The ‘American Way of Life’ Is Shaping Up to Be a Battleground

There are limits to what ordinary people are willing to endure to secure their employers’ bottom line.

NY TIMES
Chris Christie, a Trump supporter and a former New Jersey governor, pleaded with Americans on May 5 to risk disease and death by returning to work. “Everybody wants to save every life they can,” he said, but “we’ve got to let some of these folks get back to work.” Otherwise “we’re going to destroy the American way of life in these families.”
The “American way of life” is shaping up to be a battleground.

On one side is the working class. From Amazon warehouse workers to striking sanitation workers in New Orleans, there are limits to what ordinary people are willing to endure to secure their employers’ bottom line. Resistance to oppression and exploitation is a familiar experience for millions of workers in this country. And when workers have not found justice or relief in mainstream politics, they have turned to more combative ways of mobilizing to secure it.

On the other side is the Republican Party, led by the Trump administration, which has accelerated its call for states to “reopen” the economy by sending people back to work. While President Trump admits that some people will “be affected badly,” nonetheless “we have to get our country open.”

Public health experts disagree. Instead, they argue that testing rates must “double or triple” and that we need a more intense regime of “contact tracing” and isolation. This has been the established pattern in countries that managed the coronavirus with success. But without these measures, forecast models predict a sharp rise in fatalities. A conservative model that in mid-April predicted a ghastly death toll of 60,000 by August now estimates 147,000 fatalities by August. Just as the rate of infection drops in cities like New York and Detroit, new outbreaks threaten to emerge elsewhere where restrictions are being relaxed.

But if we expect tens of millions of people to stay at home for even longer, that is possible only if people have access to income, food, stable housing and reliable health care. If people cannot work, then these things will have to be provided by the federal government. It is that simple.

For Republicans, the “American way of life” as one with big government social welfare programs would be worse than the pandemic. At the core of their vision of the United States is a celebration of supposed rugged individualism and self-sufficiency where hard work is valorized and creates success. Of course, the contrapositive is also believed to be true, that when people have not been successful it is because they did not work hard enough.

Buried within this is the false notion that the U.S. is free from the hierarchies of class. Instead, Republicans and most mainstream Democrats would argue, America has fluid social mobility where a person’s fortitude determines the heights of his or her success. This powerful narrative has motivated millions to migrate to this country. But for tens of millions, this view of “the American way of life” has no bearing on their lives.

Typically, the contradictions of our society are buried beneath the American flag, suffocating hubris and triumphalist claims of exceptionalism. But the pandemic has pushed all of the country’s problems to the center of American life. It has also highlighted how our political class, disproportionately wealthy and white, dithers for weeks, only to produce underwhelming “rescue” bills that, at best, do no more than barely maintain the status quo.

The median wealth of a U.S. senator was $3.2 million as of 2018, and $900,000 for a member of the House of Representatives. These elected officials voted for one-time stimulus checks of $1,200 as if that was enough to sustain workers, whose median income is $61,973 and who are now nearly two months into various mandates to shelter-in-place and not work outside their homes. As a result, a tale of two pandemics has emerged.

The crisis spotlights the vicious class divide cleaving through our society and the ways it is also permeated with racism and xenophobia. African-Americans endure disproportionate exposure to the disease, and an alarming number of videos show black people being brutalized by the police for not wearing masks or social distancing, while middle-class white people doing the same things are left in peace. In New York City, 92 percent of those arrested for violating rules regarding social distancing and 82 percent of those receiving summons for the same offense have been black or Latino.
Our society imagines itself to be impervious to the rigidities of class, but it is overwhelmed with suffering, deprivation and hunger. Food banks across the country report extraordinary demand, producing an almost shocking rebuke of the image of a country of universal abundance. According to one report, a food bank along the affluent New Jersey shore has set up a text service allowing people to discreetly pick up their food.

Elsewhere, the signs of a crisis that looks like the Great Depression are impossible to hide. In Anaheim, Calif., home to Disneyland, cars formed half-mile-long lines in two different directions, waiting to pick up free food. In San Antonio, 10,000 cars waited for hours to receive food from a food bank. Even still, Republicans balk at expanding access to food stamps while hunger is on the rise. Nearly one in five children 12 and younger don’t have enough to eat.

