Bernie Sanders Drops Out of 2020 Democratic Race for President
Mr. Sanders, a democratic socialist making his second run for the White House, withdrew after a series of losses to Joseph R. Biden Jr., who emerges as the presumptive nominee for the general election.
Republicans Pursue Limits on Voting by Mail, Despite the Coronavirus
Trump and his Republican allies are launching an aggressive strategy to fight what many of the administration’s own health officials view as one of the most effective ways to make voting safer amid the deadly spread of Covid-19: the expanded use of mail-in ballots.
The scene Tuesday of Wisconsinites in masks and gloves gathering in long lines to vote, after Republicans sued to defeat extended, mail-in ballot deadlines, did not deter the president and top officials in his party. Republican leaders said they were pushing ahead to fight state-level statutes that could expand absentee balloting in Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona and elsewhere. In New Mexico, Republicans are battling an effort to go to a mail-in-only primary, and they vowed on Wednesday to fight a new move to expand postal balloting in Minnesota.
The new political effort is clearly aimed at helping the president’s re-election prospects, as well as bolstering Republicans running further down the ballot. While his advisers tend to see the issue in more nuanced terms, Mr. Trump obviously views the issue in a stark, partisan way: He has complained that under Democratic plans for national expansion of early voting and voting by mail, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
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The decisions seemed to augur a hard road for Democrats in the looming court fights over how to proceed with voting in this crisis moment.
The push to limit voting options is in keeping with Republicans’ decades-running campaign to impose restrictions that disproportionately affect people of color, the poor, and younger voters, under the banner of combating voter fraud — which is exceedingly rare. Democrats have more core constituencies among the nation’s disenfranchised, and both parties have long believed that easier voting measures will benefit Democrats.
But the current public health crisis brings new urgency to the battle, as Democrats and some Republican state officials turn to expanded voting by mail as an important way to avoid the serious health hazard of crowded polling stations amid a pandemic.
The president has embraced some of the most outlandishly false claims about voter fraud, at times proclaiming that the popular vote in the 2016 election — which he lost — was “rigged.” He has long impugned voting by mail, which, while more vulnerable to fraud than in-person voting, has proved overwhelmingly secure in states with mail-in elections, including Colorado and Washington State. (Mr. Trump had formed a special commission to investigate voter fraud in 2016 but it produced no evidence before he shut it down in 2018.)
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| It's what it looks like: A refrigerated trailer serving as a temporary morgue in Brooklyn on Tuesday.Credit...Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times |
New York, the hardest hit state in America, reported its highest number of coronavirus-related deaths in a single day on Wednesday, announcing that another 779 people had died. That brought the virus death toll to 6,268 in New York State, which Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo noted was more than twice as many people as the state had lost in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The number of hospitalizations had fallen in recent days, he said, suggesting that social distancing measures were working to flatten the steep curve of the virus’s spread, at least for now. The rates depend not only on the number of new arrivals but also on hospital admission standards.
“If we stop what we are doing, you will see that curve change,” Mr. Cuomo warned. Mr. Cuomo said that the staggering death toll could continue to rise even as hospitalization rates were falling, because it reflected people who had been on ventilators for long periods of time.
Then he pivoted to a more somber tone. “The bad news isn’t just bad,” he said. “The bad news is actually terrible.” New York State now has more confirmed cases than any single country in the world outside of the United States.
Never Seen Anything Like It’: Cars Line Up for Miles at Food Banks
Millions are flooding a charitable system that was never intended to handle a nationwide crisis.
Food banks are being squeezed by rising hunger and dwindling resources.
Demand for food assistance in the United States is rising at an unprecedented rate, as millions of Americans find themselves out of work and school closures mean that many families who counted on them for free or subsidized meals need to turn elsewhere.
The surge in need is coming just as food banks face shortages of both donated food and volunteer workers.
It’s a nationwide phenomenon:
Most New York Coronavirus Cases Came From Europe, Genomes Show
New research indicates that the coronavirus began to circulate in the New York area by mid-February, weeks before the first confirmed case, and that travelers brought in the virus mainly from Europe, not Asia.
“The majority is clearly European,” said Harm van Bakel, a geneticist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who co-wrote a study awaiting peer review.
A separate team at N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine came to strikingly similar conclusions, despite studying a different group of cases. Both teams analyzed genomes from coronaviruses taken from New Yorkers starting in mid-March.
The research revealed a previously hidden spread of the virus that might have been detected if aggressive testing programs had been put in place.
