to multiply when you’re by yourself for weeks on end: There’s the ever-ticking biological clock for aspiring mothers of a certain age, plus the questions about how long you’ll be on your own, if you’ll ever find a partner—I could go on and on.

A few days ago, after ignoring the apps for a while, I decided to sign on. When smiling dudes populated my screen, I thought, “Oh, here are all of my people!” Rest assured that this is not a feeling I have had literally ever before on a dating app. But there was a strange comfort in knowing that these dudes were also probably some combination of bored and lonely. It appears I’m not the only one turning to the apps: Bumble saw a 21 percent increase in the messages sent in the US between March 12 and March 19, with even bigger rises in coronavirus hotspots where social distancing orders went into effect, like New York City (23 percent) and San Francisco (26 percent). Tinder saw similar increases internationally, with particularly big spikes in Italy and Spain.

All of which begs the question, how exactly does one date during a pandemic?

The cringingly topical pickup line seems to be a popular way to start. I recently got a message reading, “If coronavirus doesn’t take you out, can I?” (Thanks, but no thanks, Andy.) A colleague received, “I don’t know what’s more attractive—your killer dance moves or the idea of weathering the apocalypse together.” One personal favorite, from a Twitter user: “A guy on Hinge asked me to self-quarantine with him. We’d never met, had been messaging for 3 minutes. The kicker? He’s a doctor at Mt. Sinai.”

The first dates seem straightforward enough: The apps have been encouraging video chats (as Hinge calls it, “dating from home”). Those swiping on Bumble will come across banners like “SOCIAL DISTANCING ≠ LONELINESS” and “Get together while staying apart,” urging users to connect virtually using the app’s in-platform video and call features. Tinder is making Passport, usually a feature just for paying users, open to everyone, unleashing the positively overwhelming option of matching with people not just near you, but anywhere in the world. (“While we all know we need to stay home, the Tinder community has shown us that this doesn’t mean we have to be alone with our thoughts and a tower of Top Ramen,” a recent Tinder press release assured.)

More perplexing is how to proceed if things go well. Do you, as one coworker suggested, go for a walk six feet apart, half-shouting, HOW MANY SIBLINGS DO YOU HAVE? How many dates should you go on before you douse each other in Purell and hold hands? If either of you lives with a group, do you pause during the lean-in to the kiss to make a quick call to the roommates, asking to add one more to the quaran-team?

Or: If you decide that dating during a pandemic isn’t your thing and you put Bumble on “snooze” mode, which of the four options do you choose as your reason for taking a break from the app? “ I’m traveling” is certainly not true. “ I’m on a digital detox” seems highly unlikely. “ I’m prioritizing myself” and “ I’m focused on work” don’t seem quite appropriate for this current moment. Alas, Bumble does not offer, “ I’m flattening the curve.”

At its best, app dating under normal circumstances feels like an entertaining social experiment with potentially life-altering rewards. After a good first date, you cherish the butterflies until the next encounter, and the one after that. You screenshot the particularly bewildering profiles, marveling that anyone would choose to finish the prompt, “Dating me is like,” with “accidentally spilling pop rocks in your underwear.” You swap first date stories with friends. (I realized I’d reached peak Silicon Valley when a roboticist told me over drinks that he had spent hours on his passion project of building a “self-raking Zen garden.”)

But sometimes, it’s less hilarious. The mediocre dates blur together. The disappointing Wednesday night beers with Platonic San Francisco Man (software engineer who loves cycling/skiing/Burning Man and is trying out meditation), the evenings swiping on the couch, the blithe conversations with friends about dating—it all starts to feel like an exhausting exercise in ignoring the loneliness tucked away in a dark corner. After all, who really wants to acknowledge that it’d be nice to have a little company? 

Now, it appears, everyone does. The paradoxical silver lining of extreme social distancing is that it seems to have given people, single or not, license to talk freely about loneliness—a bright light switched on, the shadows giving way to the real deal. News outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, the New York Times, Vox, and the New Yorker have published long pieces over the past week about the psychological costs of loneliness: how it fuels anxiety and depression, and how, when chronic, it takes years off your life. National Geographic has a haunting series of portraits of subjects looking out their windows or doorways, alone. The stories—particularly those about the elderly—are gut-wrenching. Politicians and celebrities, from Andrew Cuomo to Lizzo, are talking about the toll of isolation, too.