That “way of life” may also begin to look like mass homelessness. Through the first five days of April, 31 percent of tenants nationwide had failed to pay their rent. And while more people paid in May, continued payments seem unsustainable as millions fall into unemployment. Forty-three million households rent in the U.S., but there is no public rental assistance for residents who lose the ability to afford their rent. With only a few weeks left on many eviction moratoriums, there is a thin line between a place to shelter in and homelessness for tens of millions of Americans.



Many elected officials in the Republican Party have access to Covid-19 testing, quality health care and the ultimate cushion of wealth to protect them. Yet they suggest others take the “risk” of returning to work as an act of patriotism necessary to regenerate the economy. This is duplicitous and obscures the manipulation of U.S. workers.

While the recent stimulus bills doled out trillions of dollars to corporate America and the “financial sector,” the smallest allocations have provided cash, food, rent or health care for citizens. The gaps in the thin membrane of a safety net for ordinary Americans have made it impossible to do anything other than return to work.

This isn’t just malfeasance or incompetence. Part of the “American way of life” for at least some of these elected officials is keeping workers just poor enough to ensure that the “essential” work force shows up each day. In place of decent wages, hazard pay, robust distribution of personal protective equipment and the simplest guarantees of health and safety, these lawmakers use the threat of starvation and homelessness to keep the work force intact.

In the case of the meatpacking industry, there is not even a veil of choice, as those jobs are inexplicably labeled essential, as if life cannot go on without meat consumption. The largely immigrant and black meatpacking work force has been treated barely better than the carcasses they process. They are completely expendable. Thousands have tested positive, but the plants chug along, while employers offer the bare minimum by way of safety protections, according to workers. If there were any question about the conditions endured in meatpacking plants, consider that 145 meat inspectors have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and three have died.

The statements of the two senators from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, vociferously opposing the extension of $600 supplemental payments to unemployment insurance, offer another stark example of how workers are being compelled to return to unsafe work environments. Mr. Scott referred to the supplement as a “perverse incentive” to not work. He and Mr. Graham argued that the payments were more than some workers’ salaries, which is an indictment of the jobs and the companies, not the employees.

This is not the first time Southern politicians have complained that government aid to poor or working-class people would undermine their perverse reliance on low-wage labor. During the Great Depression, Southern leaders opposed new systems of social welfare over fear it would undermine “the civilization to which we are accustomed,” as a newspaper in Charleston, S.C., described it. The crude version came from an official in Alabama who insisted that welfare payments to African-Americans should be lower because, “Negroes just don’t want to work.” The logic was that if you could pay black men a nickel then white men would celebrate being paid a dime. Meanwhile, the prevailing wages elsewhere were significantly higher than both. This is why wages are still lower across the South than elsewhere in the country.

American progress means that Mr. Scott, an African-American senator from South Carolina, now voices these ideas. But then as now, complaints about social welfare are central to disciplining the labor force. Discipline in the U.S. has always included low and inconsistent unemployment and welfare combined with stark deprivation. Each has resulted in a hyper-productive work force with few benefits in comparison to America’s peer countries.

This is at the heart of the conflict over reopening the country or allowing people to continue to shelter-in-place to suppress the virus. But if the social distancing and closures were ever going to be successful, it would have meant providing all workers with the means to live in comfort at home while they waited out the disease. Instead, they have been offered the choice of hunger and homelessness or death and disease at work.

The governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds,[above] made this painfully clear when she announced that not only was Iowa reopening, but that furloughed workers in private or public employment who refused to work out of fear of being infected would lose current unemployment benefits. She described these workers’ choices as a “voluntary quit.”

The Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services is also instructing employers to report workers who refuse to go to work because of the pandemic. Part of what’s going on is the crush of people filing for benefits means state funds are shrinking. This is exacerbated by the reluctance of the Trump administration to bail out state governments. That the U.S. government would funnel trillions to corporate America but balk at sending money to state governments also appears to be part of “the American way of life” that resembles the financial sector bailout in 2008.