On Jan. 31, President Trump barred foreign nationals from entering the country if they had been in China during the prior two weeks.
It would not be until late February that Italy would begin locking down towns and cities, and March 11 when Mr. Trump said he would block travelers from most European countries. But New Yorkers had already been traveling home with the virus.
“People were just oblivious,” said Adriana Heguy, a member of the N.Y.U. team.
Dr. Heguy and Dr. van Bakel belong to an international guild of viral historians. They ferret out the history of outbreaks by poring over clues embedded in the genetic material of viruses taken from thousands of patients.
While conspiracy theories might falsely claim the virus was concocted in a lab, the virus’s genome makes clear that it arose in bats. There are many kinds of coronaviruses, which infect both humans and animals. Dr. Boni and his colleagues found that the genome of the new virus contains a number of mutations in common with strains of coronaviruses that infect bats.
The most closely related coronavirus is in a Chinese horseshoe bat, the researchers found. Dr. Boni said that ancestral virus probably gave rise to a number of strains that infected horseshoe bats, and perhaps sometimes other animals.
It’s entirely possible, Dr. Boni said, in the past 10 or 20 years, a hybrid virus arose in some horseshoe bat that was well-suited to infect humans, too. Later, that virus somehow managed to cross the species barrier.
“Once in a while, one of these viruses wins the lottery,” he said.
C.D.C. issues new back-to-work guidelines for essential workers.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published new guidelines on Wednesday detailing how essential employees can go back to work even if they have been exposed to people infected by the coronavirus, provided they do not feel sick and follow certain precautions.
Those employees can return if they take their temperature before heading to their workplaces, wear a face mask at all times and practice social distancing while on the job, Dr. Robert Redfield, the C.D.C. director, said at the White House briefing. They should not share headsets or other objects that touch their faces, and they should not congregate in break rooms or crowded areas, he said. Dr. Redfield said that employers should send workers home immediately if they developed any symptoms. He also said they should increase air exchange in their buildings and clean common surfaces more often.
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A jail in Chicago is now the largest-known source of U.S. infections.
The Cook County Jail in Chicago, a sprawling facility that is among the largest jails in the nation, has emerged as the largest-known source of U.S. virus infections, according to data compiled by The New York Times.
At least 353 cases can be linked to the jail — more than have been connected to the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt; a nursing home in Kirkland, Wash.; or the cluster centered in New Rochelle, N.Y.
The Cook County Sheriff’s Office, which operates the jail, said 238 inmates and 115 staff members had tested positive as of Wednesday. The outbreak appears to confirm the concerns of many health officials, who warned that America’s overcrowded and unsanitary jails and prisons could be a major source of spread.
Hundreds of diagnoses have been confirmed at local, state and federal correctional facilities — almost certainly an undercount, given a lack of testing and rapid spread — leading to hunger strikes in immigrant detention centers and demands for more protection from prison employee unions.
In New York City, jails like Rikers Island are also seeing infection rates grow exponentially. City and state officials have promised the mass release of inmates. But many say they are not moving quickly enough, putting inmates, staff and the city at risk.
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Union for food workers asks for ‘mandatory’ guidance to protect its members.
The nation’s largest union representing grocery store and pharmacy workers asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday to issue “immediate and mandatory guidance” to protect the workers, and others at food processing and meatpacking facilities.
The union president, Anthony Perrone, also asked for the C.D.C.’s help improving safety conditions at food processing facilities — for example, by requiring them to provide protective gear to their workers.
Several big supermarket chains have reported deaths of employees from Covid-19; they include workers at a Trader Joe’s in New York, a Giant in Maryland and a Walmart outside Chicago.
The C.D.C. did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter, and it was unclear if the agency could require such actions. Its guidance is generally not mandatory.
Some college students don’t want to pay in-person tuition for online classes.
Students at the University of Chicago are organizing a tuition strike, threatening to withhold their payments for the spring quarter if the school doesn’t give them a hefty discount.
That cry is being heard on other campuses as well, as students complain that online classes don’t measure up to the real thing and say they shouldn’t have to pay the full load for a subpar experience, especially at a time when more are facing financial uncertainties.
While a number of colleges are offering refunds of room and board charges, students in a number of schools are asking them to lower tuition as well.
At the New School in New York City, students have called for a boycott of online classes this week if the school didn’t refund part of their spring tuition. Students at Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts have all started online petitions calling for partial refunds.