At work, a meeting that once happened every other week is now happening once a week over Zoom, simply because everyone misses being in touch with other humans. One coworker recently told me about how, after a few glasses of wine during a virtual happy hour, she decided to rearrange her apartment at midnight, moving a heavy table through a small doorway, piling up her furniture like Tetris. “Nothing like those moments to feel uniquely alone and to stubbornly carry on,” she wrote over Slack, from her newly reconfigured living room. Of course, moments like this happen all the time when you’re a single person living on your own—her story brought to mind a late night I spent installing blinds after breaking up with a long-term boyfriend years ago. It just never occurred to me at the time to tell coworkers about it.

There’s not a whole lot about this period in history that we’ll look back on fondly, to put it mildly. But I do hope that when this is all over, I don’t kick the loneliness that’s left to its usual spot in the dark corner. There’s something empowering about dragging it out for all to see—and watching others doing the same. When I listen to Wesley Morris, host of the New York Times’ Still Processing podcast, say, “I haven’t hugged anybody in a week, and I’ve been eating from the same pot of soup for about eight days! I’m losing my mind!” I want to say, I hear you, Wesley. When I see Linda Holmes, the host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, tweet, “Good morning! Special fist-bump to people like me who live alone (when it comes to humans). It’s not forever. You’re doing great” I want to scream, YOU TOO, LINDA. When, on the dating apps, I ask a guy how his quarantine is going, and he says, “Oh you know, one day blends into the next and nothing makes sense anymore. Got some great vegan mac at Trader Joe’s though. So silver linings and all that,” I want to ask, Shall we half-shout six feet apart together?

As the coronavirus pandemic swept the country over the past few weeks, reports of child abuse and neglect dropped in many states. On the surface, this might seem like good news. But according to experts, the decline in calls probably does not reflect fewer incidents of child abuse. Instead, they suspect it is because the people most likely to report child abuse—educators and other professionals who are legally obligated to notify authorities about suspected incidents—are not interacting with children as frequently because schools are closed.

In Washington state, the early epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, calls to the state’s child abuse reporting hotline declined by nearly half in the week after Gov. Jay Inslee ordered all schools to close, according to new data from the state’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families. During the week of March 8, the state received 2,548 reports of alleged child abuse or neglect through its hotline. The following week, after Inslee’s March 13 order to close schools, the department received just 1,486 calls—a 42 percent decrease.

Similar declines have been reported across the country. In Illinois, according to ProPublica, the Department of Children and Family Services received 6,672 reports of abuse in the week before the governor’s order to close, and 3,675 in the week after. According to Colorado Public Radio, officials received 1,117 calls to the state hotline in the first two days schools were closed statewide, compared to 1,900 calls in a two-day period a week earlier. And in Missouri, the number of calls to the child abuse hotline dropped by 50 percent since March 11, state officials told the Kansas City Star.

Normally, teachers and other school staff “have their eyes on these kids all the time,” says Amy Baker, research director of the Vincent J. Fontana Center for Child Protection in New York City. Educators who see their students five days a week can observe if a child’s behavior drastically changes. They often notice bruises, or notice a “vivacious child become sullen,” as Baker puts it—all potential red flags that could lead them to seek more information, and in some cases, trigger a mandatory report. Nationally, according to a 2018 report from the US Department of Health and Human Services, educators accounted for nearly 21 percent of all child abuse or neglect referrals—more than any other category. In Washington, state teachers and other school personnel are responsible for up to 25 percent of child abuse reports made to the hotline, said Debra Johnson, the agency’s communications director.

But the chain of events that often triggers these reports has been fractured. “In general, fewer eyes are on children as they are at home,” Johnson says. Many families, Baker adds, may also be putting off routine doctor’s office visits, which present another opportunity for a professional to observe signs of abuse and involve state authorities. 

Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Welfare Reform, notes that many hotline calls ultimately don’t qualify as abuse or neglect or are investigated and ultimately found to be unsubstantiated. His bigger concern in the wake of the coronavirus is how kids already in the child welfare system are being increasingly isolated from their birth parents under social distancing measures like family court closures and visitation bans.

For kids in the system, and those stuck at home in unstable environments, “parenting strategies are going to be worn thin, stress is going to be up,” Baker says. “All the risk factors for abuse are going to be heightened during this time of quarantine.”