This cannot all be laid at the feet of the Trump administration, though it has undeniably made life worse for millions. These are also the bitter fruits of decades of public policies that have denigrated the need for a social safety net while gambling on growth to keep the heads of U.S. workers above water just enough to ward off any real complaints or protests.

The attacks on welfare, food stamps, public housing and all of the attendant programs that could mitigate the worst aspects of this disaster continue to be bipartisan. The loud praise of Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, in contrast to the poor performance of President Trump, has overshadowed protests against his $400 million cuts to hospitals in New York as the virus was raging through the city.

There will be many more examples of Democrats wielding the ax in response to unprecedented budget shortages in the coming months. With the increasing scale of the crisis — as unemployment grows to an otherworldly 36.5 million people while states run out of money and contemplate cutting Medicaid and other already meager kinds of social welfare — the vast need for government assistance will test the political class’s aversion to such intervention.

During the long and uneven recovery from the financial crisis of 2008, the warped distribution of wealth led to protests and labor organizing. The crisis unfolding today is already deeper and much more catastrophic to a wider swath of workers than anything since the 1930s. The status quo is untenable.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an assistant professor of African-American studies at Princeton and a contributing opinion writer. She is the author of, most recently, “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership.” @KeeangaYamahtta

‘I Can’t Breathe’: Again. 4 Minneapolis Officers Fired After Black Man Dies in Custody. Protests Turn Violent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis did not immediately respond.

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

Derek Chauvin, the officer seen in the video with his knee on Floyd’s neck as Floyd begs for mercy and repeatedly says, “I can’t breathe,” had at least 12 complaints filed against him in his 19 years on the job and was involved in other shootings as well.

In 2008, Chauvin shot 21-year-old Ira Toles after responding to a domestic assault call, Pioneer Press reported at the time. Toles was charged with two counts of resisting arrest.

And in 2011, Chauvin was one of five officers placed on leave after another non-fatal shooting, the Daily Beast reported. Chauvin did not fire his gun that time.

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

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

NY TIMES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Protesters overrun a Minneapolis police building and set it aflame.

Protesters broke windows and charged over fences to breach a police precinct in Minneapolis and set it on fire late Thursday as officers retreated from violent confrontations that boiled over days after George Floyd died in police custody.

A demonstration near the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct grew more intense in the hours after prosecutors said they had not decided whether to charge an officer who had pressed his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck for about eight minutes.

Some people tossed fireworks and other items toward officers, while the police fired projectiles back. The protests extended to many other cities, including New York, Denver, Phoenix and Columbus, Ohio, where scores of protesters tried to enter the statehouse.

 In Minneapolis, police officers retreated from the Third Precinct in vehicles just after 10 p.m. local time as protesters broke into the building, where they smashed equipment, lit fires and set off fireworks, according to videos posted from the scene.

Footage from helicopter cameras showed nearby local businesses engulfed in flames. But firefighters from the Minneapolis Fire Department could not respond to the area because of safety concerns, Assistant Chief Bryan Tyner said in an email.

As the unrest escalated, 500 members of the Minnesota National Guard were sent to Minneapolis and St. Paul, the capital. Gov. Tim Walz had activated the soldiers and declared a state of emergency in the Twin Cities in the afternoon after he saw the level of destruction from Wednesday’s protest — buildings on fire, clashes with the police and looted stores.

There were also protests in the bordering city of St. Paul, where officers in riot gear skirmished with protesters as several businesses were vandalized, according to photographs posted online. Smoke could be seen billowing from a NAPA auto parts store, and the windows of a Goodwill store were broken. There were dozens of fires and more than 170 damaged or looted buildings, the police said, but no reports of serious injuries.

The tally of coronavirus deaths in the U.S. has surpassed 100,000. UPDATES

Just over four months after the government confirmed the first known case, more than 100,000 people who had the coronavirus have died in the United States, according to a New York Times tally.

The toll exceeds the number of U.S. military combat fatalities in every conflict since the Korean War. It matches the toll in the United States of the 1968 flu pandemic, and it is approaching the 116,000 killed in another flu outbreak a decade before that.

The pandemic is on track to be the country’s deadliest public health disaster since the 1918 flu pandemic, in which about 675,000 Americans died.

As the nation neared the milestone, President Trump flew to Florida on Wednesday in the hopes of watching the first launch of NASA astronauts into orbit from the United States in nearly a decade. But threatening weather led the launch to be postponed until Saturday at the earliest.

 Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, released a video on Wednesday in which he expressed grief and charged that “this is a fateful milestone we should have never reached.” He faulted the administration for not enacting social-distancing measures sooner, which researchers said would have saved thousands of lives.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Trump had taken aim on Twitter at those who would question his response. “The Radical Left Lamestream Media, together with their partner, the Do Nothing Democrats, are trying to spread a new narrative that President Trump was slow in reacting to Covid 19,” he wrote, referring to himself in the third person. “Wrong, I was very fast, even doing the Ban on China long before anybody thought necessary!”

Though the numbers of new cases and deaths have begun trending downward, health experts warn of a possible resurgence as lockdowns are lifted.

The daily death toll in New York, the hardest-hit state, fell this week to levels not seen since March.
Most statisticians and public health experts, including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, say the death toll is probably far higher than official counts. People who haven’t been tested are dying at home and at nursing homes, and early this year some coronavirus deaths were probably misidentified.

  Riot police officers clashed with protesters in Hong Kong on Wednesday.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

China Approves Plan to Rein In Hong Kong, Defying Worldwide Outcry

Beijing ordered that a new law be written to extend many of mainland China’s security practices to Hong Kong, creating broad powers to quash unrest.

NY TIMES

China officially has the broad power to quash unrest in Hong Kong, as the country’s legislature on Thursday nearly unanimously approved a plan to suppress subversion, secession, terrorism and seemingly any acts that might threaten national security in the semiautonomous city.

As Beijing hashes out the specifics of the national security legislation in the coming weeks, the final rules will help determine the fate of Hong Kong, including how much of the city’s autonomy will be preserved or how much Beijing will tighten its grip.

Early signals from the Chinese authorities point to a crackdown once the law takes effect, which is expected by September.

Activist groups could be banned. Courts could impose long jail sentences for national security violations. China’s feared security agencies could operate openly in the city.

Even Hong Kong’s chief executive appeared to hint this week that certain civil liberties might not be an enduring feature of Hong Kong life. “We are a very free society, so for the time being, people have the freedom to say whatever they want to say,” said the chief executive, Carrie Lam, noting, “Rights and freedoms are not absolute.”

The prospect of a national security law has prompted an immediate pushback in Hong Kong, where protesters are once again taking to the streets. The international community, too, has warned against infringing on the city’s civil liberties.

The Trump administration signaled Wednesday that it was likely to end some or all of the U.S. government’s special trade and economic relations with Hong Kong because of China’s move. The State Department no longer considers Hong Kong to have significant autonomy, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, a condition for maintaining the trade status.

Larry Kramer, Playwright and Outspoken AIDS Activist, Dies at 84

He sought to shock the country into dealing with AIDS as a public-health emergency and foresaw that it could kill millions regardless of sexual orientation.

Larry Kramer, the noted writer whose raucous, antagonistic campaign for an all-out response to the AIDS crisis helped shift national health policy in the 1980s and ’90s, died on Wednesday morning in Manhattan. He was 84.

His husband, David Webster, said the cause was pneumonia. Mr. Kramer had weathered illness for much of his adult life. Among other things he had been infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, contracted liver disease and underwent a successful liver transplant.

An author, essayist and playwright — notably hailed for his autobiographical 1985 play, “The Normal Heart” — Mr. Kramer had feet in both the world of letters and the public sphere. In 1981 he was a founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the first service organization for H.I.V.-positive people, though his fellow directors effectively kicked him out a year later for his aggressive approach. (He returned the compliment by calling them “a sad organization of sissies.”)

He was then a founder of a more militant group, Act Up (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), whose street actions demanding a speedup in AIDS drugs research and an end to discrimination against gay men and lesbians severely disrupted the operations of government offices, Wall Street and the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

Even some of the officials Mr. Kramer accused of “murder” and “genocide” recognized that his outbursts were part of a strategy to shock the country into dealing with AIDS as a public-health emergency. “One of America’s most valuable troublemakers,” Susan Sontag called him.