Earlier today, the Southern Poverty Law Center asked a federal judge to issue an emergency preliminary injunction requiring Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide protections against the coronavirus outbreak for immigrants being held in their custody. The motion, filed in a US District Court in California, demands that ICE immediately enact a protocol to protect vulnerable people held in detention, or start releasing them.

The request for an emergency injunction is part of a larger lawsuit that the SPLC and other civil rights organizations first brought against ICE in August 2019. It was quickly filed after ICE on Tuesday confirmed the first positive case of COVID-19 in a person being held in ICE detention.

The motion argues that ICE detention centers are essentially hotbeds of rapid transmission for the novel coronavirus. Detainees are often kept in crowded areas and lack access to basic supplies such as hand sanitizer and soap. People with risk factors such as age or underlying health conditions—people who are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19, in other words—reported feeling like “sitting ducks,” according to the SPLC.

“People are talking a lot about how hospitals are going to be strained by the COVID-19 pandemic. The fact is, the ICE medical system is already strained. It’s already broken,” Jared Davidson, an SPLC attorney, told my colleague Noah Lanard.

The motion proposes a short, 24-hour window for ICE officials to put medical safety procedures in place. If they are unable to do that, they should release vulnerable people within 48 hours. “Release is an option,” said Lisa Graybill, deputy legal director of criminal justice reform at the SPLC. “The detention of people is not legally required. ICE has total discretion.”  

A number of public health experts and other officials, including the former director of ICE under the Obama administration, have called on the agency to release people from detention to protect them from the pandemic. Up to this point, ICE has announced that it would slow arrests, has given no indication that it would release people currently in custody. Graybill and Davidson say that this refusal is worsening the public health crisis.

“If there were a hospital in our community that routinely provided inadequate care,” Davidson said, “the general public would be quite reasonable in thinking it needed to close. ICE is essentially…also the provider of medical care. What our filing lays bare is that it’s doing a constitutionally inadequate job at protecting people from harm. The COVID-19 pandemic is going to exacerbate that already-broken system.”

Noah Lanard contributed reporting for this story.

When Donald Trump took office, he refused to divest from his business empire, setting the stage for a presidency riddled with conflicts of interest. The coronavirus outbreak, which has battered the hospitality sector, including the president’s collection of hotels and resorts, raised the unprecedented question of whether the federal government might help to bail out Trump’s company. But a provision Democrats inserted in the $2 trillion rescue package that could be passed by the Senate on Wednesday would block the Trump Organization from accessing the biggest pot of rescue funds. 

The measure prohibits companies owned by the president, vice president, and other federal officeholders from receiving aid from the $500 billion fund, overseen by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, that is allotted for helping ailing businesses. Also excluded from receiving a federal handout from this fund are companies owned by the spouses, children, or in-laws of these officials—a provision that seems targeted at presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, who retains a stake in his family’s company, which has struggled in recent months. (A final draft of the bill hasn’t been released, but a legislative draft includes the conflict-of-interest language.)

The provision blocks from bailout dollars any companies in which the president or other excluded individuals hold a “controlling interest,” which is defined as a stake of 20 percent or more. Trump owns almost all of his business outright.

The conflict-of-interest measure is potentially a big blow to Trump’s company as it excludes nearly all of his properties from the most direct form of help contained in the overall $2 trillion bailout.

Some possible exceptions include Trump-branded buildings or resorts, where he doesn’t own the properties but is paid licensing and management fees. Trump’s companies also don’t appear to be barred from participating in other areas of the bailout, such as a small business loan program available to certain hotel chains and other firms.

Companies across the nation are being hammered by the virtual economic freeze triggered by the spread of the coronavirus, but Trump’s business has been particularly hard hit. Three out of every four dollars Trump reported earning in revenue in 2018 came from his involvement in hotels, resorts, or golf courses—businesses that were among the first to take a nosedive as the virus spread. 

Over the weekend, the Trump Organization was forced to shutter six of its seven biggest properties, at least temporarily, and the company laid off more than 300 employees. New government restrictions in the United Kingdom will likely require Trump’s two money-losing Scottish resorts to shutter as well. 

Kathleen Clark, an ethics expert and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said that the conflict-of-interest wording in the legislation is a positive step but the public should still be skeptical.