 Voters are unimpressed with Cuomo’s oversight of nursing homes.

Governor Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes during the coronavirus crisis appears to be damaging his standing among New York voters.

In a Siena College poll released Wednesday morning, a plurality of registered voters (48 percent) said he did only a “fair” or “poor” job addressing the needs of nursing homes. 44 percent of voters rated his nursing home management “good” or “excellent.”

Mr. Cuomo’s administration had come under withering criticism for sending more than 4,500 convalescing coronavirus patients into nursing homes filled with vulnerable people, according to a tally by The Associated Press. At the time, the administration thought it prudent to free up as many hospital beds as possible for an anticipated tsunami of acute coronavirus cases.

Covid-19 has killed more than 6,000 residents in nursing home and adult care facilities, including deaths presumed to be linked to the virus. On May 10, Mr. Cuomo reversed the administration’s policy.

The governor has blamed nursing homes for failing to raise their concerns. 

Mr. Cuomo’s overall favorability ratings also fell this month, from a high of 77 in April to 66. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percent.

“Cuomo’s stratospheric ratings from New Yorkers in April have fallen from their record highs but remain very strong as two-thirds of voters still view him favorably, nearly two-thirds give him a positive job performance rating and more than three-quarters still approve of the job he’s doing to address the pandemic,” said Steven Greenberg, a Siena College pollster.

Pollsters interviewed 796 registered voters in New York State between May 17 and May 21. They found that 37 percent of voters — and nearly half of downstate voters — know someone who was killed by Covid-19.

‘Ugly Even for Him’: Trump’s Usual Allies Recoil at His Smear of MSNBC Host

The Wall Street Journal and Washington Examiner chastised the president as a top House Republican, Liz Cheney, urged him to “stop” his attacks on Joe Scarborough.

Some of President Trump’s most stalwart media defenders broke ranks with him on Wednesday, aghast at his baseless smears against the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, whom Mr. Trump has all but accused of killing a former staff member two decades ago despite a total lack of evidence.

The backlash even spread to the senior levels of Mr. Trump’s party on Capitol Hill, where the No. 3 House Republican, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, said the president should drop the matter and focus on leading the country through the coronavirus pandemic. “I would urge him to stop it,” she told reporters, referring to the false allegations.

The vast majority of Republican officials have kept silent about the president’s Twitter barrage against Mr. Scarborough, and the most prominent conservative voices on Fox News, like Sean Hannity,  Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson.let the subject go unmentioned on recent broadcasts.

But Ms. Cheney’s criticism was a sign of stepped-up pressure on Mr. Trump from the right, reflected in this week’s unusual chorus of reproach from the conservative media platforms the president often turns to for comfort.

The New York Post, Mr. Trump’s first read in the morning, lamented in Wednesday’s paper that the president “decided to suggest that a TV morning-show host committed murder. That is a depressing sentence to type.” In a staff editorial, The Post addressed its most powerful reader directly: “Trust us, you did not look like the bigger man.”

The Washington Examiner, a popular conservative news site, published a scathing article calling Mr. Trump’s attacks “incompatible with leadership” and “vile.” Mr. Trump is usually enamored of The Examiner, one of the few news sites to which he routinely grants interviews, including one this month.

And the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, a bellwether of establishment conservatism, called Mr. Trump’s unfounded accusation against Mr. Scarborough “ugly even for him.”

“We don’t write this with any expectation that Mr. Trump will stop,” The Journal wrote in its editorial. “Perhaps he even thinks this helps him politically, though we can’t imagine how. But Mr. Trump is debasing his office, and he’s hurting the country in doing so.”

If the blowback affected Mr. Trump, the president has not shown it. He taunted Mr. Scarborough — a former Republican congressman and one-time social acquaintance of Mr. Trump who is now one of his harshest TV critics — again on Wednesday in a tweet that referred to a “Cold Case.”

The president’s attacks have caused anguish to the family of Lori Klausutis, the staff member in Mr. Scarborough’s former congressional office who died in 2001 when a heart condition caused her to fall and hit her head on a desk. Mr. Scarborough was not present and the police ruled her death an accident. Ms. Klausutis’s relatives have said that the president’s evocation of her death and his unfounded insinuation that she had an affair with Mr. Scarborough have caused them deep distress.

Senator Mitt Romney, the Utah Republican and a frequent Trump critic, tweeted on Wednesday in support of her widower, T.J. Klausutis. “His heart is breaking,” Mr. Romney wrote. “Enough already.” Representative Peter King, Republican of New York, told reporters on Wednesday that the president’s claims were “out of bounds,” adding, “there’s no evidence.”

“Trump opening up this front with Joe Scarborough is another thing in the news cycle, another thing for people to talk about,” Mr. Polskin said. “It occupies time on the talk shows. It gets people away from that 100,000 figure,” referring to the estimated number of Americans who have died from coronavirus. “Trump’s a master at that,” he added. “Throwing out these bright, shiny diversions.”

Amid the Coronavirus Crisis, a Regimen for Reëntry

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

 

NEW YORKER, Atul Gawande

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evidence of the benefits of mandatory masks is now overwhelming. Our hospital system would not be able to stop viral spread without them. But will supplies keep up? Factories are increasing production of both surgical masks and N95s as rapidly as possible, but they don’t come close to meeting health-care workers’ needs, let alone supplying the general public, and they won’t for months to come. It should therefore be no surprise that foreign factories have prioritized meeting their own countries’ needs, often under government edict, and the world is fighting over what’s left.
In order to stretch our supplies, our hospital now limits workers to just a mask a day. We’ve also found ways to decontaminate masks for reuse. That hasn’t been easy: if a disinfectant gets a mask wet, the electrostatic charge is lost. A major breakthrough was the development of a hydrogen-peroxide decontamination system by Battelle, a nonprofit research institute in Columbus, Ohio....
Domestic production of masks in the U.S. has been delayed by inadequate federal support and coördination, but it is nonetheless ramping up. For instance, Joanna Newton, a pediatric hematologist and oncologist, spearheaded a collaboration among a group of institutions—including ExxonMobil, nasa, and Georgia Tech’s Global Center for Medical Innovation—to reduce the bottlenecks in the supply chain and create reusable N95 masks. She explained to me that although American production of medical masks has largely shifted abroad, the melt-blown-fibre fabric is produced domestically for lots of other things: diapers, air-conditioning filters, disinfectant wipes, vacuum-cleaner bags, acoustic insulation in automobiles. Her coalition has persuaded several idled manufacturers to help churn out mask fabric. That has required costly investments in retooling and training, but they’re now producing enough material for a hundred and twenty million face masks per month.

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

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

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

But it was not enough. An outbreak occurred in a housing unit for disabled residents. Four of the eight residents there became infected, possibly by a staff member who subsequently tested positive for covid-19. All four died. The week that my health system mandated masks, Lasell Village began requiring its staff to wear them, too, although because of a shortage of surgical masks, most employees got only one per week, plus a backup cloth mask. A few days later, residents and local nonprofits had sewed enough cloth masks to distribute one to every resident as well.
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In hospitals, we have had to learn how to bring the stringent antiseptic standards of the operating room into the professional culture of other parts of our institutions. This requires absorbing the detailed practices that keep us from transmitting germs in a given setting—like the rule at the operating table that, once you’re scrubbed in, you never let your hands fall below your waist. Even more, this requires developing norms about how to address lapses in rules, so you can comfortably call one another out when you see a standard slipping and still enjoy working together. This isn’t simple; I’ve seen surgical colleagues in the hallway pop their masks down below their noses to talk, which they never would have done across an operating table, yet I am hesitant to call out the lapse.
Culture is the fifth, and arguably the most difficult, pillar of a new combination therapy to stop the coronavirus. People tend to focus on two desires: safety and freedom; keep me safe and leave me alone. What [we need] to embrace is the desire to keep others safe, not just themselves. “I’m worried about my sore throat, and I am going to stay home.” Or “I am O.K. with being reminded to pull my mask up.” That is the culture of the operating room. It’s about wanting, among other things, never to be the one to make someone else sick.

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

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

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

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