“It is good that Congress is finally taking some action to rein in President Trump’s conflicts of interest,” she said. “But how can we trust the Trump administration to administer this provision? This administration has refused to implement or enforce other conflict of interest and ethics standards.”

Clark pointed to language contained in a lease signed in 2015 between the Trump Organization and the General Services Administration, the federal agency that oversees federal property and that owns the historic Old Post Office building where Trump’s DC hotel is housed. That lease signed as Trump was running for president, expressly barred any federal officeholders from operating the business that leased the property. Once Trump took office, the GSA decided the rule did not apply to him because he was not yet president when he signed the lease.

Clark also said it was important that certifications submitted by companies proving they are not owned by anyone on the excluded list should be made public. 

Donald Trump has made inadequate and dangerous choices during the coronavirus pandemic. His botched response includes a failure to properly plan for the country’s testing needs, administration officials unsure how to provide adequate medical gear, and the active spreading of misinformation. It’s an embarrassing lack of leadership.

As the coronavirus pandemic overwhelms health systems around the globe, world leaders have addressed their nations in solemn tones, urging people to stay inside to curb the spread of the virus, and assuring them that their countries will get through this crisis together. Meanwhile, President Trump has been belittling reporters, joking about the “Deep State,” and whining about being called a racist.

The contrast is staggering. But hey, that’s just business as usual in the White House.

One of these world leaders is not like the other… pic.twitter.com/7quXB93qsf

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) March 25, 2020

Over the last few days, major US corporations like Apple, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, and others have announced donations of hundreds of thousands, and even millions of protective masks to the government to help mitigate a massive shortage as health care workers treating patients with the coronavirus run low.

The Trump administration has praised such donations from big tech, but for many, the gifts raise an obvious question: why do all these companies have so many N95 masks lying around?

A short answer is 2018’s devastating California wildfires, which were some of the deadliest and most destructive the state has ever seen. After the blazes ravaged the northern part of the state and affected the Bay Area, the state government passed a regulation requiring employers to provide masks to employees who could be exposed to wildfire smoke.

As Facebook explained to Mother Jones, it acquired the 720,000 N95 masks that it donated to the government this week because of that guideline. The company says that because almost all of its employees are working from home, they have no need for the masks.

On Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence said that Apple would be donating 9 million masks, following Tim Cook’s tweets pledging to donate millions to be distributed to health care providers. If Pence’s number is correct, it’s unclear why Apple would have that many masks. Its Cupertino, California headquarters houses about 12,000 employees, a similar size to the roughly 15,000 employees who work out of Facebook’s nearby Menlo Park headquarters.

Apple did not return a request for comment regarding why it has roughly twelve and a half times as many masks, but the discrepancy could be explained by Apple’s overall size. Apple’s 130,000 person strong workforce is almost three times the size of Google’s 44,000, and they could have more contractors at their Cupertino headquarters than Facebook does in Menlo Park. It’s also possible that Apple has more because manufactured products are central to its business. While most Apple products are made and assembled outside of the United States by subcontractors, the company conducts research and development in the U.S. which occasionally requires “cleanrooms”—extremely sanitary areas with low levels of pollutants that provide optimal testing conditions. It’s possible that Apple uses masks to protect sensitive equipment in such facilities.

Sources inside other companies in California said that their workplaces also had stockpiles of N95 masks, other personal protective equipment, and general emergency supplies. One former corporate security employee at a large Silicon Valley tech company said that company kept water and food on hand for potential disasters. 

Rich Coglianese, who has spent the last decade helping major corporations prepare for disasters by leading their enterprise resilience and crisis management teams, explained that many businesses take similar precautions.

“Apple simply has these masks because they are prepared to continue working in this scenario,” he said in an email, suggesting the stockpile could have been assembled not just for wildfires, but in anticipation of a pandemic. “This is the challenge for every organization—preparedness is expensive and only proves its value in time like these.”

“Companies typically plan for a worst-case scenario, so the algorithm Apple probably used worked out that they need this many masks,” Coglianese elaborated on a phone call. “I was working for a bank, they had thousands of surgical masks and they also had access to Tamiflu. They had doses ready for critical staff if it was needed. It’s not a question of why do you have it. They’ve gone through an extensive process of what the risk is.”

He explained that companies, in advance of potential disasters and potential supply chain shortages, factor in details about how many people will need masks and for potentially how long. “Good response is being already ready at point of disaster, not in response,” he said, explaining a key tenet of enterprise resiliency. “A pandemic is covered by most corporate resiliency plans,” he continued.

The bigger the scientific study, the stronger the findings. That’s why nations are teaming up to launch a worldwide research project called SOLIDARITY to find a treatment for the deadly coronavirus. The study, announced by the World Health Organization last week, will include thousands of patients in several countries in an effort to determine if any existing drugs can safely treat the coronavirus.

“We commend the researchers around the world who have come together to systematically evaluate experimental therapeutics,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said while announcing the trial. “Multiple small trials with different methodologies may not give us the clear, strong evidence we need about which treatments help to save lives.” He added that “this large international study is designed to generate the robust data we need.”

With a vaccine expected to be a year or more away, scientists and doctors are looking for existing treatments that can target the virus. While developing new drugs can take years—and testing their general safety years more—the medical community hopes that medications already on the market or in research can help, including drugs designed to treat HIV and ebola. The WHO panel that crafted the trial is focusing on four treatments that its experts believe are the most promising, according to Science. These include the malaria medications chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, drugs that President Donald Trump has been hyping despite Science calling the data supporting their use both “murky” and “thin”; WHO initially decided there was “insufficient evidence” to investigate chloroquine, but agreed to include it after noting a need for a decision on its use after it received “significant attention” in several countries.

The trial makes it easy for patients anywhere to quickly become a part of the research. With a subject’s consent, physicians simply enter the data from a confirmed COVID-19 case into a WHO website, taking note of any underlying conditions such as HIV or diabetes. The physician next inputs which drugs are available in their area, and the website will assign the patient one of the experimental treatments. As Ana Maria Henao Restrepo, a medical officer at WHO’s Department of Immunization Vaccines and Biologicals, explained to Science, all that’s then left is for the physician to record when the patient left the hospital or died, how long the patient was in the hospital, and whether they required oxygen or a ventilator. “It will be important to get answers quickly, to try to find out what works and what doesn’t work,” she said. “We think that randomized evidence is the best way to do that.”

Thus far ten countries around the world have joined the trial, and researchers in Europe have announced a complementary study called Discovery that will exclude chloroquine. The United States was not among the countries that first pledged to participate.

 

There’s a familiar scene playing out all across the country: People anxious and panicked about coronavirus are flooding stores to stock up on essential items as businesses shut down and local governments issue a stay-home-no-matter-what mandate. But along with food, water, and toilet paper, there’s another item that’s seeing a surge in sales thanks to pandemic panic: guns. 

Gun stores and firearm dealers throughout the country are reporting a big spike in sales due to coronavirus-related fears. In February, weeks before the full gravity of the coronavirus situation sunk in, the FBI’s background check system had already reported that it had 2.8 million inquiries from potential gun-buyers—up from 2 million during this time last year, and the third-highest monthly total since the agency created the system in 1998, according to the Washington Post. Since then, the situation has only worsened, with news reports and social media posts of people lining up outside of gun stores trying to arm themselves in case their worst fears becoming a reality. But the surprising reality is that it is not just preexisting gun owners stockpiling ammo and adding to their armories in a time of crisis. Many dealers have said that a lot of sales have been to first-time gun buyers, who are purchasing a firearms as a way to protect themselves amid fears that the coronavirus situation could lead to a complete societal breakdown.

That’s a talking point ripped straight from the National Rifle Association, who in the past few weeks has been using the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity to stoke paranoia, cajoling its members to stock up to stay safe during a time of societal change. “Concerns for personal safety, new limitations on the arrests of criminals in some cities, and potential gun control enacted under the guise of fighting the pandemic have Americans preparing to take responsibility for their own safety,” reads one recent article on the NRA’s website, titled “The 2A is a Constant in Times of Crisis.” On Saturday, the NRA tweeted out a video of a disabled woman arguing for the importance of guns in a time of crisis and accusing Democrats of exploiting the pandemic for political purposes. “I know from history how quickly society breaks down during the crisis,” she says in the video, “and we’ve never faced anything like this before and never is a Second Amendment more important than during public unrest.”

Americans are flocking to gun stores because they know the only reliable self-defense during a crisis is the #2A.

Carletta Whiting, who’s disabled & vulnerable to #coronavirus, asks Dems trying to exploit the pandemic: Why do you want to leave people like me defenseless? pic.twitter.com/wDeEYHqzOU

— NRA (@NRA) March 21, 2020

That the NRA would be exploiting the coronavirus crisis to push their agenda is hardly surprising to Kris Brown, the president of the gun control group Brady: United Against Gun Violence. “One of the things that they know is that the powerful force in selling guns is fear,” she says. “If you didn’t know that this is a virus transmitted between people who don’t know that they’re infected and you saw the NRA’s ads, you would think that we were in a World War.”

For David Chipman, a senior policy advisor at Giffords, the gun control group co-founded by former Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords, it makes sense that the NRA and the gun industry would use the pandemic crisis to their advantage. “This is a critical opportunity for them to rebound to the highs they saw in 2016 leading up to the presidential election that year, from the lows that they saw last year,” he says. Ever since the NRA spent an unprecedented amount of money to help elect Donald Trump, the nation’s oldest gun rights organization has been spiraling out of control, thanks to infighting within the organization, financial woes, and several scandals involving its leadership. And the internal chaos has led to several public defeats when gun control has become a part of political campaigns, most notably in its own backyard of Virginia, where, in November, Democrats won control of the state legislature and passed a slew of gun control bills. 

As Chipman sees it, the coronavirus pandemic is the perfect opportunity for the NRA to push its pro-gun message, especially as state governors begin to exercise their crisis-time powers, shutting down all non-essential businesses—including gun stores. “It’s interesting to see the intensity with which they are trying to drive the narrative that guns are an essential product to Americans, like food or access to health care,” he says. In an article the NRA published on Friday, the organization slammed San Jose and Philadelphia for shutting down gun stores as “non-essential” businesses, writing that in a time of crisis “there is no more basic imperative, in good times and bad, than providing for the safety and security of families and loved ones.” 

Right now, it’s unclear what’s going into each state politician’s decision to keep gun stores open, or close them. In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy (D) ordered the closure of all non-essential businesses, which includes gun stores, as did the sheriff of Los Angeles. But the Democratic governors of Connecticut and Pennsylvania both declared that gun stores are one of the few “essential” businesses that could remain open while most other stores are ordered closed, earning praise from the NRA. “A lot of these folks are first-time gun owners who are panic-buying are not your traditional gun rights advocates, and it it never occurred to them until two weeks ago to even purchase a gun,” Brown says. “So it may be that these governors don’t want to alienate those folks too. All politics boils down to who’s voting for you.”

A pedestrian pushes a stroller as people wait in line to buy supplies at the Martin B. Retting, Inc. gun store amid coronavirus concerns in Culver City, California. More photos of the week: https://t.co/tMprMNW2Sd 📷 @pfal pic.twitter.com/z0YcMKOfXj

— Reuters Pictures (@reuterspictures) March 23, 2020

As people of all stripes continue to flock to gun stores, Brown says she empathizes with the “fight or flight instinct” that many people are experiencing right now in this time of crisis. It’s understandable that people who have never thought about purchasing a gun before might be inspired to now, as the coronavirus crisis worsens around the world and many people’s fears aren’t calmed by the Trump administration’s response to the situation. But the NRA’s rhetoric during this time, she feels, is completely motivated by politics. “They do it because they want to sell more guns,” she says. “They don’t care about the impact on people’s psyche. It’s the same sentiment for Chipman. “They’re taking advantage of a situation and certainly putting fuel on the fire,” he adds. “There’s no question about that.”

On Wednesday, as the public health crisis caused by the outbreak of the novel coronavirus crisis worsened, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) introduced a bill that would allow tens of thousands of people currently in federal prisons and jails to be released during the pandemic. His measure attempts to address the needs of a community that has been particularly vulnerable to the virus: the millions of people behind bars. An inmate at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, a federal jail in New York, has already tested positive for the disease, and criminal justice advocates have warned that jails and prisons are the perfect incubators for an outbreak. 

The majority of the 2.3 million people behind bars in the US are in state-run prisons and jails, but more than 175,000 are incarcerated by the federal government. Senators have no jurisdiction over state and local prisons and jails, but they do have the power to force the US government to act regarding federal prisons. 

“We have an obligation to do everything we can to prevent the spread of this deadly disease,” Booker said in a statement. “That means moving certain incarcerated people to community supervision when they don’t pose a violent threat to our communities and are facing high risk of serious illness or death from COVID-19.” Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) joined the New Jersey senator as a co-sponsor.

As of Wednesday morning, more than 50,000 people have tested positive for the new coronavirus in the US, with deaths surpassing 700. Both numbers are expected to rise as testing becomes more widespread after serious delays. The illness, which is marked by fever, cough, and shortness of breath in severe cases, is spread by human-to-human contact, but the spread can be contained by frequent hand-washing, avoiding crowded places and standing at least six feet away from other individuals when in public. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been recommending both hand washing and social distancing for weeks, but for incarcerated individuals, those recommendations are unrealistic.

“For thousands of people behind bars, contracting COVID-19 is tantamount to a death sentence,” Booker said. “Those in prison and jail tend to have much higher rates of underlying health issues than the general public, and the conditions of confinement make social distancing virtually impossible.” Prison and jail facilities are notoriously unhygienic, with little access to soap and water. Hand-sanitizer, which can also kill the virus, is contraband because its high alcohol content makes it a potential for abuse. Inmates living in close quarters are the perfect vectors for disease. 

The bill calls for the US Bureau of Prisons and the US Marshals Service to immediately place  incarcerated people who don’t pose a threat to public safety on community supervision. It also limits pre-trial detention unless the person is a flight risk or a threat to public safety. The measure attempts to cut back on in-person contact with officers overseeing the release and the use of incarceration for technical violations with supervised release.

Those eligible for supervised release would include anyone in a federal prison or jail who is pregnant, has chronic lung disease or asthma, congestive heart failure or coronary artery disease, diabetes, or other conditions related to a weakened immune system like HIV/AIDS, cancers, or sickle cell anemia. Approximately 33,000 people in federal facilities are age 50 or older and 26,000 of them have not committed violent crimes. The proposal calls for their release.  Finally, those with one year or less left on their sentence would also be eligible to go free under the proposed law.

The bill comes after a group of Democratic lawmakers led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote letters earlier this month to the US BOP and the private prison companies it uses as contractors to provide detailed information on how the government and the companies plan to keep inmates and their staff safe. “Thousands of incarcerated people, their family, and friends, and correctional staff move in and out of federal prisons every day,” they wrote. “As a result, the uncontained spread of coronavirus in privately-contracted federal prisons endangers the prison population, correctional staff, and the general public.” The group of lawmakers said they received inadequate responses. 

Booker’s legislation would be effective for 60 days after the end date of the national emergency. Those released on community supervision will not have to return to prison once the pandemic is over. And time is of the essence. Coronavirus has already begun to spread in federal prisons and jails. 

On the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic, there’s a dire shortage of supplies and a deadly surplus of bad information.

“There’s so many conspiracy theories and false information that’s out and about on the internet,” says Dr. Rob Gore, an emergency room physician at a hospital in Brooklyn. “That’s coming from people’s own insecurities, but not from people who are physically in there.”

Gore talked to Jamilah King on the Mother Jones Podcast about his experiences working in Brooklyn. New York City has become the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic. There are more than 25,000 cases in New York State so far, with more than 200 dead. Cases are surging by about 5,000 a day, a number that is sure to rise. Thirteen percent of New York’s COVID-19 cases have required hospitalization, and about a quarter of the people hospitalized have wound up in the intensive care unit. If this continues, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said New York City will need 140,000 hospital beds. Right now, there are 53,000. 

Gore has been using his Instagram account as a platform to share what’s happening on the ground in hospitals. He wants people to know that this needs to be taken seriously.

“I’ve admitted people to the intensive care unit from it. I’ve hospitalized a bunch of people for it. I have personal friends who have been hospitalized for it as well,” he says. “So I can give a very different perspective of it.”

King also talked to Dr. Michael Brumage, the medical director of Cabin Creek Health Systems in Kanawha County, West Virginia. 

West Virginia has 20 reported cases of COVID-19, up from eight reported cases late last week. Brumage is seeing critical shortages in N95 respirators and tests, which will only worsen as the coronavirus spreads to rural areas. 

“I come from Fairmont, West Virginia, and two days ago they closed a 207-bed hospital in the middle of the pandemic,” he told the Mother Jones Podcast. “Combine that with the overall illness of our population, and we are at a very high risk.” 

Brumage thinks the shortages call for drastic steps. He wants the government to pass wartime measures that would mobilize American industries to produce, among other things, as many N95 respirators as they can.

“We claim to have the best healthcare system in the world. But this system is now failing the people on the frontlines,” says Brumage. “The system was not designed to manage a pandemic, even though we know pandemics are coming.”

We may all be hunkering down, wearing the same PJs for eight days now and melting into couch blobs (okay, maybe that’s just me?), but the pandemic hasn’t stopped people from swiping left and right. 

According to data supplied to Mother Jones by Tinder and Bumble, the popular dating apps have seen significant spikes in use as the coronavirus has taken hold.

Bumble reports a 21 percent increase in messages sent over the app in the the US in the week after March 12, with even bigger rises in some coronavirus hotspots. In San Francisco, where officials that week ordered residents to shelter in place, message volume rose by 26 percent. New York City, which closed bars, movie theaters, and clubs that same week, saw a jump of 23 percent. A total of 87 million people are using the app worldwide.

Bumble is actively encouraging its users to take their dates virtual. Those swiping on Bumble will come across banners like “SOCIAL DISTANCING ≠ LONELINESS” and “Get together while staying apart,” urging users to consider using the app’s in-platform video and phone call options. Use of those features is up 21 percent in recent days. The average call or video chat is 15 minutes, which, to this writer, somehow seems both far too long and far too short. 

Tinder, meanwhile, says the volume of messages among its US users during a week in mid-March was 10-15 percent higher each day compared to the week before. On a global level, hard-hit countries like Italy and Spain saw increases of up to 25 percent. The app is also trying to encourage more virtual use—and, apparently, foster global connections—by making Passport, usually a feature just for paying users, open to everyone: Instead of just matching with people close by, you can now match with people all over the world.

“The one-two punch of self isolation and business closures means we’re missing out on the everyday exchanges that make us human, from sharing a smile in Chem class to the chance to Netflix & Chill,” reads a recent Tinder press release announcing the changes to Passport. “And while we all know we need to stay home, the Tinder community has shown us that this doesn’t mean we have to be alone with our thoughts and a tower of Top Ramen.”

After Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declared abortions as nonessential care during the coronavirus outbreak (and state Attorney General Ken Paxton made an order to clarify and enforce that decision on Monday), a Republican running for Congress in the state posted a hell of a take on the matter.

Kathaleen Wall, who is running to replace retiring Republican Rep. Pete Olson in Texas’ 22nd congressional district, thanked the governor for his action and claimed on Facebook that because of the order, “#COVID19 will save more lives this week than it takes! #ProLife.”

Right. 

According to the New York Times database, more than 700 cases of the novel coronavirus have been diagnosed so far in Texas.

Wall will compete in a run-off in July for the Republican nomination against Troy Nehls; if she wins, she will face Democrat Sri Preston Kulkarni, who narrowly lost a campaign against Olson in the 2018 midterms. As my colleague Tim Murphy reported then, the district is in one of the most racially diverse counties in the country and is by no means a Republican lock. Now that Olson is retiring, Cook Political Report classifies the race as a toss-up.

Wall is a major donor to Texas Right to Life, a powerful anti-abortion group in a state that tends to be on the front lines of the abortion wars, and her campaign website describes her as “100% pro-life” and vows she “will never give up on protecting innocent human life.”

Also, I shouldn’t have to say this but probably I do: basically no one gets an abortion at the stage of pregnancy depicted in the image above without extreme extenuating circumstances that risk the life of the fetus or the mother. 

The state government’s order bans all abortion procedures under threat of up to $1,000 in fines or 180 days of jail time for physicians. Ohio took a similar step over the weekend and deemed abortion a nonessential medical procedure during the coronavirus crisis. 

It’s also worth noting that Wall is not the only Texas politician who made an extremely ignorant comment in the past 24 hours regarding the coronavirus pandemic. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who is one of the few lieutenant governors in this country that I can name off the top of my head precisely because he says shit like this, suggested on Fox News last night that seniors may be willing to exchange their lives for the US economy.